Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News. This is Master's in Business with Barry red Holds on Bloomberg Radio.
This week on the podcast, I have a delightful guest. Kyla Scanlan is the person who created the phrase vibe session, and twenty twenty two she wrote the book In This Economy,
How Money and Markets Really Work. She is quite an accomplished twenty six year old who has built a career as a investing and economic literacy expert, helping to educate people about how the economy really works, why there's a disconnect in what people feel versus what's really happening, what we should think about things like centiment and the dollar, and green energy, and go down the list. I thought this was a fascinating conversation. I really enjoyed it, and
I think you will also. With no further ado, my interview with Kyla Scanlin.
Thanks for having me.
Well, thank you so much for coming. I've been looking forward to this since I got the book over the summer. I will tell you I didn't see many other people on the beach in the Hampton during this, but I enjoyed it. It's filled with fun, not only concepts, but sketches and illustrations, and I could tell you had some fun writing this.
Yeah I did.
So let's talk a little bit about your background. You graduate Western Kentucky in twenty nineteen, triple major financial management, economics, and business data Analytics. That sounds like you knew exactly what you wanted to do.
Well I didn't.
I did not.
Yeah, I didn't even know you can major in economics til I got to college.
But in college those three things scream markets and the economy, right.
Yeah, I mean it was like kind of funny. I don't know why they were such a big disconnect, but I was trading options when I was in high school and I got to college and I was like, oh, I'll just be an engineer, like I'll, you know, do that path. And then I took an econ class as a general education course and I just loved it. And then I was like, oh, you can actually major in finance, and like you can trade options for a living, which
I didn't end up doing for obvious reasons. But yeah, so I really fell in love with the data and with the analysis, and just the classes were so fun. I had a great time.
You know, the old options traders joke, right, No, I don't really. Option traders never die. Oh they just expired, right, I mean that's a that's a classic. We've all dabbled with options. I find them compelling and addictive. But I am you know, ninety percent investor ten degenerate speculator. Options are perfect for that. How did you do as an option straight?
I did poorly, which is why I don't really do it anymore. More of a buy and hold sort of person.
There you go.
Yeah, but options were fun. It taught me a lot about risk, It taught me a lot about manage. It was great.
So so you you graduate, you joined Capital Group as an associate, pretty much right into the pandemic. Tell us what you were doing at Capital Group when? What was it like starting work right into that mess?
Yeah? It was hard. I remember I graduated, you know, basically June of twenty nineteen, and I moved out to LA from Kentucky like five days after I graduated school. Had never been to LA before. That's where Capitol Group is based. And you know, six months later, pandemic happens.
But Capitol Group was wonderful. There was a rotational program that I was a part of called the cap Group, and so I got to experience fixed income, I got to sit on an equity desk, I got to do macroeconomic research, I got to do a big stock project. But I ended up leaving to focus more on financial education because that's where I felt I wanted to be, which was really surprising. I thought I'd been the rest of my life at Capital Group. It was kind of
the perfect path. And then I was like, I just I can't know what happens without like trying to do this, to do the financial education stuff.
I can't imagine two places more different than Kentucky and LA. What was that transition? Like?
It was really hard. Yeah, I didn't understand what it was like to live in a big city. I'd never been to New York at that point, I'd never really left Kentucky those couple of years, the whole life that I had there, And yeah, I mean I used to have to be at Capitol Group very early in the morning because it's on the West coast. We to East coast hours, and so I would just like walk around really early in the morning in LA and that's not so safe. And I got a couple of run ins there.
Oh no kidding, yeah, yeah, because I just.
Didn't know any better, Like nobody gives you a playbook when you moved to la on, like how to live there, and so it was a really good experience. The pandemic, of course, was difficult, but it definitely helped me grow a lot faster being in a big city like that.
Did the pandemic and being locked down at home lead to you writing this book?
I think so. Yeah. I had a blog all throughout college, ending with Julie actually was reading when I was in college was crazy, but it was called scan lit on Stocks, and so I'd always been really passionate about writing. I had always been really passionate about sharing ideas. And then when I got to Capitol Group, obviously I was under compliance. They really you really can't be talking about stocks online. That's like not cool, and I was like, okay, fine.
So I started doing these big data analysis pieces and like harvesting data from the various apps I would do that.
You could do just not specific stocks.
Yeah, not specific stocks. So I do things like with the ride, shared data with Uber and Lyft that I had, like dating app data, like all these different projects. But then during the pandemic, I think a lot of people, myself included, were like, oh, you know, maybe I don't want to spend the rest of my life doing this thing, and like, I do want to take a chance because
I don't know what's going to happen next. And so that's how I ended up leaving Capitol Group, which was really scary, and I joined a tech startup called on Deck and built out their investment education arm, and then I started doing social media basically at the same time time.
So it's funny I had the exact same experience with compliance at a brokerage firm in the early two thousands when I launched the Big Picture, write whatever you want, just don't recommend or buy or sell any specific stocks. You know, if you stay away from that, you're fine, which in hindsight was pretty hip. A lot of places wouldn't even have given you that much. But data analytics knock yourself out whatever you want to do.
Yeah, it was just cool. So the name of the blog changed the scaling on stocks or scaling on stats, sorry on stats on stats. Yeah, I didn't stay the same.
Can't scaling on stocks to scaling on stats. So I'm fascinated by the partnership you have with O'Shaughnessy Ventures. I love what Jim is doing with that tell us about that experience and that help you transition to what you're doing today.
Yeah, I know, Jim O'Shaughnessy is amazing. So I approached him with an idea for a financial education startup and he had been you know, really supportive him Patrick, both his son, and I was like, hey, Jim, like, I'm thinking about starting this tech company that might do financial education, and he was like, do you have a plan? And I was like sort of. And then this book deal came along, and so I was like, it's gonna be really difficult for me to build a company and then
also write a book. And I ended up deciding to focus fully on the book, and so Jim kept me on the team as an entrepreneur in residence for a year, and so that was neat. It was just kind of like almost a fellowship of sorts that supported me as I did this like book endeavor.
Were you the first entrepreneur in residents that he did, because now O'Shaughnessy Adventures almost does like a MacArthur grants to a number of people. Were you literally the first one?
I was the first one. Yeah, yeah, it was really cool. I think what he's doing is incredible. It's really nice to see. I guess I guess you'd call it venture capital money, you know, be used in that way, like just.
Just less focused on traditional technology companies and more towards content orient of things. Is that is that a fair test?
And like maybe stuff that isn't going to have a media returns, like it's not so much a multiple, which I think traditional VC tends to focus heavily on because that's their whole game. But I think he is like, okay, like there's a bunch of people who need just a
little bit of money, right right, Like I didn't. They didn't give me a ton of money, but it was enough for me to be like, Okay, I'm safe to focus on like this project that is going to take up so much of my time, but also eat away at the other projects that would have earned me money.
Huh. Really kind of interesting. So at your YouTube channel, you do a lot of short clips, explaner videos, short form contents on financial topics, really just financial literacy and education. What motivated this idea? This is not your typical Most people go through a cycle of working their way through various aspects of Wall Street before they at a sheer frustration, say hey, we need a lot more financial literacy and we don't have it. What led you to financial logic so young?
Yeah, I mean I think growing up in Kentucky you just kind of see like financial literacy. And I sold cars. I sold hun days for a summer, and I think that was really formative because people would come in the car lot and they wouldn't even really know what an interest rate was, right, And so you were signing these people on eighty four month, you know, car.
Leading four months, believe it Monday. By the way, you're not paying off a Ferrari, You're paying off on Monday.
Day, right, Yeah, And like you'd have to do all sorts of financing tricks to make sure they could get a card, even if their credit wasn't so good. And so I just saw a lot and I saw a lot of people that could have possibly just been helped if somebody had taught them what an interest rate was, if somebody had taught them like what a car payment meant, if what appreciation was right. And so that was when I was nineteen, and it stuck with me all Throughout
the rest of my time in college. I worked at a small asset manager in Kentucky called Hilliard Lions, and I saw a little bit of stuff there, but it was really the car dealership and just my time growing up in Kentucky that was so formative to this idea that financial education really matters. Like the fact that I didn't know economics was a major until I got to college,
Like is it something that should happen? Right? And so I think that's the goal is just like talk about econ more, make it more interesting for people, bring more people into the fold, because not only will they learn more and hopefully make better decisions, but it can also put a lot of people on a path that they might not have gone on in the first place.
