So, thanks to Bidenomics, we’re not in a recession?
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Welcome to The Most Innovative Companies. I'm your host, Yasmin Gagne, joined as always by my producer, Josh Christensen. Hey, Josh. Hey, Yas. So, you know the first presidential debate is finally here. It's like when Christmas toys are released in the stores already and the flyers come out August 23rd. Are you ready for the first Republican debate? Look, background to this, I obviously know that there's a few reasons why

DeSantis is pulling behind Trump, right? Maybe he focuses too much on social issues, what have you. I would also say if he had 10% more Riz, he'd probably be doing okay. That guy is the most awkward person in the world. But all of these people are terrible. And so many questions that people asked were like, what do you think about what small businesses are facing or our economic system is facing the biggest problem? And most of them are like trans people. And it's

It's like, what the fuck are we talking about? It's ridiculous. But we'll get more into the economics of the, you know, that we're talking about in the current election. We have somebody who actually knows what they're talking about. Yeah. The other day I got some frozen yogurt and I dropped my spoon on the street and like

Try to do the DeSantis like two finger eating situation. Okay, so the thing I always think about with pudding fingers is which three fingers did he use? Was it these three? Two makes sense. Three. Two makes sense. Three is wild. Like the three fingers or was it excluding the index finger? No. Or the very rare like, you know, taking down the ring finger. Yeah.

Highbrow election coverage here. This is what you came for. Before we go on with the show, do you have any housekeeping or updates? Just the same things we've been plugging for the last few weeks. Just, you know, come to Fast Company Innovation Festival, everybody. Tickets are on sale. We put the link in the show notes. The week of September 18th in New York City, Fast Company Innovation Festival has panels and fireside chats and workshops.

and these things called Taste of Innovation and all sorts of really cool stuff, as well as Yaz and I. We will be there. We will be hosting various things during the week. I have a little podcast booth that'll be on the floor of Fast Company Innovation Festival where you can ask a question that could be featured there.

the podcast themselves and all sorts of different things. Yeah, come by slide into our DMs. I'll be talking to Universal Pictures CEO Donna Langley and Jason Blum from Blumhouse. Yeah, a bunch of stuff. There's so much. We're all in the throes of planning this right now. And it's all really cool stuff. And

I always like when Jason Blum is here. I'm a huge horror movie fan, so that'll be cool. But also one more thing to plug, most innovative company applications are open and the link is in the show notes. If you've listened to this podcast, you know what that's all about. So check that out, send it to an innovative company, tell them to apply. Later on today's episode, Fast Company Executive Director of Editorial Programming, Casey Afaini, will be talking with Dr. Courtney Tracy about embracing her own mental health issues in her practice.

Same, I guess. But first, what's going on in the economy and why is it doing so well when we all thought we were going to face a recession? Here to help me figure that out is author of The Wisdom of Crowds and Fast Company contributing writer, James Surowiecki. Hey, James. How are you doing, Yaz? Fundamentally...

Why do so many Americans think the economy is struggling even though it's not? And I say this because I am one of them. I think the main answer is that it's mostly basically a hangover from the high inflation we saw in 2021 and really in 2022. And

I think there are two aspects of that. One is just, it turns out that people really hate inflation. So even more than in some ways, it seems like unemployment. So, you know, unemployment now is like 3.5%. The job market is very strong. You know, we now are, I don't know, more than two years into the recovery and we're still creating a couple hundred, 250,000 jobs a month.

Look at the offers for wages for fast food workers. You can now get paid $15, $16 an hour to work

fast food or Lowe's or whatever, and yet people are still kind of bummed out, or at least were until very recently. And I think a lot of it is just that the inflation of last year really bummed people out to a tremendous extent. And I think part of that was just we had gotten really used to almost no inflation. I mean, we had almost no inflation for basically more than a decade, and I think people really felt it. So I think that...

What that did was, first of all, people felt like their wages were not rising as fast as prices were, which was true for a while. Now they've been outpacing- Always true for journalists, by the way. Yeah, yeah. Well, for journalists, it's still true. But for most Americans, it hasn't been true. For like a year now, wages have been outpacing prices. But I think people still have this memory of it. And that, I think, is a big part of what's going on.

Two stats. One that'll apply to, I mean, virtually all of our listeners and the other that will apply to certain business people. But mortgage rates are so high right now. Like I'm currently reporting a feature about real estate and like the buyers now are all cash, at least in New York. Yeah. And two, it's like capital used to be really cheap. Now it's not. Venture capital and raising money for companies is really tough right now.

