Afford Anything - PSA Thursday - What’s in Store for the Rest of 2020?

Episode Date: October 15, 2020

After a brief hiatus, PSA Thursday is back! For this episode, we take a short break from covering current events to 1) reflect on why this show exists, and 2) give you a sneak peek of future PSA Thursday episodes. Enjoy! For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/psathursday Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, welcome to PSA Thursday. Today is Thursday October 15th, and it is our first PSA Thursday since coming back from the September sabbatical. This is going to be a short one. I want to give you a rundown of what to expect for the rest of the year, as well as a big picture philosophy of what we're trying to do, the mission and the goal of this podcast, which I've had a lot of time to think about during the September sabbatical. Now, for those of you who are new to the Afford Anything podcast, just as quick background,

these Thursday episodes, the PSA Thursday episodes, are nothing like our normal episodes. They are much, much shorter. They are hyper-focused on one very specific topic. And they are timely. They revolve around coping with life in the year 2020. So these PSA Thursday episodes are an anomaly as compared to our normal episodes. Typically, our episodes are Evergreen. They feature interviews with academics and thinkers and intellectuals.

And we deep dive into really big picture questions. around how to make better decisions, how to think critically, how to think about how to think, how to improve your skill set as a decision maker so that you can carry that into your investments, your career decisions, your life. So if you are a new listener, you haven't heard any of our other episodes, check out several of the recent interviews we've done. We recently interviewed Annie Duke. She's a professional poker player who talks about how to make better decisions. We interviewed Dr. Gleb Soperski, a professor who talks about developing a clear, critical thinking process, particularly when it comes to disaster avoidance, which is essentially risk

management. And risk management, of course, is important for any investor. We spoke twice with Dr. Dan Ariely, a behavioral scientist who talks about behavioral drives around spending and saving. So all of that is in our archives. Those are what our normal shows, a lot of our normal shows are like. And in every other episode, we take questions from the community. For those of you who are longtime listeners, that leads me to a piece of bad news and good news. The bad news is that Joe saw Sihae, who joins me on half of those episodes in which we answer audience questions, the Askpala and Joe episodes, Joe has tested positive for COVID-19. I found out last night, and he made it public this morning. We are in frequent

contact. We've been texting all last night and through this morning. His fever reached 102.5 degrees. Overall, he's achy. He has a headache, but he does not have a cough, and he is managing at home. So the bad news is that he has COVID-19. The good news is, so far it seems to be a mild or a moderate case. His wife is a doctor. His wife is a pediatrician. She, to the best of our knowledge, does not have COVID, so she is with him. She's healthy. She's monitoring him. And if you want to send up a message, he's at average Joe Money on Twitter. We're all rooting for him. Hope he gets well soon, and I can't wait to record our next Ask Paula and Joe when he recovers, and we get to talk about what his experience was like.

So Joe, if you're listening to this, we're rooting for you. And if you want to listen to him directly, he'll still be putting out new episodes of the Stacking Benjamin's podcast. He says that his partner on that podcast, OG, will be chatting with him for upcoming shows. So the stacking Benjamin's podcast is where you can find him as well as on Twitter. So I don't know how to segue out of that, but I also wanted to record this episode to share with you what's in store for the rest of PSA Thursday episodes for the rest of 2020. Now, as you know, PSA Thursday is a special weekly, well, not weekly, but semi, sort of kind of weekly-ish bonus segment of the Afford Anything podcast where we talk about issues related to the year 2020. So we're going to be talking about health insurance, and we're going to make this not a political

conversation. We want this to be actionable. We want this to be applicable to your life. And there are a lot of people in this community, myself included, who buy their own health insurance because we're entrepreneurs or we're early retirees or we are aspiring entrepreneurs or early retirees, and we're not covered by workplace plans. There may be some changes to health insurance coming up. And so avoiding the politics of it and focusing entirely on how do we manage our own money and how do we manage our own budget given the uncertainty of budgeting for health care costs, that is one of the topics that we're going to cover on an upcoming PSA Thursday episode.

We'll also be talking about how to work with the elderly and how to support the elderly, specifically if you have grandparents or grand uncles or aunts or anyone that you love who is elderly, what can you do? We're going to be talking to someone who is an expert in working with the elderly around that topic. We will be discussing the death of cities and the so-called death of New York and San Francisco and all of these major high cost of living cities. Is it a bunch of media hype? Is there any teeth to it or not?

