Mic Drop! ChooseFI's Brad Barrett Interviews Paula Pant

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31:34You obviously have been in this world, like you said, since 2011. Talk me through what you've seen as the evolution of personal finance. So the first thing I'll say, in 2011, a lot of people said at that time, they're like, you're too late. You're too late to the game. This is in the world of personal finance blogging. And so this is because in 2006, 2007, there are these blogging platforms like WordPress is a blogging platform. And you don't have to have any kind of technical ability. You just type some stuff into a computer and hit publish and WordPress takes care of it for you. Before the development of WordPress, you had to hard code every blog post.

32:22So very few people were blogging. J.D. Roth wrote a blog called Get Rich Slowly. Back in the days when you had to hard code every post, he was blogging at that time. So he and this guy named Harlan Landis and this other guy named Jim Wang, the three of them were the early, early, early personal finance bloggers. Those three were blogging back in like 2008 or so or 2009. They had like sold their blogs for literally millions of dollars. JD sold his for an undisclosed amount, but we all know it was in the millions. So there was this pervasive attitude at the time where people were like, oh, you started too late.

33:07You no longer have first mover advantage. So if you're starting in 2011, you're starting way too late. You should have started back in 2008. It's too late for you. Isn't that funny? That is wild. Right? Because we actually heard the same thing about Choose a Pi. So we started essentially at the end of 2016. There were so many five podcasts at that point is what we heard. There's no way you can compete. And there was essentially nobody. And now there are dozens or hundreds of five podcasts. And I think it's a larger message of you always hear, even with investing. Right. is it too late? Are we at all time highs?

33:50Is it too late for me? You hear this drumbeat constantly. It's interesting to see that through line. Yeah. In the last episode, we asked the question, what changes, but also what doesn't change? And I think one thing that doesn't change is that no matter when you start doing anything, whether it's starting a business or real estate or investing in the stock market, no matter when you start, there are going to be voices, both external and internal that say, it's too late. You started too late. And I feel like that's, that is just a universal constant, you know? So in 2011, there were all these voices saying, you started, you're starting five years too late.

34:35You don't have the same first mover advantage that, that JD Roth had. So why even bother? You're just way too late to the game. And I tell my audience this all the time because I constantly hear people say like, well, the stock market is at all time highs. Is it too late? I should have started investing five years ago or 10 years ago. Or, you know, I should have bought Nvidia two years ago, you know, or whatever. Two months ago. Yeah. So people are constantly, constantly worried that it's too late. But then fast forward five years, what are you going to be saying in 2028? You're going to be looking back at 2024 and being like, I should have done it then.

35:17I hear that with real estate constantly. In 2015, 2016, people were like, there were so many good deals coming out of the Great Recession. I should have bought back in 2012. Now it's 2016. All the good deals are gone. It's too late. Why bother? right i heard that in 2016 i heard that in 2017 i heard that in 2018 i heard that in 2019 it's like it just never stops yeah it's amazing i wanted to go back because i think we're talking about psychology right so in your new fire acronym it starts with financial psychology what do you think is the hardest aspect of the psychology of money? Oh, okay. So the first answer that immediately comes to mind, overcoming scarcity mindset.

36:07The fear of not having enough is pervasive and it's really hard to shake. Frugality in my 20s came from a place of constantly being anxious and afraid of not having enough. And my fear of scarcity was motivating me to like clutch onto every penny that I could. But I spent so much time just clutching onto pennies that I wasn't really thinking about making more or like, or I was willing to make more but not at the expense of saving. So I would make more unless making more interfered with like saving what I already had, in which case, it's like the difference between playing offense versus playing defense.

36:52I would only play offense to the extent that it wouldn't interfere with my defense. Defense came first. I wanted to talk about financial scarcity, since you said that that's something that plagued you. I know that was an issue of mine as well. And the intersection, I think of like the sleep well at night test. That's like what I always think in my head. It's like, it's okay to be suboptimal, if you will, to pass that sleep well at night test. it sounds like that might have been something that was important to you years ago. And I'm curious if the financial scarcity still kind of rears its ugly head today, or do you think that is something that based on where you are in life and where you are financially, that it's not an issue?

37:38Oh, no, it's definitely still an issue. It's not as much of an issue. And it probably, I think it manifests in different ways. These days, for me, the issues that were there in early childhood will probably, for me, always, to some extent, be there. It's not a matter of eradicating it. It's just a matter of managing it. And so that pervasive fear of scarcity, the fear of not having enough, that's something that I think I'm always going to have to really consciously manage. But as life changes and as circumstances change, I think that fear manifests in very different ways. In my early 20s, it was like consumer-based frugality, right?

38:20Like the coupon clipping kind of equivalence. These days, it probably manifests in a reluctance to aggressively grow the business. Wanting to be really, really, really careful before I hire somebody new or before I'm committing to an ongoing recurring expenditure. it manifests more in those sorts of ways yeah that certainly makes sense and so talking about growing the business so you recently announced that you're going from essentially one episode a week and plus you're the one bonus friday to now two a week yeah that's something you know something about yeah it's on top of it so for a yeah i mean that is a massive change right yeah

39:10what's the thought behind that is it impact is it something about like you don't feel that you were able to convey all the messages that you want or speak to all the people that you wanted with the confines of i guess 60 odd episodes because it was you know a little more so it's a couple of things number one is we are living in the age of tiktok where everything is short form I am a believer in long form content. Short form has its place. I love Instagram as much as anyone. But not everything can be or should be TikTok. And I think that some of the deepest, most thoughtful, most nuanced learning that can come about comes from long form content.