Tell me about how that fits in with people's wages increasing. Well, I think it's a response to the rise in mortgage rates and in capital costs more generally. That's obviously a function of the Federal Reserve basically raising interest rates, right? Which was in turn a response to inflation, but also to higher wages, right? And so it's this complicated thing, right? So as wages for wage earners rise,

And that to some degree has some impact on prices, although I don't think that was the main driver of inflation. But you're going to see interest rates rise. And I do think that has something to do with people's general sense of unease about the economy. The mortgage rate thing is very interesting because obviously the thing about mortgages is, OK, for 90 percent of us, if you have a mortgage,

the fact that mortgage rates rise doesn't really have any impact on you, right? It doesn't affect how much you pay because your mortgage is locked in. That's the awesome thing about 30-year mortgages. But what it does do is it makes it very hard if you're a home buyer, if you're in the market, to get a mortgage at a reasonable price. But probably the bigger impact is just that it makes people leery of selling. Because if you're a current homeowner, you have a 4%, 4.5% mortgage, maybe even lower than that.

And you're thinking about selling because housing prices are still very high. The problem is, wait a minute, if I sell...

I'm going to have to buy and then I'm going to have to pay two and a half percent more or whatever it is. Yeah. So I think the biggest issue in the housing market is not actually the mortgage rates. It's really just a lack of supply. People are just not putting homes on the market. And so you have, it is a seller's market because there just is not that much supply relative to demand. I did wonder how soon supply and the term supply and demand would come up during this interview and it was quick.

To go back to talking about the economy more generally and what you were saying earlier,

How is the economy doing so well and why is it doing so well? Can we go more into that? The economy has been growing at a reasonable clip, 2% to 0.5%. And we just got a retail sales number earlier this week, which was very strong and suggested that the economy could be growing in this quarter at above 5%, which is very fast, especially this far into the recovery.

And as I said, the job market has been very strong. So the question is, how is that happening, even though everybody is, you know, basically kind of depressed? Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's a function of a few things. One is that we have gotten a lot of government stimulus in this economy over the last two and a half years, basically since 2008.

Biden took office. I mean, we got a lot of stimulus in 2020 to kind of keep the economy afloat. Then Biden came into office and we've gotten a lot of stimulus to get the economy moving even faster. So 2021...

We got a lot of stimulus focused on consumers. So the American Rescue Plan sent out checks to people. It had a big child care tax credit. There were a host of other stimulus things. So that kept consumer spending in 2021. That helped the job market keep going, retail sales to hold up, etc.,

And then in 2022, toward the tail end of it, we got the Inflation Reduction Act, which its name notwithstanding was mainly focused on... It had some aspects that were going to help with inflation, but a lot of what it did was just encourage... It's designed to encourage investment. So there are tons of tax credits to encourage businesses to invest more, to build plants.

you know, a lot of that is focused on kind of the green economy or whatever you want to call it. So that also gave the economy a boost. Now, the aspect of that that was the big boost was not necessarily how much money has flowed into the economy right away. I think it was more that it basically gave companies an incentive to invest and to think about investing in the future. And so that's

encourage companies to say, all right, wait a minute, maybe we're not going to get a recession, blah, blah, blah. And then I think the other thing is just there was to some degree the fact that companies just kept hiring and consumers were

The thing I would say about consumers over the last two years is they have been incredibly depressed. The consumer confidence numbers have been pretty much as bad as we have seen literally since the consumer confidence surveys have been done, which is about 40 years. And yet for all that, they just kept spending.

And so if you actually looked at what people were doing rather than what they were saying, it was suggesting that, you know, they were feeling okay. And businesses responded by continuing to hire and continuing to invest. And I think that's really been the engine that all those things put together have just put enough money into the economy, made people feel good enough that, or even if they didn't realize they felt good enough to just keep buying and spending. I can relate to that. Just it,

You're like, I can't stop spending money. I can't stop buying shoes on Amazon. I just keep buying stuff. And I'm like, why am I doing this? I'm blowing my weekly budget. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the thing. If you think about how people act when they're really concerned about a recession, they really pull back on spending. They retrench. We have not seen very much of that.