So I'm a little older than you, just to touch when I was in middle school, in high school, this is how long ago the boys would get segmented off into shop class, where you would lose a finger if you weren't paying attention. And the girls, and I'm saying boys and girls purposefully because we were ten and twelve, they would get shuffled off this way into home economics, which has much less to do with economics than you would imagine. It's more about housekeeping and cleaning and cooking,
not here's how to manage a household budget. People are parennially discussing about bringing things like Civics back to high school, bringing things like basic budgeting and economics. It never seems to happen. How important is it to teach just basic economics, basic budgeting, basic things that we take for granted to high school kids.
I think it's important. Would you agree?
One hundred percent? I'm you know, it's amazing. I can't remember the last time I use calculus, but I deal with a budget every day. I have a running total of my checking account in my head. I know where my investments are. These are all skills, you know, autodidactism. Teaching yourself this you kind of forced to unless you study this as a major in college. Nobody teaches you how to do this. It's just trial and error, and hopefully the errors aren't too expensive. So I'm completely in
agreement with you on that. And to take it a step further, the big challenge with financial literacy is it has a very short half life. Even people who are fairly financially literate, you know, six to twelve months later, half that stuff is gone, So you have to keep drilling into people. Here's how this works. Here is what happens. There's something you wrote sort of related to what we're going to talk about later that I want to bring
out here. A quote from the book in This Economy, which is you write that people are the economy, So let's make the economy about the people. Explain the thinking behind that.
Yeah, I mean the general idea there is kind of tied into the vibe session where it's to say, idea that like how people feel really matters, like how people feel about their economic circumstances, how they feel about their ability to have upward mobility. Basically, like how people are thinking about themselves is going to influence how the economy
succeeds or fails. And so I think that's just something I tried to center throughout the book, was that ultimately, people and the decisions that they make are the entire economy, right, Like everything that we do is the economy, Like a coffee cup is an economic transaction, the labor of the beans, the supply chain, all of those things. And throughout the book I tried to center people because I feel like
most of the time in economics education. The reason it doesn't work in high schools is because the kids are like, this doesn't really relate to me. I don't really understand budgeting, Like I don't have any tangible experience with this.
Sure they do. They have an iPhone. Here's what the iPhone costs. Here's the credit that's built in, here's the interest rate impact on it. Here's supply chains from a million, here's what you pay for apps. Like, I think you could take an iPhone and teach kids everything they need to know about the economy, markets, and budgeting one device. Yeah.
No, I think that's a great idea. And that is an experience with the economy, and it's a people centric one, right, And so that's exactly it is, Like you have to sort of center it on people's lived experiences so that way it all feels relatable.
And so this theme comes up over and over again. You can't separate the economy from people. It's one and the same, isn't it.
Yeah, I would. I would definitely say so. Some people might argue with that, but I think that that is ignoring the fact that like all the decisions that people make, you know, consumer spending is such a big part of the economy. Government spending, all of these things, and those are all people making decisions, right.
I have to ask you, you're the ripe old age of twenty six. What led you a few years ago to say, I know, I'm going to write an economics book.
Well, so it actually I've always really loved writing. I wrote these books eight about a Penguin, and so I've always been writing. And I wrote a book a book, you know, quote unquote every year for I don't know, five or six years after that little Penguin book, and so being an author had always been something I was really excited about. I never thought I'd have the opportunity so early. I never actually thought I'd have the opportunity
to be a published author. But how it came about was I published this piece with New York Times Opinion on the Blob session, and Penguin Random House approached me and they were like, have you ever thought about writing
a book? And I was like, yeah, I have. And we came up with this idea to do almost like a beginner Guide to the Economy, but with sixty illustrations, all done by me, just doing it in a much more fun and accessible way, you know, trying to make an economic guide for the twenty first century.
It's funny you mentioned the penguin because in the book you compare the labor market to a goat steadily climbing a mountain, while the Fed actively trying to slow the goat down in their progress. So, first, is this frequent usage of animals and metaphors something you've been doing a while? And what made you think of the labor market as a goat and the Fed pulling the rope trying to slow them down?
Yeah, I know lots of metaphors in my in my writing. I have a subject too, kylotisubsec dot com and I always employ some sort of metaphor that I think my readers are like, okay, you know, calm down. So the book was definitely heavy with metaphors, but I really wanted there to be tangible visualizations in the book. So the beginning of the book is this economic Kingdom, because I think the interconnectivity of the economy is where a lot of people get stuck. It's like, well, how does the inflation,
How does inflation you know, influence libramarket how do they work? Like, how does the Fed influence labor market, How does the Fed influence inflation? How does fiscal policy work? What does the dollar do? So I drew that at the beginning of the book as kind of like this economic kingdom land where all the castles are interacting, and then yeah, the Fed and the labor market mountain or the Fed and the mountain goat. It was just another metaphor on top of that.
So you tackle a number of weighty topics in the book. Let's do a speed round. Tell me what people either get wrong or don't understand about each of these issues. Let's start with national debt.
I mean, I think this is a tough one because sometimes people are right, but a lot of people think it's solely unsustainable, like the US is going to go bankrupt.
And there's definitely a plausible case that the US could go bankrupt, especially because we have that debt ceiling situation that's coming up in I think twenty six days as of time we're recording, And so a lot of people get that wrong where they are like, oh, the national debt's going to explode, the dollar is going to not become the reserve currency anymore.
By the way, I've been hearing that since I was in college, since Reagan was president, and it's always it has yet to be yeah and wrong. I think if you're wrong for half a century, you're not early, You're just wrong.
You're wrong absolutely, And like you could say, maybe in five hundred years the dollar will be reserve barranty, and then I.
Won't even give you. I'll give you two hundred years, two hundred and fifty years.
But if you're dead, and like, are you still right? If you're dead, you know.
More importantly, does it even matter? I don't know right at that point. Recessions? What do people get wrong about recessions?
Two quarters of negative GDP growth?
That is a pet peeve of mine that I have been pushing back against for years. It's there have consistently been two quarters of negative GDP that haven't been recessionary. And if you look at what took place in twenty one and twenty two, remember GDP. People don't realize this. GDP is reported in real terms, meaning inflation adjusted terms. When you have two negative quarters, maybe it means the economy is slowing down, or maybe it means the economy
is overheating and prices are going up. Those are two totally different things, aren't they. Yeah.
Absolutely. I think a lot of people get stuck on that one. That is unpopular, Yeah.
Very unpopular. What about labor market dynamics? What don't people understand about that?
I mean, I think the biggest one here is that when the labor force participation read expands, the unemployment rate can still go go up. That's a tough one because people are like, oh, like, well, the unemployment rate is going up, so people are losing their jobs. But sometimes it's just more people are entering labor force.
I like to call that denominator blindness, because people don't pay attention. They just see the big, scary number. They don't see the context of the larger data set underneath, Like, hey, this company's laying out laying off ten thousand people. Is that a bad thing? Do they have twenty thousand people? Or is it Walmart with four million and ten thousand? Is you know a rounding error? It's one out of one person at every fourth store something crazy like that.
People ignore the broader context. Then you talk about context and framing throughout the book. What about housing market issues and the problem with affordable housing and first time home buyers.
Yeah, housing is something I spend a ton of time on right now. I mean, I think the biggest issue is that people think that expanding the housing supply will make all home values go down. That's not necessarily the case, but it's very important to expand housing supply. It's very important that people have access to housing. So I think that's a big one. There's a lot of nimbiism that
can arise. And then also, this is something that I don't think a lot of people realize, is that if you have a mortgage, you have to have insurance.
Which is another crisis you talk about.
I'm really concerned about insurance right now. But yeah, I would say those are the two things with housing.