And broadly, how does that affect housing prices? What are the factors that affect housing prices and how will migration that has been caused by the year 2020 as people flee places like New York? What are the factors that are going to affect that are affecting and will continue to affect housing prices? And we'll also do an episode on FI-friendly food preparation. Most of us are eating at home a lot more. I mean, we're financial independence people.

We are already a group that eats at home more than the average American. And now that restaurants are closed down or only open for outdoor dining and it's getting a little cold for that, people are spending a lot more time in their kitchens. So how do we food prep in a way that is budget-friendly but also healthy? Those are all of the topics that are slated for future PSA Thursday episodes from now through the end of the year. I also, zooming out, big picture, want to make it clear, because this question has come up in some of our community discussions, particularly on Facebook. I want to make it clear that the objective of this podcast is not to tell you what to think,

but rather to give you tools that improve your skill set in how to think. The best illustration of this that I have ever seen comes from a blog called Wait But Why. It's a great name. It's like, wait, but why. We're going to link to that blog post in the show notes for today's episode. But there's this particular post on Wait But Why that talks about a thinking ladder. And basically, he draws a horizontal line. The X axis is what you think.

So that X axis of what you think, what you believe, what's your stance on, or Y or Z, that might span a spectrum. Well, just since it's an X axis, we will say that spectrum is left to right. And that's the spectrum of what you think. But then if you plot a Y axis along with it, that vertical line, that Y axis is how you think, at the bottom of the Y axis is thinking from a primitive mind, a reactionary, primal, all or nothing thinking, filled with cognitive. biases, filled with unquestioned heuristics, base level of thinking. But as you ascend

up the Y axis, you move into thinking from a higher mind, a mind that is nuanced and thoughtful, a mind that is dispassionate, that is willing to question assumptions, that is nonreactionary, and that lives in the world of ideas rather than in the overly simplistic world of us versus them. Now, when you think from that higher mind, you know, you're at the top of the Y axis, your position along the X axis could be anywhere. The metaphor that Tim Urban, the author of Wait But Y uses, is a ladder. You have a ladder. Essentially, you have a bunch of parallel horizontal lines that ascend up this graph. And your thinking can be anywhere along that X axis, because that X axis is what you think. there's a whole spectrum of what you might think, but what you think is less important than how you think.

And the purpose of this podcast is to improve your skill set in how you think. It's something that I'm learning right alongside you with every interview that we do. And you'll notice a lot of our interviews biased towards academics, thinkers. Most of the time we try not to participate in the echo chamber of single anecdotal case studies, the how I Did It genre. We prefer to interview academics researchers. I mean, if you look at the roster of our previous guests, and I realize we've never actually said this explicitly,

but Dr. Dan Ariely, Dr. Cow Newport, Dr. Brad Clans, Dr. Ben Hardy, Dr. Wade Fow. And those of our previous guests who do not have doctor in their title, who are not researchers or academics, are esteemed journalists and writers and thinkers, Gretchen Rubin, Charles Duhigg, Mark Manson. I mean, winner, Charles Duhigg won the Pulitzer Prize. Gretchen Rubin and Mark Manson are New York Times best-selling authors.

So we try to pull out of this echo chamber, move away from the oversaturated how I did it genre, move away from anecdotal case studies, move away from self-appointed CEOs of startups who are basically trying to market their wares. And instead, really embrace our identity as a show that is, buy nerds for nerds. Our goal is to give you a framework from which you can think about the various tradeoffs and decisions that you need to make in order to be able to live your best life, make great investing decisions, and make great career decisions, and make excellent life decisions. And so if there is one takeaway from what I've just said, it is that I hope to make it clear that we are not a podcast

that is interested in telling you what to think. We are not a podcast that is interested in living on the X axis. We want to live on that Y axis. We want to explore how to think, how to be a better thinker. That is, at its core, the mission of this podcast. So with all of that said, that's what you can expect in terms of upcoming PSA Thursday episodes for the remainder of 2020. And that is also some of the thinking that goes behind the decisions that we make, the guests that we bring on, the topics that we cover, and the why, the mission, the what's it all for of what we're doing. So, thank you so much for tuning in.

Make sure that you hit subscribe or follow so that you can catch our upcoming PSA Thursday episodes as well as all of our episodes. And I will catch you in the next episode. See you then.