But it's so hard to pull back on spending. Yeah, it is hard. It is hard. But people absolutely do it. I don't know. I mean, I was really struck. The places that I was really struck by was like, if you'd go to stores or the big places, like if you go to the airport and, you know, flights are packed and it has not felt to me like an economy in recession, basically. You've been talking about employment rates being pretty high, but a lot of our listeners and a lot of the people we speak to work in the tech sector.

And that's an area that has experienced massive layoffs over the past few years. How does that fit into the picture? Yeah, I actually think it's a really great point. And the reason for it, I think, is that the tech industry, and as you alluded to earlier, the media industry, are two businesses that

that have bucked the good trend, that they have actually had a lot of trouble over the last couple of years. Let's say the last year and a half in particular. And I think that we had this incredible, in tech at least, we had this really big pandemic-generated bubble or whatever you want to call it, right? Remember when everybody thought Clubhouse was going to be a thing? Yeah, you had this huge thing where everyone's going to be staying at home and that's going to...

create all this demand for streaming or podcasts or whatever. You had tech companies that were really taking advantage of that, Zoom being perhaps the most obvious example. And then as that faded-

And as a lot of the kind of euphoria around tech faded, in part as capital costs have risen. Capital was really cheap. It was really easy for new companies to get money and to hire. And as that started to dry up, seeing companies lay off. I wrote a piece for Fast Company a while ago about the

the weird fact that you had all these tech companies laying people off and they were all like between six and 8%. It was all like, everyone was like, that's exactly how many people we should lay off. And you're like, why? And so it was kind of about why that, but yeah. - I can go back and read that. I was literally just writing a feature about the real world where they laid off 7% of their head count. - Yeah, yeah, exactly. So you just look at it 'cause there's something very odd about it.

But I think one consequence of this is tech and media have a really big impact on just the public, right? I mean, they're really high profile and they're ubiquitous on Twitter and social media. And so I think the fact that these guys and women have felt kind of depressed and been like, oh, things are really dismal. That really has had, I think, a cascading effect on people.

Americans more generally. So that even though most of the economy has been doing quite well, robust, the fact that these industries have been struggling, I think actually has kind of cast a shadow on the economy as a whole. It's also like, you know, this is a bias within like the media, but on some sectors of the media, but it's like, it's less attractive to cover. Yeah, things are actually pretty good than it is to be like...

Facebook lays off X number of employees. Yeah. Google in shambles, like that stuff, you know, if it bleeds, it reads. You know who's doing a great job? Like McDonald's is like... Yeah. No, no, exactly. I mean, I think that's exactly right. Yeah. I think that retail sales are holding up pretty well, but it's just like, okay, it's whatever. It's, you know, it's basically dog bites man. And that's less interesting, I think.

And, you know, I think one interesting other aspect of this is I spend a lot of time, well, too much time on Twitter. But if you're, you know, especially. X, X, X. Oh, yeah, X, right. We are fully behind the Elon Musk rebrand. Clearly, we're a pro-Elon podcast.

Anyway, like five or six or seven months ago, you know, you saw a ton of people writing, oh, you know, the numbers, these numbers can't be right. The government numbers can't be right. This is totally inaccurate. Either whatever, we're really in a recession. And I think it was entirely a function of if you live in this little echo chamber and, you know, if you live in Silicon Valley or maybe San Francisco, you get a very particular picture and it just is not accurate.

what's really happening in the rest of the economy. That makes a lot of sense. And you know, I would also say like, it's hard to like, was it July was the hottest month ever or something? It's like, there's this like weird dissonance where it's like, everything feels terrible because of outside factors. Because of outside, the outside. Yeah, no, no. I have always been interested in like the impact of the weather on people's general moods, basically about the economy. I mean,

I mean, like, it's hard to look at the smog from Canada that hit us and be like, no, things are going great. Yeah, you can't look outside and see just like opaque orange outside your window and be like, you know what? Consumer spending is pretty good. Like you can't capture reality anymore, basically. Wow, what a metaphor. So I want to go back to what we were talking about before and talk a little bit about

the soft landing that Biden wants to pull off? What are the key ingredients to pulling it off? And also, what does a soft landing mean? Yeah. So soft landing is the metaphor that is always used when the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates

and is trying to do it without crashing the economy. So the idea is, whatever. If the economy is an airplane, you're trying to slow it down and bring it in so that inflation comes down, but you are able to bring it in for a landing without essentially smashing it into the ground. And that's the kind of ideal for the Fed. Now, the thing to remember is we really haven't had to deal with this for about...

let's say almost 30 years is the last time the Fed was really raising interest rates

in an attempt to kind of bring you into a quick, soft landing. I mean, the Fed did that in the wake of the internet bubble too, but this is a little different. So the question is, how can you do it? And that's the goal. And I think right now things have been looking pretty good. I mean, the idea is that growth is holding up. The job market, it's slowing down, but not cratering. Inflation has fallen from 7.5, 8% till now it's around three, which is pretty solid.

