Future executives don't want to go back to the office, and why we still don't know how to manage our finances
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Welcome to Most Innovative Companies. I'm your host, Yasmin Gagne, back from the dead last week, joined by my producer, Josh Christensen, back from vacation. Hey, Josh. I feel like I had a much better excuse to be absent than you last week. I was in the Finger Lakes. I was on vacation. I was literally on a lake, and that was nice. You just had to skip out because you were sick. I just had a poisoned salad bowl. Oh, no.

No, that's so rough. I'm so sorry, but glad you're feeling better now. Yeah, it was horrible. But the thing is, this actually kind of relates to what we're talking about today, which is, you know, in the past when we came to the office all the time, if you were sick, you were kind of out. Yeah. I was sick and I was recording a podcast interview, answered my emails. I think I was too sick to like write a draft, but work never stopped. Yeah.

you know? Yeah. I think everyone's conflicted about that. Like, how do you actually justify using a sick day? Because I do think there are some positives. I mean, this is a gross fact about the restaurant industry pre, you know, back in my early twenties, but like,

I didn't miss a shift because I had a cold. Yeah, right. Everyone would go in because you don't have sick days when you're working in a restaurant. You just, you go and you try not to sneeze on people's food. It's a reality. I'm so sorry to everyone listening to this now who is now not going to go to the Ruby Tuesdays. This is why we have the sneeze guards. It's a reality of the fact for hourly jobs or jobs that don't have sick days like that. But then like,

In the office, you know, we don't have to go into the office and we can work from home or a little sick, which I think is actually okay to an extent. But then there's still days where really you should just take a sick day. Yeah, there's an element of I'm using this word wrong and I actually hate it when people use it out of context, but you're kind of gaslighting yourself. Like say last week, I was so sick. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was still like, well, but I'm sat here in front of my TV. So like I could do work. You know what I mean?

Yeah, but like that's like a realistic thing like stuff that you would have called out for earlier now like I think the other thing from working from home is sometimes like I threw my back out a little bit yesterday so I'm sitting here with a heating pad on my back right now, but it's one of those things where like I feel fine still working, I just don't want to walk around an office building. Totally. So working from home, I'm totally comfortable right now but if I start like sitting at a desk like I feel like that's a situation where I'm like okay I don't want to get behind but I don't want to go into an office.

Yeah, that totally makes sense. I mean, I fundamentally get way more done at home, to be honest. Depends on what I'm doing. Interesting. You do a lot more writing than I do. I mean, I write scripts and stuff, but... Yeah, so that's the thing. Like, I write significantly better at home than I do in the office. I agree.

I do a lot of collaborative work with other parts of my job. So that sometimes is helpful. But when I do write or when I edit audio, I can't be in the office. I have to do that at home, which is how it's sometimes now back into hybrid. Sometimes that creeps into like my weekends and my nights and off hours. But this is all stuff that we're going to get into further in the episode. Totally. So I'd say before we get into it, any housekeeping, any announcements? Yeah.

Fast Company's Innovation Festival is coming up this September. We are like six weeks away. Okay. We're about six weeks away. It's so crazy that it's almost September. Oh, it's so close. For anyone who doesn't know, Fast Company Innovation Festival, which is in New York, it's the week of September 18th. We're going to put a link in the show notes to where you can get tickets to that. We'll have a live episode of this show.

Slide into our DMs if you want to say hi. Yeah, absolutely. Because we would love that. We're going to have a little like podcast booth sort of experience on the Laura Festival. So yeah, come say hi. We always want to meet listeners and fans of Fast Company.

But wait, we have one more thing to talk about real quick. This podcast is named after our biggest issue of the year, most innovative companies, and you can apply to be considered for those lists through our website. We'll have links in the show notes. We don't need to explain it to you every single time, but apply, apply, apply. Later on today's episode, Fast Company staff editor AJ Hess will be talking with Vivian Tu about how she became a FinTalk influencer. But first, we're going to talk about working from home.

We're here with freelance journalist and author Shaleen Gupta, and she's going to tell us a little bit about why middle managers don't want us coming back to work. Hi, Yas. Hey, Shaleen. So tell us what's going on here. Why are people in the financial world saying they don't want to return to the office full time? And actually, when we're talking about people, who are we talking about?