Yeah. Right. There was an interesting piece that came out recently. I don't remember if it was Bloomberg or somewhere else, but I definitely soared in the past two weeks that the states that build the most amount of houses are having the fastest GDP. So if you look at places like Florida and Texas, and I think we're probably at peak Florida right now, but hold that aside. Florida cranking up housing left and right. Texas builds a lot of houses.
When you look at even fairly robust economies California and New York, they're growing much more slowly than those southern states, and they have horrific nimbiism and really challenging to put up new housing unless you're knocking down another house and just replacing it, that you can do, but expanding the amount of housing. Big problem in big states, Yeah, big problem.
Like it's kind of funny. I think we maybe saw the same graph where it's like blue versus Red, Like it's actually a political divide where red states are doing a great job building more housing and blue states aren't. And that's you know, we should all be building more housing because that's kind of the housing theory of everything is something I heavily subscribe to, where if people feel like they're able to get a home, they're able to
afford it, it's not a big worry. You know, everything will hopefully improve from that.
You buy a house, you're then gonna furnish it, You're gonna buy durable goods and appliances. You're probably gonna buy a horror to You're going to spend a ton of money. It means you have a job. It means you have good credit. The housing theory of everything is pretty persuasive. Tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's it's super important. It is that idea that like you will participate in the economy. And I think also for you know, there's a chart the distributional financial assets from the Federal Reserve. It's one of my favorite charts and I talk about it all the time.
Do you one flow of funds or something else.
It's a distribution of financial assets. So it shows the breakdown.
Of wealth, oh by death stiles or yeah.
Yeah, So like they'll have like the bottom fifty percent, you know, the top zero point one percent and if you look at the bottom fifty percent, all their wealth is in their house. The top ten percent and it's in business ownership in equities. So there's a lesson to be learned there. But yeah, homes are a wealth generation
tool for a lot of people. And I think to the point of, like, what do people get wrong about housing is that maybe it can't be both a speculative asset where you know, people do invest so much into it and expect it to appreciate so rapidly in a place to live. I think that's going to be a tough dichotomy over the next to you year.
Right, you know, my parents' generation when they were buying houses for twenty five thirty five, forty thousand dollars and they live through that big inflationary cycle and then rate crash over from nineteen eighty to twenty twenty two. You have to live somewhere. Plus, if your home prices appreciate dramatically, hey, that's great for your retirement. I'm not so convinced that the current generation are going to have the same experience.
I don't know if I'll ever be able to buy a home, and I think a lot of people in my generation feel the same way. So I'm technically a Gen Z and one and four Gen Z do own homes, but seventy eight percent of them got help from their parents to buy that house. And so I think that's going to be the thing for this upcoming generation, is that it's really going to help. If your parents did well, the greatest wealth the greatest generational wealth transfer is about to happen.
It's already happening right as it was. I keep seeing forty eight sixty eight trillion, Yeah, crazy, crazy number.
Ninety trillion by twenty forty five.
Wood it's a ton of money.
And yeah, some people will get a house out of that, and I think that's going to be maybe the only way that you get a house.
Even if you get a down payment out of it, it's still it's going to help move you in the right right direction. Public transit give us. What are people getting wrong about public transit?
I mean, I think people think it's like not useful to have public transit. Whenever it come to New York, it's so wonderful because the subway is so efficient. But I think a lot of people are like, no, we should just expand the highways. But if we invested just in light rail in these cities rather than adding another lane to the highway, you could transmit so many more people and you could free up the gridlock. People really love their cars in the United States because it's in
you know, it's a place where you can go. It's an individualistic thing. But if we are able to invest in public transit, the economy will grow. People will be able to get around better. Just imagine, like you know, not how having to rely on a commute in order to go into work. It would expand the opportunities for so many people who right now are maybe strapped by not having a car or not wanting to do a certain commute.
Right and the data shows adding additional lanes to highways just creates additional traffic. It does not solve the problem. The other thing that's so interesting about housing is the racial divide when you look at who's wealthy and who's not and where it comes from. African Americans tend to own houses at a much lower percentage rate when you look at the sources of wealth, let's call it the we'll ignore the top quartile, like the bottom seventy five percent.
Very often people who are middle class or above. Housing wealth is a big part of it, and you just see much lower ownership rates amongst blacks in America than amongst whites. Has a huge impact on income inequality by racial device.
Oh no, we have true. I think I believe incoming equality has improved, but wealth inequality has worsened since the pandemic.
Meaning the difference between salary and your assets.
Yeah yeah, yah. So like a lot of people you know didn't appreciate or didn't get to benefit from the appreciate of the rise in stock market values, they didn't have a home that was appreciating and value. Real wages did go up, but you know that's not quite enough I think for a lot of people, and it has created a lot of disparity, and I think that's it's really tough to navigate that. I think the candidates for the election are like trying to figure out, like, Okay,
how do we sort of fix this? And like one way that the government could address it is by taxing people so they have more money, so they could maybe distribute more money. But that's very unpopular, So like we have to have a total rethink I think of these social programs because we're like just helping people to close that inequality gap because that is going to be a massive issue over the next decade.
And our last speed round question green energy. What are your thoughts on renewable or green energy?
Oh? I think it's so important. I mean, I think the thing is a lot of people think it's all or nothing. You kind of still have to have fossil fuels as you try.
Natural gas going to be a transitional fuel for decades to come.
Transitional is the perfect word for that. Yeah, you have to like still have all that stuff. You can't just go green right away. But you know, solar power is becoming extraordinarily useful, you know, hydrogen, all that stuff is.
Solar is now cheaper than coal, and it's about to become cheaper than oil, which is a huge Like twenty years ago that was unthinkable, you.
Know, and it's exciting, and I think a lot of people are still stuck on, you know, oil being so important. But green energy is the only way that we can move forward as a society. We're just going to have to rely on the traditional fuels for a little longer.
Tell us about I like the way you phrase this, the abundance mindset.
That's Derek Thompson's term from The Atlantic. Yeah, he's tremendous, but that is kind of this idea that we tend to think limiting, right, Like we're like, oh, we can't have all this, we can't have all this, we can't have that, we can't do this, And Derek Thompson argues like, well we can, Like we can have abundance, like we can focus on immigration, we can build more housing, like, we can have all these things. We can do green energy,
like we can do all of these things. Right, there's a Keynes quote.
That's about that about scare the scarcity mindset right where.
It's like if the I think it's if the government can pay for it, you can do it essentially, Is that right?
And why can't the government pay for it? If you think about you know, it's ironic how often politicians ignore what lord Kin's taught us a century ago, which is, during economic contractions, the government should spend to make up the short fall and consumer and business spending. What politicians always tend to forget is and when the economy is expanding, well then you pull back and let the private sector fill that gap. The problem is we never seem to
pull back. It's it's pedal to the metal all the time.
Yeah, which is that's going to be interesting with inurnching that we were talking about, because the government's gonna probably backstop all of that, and I don't know how that'll go.
But why should the government backstop that? If you move to a part of the world that is being dramatically affected by climate change. Oh and by the way, if your state governor doesn't believe it and refuses to do anything to moderate it, why do I, as someone in a different part of the country have to bail out your bad decision. It's one thing when a hurricane hits
and everybody is shocked. It's another thing when you're building waterfront property and no private sector ensure will cover you because they're like, no, the odds are you're gone in ten to twenty years. We're not going to take that risk.
Yeah. I don't think the government should backstop those decisions, but I think it's going to be really tough because there is that mindset where it's like, oh, I should be able to build wherever I want, and.
You can build wherever you want. Well, you just can't ensure where if you want. Those are two very different then yeah, but.
If people expect insurance and you can self ensure if you do cash, but.
Yeah, a bank will't finance you. So I remember during Sandy, my wife and I went for a drive along Dune Road out in the Hampton's and it was shocking to see what essentially is a barrier island that's been there for hundreds of years, the ocean going straight through it, like there are parts where houses were floating away and big gaps. It was crazy what had taken place there. And the Army Corps of engineers come in and they
rebuild it. The only thing that really has changed is that FEMA has mandated, I think you have to be eleven feet above sea level above high tide, and so all these houses are built on stilts, and so you could kind of drive up to like the third or fourth step, and so by the time you get to the ground floor, you're relatively safe. If we get another sandy,
the house at least shouldn't wash away. But that doesn't do any good if the rest of the barrier island pus is the way, right, So should I know we have a shortage of housing? Do we have a shortage of housing that's ocean front?