And so that is the ideal, basically. And I think what has happened over the last, let's say, year and a half is the strength in the economy, partly because of the stimulus programs and these different government programs we talked about, has been balanced by the Fed's interest rates. And so right now it looks pretty good. I think the big question going forward is, is the Fed going to continue to raise interest rates? So they kind of took a pause.

And I think the market was kind of expecting, okay, maybe we're done. Yeah, I remember. Yeah, but that big retail number I talked about, which suggested that the economy might still be growing at a very fast pace overall,

That kind of spooked investors. So the concern is, you know, if the Fed keeps raising interest rates going forward, let's say in the fall, does that end up just basically quashing things? I think that's the big wild card. That's the big thing to be concerned about. I'm curious whether you have any theories. Why do you think Jerome Powell has become...

such like a guy that is talked about on the internet. Like people make memes about this man. People call him J-Pow. There was a profile in New York Magazine of him that was just like, yeah, this guy's really boring. Like he like rides a bike to work every day and that's basically all we know. But still, he's like this like

Internet figure. You mean the Fed chair is not a rock star? That's surprising. But I actually, I think it's really all goes back to Greenspan. I think Greenspan is when this all started. So I think that Alan Greenspan was really the first Fed chair who was kind of, I mean, who was seen as a rock star, right? He was never glamorous because he was so hyper nerdy, but he was this big figure, right? Mm-hmm.

And then I think what happened was the Fed has always been the target of criticism for a certain strain of, especially of kind of right-wing kind of libertarians, basically. But then I think over the last 30 years, the Fed has really just become much more prominent in public life. Like, I just think many more people know, or they don't necessarily know that much about the Fed, but they'll talk about the Fed. And yeah, Jerome Powell to me is like such an interesting example because he is the most

straightforward, down the line. I'm not sure if he is, but I'm pretty sure he was like an old school Republican. You know, he's like one of those classic old school Republicans. Yeah, he served under Donald Trump and Joe Biden. But he basically has become this huge figure. I think the really interesting aspect of him is that he's now getting flack for, uh,

not having raised interest rates fast enough, right? And so he let inflation supposedly get out of control. And now he's getting flack for having raised interest rates too much. And that's the Fed job. Whatever, that's the job. It comes with the territory. Like DeSantis the other day was like, I would not rehire him. And he basically was like, he was too slow and now he's raising interest rates too much. And you're like,

I don't know, what is he supposed to do, man? I don't know. I wish Jerome Powell came out after that and was like, DeSantis, you're not going to have the chance to decide that. Listen, pudding fingers. I think the point you make about the fact that the Fed has become a bigger presence in our life is certainly true for like

I was in high school during the 2008 financial crisis. You know what I mean? Like we are also, people our age are so much more aware of the Fed than it ever was before. I mean, I do think some of that is a function just of the fact that the Fed, 2008, 2009 is a great example. The Fed is just playing a bigger, it feels like a much more active role. And Bernanke was on television all the time. We're going to take a quick break, followed by Casey's conversation with TikTok's Truth Doctor.

So first of all, like what led you into your line of work outside of being a content creator, just actually being like a psychotherapist and a social worker, like what led you to what you do?

Being a human being and understanding the struggle of the human condition, being raised at the bottom of the societal system, being born with autism and ADHD and trying to find my own place in the world, and learning over time that maladaptive coping skills are a lot easier to absorb than adaptive ones,

And that there's a field out there, psychology, social work, mental health, call it whatever you want, that is looking for answers to the questions that I grew up with. And once some of those answers started to make me feel better about myself, I wanted to be someone that was providing those answers for other people. So, I mean, at what point did you decide to share your expertise on social media? That's a great question because it directly has to do with mental health. It was

It was 2019, the year that I was supposed to become licensed and be able to work as an independent clinician. And I went through a really serious family tragedy that caused me to have a lot of traumatic responses while owning a treatment center, while being ready to get my license. And I started to hide away how I was feeling. And I realized that if an up-and-coming licensed therapist was going to hide her mental health problems...