Yeah. So one thing that I absolutely love about this new survey from Deloitte is they actually asked 700 mid to executive level financial services professionals. So in other words, the people who are not in the C-suite today making the decisions, but the people who are going to be there tomorrow, what they thought about return to office. That is such a nice way of defining what a middle manager is.

It's very much a glass half full take. But I mean, truly, that is the way of the future, right? And we've been seeing with financial services, a lot of pressure to return back to work when we've had CEOs, you know, Jamie Dimon just going like, it's, you know, it's not as effective to be at home doing hybrid even.

Banking was definitely like the first ones back into office. I remember it was like the Goldman Sachs story where they were like, no, back five days of work. I mean, I have someone that is a friend of my wife and I's works.

at a hedge fund who was never didn't work in the office during the pandemic which was wild to me and possibly illegal i don't really know but anyways yeah say his name and the police can come for him oh no i mean it's his company not him yeah yeah yeah he was the one being subjected to it

So, Shaleen, what percentage of people are we talking about? So 66% of them said that, you know, if they had to return to office five days a week, they would leave their jobs. And given the sector we're talking about, I mean, this is not tech, right? This is financial services, which has been infamous for a long time.

And they're paid a lot of money. That's my thing. I'm like, I'm a journalist here. I'm like, literally, if you offered me like 250k plus bonus a year, I would do pretty much anything. Oh, yeah. I'm like, guys, you can go. You can go to your office. That's journalism, right? We'll do anything. Great. Glad to know we all have values and integrity. I'm like, bribe me. I'm here. Bribe me.

They told us at grad school, run towards the burning building. And we're like, okay. Yeah. They did. Yeah, literally. You know, over, obviously 60% is over half of respondents. Are workers feeling a lot of pressure to go in more? I was reading this morning that Zoom is now requiring their employees to come back to the office, which is so funny. Wow. That's crazy.

I know, right? I mean, it's interesting because there's actually a gender divide. So actually 68% of men are saying they feel like they're more at a disadvantage if they don't go in, whereas only 55% of women are saying that. Why do you think that is?

You know, I think if we get down into the history of work and how gendered it is, there is just kind of this expectation that women will absorb more of the caregiving. That same survey talks about how 75% of men said that working from home remotely improved their relationship with their children. And 67% of women said the same thing, which is a high percentage, but not as high. And I think that's just because women are kind of expected to just

make it happen and make it work. Whereas with men, there's kind of this expectation that your entire identity is your work and you're going to be showing up. And so you're not really given that pass to pick up your kids, you know, from school or take an absence for the doctor's office. Yeah. You know, when people were talking about the pressure to come back to the office, a lot of them felt like they were more likely to become CEO or get some kind of promotion if they came in. Why do you think that is?

probably FaceTime and mentorship. So some of the downsides of hybrid and remote, and don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of remote, is that you don't get as much feedback. There was an MIT paper that showed that junior level employees were getting less feedback from senior managers when they were remote. And, you know, I was interviewing a CEO and he was in one of the 10 companies that was remote way before remote was even a thing.

And he said he loved it. He's a fan of it. But the one thing he can't figure out is mentorship because he said so often in his career, what helped him get that promotion was a phone call, strategically placed phone call. And the way he would get these strategically placed phone calls was all through these soft interactions that happen in person where you build up that relationship with older people who mentor you. They've tried a bunch of different really creative programs.

for remote mentorship. And he's just like, you know, it's just not quite the same. So I have no hiring and firing power at Fast Company, but Josh, you kind of do. Does it matter to you? Do you think about that? Like, would you be more likely to promote somebody who you like talk to all the time face to face? I would say no.

solely because I, you know, another podcast that we do in the Fast Company Network, The New Way We Work and the work-life coverage at Fast Company, it's very front of mind for me how these biases leak in. Now, of course, like I say that and there may be unconscious biases that I need to unwrap. So,

You know, there's always that self-awareness and that imposter syndrome with anything. But I became a manager really for the first time during the pandemic. Nice. Yeah, it was definitely like a wartime promotion, I guess. Yeah.

