Ideo layoffs and the end of design thinking
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Welcome to Most Innovative Companies. I'm your host, Yasmin Gagne, joined by my producer, Josh Christensen. Hey, Josh. Hey, Yas. What are you doing for Thanksgiving? I'm not doing too much for Thanksgiving. I usually kind of stay in. We actually just moved my in-laws downstairs in my building from me, in my apartment building. So we'll probably go over there. Yeah, they're older. We need them to be closer to us. So it's a whole thing. I'm dealing with it fine. I'm fine. I really am.

I really am. I'll sidebar with you about this because I know that you can't trash talk your in-laws on air. I'm just kidding. No, they're lovely. They're lovely. But we will probably just have a very quiet Thanksgiving with them. Do you have any fun plans for Thanksgiving? Every year I visit my grandma at her assisted living facility in South Carolina. Okay. That, I'll be honest, I find a little weird because it's like...

The assisted living or the experience in general? The experience in general, like the dining room. So they have a pretty good Thanksgiving meal for everyone. And, you know, there's a dining room that she goes to every day. But it looks like something from the antebellum South. Oh, well, it is South Carolina. I would say that the people serving and the people eating are of different races. And it just...

It's like a very strange experience. But I love seeing my grandma. The food is good. Everyone there is super nice. They treat her really well. Like, I have nothing weird to say. It's just like a strange experience. And then there's something really... Maybe they need some design changes to their... They need to apply design thinking to the assisted living facility. Which is a setback. Which I...

Which is what we're talking about today. Do we have any housekeeping? Just our normal run of housekeeping of subscribe, rate, and review to this podcast. And go to fastcompany.com and look at our Fast Company Premium subscriptions. Later on today's episode, I'll be talking with SOMO's co-founder and CEO, Miguel Leal, about bringing authentic Mexican food to the online space and to Target. But first...

But first, global design firm IDEO has announced a round of layoffs. And here to talk about it and about what the design thinking era was or is, is Fast Company senior editor Liz Stinson. Welcome back to the show, Liz. Hi, good to be here. So as we alluded to earlier, I want to talk a little bit about quote unquote design thinking. When I started at Fast Company five years ago, it was a lot of

It was all anyone could talk about. And I remember being an assistant and being like, oh my God, I don't know what design thinking means. I'm never going to fit in here. Now people are saying that era is over. Tell me what design thinking was or is. I mean, first of all, it depends on who you ask because people have different ways of describing design thinking, which complicates things.

But at its most basic, design thinking was or really still is a methodology for innovation. It's a way of solving problems that is meant to take into account the perspective of the people who will be using the end product of that innovation process. So that could be a product, that could be a service, it could be something else.

So instead of a closed room approach to design where, say, a small group of designers thinks up an idea, brings it to life, design thinking is based on the notion that the best solutions are born from fostering deep empathy with the end user. It is kind of funny because it's basically like, yeah, we ask people what they want first. Yeah.

Right. No, I mean, it's a completely logical and should be the way that problem solving works. I don't think corporate entities have always thought in that way. It takes time. It takes effort to do that. But obviously, in recent years, it's become a really big buzzword in the corporate space. Just to go back a little bit, the roots of design thinking date back decades, but it really caught on in the 1990s when David Kelly announced

and Tim Brown founded IDEO, which is a design consultancy. It positioned itself as an innovation powerhouse. So clients could come to IDEO with a big complicated problem and IDEO's team of designers could use this methodology, design thinking methodology, to think up a wonderfully innovative solution

Just to give you like a little bit of context here. So IDEO over the years has worked with everyone from Coca-Cola to Conagra. They've designed everything from a hands-free breast pump for Willow to...

a new Oral-B toothbrush. They've also redesigned the lunch process for the San Francisco school district. So the idea here is that design can solve pretty much any problem so long as you employ the right methodology and that right methodology being design thinking. By now, lots of organizations have their own flavor of design.

design thinking methodology. You know, it's funny. I remember I was in some meeting and somebody was like, we're going to do like the IDEO method. And then they just wrote a bunch of things on post-its. Yeah. The post-its are a real thing. It's like the aesthetic of design thinking. And it's almost meme-ified at this point. You know, if you're a designer, then you're using post-it notes. You walk into IDEO and you're going to see post-it notes. Yeah.