What does that say about mental health overall? That we should hide it, be embarrassed about it. And I realized that's not why I got into this field and that's not healthy for the human experience. So the truth was I was a therapist significantly struggling and the world needed a therapist that was significantly struggling. So I called myself the truth doctor, told the truth about my struggles to encourage other people to tell the truth about theirs.

Wow. What has the response been within your community of you being on TikTok, you being the truth doctor? It was pretty interesting in the beginning of 2020. Define interesting. Yes. We had this small group of mental health content creators that were all licensed therapists. And we realized that we were all on there because we all had a different mental health ailment.

And so one of the first videos that we made that blew up were eight different therapists that all had a history of some diagnosis that most people would portray or perceive to be a reason that you can't be a licensed therapist. So being autistic, having a substance use issue, being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, which was my original and main diagnosis before I found out how neurodivergent I really was.

So initially it was, this is crossing the line between professional and personal boundaries. What if your clients see this content? And then the next thing was, actually, this is seeming to be really helpful. Thank you for breaking the stigma of the field and allowing us also to show up as human beings.

So that was what was interesting was seeing this shift of initial hesitation and caution to seeing how it can actually be very helpful to then it turning into compassion and encouragement. So much so that I developed a movement called the Human First Movement. So before any position that you have or any role that you play in life, whether that's

mom, teacher, police officer, or therapist, doctor, you can be a human first. And I made it into a tattoo sheet and over a hundred licensed therapists across the country got this tattoo permanently on their bodies.

and changed the direction of how they worked professionally to show up more as a human being. And the feedback that I've gotten from that is I will never be the same clinician again in the best possible way. Wow. I mean, God, make me feel like lame having this one tattoo that's just like the mercury symbol. It's fine. It's fine. You have like a beautiful story for your tattoo. Thank you. And I'm just over here with this, but that's fine. But, you know, how do you balance...

the work that you do as a therapist, as a social worker, with being a content creator? Because those are two full-time jobs. So how do you find that balance? That's a great question because I didn't. And I ended up selling my business, my multi-center treatment center in Santa Barbara that treated adults for co-occurring disorders, substance use and mental health, about a year and a half into my content creation journey. And

And it was the height of the pandemic. And I realized that I had done a good enough job creating my company that I could now pass it off to someone else. It's still running. They've expanded. And I was able to give my time and my attention to my community. And it grew over time.

another million people after I sold it. So I went from being able to help 22 people at a time to 2.2 million. Was that much of a struggle for you to let go? Because that takes a lot of work to build up a practice and start a business and have a physical location. That's a lot to pour into something to sell it off. So did you struggle with that decision at all?

Well, I realized that I was more unhealed than I thought I was and that the creation of my company was built through trauma responses a lot more than it was through an entrepreneurial pressure. And right now I'm opening up a new mental health company after taking two years off

obviously building my online platforms, but finding out what I really wanted to do with my life. So providing mental health advice to people while getting professional mental health advice on my own on the back end. So I think stepping into this entrepreneurial journey again, like right now I'm actively opening up two different businesses in the mental health space. I feel more grounded and I've actually learned a lot from my online audience.

about how to show up authentically. And I don't know if that has something to do with what I've taught them, but I know that they've certainly taught me something. And I think I'm going to be a better business owner than I even was before. So how do you see being a content creator fitting into you opening up a new practice? Well, I've started making content on opening up that practice. And so that's something that's really helpful. Exactly. But, you know, the main part of my message with my community is that

What you go through mentally or even what you go through physically doesn't have to hold you back from doing what it is that you want to do in life. And I give that message off easily with, you know, the four degrees and the almost dual license and all the things, you know, that typically in society people say you've done a really great job.

But more so, I think what I want to be doing a great job at is now showing people what that looks like, like the journey of going from being someone that doesn't have a business to being someone that does and what the challenges can be and what the benefits can be.

Because when I initially entered the content space, I already had my business. I had already gone through school. And so they were able to be inspired, but only with the destination. And now I have the opportunity to get them to be inspired through the journey.