really all of my interactions were remote. And so I kind of had to learn how to do that. Now it's definitely a learning curve. Like it's definitely has to be more front of mind because you're not just able to have those off the cuff conversations in the way that you

would at the proverbial water cooler type situation or like turning around and someone's at another desk. It's moved to Slack, those interactions where you need to have, like, I think it's good to have like the random channels on Slack where you can post nonsense stuff or like our producer, Blake, we're both big basketball fans. And so sometimes he'll Slack me about like the Jalen Brown contract that came down for the Celtics or stuff like that. And like that stuff I think is not just good to keep you sane while you're working.

remotely or in hybrid, but is also important to developing those relationships. So I guess for me, I had to really put it front of mind. You know, the whole country does not look like the financial industry when it comes to working. And like, I'm proof of this. I'm sitting here in like a t-shirt dress and some bands, right? But what can the shift in perspective tell us there about the rest of the country when it comes to remote work? I mean, I think in many ways, the financial services industry is sort of like

the platonic ideal of work, right? When we think of ultra corporate, and I don't mean that in terms of like happiness, but just like, what does ultra corporate, the man in the briefcase look like? And if the financial services next generation of leaders is saying, we don't want this ultra corporate work in the office five days a week, it doesn't make sense.

Then I think for all of us, that means remote is this door that has been opened and it's not going to be easy to shut it. There have been stories now about, you know, Zoom is mandating a return to office and workers are not happy with that. I mean, the irony of Zoom asking us to be back at work. But I think the big question that leaders are going to have to wrestle with that you were talking about, Yaz, was remote.

What are the parts of work that are really unenjoyable that actually don't have to be? Do you really have to sit at your desk for eight hours or is that just sort of a myth about work? So we're in this entire era of reinventing work. My husband now works in tech but was an investment banker when we started dating.

And first of all, I kind of miss it because he looked great in a suit. But aside from that, something that I thought was so fascinating is there's this idea that investment bankers should be compensated for the long hours they work, right? Like he would get it at 9. He'd often come back at like 11 p.m., 1 a.m.,

But the fact was, a lot of the time he was sitting there waiting for feedback until about 6 p.m. And then all of a sudden he'd have to start working, you know, because you're waiting for someone to review your deck or your Excel sheets or whatever. And I feel like working from home almost busted that gap.

You know what I mean? I was recently interviewing a young Gen Z entrepreneur who had been working in financial services and said there was this huge culture of hurry up and wait. And he had gone to an Ivy. Yeah. And then COVID hit when he was one year into his job. And he was like, this was the first time in my life I had time to think because I was no longer stuck just sitting in a chair. And he was like, oh, my God, what have I been doing my entire life? Like, what do I actually want to do with my life? And he ended up quitting.

started his own company. And it's not about a culture of FaceTime there. It's really like, this is the work that has to get done. You get it done on your own time. And I think we're seeing a lot of talented people leaving the workforce because it's inefficient. They're no longer going to put up with busy work or make work that has no purpose.

I mean, we have that the quantity of hours you work directly translates to the quality of work that you do or the amount of effort. And I think there's still that mentality where someone... Oh, being hardos? Nothing drives me more crazy. You know, you'll be like, hey, dude, what's up? And they'll be like, I was up until midnight. And I feel like I've been guilty of this sometimes, but you're like, dude, like we all are doing the same job.

And that's going to beg the question of what is the new metric if it's not FaceTime? I was talking to a young Gen Z researcher at Meta

And she was talking about how if the new metric is accomplishing a certain amount of work, meeting your goals, what happens with the extra time? Are you just going to be rewarded with more work? Like, will companies really tolerate workers saying, we actually want self-care? I mean, given our capitalist culture and the puritanical mindset of work, work, work, you know, it seems unlikely. And it's going to take a lot for that culture to shift. So, you know, how is it going to shift? When and what are the bumps going to be along the way? Yeah.

You know, we're like a near full employment right now. The job market is historically, we've heard about like worker shortages and a lot of complaining from some employers about, you know, having to give more perks and pay more equitable wages to hire people. And because we're at such low unemployment rates right now, how much is that possibly fueling or playing into some of these trends that really are about worker empowerment?