But take us through. I'm going to be really brief with this because I have not used design thinking myself. But for IDEO, it seems to be a six-step process that essentially encourages people to generate ideas by asking questions, empathizing with potential customers, and then rapidly prototyping design solutions that...

ideally could be implemented by IDEO's clients. There are various ways of approaching design thinking methodology and lots of organizations sell their own flavor of this. And so it's become kind of like choose your own adventure in design thinking, but it all is at its core.

trying to better understand the end user of a service or a product. I wanted to jump in on that because we mentioned a little bit how this has kind of like fallen out of favor and that there is basically if you ask a bunch of people what design thinking is and there's these different flavors and different people have different ideas. Like how did this idea kind of fall out of favor? Like what are some of like the bastardizations of this concept if you have an answer to that?

I think the short answer is that design thinking is evolving. So one of the criticisms of design thinking is that people realize that problem solving is more complicated than sticking Post-it notes on the wall with what might sound like good ideas, but are almost always

always more complicated to implement in real life. And, you know, one of the big complaints about design thinking shortcoming is that it often results in concepts and suggestions that are not fully rooted in reality or can be challenging to ultimately implement, right? Like it's one thing to sit in a room and empathize with the user that you've identified and

and then come up with a solution, it's a whole other thing to take into account the complicated reality of the world and how much things cost and the other factors that could influence whether or not this idea works. I mean, there's always going to be unforeseen challenges

when putting anything out into the world and design thinking isn't a foolproof way to foresee those challenges. I remember once sitting in a room with a guy who was so proud of himself because he worked for McKinsey and was very interested in design thinking. And he was like my age. So we were both like 22 and not smart. And he was like, you know what the fastest way to reduce wait times at a supermarket is? And I was like, what?

And he was like, open another cashier. That's the sign thinking. Brilliant idea. I was like, thanks, dude. That's great. That's why they're paying you the big bucks. But all this to say, you know, that's sort of classic what you're talking about, which is like, okay, so you don't know anything about the particular store you're talking about. You know what I mean? You don't know like how expensive it is to open another cashier. You don't know what that means for staffing.

It's such an easy, like, quote unquote, turnkey solution, but it's like kind of meaningless. Right. I think I think that's where innovation gets a bad reputation because innovation, in my mind, can sometimes feel very surface level. And the complexities of having to bring that to life are always really, really complicated and.

So yeah, I mean, design thinking is really guilty of that. But I do think it's interesting because you see the thinking around design thinking evolving a bit. Schools like the Stanford Design School, which is famous for Tim Brown was part of the Stanford Design School. He brought design thinking to the Stanford Design School. And so a lot of the startups that we've seen over the past decade were

were born out of that environment where design thinking was the main mode of problem solving and identifying potential new ideas and how to sort of like make those ideas bulletproof. And clearly, like that didn't really work.

But to their credit, Stanford is really evolving its thinking around this. So they totally revamped their design program just this year. And they are going to be focusing less on, I guess, innovation per se and more about preparing students to be able to answer some of the more pressing ethical questions that surface when you're creating technology and when you're a designer. And I think that's really, really important here.

They're requiring students. One thing that I found really interesting, and I'll just give a little bit of a call out because we're going to have a story on the Stanford Design School soon. So this is why it's top of mind for me. They are now requiring students to take ethics courses at the beginning of their studies versus at the end, which is how it was before, which like.

Duh. I mean, that should just be- That's design thinking. Right. Like that should just be baseline learning when you are going to be a designer bringing things into the world. So anyway, I think a lot of people are on the right track. They're acknowledging the shortcomings of design thinking. And even IDEO, I believe, has been rethinking its own approach to design thinking. So to talk about IDEO more specifically, the piece by Mark Wilson, it's a premium piece

about the fact that the company has had some layoffs. And I'd love to hear from you what happened at IDEO, like the story of IDEO through all this. I mean...

