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Tracy, do you think that the reason it's so hard to buy house it's because of black Rock is buying all that?
There's a loaded question that's like, what's that famous loaded question? Maybe this is more well known in Britain, but the when did you start beating your wife? Okay, okay, it's a little different, Yeah, a little different.
When did you stop by the way, Oh I'm sorry.
Yeah, okay, yes, that makes oh dear, this conversation has already gone off the rails.
I did a deadlift one, Jimmy.
Okay, uh barges.
This isn't after school Special, except I've.
Decided I'm going to base my entire personality going forward on campaigning for a strategic pork reserve in the US.
Where's the best posta?
These are the important questions robots taking over the world.
No, I think that like in a couple of years, the AI will do a really good job of making the Odd Lots podcast and people to say, I don't really need to listen to Joe and Tracy anymore.
We do have touching the perfect.
You're listening to Lots more where we catch up with friends about what's going on right now, because.
Even when the odd lots is over, there's always lots more.
And we really do have the perfect guest. Didn't we learn that big factoid, that really interesting factoid in one of our conversations that actually the single family institutional ownership includes like individual landlords in addition to huge firms like Blackrock.
I just feel like, this is what I think about all the time, TikTok macro, which is like Blackrock is controlling all of the market. No, sorry, Blackrock is controlling all the market. Blackstone is why you can't buy a house. All people in Congress are insider traders. What else is there? What else is there, Kyla in terms of TikTok and yeah, like what are like the sort of like pillars of like modern beliefs about how the public that?
Yeah, I mean it's always the system is working against you, right, I mean, I think there's so many misbeliefs about the economy. It was just it makes it really hard to talk about the economy. Like inflation going down doesn't mean that prices are going I think that's a really big one. And then the black Rock thing really takes hold. That's very fair that's like a.
Big pillar of like how yeah, people see problems with the economy.
Yeah, like ETFs in the world, ETFs in the world.
There's a lot, I should say. We are speaking with Kyla Scanlon, our good friend who has just published a new book called Fittingly. I have to say I love this title in this Economy, How Money and Markets Really Work. She's also a Bloomberg Opinion contributor. She's been on the podcast before, and congrats on the book. Kylo.
Thank you. Yeah, it's super exciting.
Thank you for coming to chat with us. Oh no, thank you all for also the creator of the word vibe session. Yeah, just like become it is, but it is you right, like you said it first. Yeah. No, now everyone says it and I was like, oh, people, JP were good. I saw that this is a vibe session.
But you created Yeah no, I did back in July twenty twenty two. But yeah, I know other people have taken cudit for it, which is fine. You know, No, it's not fun, it's not it's just how.
But this is sort of the amazing thing about the vibe session because when you first wrote about it, it was because the hard data was still coming in relatively strong, but all the survey data, people seemed to really really down beat on the economy. And now a couple of years later that's still the case more or less.
Yeah, people are still feeling really bad. I mean, I think about the Harris Guardian poll which was like fifty five percent of people think that or fifty six percent. Yeah, people think that we're in ocession. Forty nine percent of people think the stock market is down, forty nine percent of people think unemployments at a record And it's like, man, you know, there's an element of the vibe session that is structural affordability issues right, like husting, crisis, elder care, childcare.
But then there is an element of the vibe session which is media right and TikTok as we were talking about with like the black rockets, yeah, and how it's buying up single family homes apparently, but yeah, it's complicated.
Where do you think this comes from? So this sort of I don't know, people talk about trust and this sort of you know, people just not believing things that are objective facts, the sort of deep skepticism or typathy maybe towards large institutions or conspiratorial beliefs like where do you think is it like a social media thing, Like what do you think it's all about?
Yeah, I mean I think a lot of it's information overload, like we just have way too much going on all of the time, and I don't think we're kind of built to process all of that. And then just the framing of things really can be impactful. Like if a media headline is negative, that increases the click through rate by two point three percent, if it's positive, it decreases it by one point nine percent. So the incentives are
very clear there. But I also think you know, if you're not free out, it means that you don't care. And so I think the overall idea is that you have to be like anxious and worried, and there are things be anxious and worried about. But I think it's exacerbated by the way that we engage with one another online.
What sort of engagement do you see on a platform like TikTok, Because I feel like I'm not on TikTok, but I am on Twitter, slash x And one rule of social media seems to be if you say something negative about the economy, it's almost guaranteed to get more retweets and engagement than something that's positive or nuanced or educational. Is that something that you experienced as well?