I wonder about that because with the tech layoffs, I've been reading a lot about how tech workers are now willing to put up with more just because if the difference between getting laid off and not getting laid off is some time in the office, people are going to do it at the end of the day.

you know, I've met people at the Google offices and I've had lunch in their cafeteria, which is amazing. I know that they have a gym on campus, at least in California. You know what I mean? They have all these reasons to kind of stay. With that perspective shift, those kind of perks will change or people's attitudes towards them will change. I mean, how do you see that going? I am completely fascinated by how these perks work. It is

to me how many smart people I've talked to who are graduating from the top universities, top grades, and then they're looking at jobs at these places and they're like, oh my God, there's free snacks. I would fall into that trap. If we had free snacks here, I would come in way more. I would be in seven days a week if we had cold brew on tap, like a WeWork. I would just- Shalene is like, I'm fascinated that people are conned by this. I'm like, I'm not. Yeah.

Yeah, but have you had Blue Mountain Cold Brew? It's really good. I mean, no, don't get me wrong. I love free snacks. But if you think about it, like they're being paid so much money. And yet it's just like here, free coffee, which is like what? Okay, even if it's the premium blend. You got to stay humble out there. Right? It's just like we're all human at heart. Like give us our free snacks and we'll lease our lives.

I was at a coffee shop recently with my husband and there was like a jar with pens in it and it was like, free pens, take one. And I grabbed two and he was like, why? I was like, they're free. But honestly, it works, right? I've talked to so many people who are just like, oh my God, I am never leaving my industry. And yes, I have no time for my family. I have no time for my friends. I am in the midst of having a mental breakdown because I have to work so much, but I have free pens. That'll do a lot for your mental health, briefly. Briefly.

Yeah. To wrap this up, I guess, Shaleen, I'd love to kind of hear just broad takeaways from the study that maybe we haven't touched on as much. You know, return to office is going to really hurt caregivers. 1.3, caregivers are 1.3 times more likely to say they would quit. You know, I interviewed somebody who had to choose between

pre-COVID taking care of her mother with Parkinson's or her job, COVID hit and she was like, thank God, like that enabled me to keep my job, pay for the medical treatment and take care of the person that I love best in the world. And we shouldn't be putting people in that position, right? Like, yeah, those are not good choices. Like choose your future or your present. That makes a lot of sense. Well, we're going to take a quick break now, followed by AJ Hess's interview with Vivian too. Thanks for joining me today, Vivian. How are you?

Thank you so much for having me. I'm doing well. Great. I am so excited to talk. I'm a huge fan of all of your videos. During the pandemic, I fell really down into finance influencer, TikTok. My first question for you is, have you always been good with money? No, definitely not. Not even a little bit. I would say that growing up, my family was good with money in that my parents were Chinese immigrants and they were super duper frugal and

And that was very much instilled in me. I think the biggest fight I ever got into with my parents was over a pair of $25 ripped jeans. And they were like, you're so irresponsible with money. These jeans are already broken. I was like, no, that's the look. I'm cool. But, you know, they didn't understand my teenage angst. Mom. I know. Yeah.

But becoming an adult, going to college, coming out, having a real job, when I started my career on Wall Street, that was the first time I had seen people with like an amount of wealth that frankly, I just had never even visualized before.

And frankly, for very shallow reasons, I wanted to be good with money after seeing that because I was like, well, I want a designer bag. I want a vacation home. You know, I think that's the gateway drug for a lot of people. My only thought on that is labeling that as shallow. I worry sometimes is a word that women get labeled as.

Right. If a man's like, oh, I want to get a vacation house for my family. He's a great provider. But if a woman wants it for herself, it's shallow. Is that something you've noticed in the kind of sphere? A hundred percent. And I think it's crazy. Right. Because we talk about not wanting transactional relationships.

Every single relationship is transactional. I am best friends with my best friend because she makes me laugh. She makes me feel good about myself. And she occasionally lets me borrow that really cute dress that she bought. Yeah.

that I don't have in the same way that I'm providing her value, maybe not necessarily monetarily for each other, but like that's transactional. So why is it any different when a woman will say something like, I want financial stability. I want to live my life a certain way. I have certain expectations that require a certain financial status. Why are we then giving women a hard time for doing the things that other people are expecting of them anyway? So Vivian, how did you get into the financial literacy space?