That's a really big question, and I will do my best to answer it. IDEO was founded in the 1990s to be this innovation studio where big companies could come and ask for help in solving some of their biggest and most challenging problems. And I think that

that was a really interesting proposition, especially for big companies at the time, to be able to outsource this piece of, you know, the innovation piece of their puzzle. IDEO has been really successful for a very long time, but in recent years, it seems that the demand for its more traditional services, the design thinking aspect of things,

has decreased. And that is potentially partially due to the fact that IDEO actually sells a service to teach companies how to practice design thinking. So that's funny. Teach a man how to fish and you go bankrupt. Right, exactly. So, you know, IDEO began selling its methodology through something called IDOU, which is essentially an online school where organizations can pay to take classes in the design thinking methodology.

Even the current CEO of IDEO, Derek Robson, had said that its services are just less in demand partially because people can do this themselves now. And tell me about the specifics of the layoff. Who has left the company now? So Mark Wilson reported that the number of layoffs will reach 125 people by the end of this year. But IDEO has actually been undergoing layoffs since 2020.

In 2020, reportedly, the headcount was 725. And this is the second round of layoffs in 2023 alone. So, you know, you remove 125 people from that headcount. And IDEO told us that they were looking at reducing its staff by 32% by the end of this year. And all levels of the company are impacted. Everyone from, you know, the lowest levels to the C-suite. So...

That's huge. I mean, that's a really big reduction in staff. And to me, that says a lot about how in-demand design thinking is these days. It might also say a lot about where IDEO wants to take its business. One interesting thing that Mark wrote about in his story is

is that IDEO seems to be undergoing somewhat of a identity crisis. If you're not peddling design thinking anymore as your primary product, then what are you? I mean, the CEO comes from an advertising background. He had a really interesting quote

in his speech where he was talking about IDEO being more of a media agency. So I guess the question here is, what is IDEO going to be in the future? And I think that that is a really fuzzy question at the moment. It could continue doing its services as it does today, but it sounds like it's going to be leaning into more of the marketing side potentially.

That's fascinating. And it's funny because I felt like during COVID, especially, design thinking was really at work. Like, I know I've ragged on the term a lot, but people were redesigning hospitals, designing spaces for people to get vaccines. Like, to me, that felt like one of the first times I really saw people taking in that mindset into account.

Yeah, you know, I mean, I think that that's probably true. But do you need to hire an IDEO whose services are going to be comparable to a McKinsey to help you do that? I'm not sure you do. I don't know that you need to hire McKinsey either, to be clear. I feel like this is a lot of like, you can do it yourself, guys. Yeah.

I'm with you on that. Although I do think that like not everybody can be a designer, right? Like not everybody is a designer. There is a method to the madness. Like I think it's important for people who are working in this space to really be grounded in some good methodology around how to come up with these ideas because there's a lot at stake, right? Like especially when you're talking about healthcare, there are people who specialize in this. I just don't know that outsourcing it to people

an agency is the best

And maybe that's where, you know, the design thinking methodology comes into play. A lot of organizations now, they hold design sprints in their own offices. They have figured out how to do design, quote unquote, design thinking themselves and maybe tweak it to be what they need it to be for their particular organization. We're seeing the pains of that manifest in the shrinking of IDEO and other organizations like it.

It seems like IDEO is kind of in a situation where at their price point of, we said, just shy of the McKinsey numbers, according to Mark Wilson's reporting. So it's big companies that can afford to do this, big organizations. But then also in the piece, Mark wrote about Ford creating their own design lab that was basically copying the IDEO style internally and a bunch of other companies doing that. So it seems like the companies that don't have the resources

to do this sort of thing, that need a consultancy, don't have the resources to afford IDEO. So it seems like kind of a, you know, a little bit of a paradox there. Right. I mean, I will say that IDEO has always done well-publicized pro bono work. And it does have...

It does have an arm that focuses on problems that are not for like, you know, Fortune 500 companies. So that is worth saying. Like their bread and butter obviously is working for big companies because it's a company. It needs to make money. Mm-hmm.