Yeah, I mean, I think the whole thing is doumerism can absolutely take over. Dumers sound really smart, like if you're like the world's ending, everyone's like that guy knows what he's saying. And I think that that is just a great way to sell a newsletter. And so you see a lot of people selling newsletters by selling a narrative. And I think it's the same on TikTok, like all the algorithmic incentives are for you to post very negatively, and it's hard as a creator because you know that.
But there's one of my favorite sayings right now is nuance doesn't sell. And I think that's a big part of what we see on social media is people feel like they have to take a clear side on what they're talking about.
By the way, I see your book in This Economy number one bestseller in the Business Encyclopedia. The number two is the audiobook version, and then three and four are both Robert's Rules of Orders, and then five is again is the Kindle. So congratulations on your absolute dominance of the business Encyclopedia's category on Amazon.
Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, it's funny what they end up categorizing you on on Amazon. It's also doing well in the money and Monetary policy section, which is fun. Yeah. Yeah, but I didn't know it was a business encyclopedia, so it's good to.
Know that it is.
That's very cool. What was one of the things that you sort of learned through writing the book? So I was flipping through it, and first of all, I love the little cartoons and the drawings and the diagrams. They're very, very sweet and also very illustrative of some of the points that you're trying to make. But I'm curious, is there one thing that sort of stood out to you when you were researching the book?
Oh?
Yeah, I mean I think that for me, like there was two things, right, like how do you structure a book? And then what should a book be about?
And this is important for me and Tracy, by the way, because every once in a while we talk about writing a book. Yeah, and we're not we're close, so we're going to listen very intensely to learn how it's done.
Well, this is how I did. I don't know what it's done. But yeah, I learned. You know, you have to have a flow to a book in the structure, it really matters. Even though each chapter can be read separately, you kind of have to tell a narrative throughout it. And that's a little bit difficult with something as big as the economy.
Right because your book is quite wide ranging. Yeah, it's basically everything that you find interesting about markets and the economy.
Yeah. No, And I rewrote it three times, so the structure of the book was it was a big one. And then I think too, like I spend a lot of time trying to understand the history of the economy because I felt like that was really important to include in some of the beginning chapters, like how did we get here? And so the beginning of the book is kind of like the teap history of the economy, the economic kingdom, so the Federal Reserve Castle, the Monechechy policy Castle, the fiscal policy inflation.
Just like the inflation pizza by the Yeah.
Yeah, and all the diagrams are meant to sort of guide people throughout the book. And I guess it's like the biggest lesson learned for like writing an Econ book, And it was an interesting lesson to learn as the structure really matters, and how you guide people through something as harry and confusing and big as the economy is important.
You say, people don't click on nuanced. They don't click, and yet you're into nuance yourself, and so like, as someone who has been a successful financial system educator and now a successful author, it's apparently possible. It's apparently possible to be successful and nuanced.
At the sometime. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it totally is. I just think it's much easier to be zumeristic. Yeah, and so I think it's super important to have nuanced because as with the economy is all about you know, everything has an opposite and equal reaction, and it's the same in the economy. But I think it's just easier to tell lies.
Tracy the last So my last job, like about ten years ago Business Insider, I sort of wrote my last post there was about why I really like covering markets, Like I sort of thought about the blind men touching the elephant, except the elephant keeps moving. So not only do you never really get the full picture, like at any given time, by the time you think you're getting the full picture, it's like there's still there's another way. The elephant is already involved into a new species.
It's not easy, but you know, you know what I think, Well, I'm not an authority on this subject by any means, but you know what I think the solution is to nuance is like comedy and entertainment in some respects. And that's kind of what you've been doing on TikTok, right, Like you make informational videos, but they're fun and engaging to watch, and so you can still provide nuance, but you still come out the attention of the audience because they want to watch them.
Yeah. Yeah, that's the goal with like making, and that's why the book has illustrations too. It's like, if you make things fun, people are more likely to pay attention. It's like a game of human behavior, right, And so yeah, if you can like tell jokes about things that are inherently kind of funny, like a lot of stuff in the economy, even though some parts of it are very serious, like unemployment and inflation, Like some parts of it you
can have fun with. And I try to do that as much as I can, because I think that's how you engage people. People who think they're outside of the economy, within economics education, you know what.
I don't know, how did you realize what your career was? Oh? Yeah, like you know, it's like, you know, you people tweet and people post, and then suddenly it's like, oh, like people listen, and this is what I do now, Like it took me. It was not until a couple of years of being a journalist that I realized like, oh, I guess this is what I'm gonna be journalists. Like, at what point did you realize that this is what you do?