I mean, that's a good question. It's like not only ocean front though, Like insurers have pulled out of California too.
It was a wildfire, those fires, right.
And they've pulled out of Louisiana for the same words of hurricanes. They pulled out of Florida because of the issues with hurricanes too, And so I think it's just like there's an increasing climate risk, and that's across.
The board, right. It's one thing for politicians to argue about climate risk, but when insurers say, oh no, we're not going to cover that because we've done the numbers. This is an opinion they're uninsurable in that part of the world or that part of the country. It really raises some fascinating questions.
Yeah, when Florida's second biggest insurer is the government, it's Citizens Insurance, And so that's kind of the funny situation that we're going to be in. You know, natural disasters are only increasing just because of what's happening to the environment,
which is why green energy is so important. And I think that'll just be a big reckoning moment where it's like, you know, housing is so important, but we also have to have this huge conversation about how we're going to ensure these homes right because insurance has gone up twenty percent on average, I think since twenty twenty three across
the whole country. Like property insurance is a huge burden for a lot of people right now, and that's something that you have to consider with the broader conversation around what does it mean to own a home in the United States?
Right I recall when my mom moved to Florida, you know, decades ago, there was a fantastic arbitrage opportunity the cost of living there was a fraction, real estate was a fraction. Now between taxes, problems with insurance and all the HOA fees, the homeowners association fees for condos and houses have gone up because their costs have gone so much up, it
doesn't feel like that it's a bargain anymore. Hey, maybe you get nicer weather when there's not a hurricane, but it doesn't seem to be the same bargain.
No. I think Florida is in a really unique spot as a state because they there's nothing that's being done to make the homes more ensurable. Because one way that you could do that is to maybe invest in climate resilient infrastructure.
I don't know, it's a hoax. We can't waste money on that. Climate change is a hope.
No, it's it's it's a And like there's other reasons why insurance has increased other than climate, Like you do have to talk about the reinsurance companies, the people who ensure the insurance. They've raised greats. You know, inflation has impacted the costs rebuilding the homes. So like there's other reasons outside of climate change, But like we can't live in this state of denial. Not to like turn this into a climate change conversation, but it's.
A it's a factor, and I think it's a more of a factor for your generation than my generation, because by the time climate change is really bad will be done and buried for a long time, You'll still be clearing up the mess that I like to blame my parents on. I'm semi green. You're probably much greener than me. I have a hybrid, I have an electro vehicle. I also, you know, fly, and my house is probably too big relative to what I really need. But that's a very
generational thing. You could see how people's carbon footprints really vary with age. So what happened with the egg situation in twenty twenty two? What did people get so wrong about that? Oh?
Man, I think eggs were It's funny, like thinking back to it, I'm like, that was so long ago now, but it was, you know.
It was a year or so, right, So there was a chicken flu going around that was killing that millions of hens, and people lost their mind when eggs were like seventy eight dollars a dozen.
Yeah, yeah, I know, people freaked out and they were like oh, you know, inflation is so bad. Everything is so bad. You know, the eggs, there's pray scouging going on, all this stuff, and it was really just kind of like a supply and demand misbalance because of the chicken flu.
And there was price gouging going on, just not with eggs, of all the things. To point out to eggs was a legitimate Hey you kill fifty million chickens, guess what less eggs.
Yeah, and I remember there being egg shortage at the grocery store if people were freaking out. But it all, I mean, it all calmed down like a month, like it really normalized quite quickly.
Yeah, that's a pretty short gestation period for birds, right.
Yeah, they lay a lot of eggs. Good for us, I guess when we eat them. But yeah, that was just kind of I think the a good example of you know, people and how important they are for the economy, because how people freak out ultimately does impact how everyone feels about things. Because that was kind of like mass hysteria in a really big way too, like the egg situation.
I mean, I remember some of my friends were texting me about it, and they're like, Kylo, what's going on, the eggs, like economically speaking, by.
The way, that that would take you a little thirty seconds to figure out on Google, I'm always surprised, like, there there's an acronym that I haven't seen recently on Twitter, but it used to be let me google that for you lmgt me f y. And it's just like, come on, why are you asking me so much of readily accessible answer? Ask something more complicated. But people see highering prices, they lose their mind. Let's talk about something else that I
found fascinating from the book. People's eyeballs are now dollar signs. Explain what you mean by that?
Yeah, so this is something I talk a lot about the presentations I give too, because the attention economy is really important. I think that our eyeballs are the most expensive things that we have because advertisers will pay so much to acquire them, and so I think that is both good and bad, right, Like it's valuable as a consumer because you kind of ordered the product, and so a lot of products can be free, like the social
networking sites. But I think there's this general sense of exhaustion where people are like, I'm really sick of being advertised too. I know how expensive. My attention is and I don't want to pay attention anymore. And so I think that's kind of what we're seeing with the attention economy is people are quite tired of it because their attention is so valuable.
And you mentioned advertising. The younger guys in my office, half their wardrobe comes from Instagram. They see something they like, click and buy it right from that. It's it's it's almost as if the advertisers are being removed from the middle. It's here's an influencer wearing this, Oh I like that, Bang, You're purchasing it in real time.
Yeah, Instagram shopping is extraordinarily powerful, and that's true, is people like and that's kind of I think the exhaustion too, Like you do see sort of this influencer pushback. I wrote about this at the end of last year, like the influencer apocalypse that could be upon us, where people are very sick of like not knowing what's an advertisement
and whatsnot. But there's also such power in the curation that influencers provide that I think it's more just people are like, I don't want to deal with it, but I think it's really valuable and the influencers do get paid quite a bit of a course to be essentially a billboard for these companies.
Right. You know, it's funny because you and I both do a lot of content marketing, which is a phrase I don't love. But anybody who pays attention to someone who does that, it's because, hey, I've been following them for a while. I understand their process. I trust their judgment. They're not for sale, and if they're telling me go read this or go look at that, it's because they've done it and they think it's valuable. Like is that going to go away? Also? At what point how far
down does the influence or apocalypse go? I don't know, he asked self interestedly, Right.
Like what do you think? Yeah? I wrote this piece in February of this year around trust and because I think trust is a very expensive commodity too, and I think that trust is you know, there's not a lot of it going around. It's very difficult to gain trust, and so I think people will still have, you know, people like you where they trust, they trust your judgment. They're like, he knows what he's talking about. He's not going to try and pedle me a product. But like, once you do pedal, somebody a.
Product now variable of newit. He's coming to you from right. Once that happens.
Once that happens, trust you're done.
So I've told this war story a million times, but it's just so perfect. The same day, during the lockdown, I want to say it was like March or April early in twenty twenty. No, maybe it's May or June, but you know, first half of the year still early days. I get an email from two different companies the same day, and one was Delta saying, hey, listen, we know you're stuck at home and this sucks and everybody's really frustrated. One thing you don't have to worry about are your miles.
They're gonna last forever. And your silver medallion status now platinum. Your silver medallion status won't expire, will extend it for another eighteen months. You don't have to worry about it. Once you're ready to once this ends and you're ready to start traveling, Delta is ready when you are. And
I'm like, holy cow, that's fantastic. And then I read the next email from Starbucks and it was, hey, your Starbucks points, which are nonsensical things that you get a free latte if you, you know, buy enough stuff, they're gonna expire at the end of the month, so go out and use them right away. And it's like, are you kidding me? I don't know if it was the juxtaposition, but I know that since then, I fly Delta a whole lot and I go to Starbucks a whole lot less.
And I don't know if the guy from Chipotle is gonna do anything about that, but it just seemed like such a petty, silly, panicky thing to do. Like, wait, your cost of food is like the least expensive part of the real estate, the labor, everything you do. My dumb egg white whole wheat McMuffin, you're gonna just take that because we're in the middle of a pandemic. Nobody's going to your store, don't you want to encourage. I guess that was their attempt use it or lose it.