There are also all sorts of design organizations out there that are not IDEO that are doing really great work in this space that are solving problems, really complex problems, and they just don't get as much press, right? I think that's worth saying as well. And I think a lot of these people who are in the newer generation of designers are

are looking at design thinking and asking, okay, well, this is an okay baseline. How can we improve upon it to be more inclusive, to be more equitable, to be designing for a world where justice is centered? I mean, I think that was a really big complaint about design thinking too, is that at the end of the day, you have people who are transposing empathy onto the people who they're solving for, but the people who are solving their problems are

are usually highly educated, often white. There are lots of issues when you have that sort of arrangement. So what you're saying is we need to apply design thinking to design thinking. Perhaps. I think that's a good place to end it. We are going to take a quick break, followed by my interview with Miguel Leal.

Hey, Miguel, how's it going? Yes, it's great to see you again. It's good to see you too. So I want to get to SOMOS and talk a lot about that. But beforehand, I want to talk about your previous career because you started out at Kind, like Kind bars, which you see everywhere. Tell me about what you learned from that and then what you brought to SOMOS. The opportunity to work at Kind was amazing in many different ways. I think Kind...

is one of the most beautiful brands in retail. I mean, it's now a billion-dollar brand, and being part of that journey was incredible. But it also allowed me to learn from a founder and from a culture that was best in class. I mean, the team there was great and super talented. But one of the things that I learned that I brought to Somos was this sense of ownership.

So Daniel Lubezki, who's the founder of Kind and is my co-founder at Somos, he created this culture of ownership at Kind in which not only everybody owned a piece of the company and that ended up being incredible for everybody, but

But also everybody felt like they were owners. And what I mean, it was OK to challenge each other like you would do with another co-founder. It was OK to give your opinion when you travel. You know, you always were looking for the cheapest option and how like if it was your own checkbook.

And I think when you have 10 co-founders is great. But, you know, when I got a kind, we're already 100 co-founders there. And I just saw how amazing that culture just was exponential because everybody was trying their best.

It didn't matter your point of view. It didn't matter being wrong. The only thing that mattered was building this beautiful brand. And that is something that we tried to instill at Somos since day one. The insight that you had with Daniel Lubetzky when you founded Somos was basically that Americans consume tons of Mexican food, but never make it at home. Tell me about that. Yeah, it is very interesting. We first saw that when we were both living in New York.

And we saw in the years that we were at Kind how much Mexican food changed at restaurants. So Mexican food just became anything, you know, from like taco trucks becoming birria trucks, taco bells becoming chipotles, all the way to Cosme getting, you know, Michelin star. There's a Michelin star Mexican restaurant in Manhattan now.

And the shelf just stayed the same. It was the same yellow corn, hard tortilla and the yellow fluorescent cheese, canned beans. You're pulling a face, but I do like all those foods. I also like some of those.

They are amazing and we love them and we love being a part of those meals. But it was not that those foods are not great. It was just that they were not moving the cuisine forward. And that's what first got us interested in the space. And to your point, what really blew our minds was that 82% of Mexican food comes from a restaurant.

That is not the same for Italian food. That is not the same for Chinese food. That is very peculiar to Mexican food. And because of the size of the market, it's a $68 billion market. We just thought, what a great opportunity to become the spaghetti and sauce of Mexican food. And

you know, I've seen your products on Target shelves and I think their prices reflect that, right? Tell me about how you thought about, you know, building the packs of rice that you have or the sauces that you have and keeping them cost effective. Yeah, it was a process. We started the company

with Rodrigo, our third partner who lives in Guadalajara, sending us cases of product to Daniel and I, to our homes, which we will share with our family and with our friends and just loving it. And we said, well, you know, everybody's doing Taco Tuesdays through the pandemic.

Wouldn't it be awesome to have like a solution that you can just very quickly put in the microwave? And it was a little bit the juxtaposition, Jasmine, between the recipes that you see for Mexican food. If you Google taco Tuesday night recipe, that it would be an hour and how quickly it was to do samos in under 10 minutes with very minimum cleanup.

And I always say that our products are fantastic. If you take our rice and you pair it versus the competition or our Mexican chili crisp or our enchilada sauce and you compare it versus the competitions, our products are great.