It was really around GameStop is kind of when the video started, and then I spent probably six months being like I don't know what's happening, and I was just making these videos and I didn't know if anything would work. And then I kept on writing my newsletter and then in July twenty twenty two, the Vibe session kind of took off. And I think that was kind of when I was like, oh, okay, I'm saying things and people
are listening. And I had the New York Times opinion piece, which was really awesome, and that's kind of when I was like, oh, okay, wow, whoops.
You know, so, why do you think vibe session took off as a term.
I think people were just really like or this has been feedback though people have given me. I think people were just looking for something to explain this discrepancy between consumer sentiment and economic data. Like so many of my conversations are about why do people feel the way that they do, And I think the vib session word was at least a step in the direction of addressing, you know, why there is such a big gap and why people were a little bit worried about why that gap existed.
Neither Tracy and I are on TikTok. Are we like at risk of just becoming completely irrelevant? Like I don't even use reels. All I do is like do the podcast and post tweets and stuff. How separated am I from actually the real world of where people, actual people are actually getting there?
I don't know TikTok is the real world. But yeah, I mean, I think TikTok is at risk of being banned in the United States, but.
I don't I'm biased, but that you know, it's like, Okay.
Well that that's fine with you, That's.
Fine with me. There's level of the playing field for me because I'm so far behind. No, But I have no opinion on this.
But no, a lot of young people do get their news from social media, and that's why I made my videos on social media. It was because I was like, this is where people are. They need information about the economy where they are, and so that's what I set out to do. But yeah, it's it's definitely where people It's like the watering hole of the Internet in a big way, but not like Twitter. Twitter is a little bit different. It's very direct on Twitter.
You know who I blame for TikTok thing massive hole in our consciousness show. Ironically, I kind of blame samro because he amalgamates the best of TikTok and then posts it on Instagram, which means I never have to go on TikTok because he just does all the aggregation. Yeah, it's a public service for sure, Kyla. I want to talk more about like the Vibe session and where we
are in the economy now. But so inflation has been coming down a little bit, and yet the sentiment surveys are still coming in pretty I mean I'm generalizing here, Yeah, they're bad. If this is a structural problem with some of the surveys, if people are too polarized because of the media, or if people are reflecting on the longer term outlook and just thinking I'm never going to be able to buy a house, or I'm never going to be able to retire, and that's feeding into some of
the shorter term responses. Is this discrepancy ever going to go away or is this something that we and economists are going to have to learn to accept and kind of analyze and digest.
Yeah, that's something I've been wrestling with quite a bit ever since the Hairst Guardian. And you've got to take all surveys with the grain of salt. But ever since the Hairris Guardian survey came out where it was about more than just vibes, like it was a clear disconnect from reality, right, Like it was like, we're not believing in truth, which is stock markets up, on employments, styllars,
we're not in a recession. I do think that because of information being a playing field for foreign adversaries, that there is more and more of an incentive to push consumer sentiment down. People are getting their information from all sorts of disparate sources, and so there really isn't a cohesive way to consume information, like how you know we used to when it was just like one cable TV show. So I do think that sentiment will be impacted just because of the way that we get our information now
is so confusing. But I am very optimistic that it'll improve, but I'm not sure yet how it will. I think it has something to do with transparency and trust and rebuilding that. But that is a big project to undertake.
It seems like a really big project. Why can't everyone just do what I do? Was just fire up the Bloomberg terminal type out top and look at the most credible selection of news stories related to business in the world. It's easy. I never get any misinformation.
I know, don't respond. I've learned the best thing to do is just don't respond to you.
And then you have your information. Fire hose Alt.
There's this crazy statistic about and I say that, and it sort of refused what I'm just saying about media being a way that people will get confused. Is like, the average American spends like five minutes a month on the top twenty five news sites, so people are really just scrolling headlines, and so I think it's like all of these things, and also I think the decline of
local papers. Everything has become very big and national and algorithmically designed, which sounds very dumor of me, but I think we're in a weird weird there's so much uncertainty going into the election too. I think it's just going to be a funky a few months.
What's your creative process like for creating the TikTok videos? And I have to say at this point, sometimes when I'm imagining, like the FOMC meeting around like a big table in a poort room, I sometimes have visions of like talking to yourself the way you do from like different camera angles, and Jerome Powell going, I think we should do this, and then Kyla response like, no, we should do this anyway. That's just me.
That's so funny. Yeah, the creative process is kind of like whatever I'm into that day on it. I get a lot of inspiration from other videos, all sorts of like movie makers and video creators, and that is how the creative process is driven. What I try to do is a multidisciplinary approach. So in the book, I have a lot of poems in philosophy and literature, and I feel like, that's really fun because I feel like with economics we kind of stay in one line most of
the time, which is like money. But you can really you can have a lot of fun just talking about how all this stuff relates to everything else totally.