That look, I'm curious your thoughts on how does corporate America capture and maintain trust from people who my generation is arguable will be more loyal to brands like my neighbor's growing up. He's a Ford guy, he's a Chevy guy. I don't know if that sort of brand loyalty really exists anymore.
There's a really good piece called Life After Lifestyle by Toby Shoren, and he kind of talks about this, how like some parts of brands are influencing culture, but it's not the traditional brands. So it'd be brands like you know how your office guys go on Instagram. It would be like all Birds. All Birds is now a terrible stock. But that's just one example, like where.
Oh god, we've had those for like seven eight years, that's like mid twenty ten.
But they were kind of like the pinnacle of like forming some part of culture and some sort of brand identity. But as you're saying, people jumped immediately to the next thing. So I don't think it's like cohesive brands stories anymore. It's kind of like these brands that patch together to create like an archetype of a person.
Especially in fashion that changes so rapidly. Although these aren't Warby Parker's, but they seem to be doing pretty okay. Like some companies develop a relationship I love my Maui Jim's or my Olaci shoes, And at a certain point, maybe this is being an old man. But it's just like you just know, just reorder the next one. Oh, these shoes are ratty, all right, leave them out at the beach house, order another pair, get a new pair. But I don't know if that's true for your generation. No.
I think it is that you know, you sort of follow the trends. There's a really good book by douglash Rushkoff called Present Shock where he talks about how everything moves in a fashion timeline now, so like people just recycle, like they just moved through stuff so quickly.
Literally fast fashion is what you know, shine in those companies are all about.
Yeah, trends move so fast, and you want to be on top because your whole life is you know, on screen.
On screen, to say the least. So what were you looking at that led you to the phrase vibe session? Yeah?
I mean I think for me it was really fortunate because I had all these comments, Like I was making these social media videos, so I'd get hundreds of comments a day of me talking about how GDP was going okay, and then people would be like, we're in a recession. I'm upset, Like what are you talking about? And so I was like, what's going on? Like why, Like the economic data is okay, but all these people are extraordinarily upset.
And so I was on a bike ride one day and I was thinking about that, and it's kind of like this disconnect of vibes, right, Like it's this disconnect with beading consumer sentiment and economic data, and that gap is really the important part. The vibe session has taken a life of its own, which is really cool. But it's been used incorrectly. A couple of times.
Do people use it incorrectly.
They'll be like, people shouldn't be feeling bad. It's like, and that's not the point of that word.
That's a generational thing, isn't it. You and I were talking earlier, my buddy Dave, our friend, mutual friend, Dave Nadic was saying, hey, people over fifty hey, vibe session concept and people under seem to get it. What is it about the way it's being misus used? That reflects the lack of comprehension.
From my experience of having conversations because a lot of people don't like the word. I got death threads over it.
It was toxic social media? Right? What is better than Twitter? Since Elmo took it over?
Oh, God, it's a nightmare right now. It was lucky. This was two years ago, you know, just to make that word because I don't know what the comments would be like currently. But we're kind of seeing a real time social experiment with that. Like it's almost like four chun come back to life. But none of these people are anonymous.
Well, plenty of them are anonymous, and my guess is thirty forty percent of them are just bots.
Yeah, yeah, that's the foreign interference is a really big thing.
Some domestic, but a lot of China and North Korea, Russia elsewhere. For sure. Arguably I ran, although I'm not not as convinced of that. So you coin this phrase. June twenty twenty two. By Quinn's ends, CPI inflation peaked at nine percent in June twenty twenty two. How much of vibe session was just utter frustration with rapidly rising inflation?
A lot of it. Yeah. So the way that I talk about vibe session now, you know, tw years later, is that it is an element of structural affordability, right, Like, inflation is really high. Even with inflation going down, that doesn't mean the prices are going down. Housing is unaffordable as we talked about Eldercare is extraordinarily unaffordable. Childcare costs
are up thirty two percent since twenty nineteen. So like there's a structural affordability that is being captured in people's vibes that doesn't necessarily show up in the broader economic data, Like you don't look at GDP and say, okay, people can't afford to put their mom in a nursing home. And there's also media headlines like the media has become
really negative. Sentiment has you know, decreased over time too, and so I think it's those two things where it is unaffordable, and then also there's a lot of stories about things being really bad and that is creating a vibesession.
So it's interesting you mentioned sentiment. I did a blog post around the same time, and I was kind of fascinated that the University of Michigan sentiment survey was lower than the pandemic, lower than the financial crisis, lower than September eleventh, lower than the dot com implosion. That seemed to be wildly inappropriate. What else do you think factored into that disconnect?
Well, I don't know if you saw the Harris Guardian poll that like a lot. God, I can't remember the exact number, but a number that is way too high. Percentage of people think that now was worse than the Great Depression, And so I think that that's kind of what's going on is people are looking at circumstances and as we were talking about earlier, maybe not having context for what's happening right now. Right now, we're not in a great depression.
It's unaffordable, but we're not even in a recession. Arguable, you were expanding two and a half three percent somewhere in that range in the third or fourth quarters of twenty twenty four. So I have to ask you this question. I forgot. I looked up the quote the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed by William Gibson. How much of what you described Vibe session is about the abundance
of our economies here, it's also not evenly distributed. I'm old enough to recall that the Baby boomers are in trouble. They're never gonna pay the wealthiest generation in history. Everybody got that wrong, or a lot of people got that wrong. We see gen X doing well, we see Gen Z kind of coming up a little bit and now they're a new generation that's calling jen Alpha or something like that.
So how does the ditribution of wealth back and loaded to the oldest people who have been working and saving and investing the longest. How does that impact the concept of vibe session.
Yeah, I mean I think you know, there's so there's a couple of things there, right, Like there's a saying where America has a lot of wealth but not a lot of prosperity. And I think that's kind of the situation where a lot of people have a lot of money and a lot of assets, but that is not evenly distributed, as you said. And I think also because people are living longer and you know, staying in jobs longer, taking longer to retire, there isn't maybe as much upward mobility as there used to be.
Will you people hurry up? And what's the problem?
No, I just it isn't it's I don't think people should die. But it is interesting because there's I need to do more work on this. But there's almost kind of like a leadership slash mentorship crisis where it seems like.
Certainly with remote work is giantly problematic.
Absolute because like how do you train up the next generation if you're not with them. And also there is an element of resistance to training up the next generation, I think, because there's elements of agism, like the older people don't want to be pushed out of their jobs and they feel like that's happening, and it's tough within like within the generations too, Like I think it's forty three percent baby boomers have no retirement savings and then some of them have, you know, a.
Bubble toimes right, it's not even lead distributed, no doubt about it.
And so I think that's totally true because in the US we are very much in all or nothing society, like you either figure it out or you don't, and there's nobody who's going to help you.
So you're hinting with the mentorship issue, you're hinting at something vibe session related, which is I mean, let's talk about the eight hundred pound gerill in the room. How big an impact was the pandemic, the lockdown, being forced to work remotely, not being able to have the sort of social interaction that my generation took for granted when I was your age. How big of an impact was that mess on? And let's be blunt the pandemic was
not well handled by the previous administration. You can argue the at least they got the vaccine out and was somewhat better handled by the next administration, although both of them contributed Karzac one, Karzac two, and Karzac three that massive fiscal stimulus is a big part of the inflation spike. How much did the pandemic contribute to Vibe session feelings.
I think a lot. Yeah, I think, you know, to the point of social interactions, Like I graduated basically into the pandemic and I still don't know how to like talk and adult species, right, right, So I think that's definitely a big part of it, is like the lack
of social interaction. And then two, like a lot of people ended up just consuming content all day long, right, and what goes viral, as you know, on social media is doomer stuff, right, And so I think that's a big thing, is like people were consuming because we were stuck inside. It was extraordinarily scary. Nobody knew what was happening.
And you when people are telling you that the world is ending, and you're like, okay, yeah, that makes sense to me, and you just kind of keep on consuming that info even after things get better.
