Meet Kyla Scanlon: Master of TikTok, Markets and Vibes

KS: People don’t really experience the economy in terms of GDP growth. They experience it in terms of gas prices and food prices. And so if you start to see those easing, I do think people are going to end up feeling a little bit better. But on the margin, I don’t know how much has really changed. There’s still a lot of uncertainty.

CS: What would make people feel better? Are there certain things that you’re looking for on TikTok that would suggest that things have improved?

KS: The barometer for how people feel in my little bubble is my comment section. Although we’re talking about how things have improved — at least over the past few weeks — the sentiment in the comments has not improved at all.

There’s a lot of confusion around what the Fed is doing. When we have that next meeting in September, it’ll be interesting to see how people respond to that.

CS: You straddle Gen Z think and millennial in a way that nobody else does. Do you think that Gen Z sees markets and maybe the economy more broadly or differently than people, say, my age do?

KS: I don’t know if it’s really an age group thing. I definitely think there’s an element of “financial nihilism” where it’s like, “oh, I’m not going to save for the future because who knows, right.” That shapes a lot of spending patterns. And when I tell my friends that I like the stock market, they’re like, “that’s not real.”

CS: When I was in my mid twenties, it was the subprime bubble and people were going to Vegas and then the Iraq war was going on. People were pretty nihilistic, feeling like, “this economy is a joke, it’s all fake.” I do wonder whether the past 20 years have been weird, or maybe it’s always been this way, and we just have different themes and characteristics that shape this cynicism and uncertainty.

KS: I’m sure it’s always been this way. You could read literature and see that everybody has always been feeling pretty bad. Social media has made a lot of stuff worse because our brains are not built for consuming this much information.

CS: It’s generally not helpful if everybody’s thinking about the state of the economy and markets the way they do their favorite sports teams. Negativity can spill over to your point about people: Are we going to will ourselves into a recession?

KS: Fed meetings are now like a Super Bowl party. If you look at your timeline, people are saying things like, “oh, the market is going to be super choppy,” or “get ready, everybody. It’s gonna be crazy.” It’s kind of interesting that the CPI print and the Federal Reserve discussing monetary policy can be that exciting.

CS: You’re trying to help people navigate this scary, confusing world and these algorithms that try to make us negative. As an optimist, what do you think we can do to combat the negativity?

KS: The biggest thing is explaining things in a really accessible way, all while using data and recognizing the human experience of it, too. The reason that we don’t like inflation is because it causes uncertainty.

If you explain things in a way that’s entertaining, it will help people feel a little bit better. Hypersensationalism and doomism are rewarded by the algorithms. And our little brains love bad news. So you have to battle those dual forces. A lot of people entered the market in 2020 when the expectation was that things would go up forever. But it’s okay for things to not go up all the time. In fact, it might be good to take a breather.