It was kind of an accident. During college, I didn't really know what I wanted to do when I grew up. But all of my friends were interviewing for these Wall Street jobs. So I said, you know, seems like a good enough idea. Pays well, sure. I'll get one too. And when I left the industry to go into tech and media, all of my new colleagues and friends were like, you came from Wall Street, you're going to rebalance my 401k, you're gonna help me pick my health insurance.

plan? What investments should I buy? Like, what kind of insurance did you get? And so I would get the same ones over and over again. I was like, you guys are annoying. I'm going to put this on the internet. Stop asking me during my day job. I'm busy. The very first video I put on to TikTok went viral overnight. I

Eventually ended up amassing like 3 million views, had 100,000 followers by the end of the week. And it was really so unexpected. I really didn't even know how I was going to keep up. What's the worst financial advice you've seen on TikTok? I mean, where do we start? I think there was like a big, big crypto phase, right?

where every single week there was some new shit coin that like no one knew what it was, no one knew anything about it, and it was just like all hype.

And investing on hype is incredibly dangerous because when a cryptocurrency is not backed by anything or does not have any real tangible use cases, the value is derived only from what people are willing to pay for it. And that's scary because what ended up happening was there were a lot of instances where founders of these random cryptocurrencies would hype it up by paying celebrities to buy

pump them, pump, pump, pump, pump, pump. Everybody's buying in. The price of this crypto is going up, up, up, up, up. They would then lock the liquidity so people couldn't trade in and out. And then the founders would have gotten very rich and they would sell all of their gazillion shares and it would just be valueless for everybody else who would put their hard-earned money into that. And that's

fraud. Like there's a word for that. That's a pump and dump scheme. Yeah. And I think we'll see in due time how some of those cases play out, but I'll be following very closely. What do you think are the main issues of financial literacy in this country? Yeah. Well, first things first, shame on us because we don't teach financial literacy in schools.

K through 12, you're learning reading, you're learning math, you're learning history, you're learning science. Great. That was wonderful for me. Let me tell you how many times I've used the Pythagorean theorem. Zero. I don't necessarily need to know exactly how photosynthesis works, but it would have been cool to know how to file my tax return in a way that my first year working, I didn't think I was going to jail.

Frankly, unless you are so rich that it doesn't matter or you live off the grid, every single person needs to understand finance and money to live in our society. I think there's a massive gap in education that then allows a lot of disinformation to be spread

And to make matters worse, the economic system as it currently stands, my generation and the generation after mine has never really seen it work correctly. Right. So like our parents, our grandparents, they were peddled this truth that if they worked hard, got a good education, went to college, got the right job, regardless of what it was, they

They would be able to afford that lifestyle of my two and a half kids, my golden retriever, white picket fence home. We go on vacation twice a year. I am able to contribute to my retirement funds. And when I turn 60, 65, I get to move down to Naples, Florida. Cool. Sick. That worked for them. I love when the older generation is like, well, I bought a home at 23. I'm like, yeah, your home was like $47 and a handshake. Yeah.

It's not the same. Now, this younger generation is so disenfranchised by this system that hasn't served them. They're constantly looking for either a quick get rich scheme, or they're looking for living for today is what I would call it. The YOLO mentality of like, I don't even know if I'm going to see retirement. So I might as well be traveling all across Europe and spending every last dollar I have. And I think both of those

realities are scary. What do you tell someone who has never seen themselves in a place of financial stability, even after doing everything that they were told was the right thing to do? And, you know, one of the things that I typically hear come up is that the people in power benefit from creating a system where people aren't educated about how to operate in it. Of course. Can we talk about how expensive it is to be poor? Yeah. When you don't have money to go get your teeth cleaned at your dentist,

You're not going to have money for the root canal you need next year because all of that plaque and calculus built up. When you don't have money to pay your rent right away, that payday loan has a 15, 20, 25% interest rate on it. Being poor is so expensive. And we don't talk about how...

The current system as it stands feeds the rich and starves the poor. Could you just speak a little bit to the way you think about wealth versus earnings? Because I think a lot of time when we think about financial advice, it's about earning more. But so much of wealth accumulation comes through other methods.