And I'd love to talk about your audience for a second, like those 2.2 million people that you're reaching. So what's the makeup of it? Like who are you seeing that's showing up for your content? That's a good question because I look at it in two different ways. I look at it obviously by demographics and analytics. So it's mainly 18 to 34 females in the U.S.,

But more so, I look past the demographics and I try to analyze who these people really are in the comments. And they are people that struggle with mental health issues. Yeah. They're people who are diagnosed with borderline, who think that they're neurodivergent, who have been through so much trauma that they don't think they can get licenses and open businesses. And so it's not just that they're young adult females in America. It's that they're young adult females in America that have a reason to believe that they can't

And then they come to me to find reasons that they can. Do you ever wonder that raising these issues in the style of TikTok trends and entertainment somehow trivializes these really serious issues? It absolutely can. And it depends on the intention behind the creation of the content, the education and research that's gone on behind the content.

and how it's supposed to make you feel. Not only the intention of why the person themselves is doing it, but also what are they trying to make the audience feel. It can obviously be trivialized. And, you know, I've gotten comments like, you can't combine a topic like this into 60 seconds. But the reality is, is if you think about the actual mental health advice that people are already getting in a non-professional setting, it's one to two sentences from a family or friend that says something

It's not a big deal. Get over it. Or it's advice that maybe helps them personally, but doesn't necessarily help the person that they're speaking to. And so we are already getting bite-sized, potentially inappropriate mental health advice.

in our lives. And so I think it's better to have professionals coming out in the space where we know people are. Everyone is online, at least everyone here at VidCon right now. And so I think it's important that professionals in all different fields are in this space giving this information because someone's going to be giving it. And it's better, I think, to be people with a license

And or people with lived experience versus people who are actually hopping on the mental health trend and adjust to trivialize it to get the engagement when, again, that should not be the intention.

So what would you say is the purpose of the content that you put out on TikTok on social media? Like, is it just to get the conversation started? Because obviously you can't really diagnose someone or, you know, have any prolonged session with someone on social media. Like it's, that's not really it. So what would you say is the purpose of the content that you put out on social media?

I think there's two purposes to it. I think the first is education just in general for people to understand from a nuanced and educated perspective

All of these things that are now in typical speak, like therapy talk, right? It's like everyone is using the words. They're talking about narcissists and they're talking about gaslighting and they're talking about boundaries and self-care. Sometimes incorrectly, but they're talking. That's what I mean. A lot of the time it is misconstrued and that can significantly affect people's lives. Like people take this advice and then they go and make decisions, real life decisions.

And so one is education and making sure that people are making the right choices with the right information. And secondly, I think it's just inspiration. I mean, entertainment, of course, every content creator is trying to entertain. But inspiration, not only that they can do what they want in their life professionally, but also that it's okay to just be not okay. Like I'm a doctoral level licensed therapist and I didn't want to get out of bed today.

Like I was super anxious today and I had to pull back on my dissociative tendencies while I was live on a panel. And that I think just gives people an example, not only that they can overcome it, but that if they're experiencing it, they're not the only one. And it's not just that they're uneducated and don't know how to take care of themselves because I'm educated and I know how to take care of myself and sometimes I don't. And that's okay too.

Dr. Tracy, thank you so much for this. This was wonderful. So please keep doing what you're doing because you're obviously helping people. So thank you for your time. Thank you so much. It was an honor. Okay, we're back with James and it's time to wrap up the show with Keeping Tabs. As a reminder, this is where each of us shares a story, trend, or company that we're following right now. And James, since you're our guest, what are you keeping tabs on? So I'm just really interested in this guy, Javier Millier, who is the...

He describes himself as basically like a libertarian anarchist and he just won- Oh, the guy with the hair. Yeah, in Argentina. So Argentina has this kind of weird system where they have a presidential primary in which all the potential candidates run and then they have the general election in which I think like the top performers run. So it's not exactly like our system, but in any case,

Um, Millie kind of came a little bit out of nowhere. Uh, and he did, he did the best of the, of the, of the major candidates. And so he'll be running in October and, um, you have to check out a picture of this guy because, um,

He has these amazing sideburns and this kind of mop top haircut. He looks a lot like a movie detective from the 1970s or something. I think he looks like an emo singer. Oh, yeah. Well, that's actually a good one, too. Yes, he actually... That's a really good example. But he is...

like full on libertarian, like, you know, wants to get rid of the, of Argentina's currency, uh, basically, you know, wants to abolish central banks. If he could figure out a way to do it is also like pro drug legalization. I mean, he's, he is really an unusual character, uh,

He also talks about this weird, he had this whole riff on tantric sex and stuff. So he's really out there basically. Wow. I just looked up a picture of this guy and this looks exactly like someone who would talk about tantric sex. Wow. Yeah.