Right, That lack of information hygiene is really important. Here's another generational difference, and I want to ask you how this contributed to the vibe session. So people I don't know, over fifty, maybe even over forty, like that, were already in their teens or twenties when the Internet came about. The Internet has always been a room in the house we would visit, Oh, I'm going to go online for a while, whereas the forty and under generation, the internet
has always been there. Is that true forty and they, let's say thirty and under certainly since the mid nineties, and they exist in the Internet. It's not like a separate thing. It's part of their virtual reality. So raises the question, what's the impact of social media on that generation's self identity? They at least a decade ago, we're so focused on likes and social approval and you mentioned
going viral. Does that lead them to be less data driven, less more embracing of these subjective measures of reality?
Maybe? Yeah, that's interesting. I think definitely. Yeah, Like the Internet is something that it's like a room that you go into in your head, right right, Like you are not with other people if you're on your phone, even if you're around them, right, And so I think that's something that we're like just starting to grapple with. I've noticed it within myself where it's like, once I start scrolling, I'm not in the room with my friends, like I'm
in the room on Twitter. And so I think that's a big part of it too, where you do everything does end up being influenced by feelings versus like quantitative measures, and you kind of know how it feels in your head and you kind of extrapolate that out into the world beyond you. And so maybe we do have a more subjective generation that is like, well, this is how I feel about stuff, because look how feelings perform on the internet.
Right and listen, social media has perfected the algorithm for outrage, because outrage increases engagement even as it slowly eats away like a cancer society from the inside. You know. I have mixed feelings on the death of Twitter as it slowly circles.
The dreaming it's going to die.
I think it's dead already.
Really.
So last summer, not twenty four to twenty three, I lost I got hacked. I call him Elmo but Elmo decided to make you pay for two factor authentication, which is standard security practices. It used to come with it. And I came home from dinner Saturday night. Apparently you could send an email requesting a change of password and those idiots would just do it, like if you don't
object to it in sixty minutes, that's something silly. So that's how I lost my Twitter account, and fortunately the folks here helped me get it back and only took three months. And again Dave nottiing and I I was like lamenting this, and He's like, you're not missing anything. It's died already. This is a year ago, and I'm genuinely shocked at how the engagement has gone down, how the interaction and half the people I know irl I've
met on Twitter over the past fifteen years ago. It's so terrible, And there's nothing else has come along that quite matches it. Just that. So now I'm pretty much
down to just focusing on my lists. At least it used to be with your list, you weren't seeing a lot of other junk that even that's starting to get corrupted because I know I have a list on behavior finance and a list on charts and at markets and economics, and a list on automobiles, and a list on travel, and a list on I have all these lists, and I used to be able to just go, you know what, I'm just going to spend some time learning about, you know,
the hills of southern Spain, and you could do that. And now everything is just intruded with craziness and politics. But it brings I want to bring this back to the vibe session question. So we've talked about the pandemic, We've talked about inflation as a driver of the vibe session. How much of this is driven by social media? How much of this is that doomer loop of people who have been wrong since the financial crisis and yet still have a big following.
Yeah. No, it's something I combat all the time with the stuff that I post on Instagram and TikTok, because that's what goes viral, is like not the truth, but big scary things. And that's a huge problem on Twitter,
as we both know. And so I think it is definitely an issue because, like, you know, we have these animal brains and they're trying to protect us since they're like, you know, pay attention to the big scary thing, and that's always going to be a duomer story, right, right, Like nobody really wants to hear Okay, the economy's going okay. It's like, no, the economy's going crazy and you're in a lot of trouble. Like that's what you're going to
end up paying attention to. And so I think totally the vibe session has been heavily influenced by social media. Even when I was writing that initial piece, I reached out to a lot of people in my comment section who had been commenting that they were like not feeling good and that they were very worried, and there's of course like true economic pain out there. But a lot of these people were like, Oh, I read an article that things are not okay.
And what's the track record of that paper on that author? How why do you assume that because it was published it's accurate. I'm always sure I spend a lot of time fending off nonsense that clients read and say, hey, you know, New York Stock Exchange margin dead is at record highs. So is the New York Stock Exchange. Look at the two. As long as you're it's at all time highs. Margin dead is also going to be at all time highs. Why is that a problem? Back to
denominator blindness. You got to look at the broader context, and yet people don't seem to ask those questions.
Do you think that's an element of media literacy?
There's some of that. It's also you brought up you know, our lizard brains. Things that are good are not an existential threat. So all right, it's great, things that are bad. Oh my goodness, this can end. Hey, I'm here to propagate my genetic lineage if if this threatens that, you know, we were hardwired to be a classic risk aversion. It's losses feel twice as bad as gains because losses are an existential threat.
Yeah. Absolutely. I was reading this really interesting article about the you know, propagating the generic lineage thing, because I'm really interested in the dating apps and how they're sort of influencing the mindset of the younger generation around that and this guy, he's a sociologist, and he's arguing that our brains are actually switching away from the desire to repopulate and they're more so becoming focused on the individual and that's maybe why we're having more and more of
a fertility crisis.
Isn't that a global issue? Oh yeah, seeing a fertility crisis around the world across the board. You mentioned the quant who works in my shop, Nick Majulie. He did some stuff years ago, look scraping the data from the apps. You should dig that up. I remember it was like just insane the sort of numbers he pulled out of that. I think I'm hard pressed to imagine that five years or ten years of social media are going to undo
two million years of evolutionary biology. Maybe I'm wrong, but is this something that it's just a novel theory or you finding against a lot of wetwear and hardwired aspects of the human experience.
Yeah, yeah, I think it's it's definitely like paper covering the deeper, you know, need to do that, because I do think that's a genetic desire. But it's just interesting and like maybe that's like why the vibes are disconnected, right, Like why you see these high rates of depression, anxiety, et cetera. You know, whenever you talk about society at large, you're always pulling theories and there's always gaps in them.
But I think it's just interesting to think about like, you know, what is the impact of dating apps, What is the impact of being on social media and seeing you know, not real faces but edited faces, Like how does that impact how we actually exist in the real world and ultimately how we feel about everything that we're doing and the economy at large.
Well, we know that kids have a much higher depression rate than they used to ever since you know, the iPhone came out and all the apps, so it's having a real effect all right, which leads to my last vibe session question, which is there were a number of economists who thought a vibe session would be a self fulfilling prophecy and that we would end up negative sentiment, would end up driving recession. That didn't happen.
Why, Yeah, that was good. That was actually the title of the original piece, you know, vibeesession, self fulfilling prophecy. And I don't think it ended up happening because the economic data has been so strong, Like the government is spending a lot of money, right, and that's going to help prop up GDP, and that's going to help a prop up the consumer. The consumer had an incredible savings buffer post COVID, and we did see real wage gains and so you had a resilient consumer who was ready
to spend, especially on services. And so I think that helped us avoid a recession as we had a government to you know, spending a lot of money. And then we had a consumer that up until recently has been quite strong in a labor market that was incredibly strong. We're seeing weakness in that now, but I think that's why we were able to avoid the self fulfilling prophecy aspect of it.
Are we really seeing weakness? Are we just seeing less strength than we.
Did, We're seeing That's a good point. It's more lukewarm versus.
High and the crazy thing I think people So you talk about the abundance mindset earlier, there are a couple of areas in the economy that scarcity has taked. So we don't have enough single family homes, there aren't enough laborers. We've reduced a number of legal immigrants since nine to eleven. We lost a whole bunch of people to COVID we launched, We have removed a whole bunch of people from the
labor force through disability, including long COVID. Arguably we're short two or three million houses were short a few million automobiles due to the lag in ramping up semiconductor production. And we're also short I don't know, pick a number one, two, three, four million laborers out of a laborpool of one hundred and sixty two million people. So we have all this abundance and yet at the same time they're scarcity in very specific areas.
Yeah. Absolutely, in the abundance mindset is like we can't have all these things in great numbers, and like it doesn't have to be this issue where there's not enough of things and that creates so much wordy and concern for people. But yeah, I think that's kind of the issue across the board is we don't have enough, and yet we have so much money as a country, right.
