Kyla Scanlon has spent the last few years making economics easier to talk about. After a stint at Capital Group in LA, she started posting whiteboard explainers and skits on TikTok in December 2020 and has since built an audience of more than a million people across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Substack.
In 2022, she coined “vibecession” in a Substack post to describe the gap between strong economic data and how people feel about the economy. Her 2024 book, In This Economy? How Money & Markets Really Work, became a New York Times bestseller, and she has been named to the TIME100 Creators list. She is now an economic contributor and analyst for CNN and writes monthly for New York Times Opinion.
Her new show, Best of Luck, was featured as our Podcast of the Week Podcast Delivery #478 and we absolutely loved it. Each week, she sits down with guests ranging from economists to farmers to comedians to talk about how they actually built their careers, then puts them through a mock job interview and an “advice autopsy.” Lots for you to learn if you’re staring at the state of the economy in bewilderment.
We were lucky to connect with Kyla to ask some questions about Best of Luck, her writings, and of course, the economy.
SO: Best of Luck puts the idea that career advice often comes from an economy that no longer exists front and center. Can the argument be made that this has always been the case and that we’re seeing an incredibly acute version of that right now?
KS: Yes, the economy is always changing. Kai Ryssdal was my first guest and when I asked about the worst advice he’s ever gotten, he said it was his mom telling him to stay in his Navy job because it was a good job and he was doing well. That was 30+ years ago, and it was sensible advice for an economy she knew. It’s the same advice I got less than five years ago when I quit my safe and good job.
Advice is always vintage in a way, but the classics don’t apply as well to the present moment.
Get your foot in the door! Work your way up the ladder! Stay loyal and it pays off! All those assume that there is a door that is just going to swing open for folks and that they will be able to seamlessly climb it. We have a low fire, low hire labor market.
People are holding onto what they have, and the advice we tend to share is for a world where there was a bit more mobility. But yeah, of course it’s always been the case and always will be the case. That’s the economy - but we do an advice autopsy so we can listen to older advice and parse out what is evergreen and what still works.
SO: So, what should new and existing entrants to the job market really be panicking about?
KS: I don’t think people should panic, as panic isn’t helpful. But there’s a few things here (1) the first rung of the ladder and the ladder itself is different. It is harder to break in if you’re just starting or if you got fired. The economy matters and YOU matter, and it’s useful to know that right now, the economy is working against a lot of people. (2) I wouldn’t panic about not having a perfect plan. Kai was 34 and working at a bookstore before he found radio.
Dan Toomey got turned down by late night TV four years in a row and then built the wildly successful Good Work Youtube channel.
You can do a lot of stuff: make things that no one asked for and reach out to people to ask for help.
SO: Similarly, your book, In This Economy? How Money & Markets Really Work unleashes a 21st century-coded reframing of behavioural economic theories and expands on the term you coined in your 2022 Substack post – “vibecession”.
This puts a finer point on things that we can assume were already at play in the economy.
How do you see podcasts’ role in amplifying or modulating those vibes? Are we gaining or losing anything in podcasting’s shift from audio to video?
KS: I think the video aspect is warm and helpful. I come from a video background, so perhaps I am biased. However, I think we gain faces and I think we gain some play.
Video is so multi-dimensional, so it can be a way to add more depth to a conversation. But with video comes clipping, which I think can be net harmful for society at times.
SO: A few years on, does the term vibecession still hold now that sentiment and data have shifted again?
KS: That word was invented in 2022 to describe a gap between data and sentiment - the economic data was okay, yet people felt terrible. So I wanted a word that encapsulated that, and came up with vibecession. The gap is different now - both economic data and sentiment have worsened. How people feel is very important economic information. Kai told a really good story about this, that you have to understand people to understand the economy.
So the concept holds but the application to describe our situation has shifted.
SO: Your guests on Best of Luck range from economists to farmers to comedians. What does a farmer’s career path teach us about the economy that an economist’s can’t?
KS: Everyone’s path is really different and it’s important to talk to all types of people to understand work. Claudia Sahm, a wonderful economist, grew up on a hog farm in Indiana. She spent a summer shoveling manure. It’s shaped how she talks about the economy and understands to this day. All stories are important and each one teaches us something different.
SO: Every guest does a mock job interview and an “advice autopsy.” Which piece of conventional career advice has fallen apart most spectacularly under autopsy so far?
KS: “Just keep doing what you’re doing” seems to not be working so well. Dan Toomey applied to late night four years in a row, and the thing that changed his life was giving up on that dream. He now is living out his dream in a totally different way.
Most of the autopsy is safe advice from someone that loves the guest, with the absolute best intentions at heart.
SO: Before Mark Carney became the Prime Minister of Canada, I sat down with his book Values. It was a thick, challenging read and for all his efforts, I put it down partway through my read because I was just steeped in a series of economics lectures that felt like homework. (He’s my PM, I can get away with this sort of critique.)