He's a true character, but he's now the favorite in the October election. I mean, the way it'll work is no one's going to get a majority, so there will be a runoff, but there's a very good chance he will be Argentina's president, which is Argentina has a long and complicated political and economic history, and this will just be the latest very bizarre twist in it if he becomes it. I have

completely missed this story entirely. It's incredible. Josh, what are you keeping tabs on? So I was going to talk about the ink election coverage, but I scooped myself on that up top so you can keep that up. So I've got a couple backups. One that just kind of came across real quickly that Instacart's going to IPO, which is interesting. I wrote a profile and feature on Fijisimo, Instacart's CEO, in our...

Winter issue? Spring issue? Go back and read it. Talked about the fact that they were just kind of waiting to IPO. They've had a strange journey in their big bet. Very interesting. It's one of those pandemic companies that kind of blew up during the pandemic for obvious reasons. But then I was fully expecting those companies to recede back, but it doesn't seem like Instacart's going anywhere. Yeah.

Well, they slashed their internal valuation by quite a bit. I think it was from like $30 billion to $10 billion, but... Instacart was once valued at $30 billion? Yeah, it was crazy. And now they've raised it back up a little bit, but I will say they're close to break even. It's like not necessarily a bad business. They did that in part by doing what every business does when they need to...

make money putting ads on their platform. Yeah, they did that. But that was my real quick one. Then my real lowbrow one is that have either of you been watching The Real Housewives of New York new series?

cast and season? No. No, but I want to, you know, Jenna Lyons was my white whale. This is what I was going to say. She was on the cover of Fast Company 10 years ago and I... Jenna Lyons, who was former president of J.Crew, is now a cast member on The Real Housewives of New York. Yeah. So she was on the cover of Fast Company like...

2012. 10 years ago, yeah. Yeah. And I have since the announcement of The Real Housewives has been emailing her team nonstop being like, let me profile her, do a Q&A. She's fantastic on the show, by the way, because she's too good for the show, thank you.

And kind of knows it, but it's like adds this thing because everyone else on the show is like kind of like talks about Jenna Lyons like people talk about Jenna Lyons because most of them are like models, creator, people kind of in the fashion industry or in the fashion industry. But like Jenna Lyons is...

She's a name, yeah. She's a name. She's a real person. I was a big fan of her work at J.Crew, and I think she's sort of just like a very interesting character. She was so famous that she was on Girls. She had like a small part in that show. It's like a very time capsule. Oh, I never watched Girls, but yeah, that doesn't surprise me. It's actually quite good. Well, maybe that's another binge. But yes, what's your keeping tabs? I'm going to talk about Britney Spears this week.

Which, I speak for us all here when I say we really wanted her to have a good marriage to a nice man. And it seems like that didn't work out. And Brittany, I'm sorry. Yeah.

For everything. I actually listened to a couple of the Britney, the conservator podcast ones, basically. But he's 29, right? But I think they've been dating. I mean, they dated for, what, seven years and they've been married for like 14 months. Oh, so that's what it was. Okay. Oh, so they, for some reason, I thought they had gotten married almost right away. But no. Okay. They dated for a very long time and then got married. Okay. And then there's all these theories. And I'm not like a huge Britney truther, but I have listened to-

Like you, it's fascinating. I'm sorry, it's like fascinating. No, no, no, the conservator stuff is totally fascinating. You know, there's all this debate about whether it was like he's finally free and she got to marry him or whether he was like kind of in on the conservatorship. Oh yeah, that's dark. I hope not. But you know, she has an Oprah tell-all coming up and she is going to release a memoir soon-ish. So I suspect we will be finding...

a lot more out about her. Man, talk about conservatorships, though, having a moment in culture the past few years have been part of two very major news stories now with the Michael Orr. So I don't really understand what it means that he was... The whole thing is very confusing because he still is on... I mean, they said they're going to end the conservatorship, but...

it doesn't sound like it was a Britney situation in terms of like they weren't making financial decisions for him. Yeah. So I don't even understand. The whole thing is very odd. It's a really weird story. Yeah. Well, Michael Lewis, we're still waiting on you to weigh in on this whole thing. Yeah. Main character of the week, Michael Lewis. Come on.

All right. That's it for Most Innovative Companies. James, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. Our show is produced by Avery Miles and Blake Odom, mix and sound design by Nicholas Torres, and our executive producer is Josh Christensen. Remember again to subscribe, rate, and review, and we'll see you next week.