I mean, I think this is one of the things we've learned on odd lots. There are very few topics that can't fit in in some way, like some way, Yeah, you just sort of realized in some way it's all business and economics. One of the questions that people ask me, like, well, what should I read or what should I What do you like to consume? What's your other books that you like a media diet or like someone said, like I want to learn more about the economy or I want
to learn more about markets. What should I read?
What do you tell people I have a great book you can read in this economy. But yeah, I love reading books that aren't about the economy but like kind of an economics angle. So I'm reading this book called Paved Paradise right now, which is very good. It's about parking lots and like the history of parking lots, and that's been really fun. I feel like that's right up your guys's alleys.
I single topics are so good.
Yeah, yes, yeah, and then I just finished Cultish, which is about like cults and how they started up. And then I'm reading The Material World by Ed Conway and that's been really fun. Yeah, that's that's a good one. But yeah, I basically read everything. I read a lot of philosophy during the pandemic, which I think a lot of people did. And now I'm kind of on this like real world kick where I really am obsessed with geology, materials and stuff like that and how that can be applied to the economy.
So you mentioned, you know, things sort of taking off for you during game stop, and I think the last time we had you on was to talk about meme stocks, and maybe we did a little bit of crypto then as well. But of course in recent weeks we have seen the return of some meme stoks, although it seems to have kind of gone away relatively quickly.
Recording this, it was up like twenty yesterday.
Yeah, it was a lot, but like not not quite on the scale of the first round of MEMESNIA and it's dropped again. But what do you think is happening there?
Why?
Why does it seem to resonate, you know, even two years.
Yeah, I mean, I think rowing kitty returning probably had something to do with it. But you know, one topic I've thought a lot about is financial nihilism, So people sort of not believing in markets. But I also think like game stop is sort of fun, Like it is a casino in the way that if you throw some money at it, you could make a lot of money,
and so I think people view it that way. But then I do think there's an element of financial nihilism, which I know that you will just cover sports gambling. I think that is maybe sort of in the same bucket. Connerson, also from Bloomberg Opinion, has a great theory where he's like, because millennials and young people can't buy a home, they sort of have this extra cash that they're gonna throw
at things like GameStop and sports gambling. And I think that all of those things are simultaneously sort of true.
Eventually somehow, you know, even the most online gen zers, like, eventually they'll get old like we are, and eventually some of them will own homes, and eventually some of them
will have kids. Do you think that for younger generations they're just going to permanently see the world differently than many other people, or do you think it's gonna be, like, know, the constraints that inevitably happened as people will get older and having to save pay for childcare and pay for elder care will be a sort of forcing mechanism for having I guess views or media diet that we sort of see as a little bit more normy.
Yeah, I mean, I think the mean reversion I suppose is normy. As you might say, yeah, I think that like, as you get older, you just have more responsibilities, so you're more likely to become more normy. To say it again, but you know, people aren't having kids like they used to, Like everybody knows, and you know, it's really tough to get home. So I think that that will be something that we see. I just think that's something that happens over time. But it'll be interesting to see how the
gen zers move throughout the world. I wrote this piece for Fast Company this time last year or a little bit earlier about how gin Z thinks about work, which is very very different like all the media terms. There yes, a quiet quitting and all that stuff. All right, they just had something where it was like quiet lunch or something where people were like going to lunch and they were like, why would you do that when you could work for a corporation and not take lunch and just
work all day. So I think that there is more of a desire for work life balance, and you know, corporations don't provide perhaps the same support that they used to, like when there was pensions and you know, more supportive healthcare possibly. So I think it's just a totally different relationship with work. And I don't know if that'll carry through to the future though.
Again, Tercy and I maybe one day will write a book ourselves. So we were curious about this whole process and what happened. What's next for you now? So the book just came out, came out May twenty eighth. What happens now?
What would your book be about?
I don't know, just the problem. We can never think of an idea. You stole an idea, oh you know, no money, and I have no idea what it would be about.
Yeah, I mean you could just see a compilation of all the odd episodes.
Yeah we could. We were thinking about something like oh.
Like wait, wait, wait, can we not have this on the thing because we might actually do it.
All right, so we've thought about ideas like that, But what's next, what happens after you write about.
Yeah, I don't know yet. It was like a really big project for about a year, and like right now, I'm just very interested. This is like personally, I suppose, but I'm very interested in learning. You know, everything that I've done has been in my bedroom. You know, it's been like, you know, low resource. It just sort of hacked from from zero and now I have you know, everybody's been so supportive and kind, but I'm really curious to explore like other mediums like radio, TV, see what that's like.
