#55 - Blue Flame Thinkers: Kyla Scanlon

Welcome to the Alumni Ventures podcast, The Tech Optimist. This is our Blue Flame Thinkers show. This is a new one for you. We hope you enjoy. Now I know what you're thinking. This doesn't look like a typical Tech Optimist episode, and that's because you're right. Welcome to the first installment of the Blue Flame Thinkers. Part of the Tech Optimist podcast today. As always, our guide is going to be Mike Collins, founder and CEO at Alumni Ventures. And our first guest on the show is Kyla Scanlon, founder, author, educator, content creator. And she's again the founder of a cool company, Bread. But you know my name. My name is Sam, and I am the editor and guide for this show. Mostly for this episode today, I'm going to take a step back, and we're all just going to listen and really absorb the conversation that Mike and Kyla have today. So Kyla has done so much at her age. I'm just going to read her bio from her LinkedIn. I'm the founder of a financial education company called Bread and a Creator. I write a newsletter, make YouTube videos, and daily short-form videos. My main goal is to conduct human-centric economic analysis to help connect the dots between what is happening and why it's happening. I think that's so important because in this day and age, there is so much content and so much stuff everywhere all the time. That we need a translator, right? Especially people like me. So Kyla has an insane social following. On Instagram, she has 255,000 followers. On TikTok, she has 183,800 followers. And on YouTube, she has 50— almost 51,000 subscribers with 400 videos. So without any further ado, let's dive into this conversation between Mike and Kyla. As a reminder, the Tech Optimist podcast is for informational purposes only. It is not personalized advice, and it is not an offer to buy or sell securities. For additional important details, please see the text description accompanying this episode.

Hello, welcome to this week's episode of Alumni Ventures and our Tech Optimist podcast. This is our Blue Flame Thinker Edition, and I've got Kyla Scanlon as our guest today. If you don't know Kyla, get ready. She's young, entrepreneurial, super sharp, and you need to follow her on Instagram like right now. Kyla's the author of a book already, In This Economy. She has something like a quarter of a million followers on Instagram. And I think her superpower is her ability to take 2 hours of kind of mind-numbing financial blathering from a financial channel on TV and kind of give you 2 crisp minutes of really clear thought and analysis. She's built her own platform translating confusing things into language that everyday folks can understand. It's impressive. Congratulations. I'm excited to talk with her today. So, Kyla, welcome to the show.

Oh, thanks so much for having me on.

So my first question, I'm going to— this is one of my favorite questions, which is, what do you think the world is really missing? What does it have wrong? What do you think that the rest of the world doesn't get?

Oh, just in general or like in terms of the economy? I

guess just pick one thing. That you think is like the biggest miss?

Uh, yeah, I mean, I think the biggest thing is apprenticeships. I've been thinking a lot about that and, you know, sort of what does it take to build the next Renaissance? I think that we have a lot of amazing art and a lot of amazing videos. Like, we have so much amazing stuff, but it's really difficult to sift through all the information. And there's like a point of saturation that we're at, and it seems like the really, really good stuff is harder to find, right? And so, I think going back to the point of apprenticeships and the Renaissance, like a big part of the Renaissance was that these artists and these painters and these thinkers had sponsorship to be able to do the work that they needed to do. Right. And they were apprenticed to like the top artists before them. Like there was a lot of mentorship. And so, I think I would I would wish that the world would invest a little bit more into that. Like, what does it look to train up— what does it look like to train up the next generation of thinkers, and how do you connect them with, with other leaders? Um, and then what does it take to really invest in the arts and, um, in a meaningful way?

Yeah, I mean, I think there's kind of 2 threads of that. There's the world needs more curation Right. Which is, it's so noisy. How do I find the good stuff? So I think I do agree with you. We're going to— I think we're going to swing back a little bit to like, everybody's a creator, everybody's a brand, but it's just too much. How do I get to the good stuff? Yeah. And yeah, mentoring and apprenticing and that. In this world of technology empowering the individual and individual contributors, I think it's super interesting to think about where are there opportunities to, you know, pay it forward and mentor and apprentice and learn.