Wealth, but not prosperity. I love that economy where if you go to I remember being in Europe right during the dot com implosion and everybody was so stressed out in Manhattan you could feel like, hey, I get fired, I'm gonna lose my health insurance. What it's gonna happen if my kid needs a operation. You go to Europe and they're in the cafe is having coffee and they're smoking cloth cigarettes and nobody really seems to be bent out of shape that hey, the technology is imploding eighty percent.
They're all kind of just groove in life. It's a very different mindset where the focus isn't on wealth, but it's on prosperity. Yeah, are there that much geographic differences? Is United States that unique compared to the rest of the world.
I don't. I mean, I think there's actually a big conversation kind of happening around this right now, like why the United States sort of does this to itself? And I think the US has these elements of workaholicism, like we love the work and Europe maybe doesn't. But yeah, we've chosen maybe not to spend so much on the social aspect of it, and you do see consequences of that. Like I think having a social safety net for people
is a really good buffer. Like once you have a sense of security, there's kind of a lot that you can achieve.
A lot less stress. Also, although although arguably we don't have that safety net, we don't and we've achieved I think the stress is what has driven us.
Yeah, because we know that we have to have a safe you.
Better get off your go do something otherwise no one's feeding you. Good luck being homalless, which kind of is really funning at about the Wall Street bets and all the crypto bros that have fun being poor. Was such an interesting basic approach to No. No, you've got to go do something, even if it's something like NFTs or crypto figure something out. That's a uniquely American proposition.
Yeah. Absolutely, because there's nobody to catch you, right, and so you have to go invest in disecoin. And that's like, now we have this gambling issue as a society, like sports gambling, unbelievable. Gosh, it's awful. Yeah, and it is. I really do believe it's because we don't have a safety net for people, and so they're like, I don't know what to do, I'll just gamble my money.
That makes sense. Usually if I don't know what to do, I'll go watch YouTube. But hey, whatever you have to do. So the Vibe session did not become a self fulfilling prophecy. I have to do a compare and contrast with something he wrote in the book, inflation is entirely dependent on what people expect to happen. I disagree, but I want you to explain why you think that is.
Yes, So this is definitely an unpopular opinion. Drew and Poll actually talked about this in his Jackson Whole speech. You know, infulation nextperts have been tempered, so people don't expect as much inflation as it used to and that'll help the Fed.
So let me just let me just stop you right there. So after inflation has fallen from nine percent to two percent, their expectations go down. That sounds quite backwards looking and lagging. Let me also point out that when inflation was about to spike up in two thousand and one, everybody's forward inflation expectations were pretty low. Isn't this like asking people what their risk tolerance is? Aren't you just getting whatever happened over the past six to twelve months? Yeah?
Usually, But I think the reason I said that in the book was like, the expectations do matter, and they'll ultimately influence how the Federal Reserve makes decisions.
I mean, Jerome Powell one hundred percent agrees with that. I just think he's.
Wrong because you think it's what, like, what do you think?
I think people don't know what the hell they think. They certainly don't know what they're gonna do you ask them a question they don't know. And because of the American educational experience where we're tested within inches of our lives, Hey, no penalties for filling in that bubble on your multiple choice. So people nobody likes to say I don't know, So here's a made up answer. Go away. I can talk about this stuff with you forever, but we have a
hard stop. So I have to get to my favorite questions that I ask all of my guests, starting with what's keeping you entertained these days? What are you listening to on podcasts or watching on Netflix, Amazon, Disney, whatever you like?
Yeah? So I really like the podcast Philosophize. This Philosophize, Yeah, that's one of my favorite podcasts. It's by Stephen West and he talks all about the different schools of philosophy, goes back to the very beginning, and it's just phenomenal and he walks you through everything and all the different schools of thought, and I think he does a fantastic job. And then there's this series called Land of the Giants by Box.
You've heard of that, yes.
Yeah, Peter Kofka has done a couple of them, but.
He was a Business Week for a long time, and then I think it was briefly at the Times and now he's at Fox.
Yeah, I think so. I think that was his path.
Well unless it was backwards Times Business Week, but whatever. He's a good economic writer.
And he's a great podcast Oh really Yeah, I really enjoyed his his dives. They talk about like delivery apps, they talk about dating apps, they talk about Twitter and what happened with Twitter, and so I really enjoyed that. And then I've been listening. I listened to a ton of audio books because I'm on a bike a lot, and so I'll listen to a book on the bike and Blood in the Machine is really good.
It sounds so from the Oh.
I can't remember the author's name.
So I'm going to get to specific books. We'll start, Okay, so hold on that for a second. So those were all podcasts. Any any video anything you watch on video like YouTube stuff, YouTube, Netflix whatever.
Oh I don't watch a ton of Netflix. I do listen to a lot of podcasts. And then on YouTube, I've been listening to Eddie Burback. Have you heard of him? No, He's kind of like a commentator YouTube guy. But he did this thing on Ai. Recently, he did this funny video where he visited all the rainforest cafes in the country. And he's just a very good producer. Uh huh, and I really enjoy think.
How many rainforest cafes other in the country. There's one like didn't that come out like twenty year twenty five years ago Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwartz And there wasn't like a crazy question like they teamed up so after Planet Hollywood. I don't remember. I'm getting that wrong. I know that they were involved. Some people were involved with Planet Hollywood, and a subset of those people did Rainforest Cafe. I could be completely wrong about that.
I don't know, but yeah, he walks. I don't know, maybe not everything.
Are there a lot of these left?
Yeah, there are at least one in every state.
I think, uh huh huh. Good, that's crazy. I'm going to share a channel with you because you brought up mass transit. Yeah, there is a guy. He's a Canadian. He moved to Amsterdam and he has a channel called Not Just Spikes and I'm addicted. First of all, I love Amsterdam. It just barely edged out Paris is my
favorite city. But the whole concept of, hey, what you do with your mass transit affects everything from wealth and incoming equality to quality of life and why people in countries with better mass transits have higher happiness quotients and better health outcomes. And it's crazy how it just cascades after higher education that seems to be the next most important thing.
Do you know that the average car in the United States has more space for itself than the average person does?
Yeah? Absolutely, Yeah, just look at all the plus to say nothing of the parking spots that.
Have you read Paradise? No, Oh, it's about parking and it's great.
So so let's get to your favorite books. No, let's paid Parking, Yeah, paid Paradise. About what else?
The parking Blood in the Machine? Which can It's this gorgeous book and he talks about the blood hees and he goes into deep detail and like talks about what it was like and obviously a very hard time, but what it looks like for their lives to be impacted by the introduction of like the spinning machine, and how AI is like kind of comparing to that, And it's just it's really good historical writing.
And I just saw a research report this morning. I don't know who put it out, is the problem with being a consumer of just too much jumps that AI is going to be a net positive? Oh, I know it was Torsten Slock looked at unemployment rates and phil the Philippines and somewhere else that a lot of a lot of call centers and a lot of outsource stuff and despite the introduction of AI, none of these places
have seen an optic in unemployment yet. Oh. Just kind of fascinating, Like you would think that's that's the canary and the call, right, And.
I think like the way that a lot of people are thinking about AIM, not this author of blood the machine, but as a compliment to the human laborer, where it's like it's not something where that places you, but something that has an augmentation. Yeah. I've seen AI be.
An augmentation in my life one hundred percent. Every time I do uh, do the prep work for this, the last thing I do is entered into perplexity and chat GBT and see what comes up. It still is occasionally wrong. You have to be very aware that it's not trustworthy. But it's getting a little better all the time, and every now and then it'll uncover a nugget that we miss and it's I have a research team, it's not just me. And even still, those deep dives will pull
pull stuff out. So Paved Paradise blend the Machine. Any other books you.
Oh, gosh, yeah, I read a ton on the bike a lot. But I I read this book about the founder of Glasciator, which was really interesting. Or Glossier the water company. Yeah, it's the makeup company.
Oh, the makeup Yeah.
Yeah, So it's about that that founder and like what it was like for her to build a makeup company, and that was quite good. I read a lot of fiction.
So right now those first three year all nonfiction you just gave me, uh huh yeah, right, so that's three nonfiction. Give us three fiction that you're enjoying.
I'm reading A Gentleman in Moscow right now. Have you read that?
I have it on my list forever, It's always in my queue.