I could see like in this Economy Netflix documentary.
Right, yeah, I'm really interested in exploring how the government works. I feel like one theory that I had and I didn't really explore it throughout the book is you know, if you don't understand the system that you're in, it it's tough to make good decisions about the system. But you're also more likely to not trust the system if you don't understand the complexities. And so I think a really useful thing would be to explore the complexities of
the system. What is the US Post Office. You all do such a good job with this with the podcast, but I think, like really going deep into the more government facing I think.
That's a great idea, like what do all these agencies actually do and how they operate? The total black box? Yeah exactly, Yeah.
And I think that leads to the distrust and the dismay and all the stuff we've been talking about throughout the podcast. But I would really like to explore that. Like I'm just very fascinated by different mediums to educate about the economy, and like it's this thing that people think they're not a part of, but like, you know, I got a coffee about an hour ago, and that was like an economic transaction. I took the subway here,
that's an economic transaction. We're sitting in chairs which are made of material and probably like put together by hand machine and all this is like part of the economy. And I think that the more that people can sort of resonate with that and see themselves as part of the economy, the better off we could be. And so that's my soapbox on it, but I think it's important.
So I remember actually going back to game stuff and maybe this you know gets into the nuanced thing. I remember we did a handful of like there was a lot of financial nihil it. You know, you mentioned the term financial nihilism and you know, people just doing their yolo bets and their yolo loss.
It's the lottery ticket philosophy.
There were a few people who like actually use that moment to learn more, and like we did a few episodes on how you know what is like gamma squeezes and stuff, and like probably most people didn't care what they were a handful that's like I really like want to learn more and then actually use that moment, like I don't understand about how you know the Greek letters
work and options of math and stuff like that. What have you found, Like, is there like a cohort of people that you've been able to connect with online who like through your stuff, like have really gone deep to these topics.
Oh yeah, I mean I get like really special messages from people being like I majored in economics because if you yeah, it's so kind, or like you know, I passed an e contest because of your video on Veblin goods and yeah, so like I don't know if that's
exactly what you're asking. But there's been a lot of like really kind notes about how people realized, like the economics world can be fun, that they're a part of it, that you can understand it doesn't have to be a bunch of charts on the screen, right, And so yeah, and I think also game Stop kind of opened up to people's minds to investing. Like before, when I talk to my friends about investing, they would be like, that's
not something I'm ever interested in. But now game Stop they're like, oh, okay, I could make like a million dollars. But they're just more likely to be receptive to the knowledge because game Stop streamlined so many conversations about the stock market.
Well, this is the other thing about your content and your approach to economics especially, is I feel like you take into account human behavior in a way traditional economics, with the exception of behavioralist economics, obviously doesn't necessarily do so. In like a classical interpretation of the economy or even the market. Stuff like GameStop isn't really supposed to happen, and people are always supposed to act rationally and things
should eventually balance out. And yet we've seen time and time again that the economy is, you know, the result of individual human decisions, and sometimes it doesn't work precisely as expected.
Yeah, humans are irrational, which kind of goes against you know, what we think they should be, which is rational. But I think that's what I tried to do with the book because there's so many like brilliant economists out there, Like this book is a consolidation. It's not Kylo's big
original ideas. It's all these other ideas from all these other amazing economists, like Basic Economics by so you know Economics and One Lesson by Hasli, Like all of those books are so good, but they're so dense and like
sometimes they don't attach back to the real world. And so what I really wanted to do with this book was get into theory and like why stuff how happens, but then also be like, oh, look like this soew inflation impacts you, and this is how the living market impacts you, and this so GDP impacts you, and here real world examples of all of those things. And yeah, instead of being like, here's the supply and demand graph and that's all you get to know about, I just.
Want to say economics and one lesson is the biggest lie there is. That's a two eighteen page book. Someone handed me that to me when I was like in college, Henry Haslin's book. I don't understand how they got it with titling just marketing. Yeah, one lesson. It's a two hundred and twenty page book. You mentioned charts. Do people still twitch stream? And could we have a show Tracy and I where we look at charts on the Bloomberg terminal live on Twitch and talk about that. Would that be a hit.
You're really innovating on show format right now. A good app and switch. Yeah, I mean I think people just like to watch people talk about stuff. Okay, that's like my big theory. Like I think people love watching podcasts because it kind of feels like you're just hanging out. So I think you all could definitely get on Twitch and stream some charts and show people Bloomberg terminal that.
You gotta do like competitive charting?
Yeah? Should competitive?
Someone could say, like housing and then we raised to see you the most interesting housing chart.
That be fun?
I like to be fun.
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