But when you cook with them and you realize how quickly and easy and how much time you have left at the end and how happy your family is and how the ingredients are so clean, that's really the game changer. So when we were thinking about pricing it and creating, you know, that architecture that you saw at Target and the burrito bowl kits that we just launched with them, that is what we had in mind.

You know, I want to talk a little bit about product development because obviously Kind is kind of known for pioneering a really ethical supply chain and working well with suppliers. How have you figured out how to do that with Somos? With Somos, we started with the quality of the ingredients. So there is an area in Mexico, in the north of Guanajuato and Zacatecas and Chihuahua area that is really the Napa Valley of peppers. I

I learned this from my work at Cholula. The best peppers in the world, the best quality come from that region of Mexico. So it was very important to us to develop relationships with the growers there, develop relationships with the chefs in the area so we could cook our product close to the source.

And then to use authentic Mexican cooking methods like tatamado and externalization to get that done. I think like the greatest compliment that I get is people tell me your salsas don't taste like they came from a jar. And I think it's that mix of like the best quality ingredients and then manufacturing and cooking them close to the source of the ingredients.

Tell me about pursuing those relationships with farmers and keeping prices low on the shelf. People thought we were crazy. We would go down there, me and Rodrigo, my co-founder, and we would meet, you know, with the chefs there, with the cooks, with the farmers.

And we're like, well, we need to have this quality of peppers. We need to have this quality of tomatoes. We need to have this quality of oil. And by the way, we need to process them in the slow roasted, you know, old school way. And at the beginning, people said, we don't want to partner with you because no one is going to buy this product.

And no one is going to pay for this quality of ingredients. The other people that you're competing against is coming and asking us for the cheapest possible ingredients. They are going like the other area of quality. Yeah. The difference was we never saw retail as our competition. We didn't see those old products on the shelf. What we were focusing on is taking out takeout.

So our idea was our competitors are not the other brands of the shelves. Our competitors is the restaurant. We need to have restaurant quality food. And if people do it at home, it will save them money. It will save them time. And now, you know, of course, we're growing a ton and we go back to Mexico to look for more capacity. And now everybody wants to partner with us and be part of the story. But you are right. At the beginning, it was so tough to convince them.

So your background is in marketing and you did something kind of interesting with this company, which is you cloned your grandmother with Abuela AI, I guess is what you call it. Tell me about that process. Explain what it is. It seems like something that we did last minute, but it's actually something that I've thought about since the beginning of Somos. So going back

to why we started this company. What we saw was that the only people that were cooking Mexican food at home were people like me that have a Mexican grandma. And then my wife is from Michigan. She's Italian-American, so she doesn't have a Mexican grandma. Yeah. She loves now cooking Mexican food. But if we have any issues, if we have like leftover enchilada sauce and we don't know what to do with it the next day, we always just text my mom.

And the original idea was, wouldn't it be great if we could give everybody in America a Mexican grammar that they can just talk? And the original idea, this is crazy what I'm going to share with you. But I was like, well, why wouldn't we just pay 200 Mexican grammars in Mexico the ability to text with people and then be able to like adopt people?

one or two families and then they can just like send tips. But it was very hard to execute, obviously. And a few years ago, I did a deal with Yvonne Kinzer when she was at Avocados from Mexico. And, you know, she was the CMO there for 10 years, did Super Bowl ads. You know, it's a very successful brand. I think it's

one of the most successful Mexican food brands. And when she left, I told her about my idea and she was like, no, let's do it with technology.

With a version of AI and AR and also, you know, cloning your mom, we would be able to talk to her. We also would be able to take a picture of the shelf and ask for a recipe. We would be able to text to WhatsApp any questions. And we could model it after your mom. My mom actually went to Dallas with her for a full day so they could get her mannerisms right, her stories. It's interesting. I just ask...

you know, the Abuela AI, who was her favorite son. And I was very disappointed by the answer. I was going to ask, yeah, now when you need recipe tips, do you contact the AI version of your grandma or do you contact the real one? Well, right now I'm definitely contacting the AI because it's a five-minute conversation. I know if I call my mom...

It's like an hour conversation. But yeah, it's a lot of fun. That's really funny. Is there a Mexican dish that you are dying to recreate at SOMOS that you have had trouble with or that you're working on? Yeah, there is.