Attention spans aren’t what they used to be but the willingness to know what’s going on hasn’t necessarily eroded in the same ways. How do you take accessibility and ease of intake/understanding into account when writing your books and producing your content?
KS: I draw my own pictures, use a lot of metaphors, try to explain things with words that we all use. The podcast is segmented for that reason too, so people can take the bits they need as needed. Kai has explained the economy on the radio for twenty years without ever taking an economics class, and he says he does it by just calling people and asking them to explain it to him.
So I think of my work like that in a way - what are people asking for, how can I explain it simply, and how can I bring people more into the fold without scaring them away from economics?
SO: Is there an aspect of economic policy or the economy at-large that you wish people just understood better? Put differently, what fundamentals or core mechanics of our economic world have been shrouded in “the fog of political theatre” that you wish were simply left alone?
KS: Bond market. Prices everything in the economy. Policy has timing too - Claudia Sahm spent years at the Fed studying stimulus checks and pointed out that the same money helps a whole lot more at the start of a downturn, rather than the end.
SO: Tariffs, a shaky bond market, and AI spending are all running at once. Which one do you think is most mispriced by the public’s vibes
KS: Bond market because it’s so confusing and so pervasive. Does the most to regular life because it impacts mortgage rates and car loans. I wrote a substack piece tying the three together - shrugflation, meaning that some are able to shrug all three off, while regular folks bear the brunt of the cost.
SO: What are you doing to prepare for, if I can be a doomer for a moment, the fiery descent into global crisis thanks to a chaotic bond market?
KS: I don’t think it’s right to talk about things like that. People are scared enough, and what we need to be is practical. Raymond Williams talked about that, making hope practical is one of the most important things we can do. Save what you can, cut what you can, know what’s going on without obsessing - Kai talked about a lot of this on our show.
Claudia Sahm started at the Fed right before 2008 and told me about what her boss told her then: yes it’s scary but panicking doesn’t get any work done, so take a breath, and do the work. I think that’s good advice.
SO: For our non-U.S. friends, any idea which of the G7 economies is most exposed if the U.S. bond market or tariffs get ugly, and which is best insulated? Basically, which country’s economic vibes are furthest from its data right now?
KS: Tariffs - Canada, sadly. Hopefully that changes.
On bonds, no one is insulated because the selloff has been global. Vibes furthest from the data is likely the US.
However, I just taped an episode of the show with David McWilliams in Ireland, and they have their own version of this problem there too.
SO: So I shouldn’t bet on the loonie on Kalshi or Polymarket, got it. Do these prediction markets change how you read the economy, or are they just vibes with a price tag?
KS: Prices are information, but prediction market flow is mostly sports gambling. I think they are always useful to check, but it worries me that so many people are betting with them. I’ve written a lot about financial nihilism, this belief of a lack of path in the economy. Long shots look like a plan in that sort of situation.
Another guest on the show wrote two books on risk and talked about how to define risk vs gambling, and I think a lot of people are trying to work that out with real money right now.
SO: If you weren’t a finance research nerd (can I call you that?!), what other academic fields might captivate you the way this world has?
KS: I think that I would like to write a fiction novel one day. I love CS Lewis, and would love to find a way to do what he did (if even possible to replicate) with the dance between religion and philosophy.
SO: What are you doing that has little-to-no economic input and/or output? (What are your hobbies or how do you cleanse your mind of all academic economic thought?)
KS: I love my work! But I trail run and ride my bike. I read a lot and write poetry and draw a lot and do big hikes with my dog, Piglet.
SO: Which of your mentors do you think about most often when you search for your bearings in times of uncertainty?
KS: Kai! He’s a big part of the reason I got into this, and he was our first guest. We are opposites in a way - he’s all gut and I am all anxiety. I think he is a superhero and I often think about how he handled his own uncertainty - just moving through it, figuring it out. And he said he is still figuring it out too, even today. So that makes me feel a bit better.
SO: What’s the best (or worst) piece of career advice you ever got, and would it survive a Best of Luck advice autopsy?
KS: I wanted to get a PhD in economics and my professor told me to work for a corporation instead, which made a huge difference for me. I got real world experience and learned a lot. It would survive, I think!
SO: What other exciting things do you have coming up that you want to share?
KS: I am excited for the podcast! New episodes of Best of Luck every Tuesday! The paperback of In This Economy is also out now.
SO: What are some podcasts you’re listening to these days?
KS: Marketplace, the David McWilliams Podcast, Ben and Emil Show, Hasan Minaj Doesn’t Know, and Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso
Kyla Scanlon can be found on Substack at kyla.substack.com, and Youtube, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, and Twitter at @kylascan.
Her new podcast, Best of Luck with Kyla Scanlon is on Instagram at @bestofluckpodcast
Best of Luck is a production of Vox. The first two episodes are out now, with episodes releasing weekly on Tuesdays on Vox's YouTube channel, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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