Right.

You know, very much.

No, there was this article from Mother Jones and like, however you feel about them as an outlet, you know, whatever. But the article was really good because it was talking about electricians. And how, like, we don't have enough electricians, especially for the transition to green energy. We don't have enough electricians to be focused on building data centers and maintaining data centers for AI. And so, like, there's kind of this interesting base layer of it too, where we're talking about content, we're talking about curation, but, like, the things that are required to, like, curate content, which would be, like, electricity, like, that's not even established from an apprenticeship level at this point. Right. And so, I think just across the board, there's, there's a, a real gap between generations for whatever reason. And I'm not sure how to address that, but it's something I've noticed. And like, there's kind of a leadership crisis where there's questions of who's going to take over, right? Like across all these small businesses and big businesses too. And, you know, apprenticeships could be one way to address that. But yeah. A lot of threads that are kind of tangential but sort of tie together. Yeah.

Yeah. And Kylie, you're— the first thing is identifying the problem, right? And I think sometimes as a society, we don't— we always immediately jump to solutions and kind of short, easy answers. But thinking deep about these problems, like how do you develop the next generation of electricians? How do you develop the next generation of teachers, leaders, etc.? Really good point. So tell me about a current project. What are you working on right now?

Right now, so the book, my book In This Economy came out 4 months ago. And so I'm just sort of wrapping up the book tour and I'm kind of in the wasteland of between projects, but I'm really just focusing on my own writing again for my newsletter. So I wrote a piece on dating apps, I wrote a piece on home insurance, and the goal of my current work is to tie together, uh, disconnected thoughts. So like with the dating apps, I talked about the demographic crisis. Like, I'm going to write a piece on apprenticeships and tie that into, you know, AI. Um, so that's the, the goal right now is just to get back to writing. Yeah.

No, the beauty of writing is it's just such a great discipline to improve your thinking. And, um, let's talk a little bit more about kind of the demographic crisis. What are kind of the 3 or 4 big threads there that you're thinking about?

Well, I mean, it's really 2 main ones where, you know, it's 2 ends of distribution where we have an aging population and we just don't— we're not having enough babies and not having enough immigration to take care of the aging population. And so, with the aging population, you know, the over-65 age group is growing. They're growing tremendously fast and younger people aren't as an age group. And with the issue with that is that now the aging population is going to put pressure on Social Security, on Medicare, Medicaid, and also elder care is extraordinarily expensive. It's $5,000 a month on average. Yeah. And so you have, you know, going through the generations, you have the Gen Xers and the millennials who are the sandwich generation. They're dealing with aging parents and then they're trying to, you know, have kids, maybe send those kids off to college. And so they're dealing with the extreme cost of elder care. They're also dealing with the cost of college. And if they have young kids, they're dealing with the cost of childcare, which has risen, you know, 32% since 2019. And the reason that people aren't really having babies anymore is a variety of reasons, but like one is that it is quite expensive. And the fertility rate is, you know, far below the replacement rate. And we also have issues with immigration policy. We haven't really invested in that. And so that's kind of the root of the demographic crisis is Not enough babies and an aging population. Yeah.

And again, as a venture capitalist, everything's a nail that I try to hammer. So we are investing in companies that are dealing with— we have just kind of nicknames for it, which is there's definitely the aging population, and then there's kind of the loneliness epidemic, low household formation. There's kind of a crisis on both ends of this adult spectrum here that we need new solutions. And there's a role, I think, for all of the above— government, root cause work to be done. A lot of this, in my opinion, is kind of unintended consequences of technology. I mean, you know, you talked about dating apps. Those things do certain things and certain— there are unintended consequences of those things. And so But I also think there's a role for entrepreneurs and innovators and startups to solve problems. And these are real problems that our society faces.

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Yeah, I mean, I think sometimes, like, it's almost over-optimization by some startups where they, like, techify everything, and that creates even more issues. Like, it really— I think there needs to be a return to organic connection sometimes, but that's really tough to, to manufacture. But yeah, I'm glad to hear that there are companies— I know that there's companies focused on that, but I'm glad to hear that they're investable too.

Yeah, no, I mean, and it's, you know, one of the things as a society, we've lost some of those face-to-face opportunities for people just to mingle. And examples of that is, you know, there are in New York, for example, now there are running clubs that literally have thousands of single people just kind of go out for a run and people are just bumping into each other and meeting people and just getting out. And they're doing that with now book clubs and kind of bar bookstore hybrid concepts. Because there is just this lack of third places now for people to meet other people with common interests. So yeah, again, I am a tech optimist. I'm a tech guy. I've been in it my whole life. So I definitely view things through a lens that some technology goes forward, it's a great solution, but then it creates these problems, right? The automobile was great, but all kinds of horrible things have happened because of the automobile, right? But we're not going to undo it. The only solution is really to go forward and now solve those problems and keep innovating. But that's my perspective. We never go backwards. So you've had really an interesting career, professional success. Just sharing with our audience, what are 2 or 3 things that you Got right so far?

I mean, I think a lot of it is the way that I talk about it, like hard work meets opportunity, and that's luck in a big way. And I think that's like one thing I got right was, you know, worked pretty hard and for a long time. And it was, you know, making videos during the pandemic when everybody was stuck inside and that really helped, right? You had a captive audience. And so I think that's like a big part of it. Um, and then I just think consistency too. Like, you know, I, I, I, I try to be as, um, consistent as I can for the audience with videos and, and posting and writing and making sure that I'm addressing their questions. Um, so I would say those are like 2 things I've gotten right. And then of course, like there's the stuff you can't even measure, which is how helpful other people have been. Like the number of people that took chances on me, believed in me, helped me out. Yeah. It's like, Unreal. So yeah,

great. Um, how about trends, segments? You know, again, a lot of our, our audiences are interested in technology and trends in the future. Any— if you were a VC for a day, where would you be looking?

Uh, yeah, I mean, I, I think for me, like, uh, I'm very interested in homes and housing and housing supply. specifically, you know, home insurance. Um, so I'm very fascinated by how we can fix the insurance crisis that we have— health insurance, home insurance, auto insurance. It's, it's a massive issue across the board. Uh, that requires quite a bit of interface with the government, of course, um, and, and private insurers. You know, how do you actually properly price risk? And so that's something I, I would probably want to spend time on as a VC. I don't know what the multiple would be, but I think it could be a really interesting— Yeah. place. And then I think also, yeah, like some sort of like human connection thing. I know that a lot of, you know, there's whole entire VC firms that are focused on that. I think Bree Kimmel has a firm dedicated to it. But yeah, I think those would be the 2 things would be like, okay, so how do we properly price risk across everything? And then how do we actually hang out with each other?

Yeah. Cool. All right. So playing a little game, long or short. Okay. So the basic idea is I'm just going to give you a name of a company or a word and tell me, you know, are you long or short that idea and why? And then you can play it back to me if you want. But yeah, I mean, residential home prices, Kyla. What do you think, long or short?

Like long, meaning that they're going to continue to go up, probably. Is that what that is? Yeah.

Bullish or bearish? Are you like, you know, prices going up, prices going down, prices going sideways over the next couple of years?

See, this is why I'm a bad investor, because I'm like, well, it could mean this, but like, I think I'm probably long.

Yeah,

I think that it's going to take a really long time to address the housing supply problem. And because of that supply and demand mismatch, it's very easy to have that upward pressure on prices. Like, we have seen home prices basically flatline in a lot of areas, but not in a way that we're like going down. And so I think that I would be almost like neutral to bullish on home prices until we can address the housing supply issue at scale. And I don't know how long that will take.

I'm right with you on that. I'm— I think it's a supply problem.

Yeah.

And I think it's— that's a hard problem. And there's a lot of incentives that get in the way of it. And until that gets unleashed a little bit, you know, and maybe it's, you know, boomers are getting older and dying off and maybe that creates some supply issues, but it's hard to be You know, it's hard to be short housing prices right now, I think.

Yeah.

What do you think about how— yeah, go ahead.

Well, they just like, they tend to go up. Like, that's kind of the issue with the housing prices. Like, even in the 1970s, 1980s, like, we did not have the sort of movement that we've had now where it's like going up by $55,000 a year, the median home price. But, but like, home prices are usually where people park their money. The bottom 50%, all their wealth is in their house. And so I think like for that reason alone, it's a speculative asset that people rely on. And unfortunately that probably means that there will be incentives to make home prices go up, right?

Yeah, no, I think it's a place where, you know, the rich park wealth.

Yeah.

You know, it's a place where, you know, a lot of regular people have, as you point out, huge amount of their assets. It tends to be psychologically, I think, very sticky too. People don't like to lose money. Like, they won't move, they won't take the promotion at work because they don't want to take a loss in the house, right? Kind of thing. So it may not grow, to your point, but it's hard to see where it's going to really go down. I think

I'd agree.

All right. Are you long or short the idea of college?

I have a tough time with this one because I loved college. Like, I think it's important for people if they have the opportunity to like go and have 4 years where you can make safe mistakes. So for me, like, I went there on a full ride, like it was awesome. And that would like really was, was mentally good. But I think for a lot of people, the ROI on college has become quite low. You know, getting an entry-level job with some degree degrees versus the amount of debt that you're taking on. It's just not, the math's not adding up right now. And so I think for colleges, there's a lot of bureaucratic bloat. A lot of people have written about that where there's just a lot of administrators and they've kind of lost the, maybe the ethos of education in some capacities. Like it has become, you know, basically a football team with some classes attached to it. So I am long college because I think education is one of the most important things that can do. But I worry about the current structure of the university system.

Yeah, I think I'm long short-term and short long-term.

Yeah. Why is that?

Meaning, you know, I, I, my niece just gave birth and she was asking about like a 529 account. And I said, you know, and I've always been a big believer. I mean, there's— and I funded my own kids' college education using them. But I said, I said, no, I think, first of all, I think you have to get your own financial house in order first before you start saving for a kid 17 years from now. And I just think The existing system is so ripe to be disrupted and it has gotten so expensive. And I think there's problems at the high end, the Harvard Ivy League level. I think there's problems at basically all terms of the product stack. And I think in 15, 20 years, it's going to be a very different world. I'm just, I am just medium and long-term pretty bearish that that system has gotta change pretty fundamentally. And again, like, like you, Kyla, I'm torn too because it was very important to me, the education I got, the network I got, the credentialing I got, all very, very important. But I think it's kind of where we're heading is unsustainable. I think there's some technologies coming that are going to fundamentally change. I think the cost structure is way out of whack. And I think it's a little scary and a little unfortunate because it's such an important national asset as well for our country. Yeah. I mean, we do education, especially when you talk about Colleges, we do that really, really well. People come from all over the world to go to our universities. And so I hope they get it fixed. But I am definitely concerned. And you pointed out with your comments earlier about the need for different ways, right? People who want to become electricians and, you know, where is our apprenticeship model? And people who want to pursue the creative arts, what are the opportunities for those people to get in and be mentored and to develop a career? So I definitely think there's some, some opportunity there.

Yeah, I would agree. There was a good article. I don't know if you saw it from The Wall Street Journal a few months ago, calling Gen Z the tool belt generation because they are— some of the younger ones are forgoing college and saying like, well, I'll just you know, figure out the trades instead. And I could see that becoming more popular. Okay. Because yeah, it's just like the fact that people know that they're going and getting a degree that doesn't guarantee a job is tough. And like there probably should be some sort of like job guarantee model from the universities if you're going to take that much money from an 18-year-old and their parents. But yeah, it's unsustainable. I agree with you.

And I think, I think it's also incumbent on businesses to be open-minded to hiring people without, you know, a degree.

Yeah.

And, and, or are, you know, some firms only recruit from 5 schools that have very kind of prestigious names to them. And, you know, I think that's ridiculous. And so I, you know, I I think it's also incumbent on leaders and business people to encourage this kind of stuff.

Yeah. So, no, I think I— the reason I got my first job in the finance world when I graduated was because of blind resume. Like, that firm only recruited from top 5, and I got in. And there's a lot of people, I think, that are like me that are willing to work hard and be there for the firm. But, you know, name value matters more, I suppose. And so I agree with you, it'd be awesome if more firms opened up their minds.

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You were talking a lot about like third places and sort of the loneliness crisis. And I guess I am curious like what your long and short of that would be, like the loneliness crisis. itself? Do you think it's going to continue?

Yeah, I mean, I think they're— I'm optimistic about the future, meaning I have access to a lot of really smart, young, talented entrepreneurs who have identified this as a problem and are really interested in innovative ways to solve it. So I think some of the things that have taken place kind of in a societal basis with, you know, kind of declining attendance of church and geographic flexibility that people are just moving around and kind of not establishing roots. Clearly technology of being able to kind of Work remote, stay in touch with friends who are on the other side of the country. It's easier to keep an old friend who's on the other coast than to go out and try and meet a new person. So I think people are identifying that and trying to create fun, interesting ways for people to connect with each other. And I think we're starting to— there'll be a lot of experiments and a lot of failures. And, you know, I think in the short term, there's, you know, there's unfortunately some kind of reactive things with kind of mental health solutions. And, you know, the issue of, you know, if you look at, you know, some of the top business schools now and you— and something like a huge percentage of the women going to these schools are kind of like freezing their eggs. You know, kind of thing, because they want to prioritize their career and start families later. And they want to, you know, have babies with the young, good eggs, not the old eggs. And, you know, those are, you know, those are part of things going on. But I also think there's more problem than solutions right now. And we are behind. In addressing how people make connections, develop friendships, household formation, dating. No one likes the dating apps from what I can tell. Again, I think other people have written about that there's a huge gender difference that a certain small group of men get like 90% of the interest and that That's not good for them, and that's not good for— if you're not in that 10%, it's not good for you. So I think that that's a problem. So I think this is an area where I think there are more problems than answers, but I'm optimistic that people have identified it and are talking about it. And if you go to incubators and Y Combinators, demo days, those kinds of things, there are people that are articulating potential approaches and solutions where it's, you know, we have to marry kind of the high tech with the high touch. And so I think we're swinging back toward the high touch end of kind of human connection here.

I hope so.

I don't know. You have any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I, I've written a lot about it and it's like something I personally have experienced, like during the pandemic. And just like, I graduated into the pandemic. And so all of a sudden, you have no idea how to make friends as an adult. And I think like one thing I worry about is the dopamine that comes from engaging with a smartphone versus engaging with a person. Like, it's much easier to go to a crowd of, you know, faceless people and seek solace there than to seek solace from friends. But I'm optimistic too. Like, I I think that at the root, humans love each other, you know, not to get woo-woo about it, but I think there is like that desire for connection and we will like find our way back to it eventually. But there's just a lot of forces working against it, right? Like, I think the dating apps have, not to their own fault, they were trying to solve a problem, but it made things worse. So

made it worse.

Yeah, it wasn't like, I don't think that was the intention by any mean.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, it was, um, And I'll just speak from this standpoint, which is I am also seeing kind of a pendulum back with young people wanting to go into work.

Yeah.

Again, we do a lot of really early-stage investing, and there was 2 years there where every startup was remote. They had no choice. And they're finding that they want to get together as a team, that they're more effective and more productive as a startup when they're physically together. And I think there's going to be a generation of startups who don't make it, and they're going to look back and say, one of the things I'm going to do next time differently is we're going to have our team together.

Oh, yeah.

And I am hearing more and more from young people applying to jobs we have that say, yeah, I want to come in. And maybe it's not 5 days a week, 9 to 5, but I want to be around other people. I want to be mentored. I want to get out of my apartment. I want to meet other people. I want to go out for drinks after work with other human beings. I mean, we are human. We're human. We're social animals. animals. And I couldn't agree with you more. Well, Kyla, again, it's been fun talking with you. Super interesting. Thank you for your time. Keep doing the good work you're doing. Strongly encourage our audience to check out you on Instagram, check out your videos, buy your book. And thank you for the work you're doing.

Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me on the podcast.

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