So one of my favorite things to eat is chilaquiles. So good. Are you familiar with chilaquiles? Of course I am. I love them. I think it's one of the most wonderful breakfasts for people in your audience that haven't found them. They are basically breakfast nachos. That's the way that I explain them.

Like if it is okay to eat nachos for breakfast, these are the ones. But we need to find the right salsa, the right tortillas, the right beans. And then of course, you know, you end up with an egg on top and some crema and you can add some avocado.

You know, our focus is creating recipes that take five ingredients, 10 minutes and less than $15. Yeah. So we have developed the right chips. You know, they need to be crisp.

because if not, they get really soggy with the salsa. We have developed the right salsa, and now it's all about how do we package it in a convenient chilaquiles kit, like the bowl kits that you saw at Target, the burrito bowl kits.

and be able to do them in under 10 minutes. So the barrier is like trying to run the four-minute mile, right? Like how can we get 10-minute chilaquiles? Are there any other packaged good brands on the store that you see and you're like, they're doing a great job?

Oh, tons of it. It really just depends on what are you looking for. I spent a lot of time looking at what Italian food brands and Asian brands are doing. But a couple of founders that I really respect the work that they are doing, Jing by Fly by Jing. So good. Yeah.

I think her brand and the way that she manages her community around the brand and also the product. She's a dear friend, but she's also incredibly talented when it comes to product development. You know, Vanessa and her sister at Omsom, you know, their new noodles products.

So good. Incredible. But I also look a lot at Italian brands. I think the team at Carbone and the team at Rao's, what they've done to take a category that was already so dominant, pasta and sauce.

And I'll take it to really to a quality place that they are competing with restaurant quality food. I would love someone to be that in the Mexican category. Those are the people that I look at and they're like, we can bring that to the Mexican set. What's coming next? Is there anything you can preview for us? Our number one KPI is...

How can we get more people cooking at home versus ordering out? This whole notion of taking out takeout.

And what we are realizing that is working is that Mexican meals made easy. So our, you know, obsession right now is how do we marketing somos more like Legos than like kind. What we want to do is create this system where you can mix and match different pieces and

And you can see in our signature, in our email, we put these like 10-minute recipes. Abuela AI is part of getting us to these Mexican meals made easy. The Target kits that you just saw in store is basically a Lego kit, a Lego system that you can come in and bring these different pieces. And as we launch new products...

What are the recipes that those products unlock? So it's not kind with dark chocolate, nuts and sea salt. It's okay. Now that we launched an enchilada sauce and it is so successful, what else can you do with enchilada sauce? Well, that sauce is amazing for chilaquiles in the morning. So that is kind of the way that we're looking at. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Miguel. Yes. Thank you so much for your time and for your support of SOMOS. I always have so much fun talking to you.

Okay, we are back with Liz and it's time to wrap up the show with Keeping Tabs. This is where each one of us shares a story, trend, or company we are following right now. And Liz, since you're our guest, what are you keeping tabs on? So recently I have been very fascinated by the media's fascination with the lack of reservations available at fancy restaurants in New York City and other big cities. And I've been very fascinated by the lack of reservations available at fancy restaurants in New York City and other big cities.

I don't know if you've all seen these stories. The New York Times did this really interactive feature. The New Yorker's new podcast spent 45 minutes talking about reservations and how they're being gamed. I think it's hilarious. It is a real problem for a certain person in this world, but it seems a little ridiculous.

It's the service journalism we all need right now. Are there any restaurants that you two are dying to get into? For me, it's Lilia in Williamsburg. It's just like... Oh, yeah. The amount of planning you need to do. It's a lot. But Lilia has been around. I went to Lilia in 2017 or 2016. I mean, that's amazing. What a success story that you can sell out your restaurant night after night for seven years straight. Yeah, that's wild.