I never get it's like, so I'm probably a quarter of the way through it, and it's kind of a lot of dialogue, which I don't always enjoy. Like I really love world building in fiction novels like Lord of the Rings, et cetera.
Are you a sci fi or fantasy. I mean, obviously Lord of the Rings is a classic.
But like kind kind of it's more of I like settings to be very clear, so I can have it in my head as a visual. I don't know if that makes sense.
But CJ. Scherer was this and you could tell she was a woman because it's initials. Because once she was writing back in the sixties and seventies, I had a high that she has. If you like world building, go check out Pride of channor Cha and you are ok. If you're like twenty pages into it and you're not deeply in love, just throw it away.
Okay, done.
Yeah, but I may just have sent you down a rabbit hole that will. Yeah. And she's just this amazing builder of worlds, wonderful that very few writers like I just remember, of all the sci fi stuff I went through as a kid, she just totally all right. So so, gentlemen of Moscow, give us two more.
I'm reading. I read Olive by I can't remember her name, but it got turned into a TV show. But it's kind of really interesting because it's about and she has a sequel too, called Olive Again, and it's about this woman who just lives in this little town, and she has all these little stories that surround this woman, and all the stories interweave really beautifully, and I really like that, kind of like time bedding stuff.
Elizabeth Strout, Elizabeth, thank you.
Right, And then I.
Google makes the universal information. We don't know anything, but where knowledge, Jason, and there it is.
Let me google.
Oh wait, Olive Olive again? She is too, Emma Gannon or Allah or Elizabeth Strapp.
Those it's Elizabeth Stroud.
Okay, Yeah, there's another book called Olive by Emma Gannon. No, it's from twenty twenty one.
No, it's Stroud.
Okay.
Yeah. And then I read Trust by Hernan Diez. Have you read that?
No?
Oh you should. It's it's all about what this guy. It's I think it's a fabrication, but it's this guy that lived during the Great Depression. And there's actually three stories interwoven into one, and so you get the like the fictionalized version of this guy's life. And then that guy becomes the second part of the book and we get to hear his actual story, not one that's like
fabricated by this author. And then you get another part of the book that goes a little bit deeper into his wife's life, and so it's really it's I think I want to Poultzer.
Yeah, I'm looking at it right now. Could surprise winner. Yeah, I love when authors are like twenty twenty three, that was last year.
Yeah, it's really good.
I understand the hardcover and the paperback are now the same price.
The new books are tough, tough industy.
I guess one of the New York Times one hundred best books of the twenty first century.
Yeah, it's quite good, as.
Long as they've read every book in the twenty first century so they can make an informed evaluation like that.
It's a big claim.
I'm down with that.
Yeah.
I know it's again more stupid media stuff the modern era. So that's a great list of books right there. Yeah, I skipped the question to get to books that I have to ask you, But I'm not sure if you can have a good answer, which is who are your mentors who helped shape your career?
Oh, because what I said about the mentor things, well, I.
Know, Jim O'Shaughnessy is obviously a big influence.
Oh gosh, I've had so many people like I could we'd be here all day.
If I listed every give us one or two.
So the two people that have probably been the most influential because they believed in me before I did, was my two professors in college, doctor Chocci and doctor Lebedinski. I basically would go to them and be like, I want to start a club, I want to do research around this s and P five hundred, I want to go travel to this conference. And they'd be like, all right, good, and they would just help me kind of achieve all of these streams that I had, And so they were phenomenal.
Like I remember, I was applying to jobs and I wanted to do a PhD because I really wanted to teach, and doctor Chacci was like, no, you should go work in industry for a little bit and then you can go and get your PhD. And so it's just kind of like that really tailored advice and support and they were probably the most important people to me during my college time.
You know, that's really interesting. Angus Deeton, who is the British economist who won the Nobel Prize, and I think he's teaching. Is he teaching at Princeton. Yeah, he's teaching at Princeton, and he said, you could look across a thousand different factors and nothing impacts your life as much
as a higher education. We see it in wealth, inequality, income and equality, health outcomes, whether you go to jail, whether you get divorced, like all these social things that you would think are unrelated your self described happiness quotient like deep deep down the rabbit hole, And consistently there is a gap between between what we see on the have at college education and don't it's pretty amazing.
Well, I mean it's kind of for like, I work three jobs during college, but it's four years to sort of figure yourself out. And I actually think that's really important because you learn how to socialize, you learn how to learn, You get tested, but in an environment where like if you fail, it's okay most of the time. Like if you feel out of college, it's not okay, but you kind of have the chance to make safe mistakes, is what I would call it.
And that's the true today with well, it seems like some of the campuses, some of that has kind of become more challenging.
Well ever, yeah, from a political angle, absolutely, yeah, I think.
But it should but what you were describing should be true it should be a place where you can make mistakes.
I think. So I graduated in twenty nineteen, and I think I was the last year to have that. I do because of the pandemic and because I just like the scholarship package that I got and the reason that I went to Western Kentucky. It was a full ride and I was paid to have school, and there's nothing like that unless you're like a top, top top student. And I was a good student. But it was an in state school, and so I had all these opportunities
because I was able to have a full ride. And I just don't think that.
Where else did you consider going besides in state of a Vanderbilt.
I wanted to stay close to my family, So Vanderbilt, which was in Tennessee, I was in Kentucky. I was looking at Butler up in Indiana, Notre Dame. Yeah, like just kind.
Of big us little schools both. Yeah, you looked at everything.
Yeah, I wanted like a good school because I did want to.
Well, none of these are bad schools. You're talking about all it good or better schools.
Yes, yeah, but like I wanted to leave Kentucky and the only way I knew how to get out was like through education, and so that's why I was looking at a schools, but I ended up staying in Western Kentucky because the scholarship and it turned out to be an incredible experience.
Huh, to say the very least. And our final two questions, what sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad interested in a career in either finance or investing education?
So I think for me, and this is the advice I give when people ask, is like to read everything and to figure out what you'd like to read, and then try to challenge yourself to explain it, to write about it, to learn about it as deeply as you can. And I think the only way that you actually understand stuff is if you can explain it simply. And so that's what I would recommend to just be a consumer
and ask questions. You'd be surprised how many people are willing to just take thirty minutes to chat with you and just ask her help as much as you can. But yeah, to absorb as much as possible, but then make sure you're digesting it by repeating it back to yourself, whether through writing, videos, etc.
And our final question comes with a little bit of a caveat. So I always share the last five questions, partly because they require a little recall with our guests in advance. And I asked you, what do you know about the world of investing today that you wish you knew twenty five years ago? And you hilariously wrote back twenty five years ago I was one, don't bite the cat. I mean, I think that's so funny. I don't know if you said that or Dave Knadi said that, and
our back and forth. I shared your answer with him and he think I think he said don't bite the cat. Yeah, yeah, But what do you know today that might have been helpful earlier in your career.
I think for me, there's so many facets to finance, Like I was very much like, oh, there's one thing I can do, and it's portfolio management. But there's so much that you can do. Education, you can look into ira spaces, you will do you can do media like, there's just and there's so many different worlds within finance, commodities, fixed income, equities. It's really massive. And so I think the advice that I would give to my one year old self is to, you know, just keep on learning.
In similar to the device I give previous, but really just know that the world is so big and there's so much opportunity within these segments that are just fascinating to explore you to spend a lifetime doing it.
Well, thank you, Kyla for being so generous with your time. I'm gonna have to have you sign this.
Oh, thank you.
We have been speaking with Kyla Scanlon. She is the author of In This Economy, How Money and Markets Really Work. If you enjoy this conversation, well, check out any of the five hundred or so we've done over the past
ten years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you find your favorite podcasts, and check out my new show At the Money, short ten minute discussions about specific topics in finance, earning money, spending it, and most importantly investing it At the Money, wherever you find your favorite podcasts, and in the Master's in Business feed. I would be remiss if I did not thank the Crack staff who helps us put these conversations together each week.
A Teak of Albron is my project manager. Anna Luke is my producer. Sean Russo is my head of research. Sage Bauman is the head of podcasts at Bloomberg. I'm Barry Ritolts. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio