First Friday: Hope in Nepal; Trouble in the Bond Market
Episode Date: September 5, 2026#747: We have good news on multiple fronts to share about the job market, the stock market, the commodities market, and volatile news around the bond...
You can afford anything, but not everything. We make daily decisions about how to spend money, time, energy, focus and attention – and ultimately, our life. How do we make smarter decisions? How do we think from first principles? On the surface, Afford Anything seems like a podcast about money and investing. But under the hood, this is a show about how to think critically, recognize our behavioral blind spots, and make smarter choices. We’re into the psychology of money, and we love metacognition: thinking about how to think. In some episodes, we interview world-class experts: professors, researchers, scientists, authors. In other episodes, we answer your questions, talking through decision-making frameworks and mental models. Want to learn more? Download our free book, Escape, at http://affordanything.com/escape. Hosted by Paula Pant.
788 episodes transcribed#747: We have good news on multiple fronts to share about the job market, the stock market, the commodities market, and volatile news around the bond...
#746: We begin today’s episode with a discussion of the disastrous flash flooding in Nepal, a personal topic for Paula given her family there. There’s...
#745: A friend once asked Sahil Bloom how often he saw his parents. About once a year, Sahil said. How old are they? Mid-60s. His friend did the...
#744: With about $200 and a crypto exchange, historian Joseph Moore turned himself into a legitimate billionaire — a stunt that says more about how mo...
#743: Everyone talks about a loneliness epidemic — but Luke Burgis argues the opposite problem is just as real: we now have so much easy, frictionless...
#742: A listener hit her $1.4 million early-retirement goal three years ahead of schedule — and now she's stuck deciding whether paying off a low-inte...
#740: Jack Raines turned $6,000 into $400,000 trading blank-check stocks during the 2020–2021 bubble — and he says it was some of the least fun money...
#740: Paula and Joe rarely butt heads — but a caller's side hustle, which pulled in $5,500 in a single day, sparked their most heated disagreement in...
#739: The U.S. just lost 23,000 jobs — and unemployment fell anyway. The numbers were strange enough that Paula broke a years-long, all-stocks habit a...
#738: Hackers broke into a real estate closing company's servers and waited three months for the right deal — then intercepted a wire and stole $1.2 m...
#737: Beth Kobliner has covered personal finance for people in their 20s and 30s for over three decades — and she says this is the hardest she's ever...
#736: A bride wants to spend $60,000 on her wedding — money that could grow to $800,000 in 40 years if she invested it instead. This week, three very...
#735: Cody Berman failed at more than 30 side hustles — from a disc golf manufacturing company to sweaty bike deliveries in the Australian heat — befo...
#734: Depending on which source you ask, the U.S. is short somewhere between 1.2 million and 10 million homes — and the reason for that wild range say...
#733: Venture fund managers can collect years of fees before a single dollar comes back to investors — and the bar to hand over your money is lower th...
#732: Where you live is already deciding what you'll buy today, before you've even made up your mind. And it turns out the customers your local stores...
#731: What if the best way to test a new hire wasn't a resume, but a two-hour breakfast? One CEO built his entire hiring process around it — and it wo...
#730: What does it actually mean to have "enough" — and how do you know when it's time to stop optimizing and start living? AVOIDING THE REAL ESTATE...
#729: The U.S. added 57,000 jobs in June. Economists expected 115,000. Meanwhile, inflation hit a three-year high. The Personal Consumption Expendi...
#728: What do you do when you suddenly have $850,000 and no idea what to do with it? GET TOTAL CLARITY ON WHERE EVERY DOLLAR BELONGS 👉 https://aff...