So I think one of the biggest myths is that only rich people invest. Nah, babe, how do you think those rich people got rich? We talk so much about earning and labor and putting in the time, nose to the grindstone. There are even just like phrases in English that we use to purport the value of work ethic and living that hard life and earning. But

That's not how wealth happens. Frankly, I would say most rich people are incredibly lazy, much, much lazier than the average blue collar employee, much lazier than the person scanning your groceries at the Walmart. But we have ultra wealthy people on a pedestal and said they must be smarter. They must work harder. They must be better people than the rest of us. But they're not.

literally just have more money to begin with. And with that more money, they are putting their money to work. And so when it comes to wealth,

I think it's really important to discuss having multiple income streams. And sure, that can mean picking up a side hustle or getting a second job. But like, you're a human being. You still need to get a certain amount of sleep every night. You can only work yourself ragged for so long before you burn out. Your money, it does not sleep. It does not get tired. It does not have feelings.

You don't have to feel bad for it. You don't have to provide it a lunch break. Your money can work around the clock 24-7 for you.

So much of financial literacy or just conversation around finance has been dominated by white men. Could you just speak a bit about what it's like for you to be in part of this conversation and how your identity lays into that and whether or not you think it impacts why or how much people resonate with you? So you're totally right. I like to say that things have been a little too male, pale and stale for a while. For so

So much of my life as an adult or my career, I always had like a little chip on my shoulder. I felt like I needed to prove something that like, I am just as good as the boys. Like I belong in the boys club. I'm a cool girl.

I realize that I am able to succeed not in spite of being a young Asian woman, but rather I succeed because I'm a young Asian woman. I call my audience the leftovers. And it's an endearing term because I think I primarily speak to women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, people who grew up low income.

AKA the people that the financial services system has left behind for centuries. I think it's nice for people to watch someone who looks like them. I think it disarms people because when you're hearing a lecture from somebody in a suit and tie on TV, who, you know, they're rich.

You know they don't have any sort of relationship with someone who looks like you. What compels you to listen? Whereas I'm talking about, oh my gosh, my girlfriend did this stupid thing. Or when I was 22, I made this mistake by dating this horrible person. People are like, I have that story. I have done that. I have been where you are. And to see someone who is so imperfect, so human, who has made all of these mistakes, then come back and say, I'm not better than you. Frankly, I'm probably worse. And you can do it because I did.

One concern I've heard about FinTalk or just Finfluencers in general is that, you know, these are people who are making their livelihoods off of creating content. We've seen a couple Finfluencers come into hot water for having partnerships with brands that might be encouraging people to make certain decisions. How do you balance kind of making those business decisions of being a content creator and making sure you're creating content that you stand by and is good, sound advice?

First and foremost, I would say I turned down 95% of the opportunities for brand partnerships that come my way. I'm very, very fortunate in that I have less inventory

because I don't like to put out more than one ad a week, then I have demand. That said, a lot of those rejections happen because I don't think a brand is a good fit for my audience or I don't personally stand by that brand. I think what we should all remember is, frankly, there is no such thing as conscious consumerism under capitalism. In a capitalist society, there are always going to be levers, pushes and pulls that push

may push certain places and brands to make decisions that are in the best interest of shareholders versus consumers. And that's okay. There's always going to be a conflict of interest. Creators are monetizing, but I also think creators deserve to make a living. You would never ask a plumber to come to your home and fix your toilet for free.

I spend 12 hours a day working. I ideate content. I film content. I edit content. I write podcast outlines. I work on the manuscript for my book. Like my time is not free. And I left a very lucrative job to do this. I think I deserve to get paid. If you watch my content and you trust me, know that I have done my research. I have compared competitors and I like this one. And I think that's really important to put out in the world.