I really want to try, there's a new restaurant on Christopher Street called Libertine. That's like a French bistro down there. That's supposed to be fantastic. Yeah, it's new. It's tiny. It's really hard to get a reservation, but it looks terrific. And I'm also always up for any Omikase experience in the city.

which is always tough to get tables at. If anyone wants to treat us to omakase, just slide into my DMs. I'll give you my Venmo. Let us know. I mean, this whole thing for me has really shown me the beauty of a local neighborhood restaurant. Yes. For various reasons, my life is not really conducive to trying to go to fancy restaurants. So I've, at the end of the day, I put my kids to bed. If I have a babysitter, like I want to walk three blocks outside

And so, you know, I would encourage people to go to their neighborhood restaurants, although the worst of it is when you have a neighborhood restaurant and then it becomes sceney. That's terrible. Yes, that's so real. Yeah. That's how I feel. I love Miss Ada, which is near me, and I feel like it's sort of been dangerously close to that. For a very long time. For several years. Yeah, for a long time. Totally. It's also, you know, it's New York City. This is the greatest food place.

city in the United States. It's amazing to go to a Jean-Georges or Nobu, but there's so many great restaurants. Totally. I mean, even food carts. Uh-huh. Food carts. And that you should patronize. Support local restaurants. Josh, what are you keeping tabs on? Well, I'm keeping tabs once again on George Santos. Congressman from New York for now. The Prince of Wales and

the NBA MVP from last year, according to him. He's just the most notorious liar, and I'm obsessed with everything that he does. The ethics investigation into him just concluded, and there were some new details that came out, particularly on what he spent campaign finances on. His expenditures included Botox,

Fancy trips to Atlantic City. That's their words, not anyone else's. Hell yeah. There's no such thing as a fancy trip to Atlantic City. And also spent money on OnlyFans subscriptions, which is just... Do we know who he subscribed to? I don't know. Um...

I feel like that would break me. Finding that out would just do something to my brain. Someone, I saw, I forget who it was, but someone posted on X the other day that it's really a shame that Jezebel closed down, which also is a keeping tabs. I'm bummed that Jezebel closed down. Goddammit, that was going to be my keeping tabs, Josh. Oh, no. Well, we'll get into it in a second. Yeah.

But that Jezebel, this is a good segue, that Jezebel would have had a reporter find out exactly what he subscribed to on OnlyFans and where he stayed in Atlantic City. Like, they would have been on it. Well, I actually miss, you know, like all the George Santos stuff made me miss Gawker a lot, which I know Gawker had flaws, but...

Oh, deep, deep flaws. They were so good at covering this. Snark is underrated. It's true. There is a time and a place for Snark. I don't know if an entire business model of a media company built on it is the best possible thing. It's certainly got into some gross areas, but Gawker had some fun. It was built to report on George Santos. Exactly. Oh, yeah. Gawker is responsible for most of the bad aspects of my personality because I grew up reading it. Oh, no.

And we are three millennials talking about how snark is underrated, which is also funny. But I do miss it in times like this. And the texts alone, like reading George Santos' text exchange. Oh, the texts are wild. Are so funny. Who's Janet? Who's Janet? Just didn't know. Secretary of the Treasury. U.S. Congressman. Sad face emoticon. Yeah.

Oh my God. Just terrific. So let's go to your keeping tabs. Yaz, are you going to stick with Jezebel? Yeah, my keeping tabs with Jezebel is over. I'm really sad about it. I think that website launched so many really good writers. It's funny, I was talking about this in front of the PodMax and like...

I think the perspective that Jezebel brought to its reporting actually ended up kind of becoming a mainstream perspective in a lot of ways. And you saw a lot of writers sort of adopt that tone or that way of thinking about, and this is the wrong way to put it, but like quote unquote women's issues or feminist issues or whatever. All this to say, you know, I was sad when I heard Jezebel closed. I also realized I hadn't really read it in a couple of years, but yeah.

I will miss its voice. Maybe it'll come back somehow. Although I think Gawker just got purchased by someone and I'm like, guys, it's fine. We can just lay it to rest. RIP design thinking and RIP Jezebel, I guess. So that's it for Most Innovative Companies. Liz, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks so much for having me.

Our show is produced by Avery Miles and Blake Odom, mixed and sound designed by Nicholas Torres, and our executive producer is Josh Christensen. Remember again to subscribe, rate, and review, and we'll see you next week.