I understand you have a book coming out this winter. Can you tell me a bit about it? Oh, my pride and joy. Let me tell you, for some reason, I thought writing a book would be very easy. Can confirm. Narrator, it was not very easy. But it is truly my pride and joy. It is titled Rich AF, The Winning Money Mindset That Will Change Your Life. And it is just a foray, a peek behind the curtain as to how rich people live their lives and

and what lessons we can take from them as everyday regular people that can help enrich ours. I would say rich people have some very different habits

and a different mindset. And that is really important to change if you want to grow and have your money work harder for you. I would also say that the chapters are laid out in an organized way so that if you know nothing about money, you can literally pick this book up and you will be in a better financial position by the last page. But you can pre-order it online at richaf.me. Yes, I made the URL a manifestation because I am, you know,

Woo woo. It's okay. I like it. And I think it's important to talk about yourself in that way and use phrases like rich and know that it's okay to want that. And it's not a dirty word. All right. Well, thanks so much for chatting with me. I really appreciate it. Thanks for chatting with me.

We're back with Shaleen, and it's time to wrap up the show with Keeping Tabs. This is where each of us shares a story, a trend, or a company we're following right now. And Shaleen, since you're our guest, you go first. What are you keeping tabs on? Right now, I'm keeping track of periods. And that's because I'm writing a book that's going to be published in February about severe PMS. But it's opened my eyes to how we just don't talk about periods. And in fact, in Florida right now, there is a bill to prohibit talking about periods and teaching about them in the classroom.

I mean, of course, Florida. Don't say period. Yeah, don't say gay. Don't say period. Don't say anything smart, basically, out of Ron DeSantis' mouth. I really believe Ron DeSantis could do better if he just had any amount of riz. It's just like every human interaction he has, he just kind of botches.

Oh my god, no, he is a weird, awful human being. And of course he wants to pass something that's about not talking about periods. He's definitely of the archetype of man who hears anything about PMS or periods and shuts down immediately and makes like a ew noise about it. They can't all be enlightened like you. I'm an Alan in a world of

Go Alan. Yeah. Well, I sort of feel like shit today for reasons outlined in your book. So I feel seen. Josh, what are you keeping tabs on?

Did you all know that this past Saturday, August 5th, we had a holiday? It was National Mustard Day. And to celebrate, French's Mustard collaborated with Skittles to make a mustard-flavored Skittle that is available in limited time in Atlanta, D.C., and right here in New York City. They also have a sweepstakes where you can win a pack or something like that.

Did you create a bunch of fake email addresses to enter that sweepstakes? Oh, yeah. All my burners are running in on this. My Gmail, my Hotmail, my Yahoo, my Earthlink, whatever, whatever I had. French's Mustard has done this like the past couple of years. They had like a mustard flavored donut. They had a mustard flavor ice cream, which made similar. But would you try a mustard flavored Skittle? And in what context?

Listen, I'd try anything if you offered me a lot of money. If it was free in the office. And if it was free in the office and only snack provided, best believe I would take three packets. Shaleen, would you try a mustard-flavored Skittle? I was going to say no, I don't hate myself that much, but you know what? I am a journalist. I do hate myself that much. If it's free, absolutely. Yeah, you spent this whole interview acting like you wouldn't get swayed, but we know. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

I feel like it would be good in popcorn. I feel like you kind of like, you know, the candy mix in popcorn. I feel like that could be fair. I think it's the texture where I'd get thrown off because it's still that chewy, very distinct Skittle texture. But yeah, anyone, I know the audience is cringing right now, so let's move on to something else. Yes, what's your keeping tab? So...

Very sad news in the world of celebrity, which is something is going on with Natalie Portman and Benjamin Melpied's marriage. I am happily married, but Benjamin Melpied, if you want to call me, I'm here. I have no idea who that is. Wait, okay. I actually interviewed him for an article for Fast Company. He's like a very famous dancer and choreographer. He runs a company called the Los Angeles Dance Project. He choreographed Black Swan, which is how they met. But I have mostly been cracking up at all the jokes on Twitter that are like,

Jonathan Safran Foer like cracks his knuckles and stretches before writing the most important email of his life because of that terrible correspondence between him and Natalie Portman that was published in the New York Times Magazine next to like photos of her in bikinis. It was just like such a bizarre decision. Probably pretty smart because I did read all of it. Yeah.

This is true. It's all marketing. Everything's marketing. And that's it for Most Innovative Companies. Shaleen, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. Our show is produced by Avery Miles and Blake Odom with additional support by our intern, Mariam Kiparitse. Mix and sound design by Tad Wadhams and our executive producer is Josh Christensen. Remember again to subscribe, rate, and review. And we'll see you next week.