39:54And it comes from podcasts, from audiobooks, from written books, print books, long newsletters or substacks or blog articles. I think that long form really gives you the space to explore a topic with depth, with nuance, with layers, like to peel back the layers of the onion in a way that you can't with quick hits. So I want to lean into that, right? I want to create more of that, especially in an age where long form is becoming in some ways a bit more rare or a bit more maligned. That's part of it. The other part of it is simply the format of our show is every other episode is an interview. And every other episode, I answer questions that come from the community, from the audience, along with Joe Salcihai.

40:42But right now, with us being a weekly show, it means that there's a two-week gap between every interview that we publish. And likewise, there's also a two-week gap with every Ask Paula and Joe episode. And so by going to twice a week, now we can publish an interview every single week, which means our interviews can be more timely. If we're only publishing functionally two interviews per month, because there's on average 4.3 weeks a month, it's hard to publish timely interviews. Versus if we're doing an interview every single week, we can make that happen a bit more. I would love to be able to have the leeway to just have more interviews on the calendar so that the next time that the Fed is meeting eight times a year, they just met, they held interest rate steady.

41:33And I'm going to be meeting again many, many times throughout this year. I would love to have some interviews related to that, that we can time to come out. Yeah, that makes sense. I think for me, just to give a little insight into Choose a Vi, and I suspect Paula deals with this as well, is it's this interesting balancing act of you, obviously you have this publishing schedule. And every Monday at 1 a.m. Eastern, people are expecting a new Choose a Vi episode. So I feel like I constantly need to be ahead because that anxiety of, oh my goodness, it's the Thursday before I don't have a Monday episode, that's not something I want to deal with.

42:14So I'm usually a couple of months recorded out in advance. Yeah, same, same. And that's wonderful. But then you lose the spontaneity of being able to respond to things. Right. For years, we published two a week. So it was 104 episodes a year for the first five years, essentially. And then we went away from that because it was just it was punishing just every single week, week in, week out. But I lost that ability to be able to put out timely content or we used to do these roundups or, hey, I just had an episode on Social Security and there are 27 questions that came in and people want more clarity.

42:55Now, if I'm months out in advance, what do I do at that point? So I'm actually recently starting to add in a couple extra episodes. I'm not as brave as you in saying I'm going to do an extra 52. That's kind of crazy, to be honest. But every now and again. And so it's almost like the intermittent variable rewards, like a casino. Hey, you never know when you're going to get a Friday episode. They were saying it. Yeah, so I do the same. I get so nervous about the possibility of not having anything prepared. I usually have some reserve of interviews that are evergreen that I know that we can sprinkle it.

43:33So I have a confession. So I interviewed Mad Scientist in November, but the interview is totally evergreen. So we have that in reserve so that we can just schedule that whenever. except I just realized I was thinking about this the other day the one part of it that's not evergreen is at one point Brandon's like oh yeah my son is 14 months old and by the time we publish this that my son's gonna like be in college yeah I realized the other day I'm like oops oops that's the one not evergreen piece of this episode that only like a random like a small handful of mad find his diehards are going to catch that.

44:10The ones who do are going to be like, what year was this?

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46:36i think we should move to q a all right let's do it so we do have a microphone steven that's not putting you on the spot for number one i saw paula congrats um but also i know that you spent quite a bit of time recently at columbia you don't need that necessarily to like start a new career and so we were curious and what did you take away from your time in columbia like is there anything that you really brought into your podcasting and interviewing from that time and kind of the value of going and getting education and your passion without a career on the backside of it. But just to like make you better at what you're doing currently.

47:12Yeah, I think a lot of people were a little confused as to why I did that because of the cost of higher education. A lot of people will go back into higher ed specifically if they need the diploma for a specific purpose. Whereas I and I had a fellowship that paid for everything. So it was zero out of pocket cost to me. I was going back just learning for the sake of learning, which is wonderful, but it kind of like caught a lot of people off guard, I think, because they're like, wait a minute, why are you going back? I talked earlier about being a financial journalist. The other word that I had in my head that I didn't say out loud was economic journalism.

47:49And I don't necessarily think of myself as an economics journalist, the people at Planet Money, they're great economics journalists. The Indicator is like one of my favorite podcasts. Not just learning economics, but learning specifically the skill set of economic journalism, which is kind of a unique skill set that's right at that Venn diagram intersection of economics and journalism. That to me was really critical. You know, learning how to talk about the Fed, how to talk about inflation, how to talk about China, how to talk about all of these things that are happening in the world and how to make it accessible, easily understood, entertaining, how to make it something that you want to hear about.

48:34You have the option to be watching the Golden Bachelor. You're choosing to tune into this instead. So I've got to make it both informative and interesting. And so that was a really big piece of what I learned there. And I'm just starting to incorporate it in most of our recent First Friday episodes. I've done like a monthly economic recap. app. It's only once a month, but I'm like, this past month, here are some of the headlines and here's how we can contextualize this. And then here's what it means for you. And here's how it applies to your life. And recently there's all this stuff going on with the National Association of Realtors.

49:16There's so much that's happening in the news right now, in economic news. And so learning how to tell those stories, bringing those stories in to afford anything. Again, it's that there is that like evergreen versus timeliness component of it but creating more more content that's that's timely based on like what's happening in economic news right now that's a big piece of what i got from it that i'm bringing in to afford anything oh flip make sure uh flip it on hey brad hi everybody hey brad hi paula i first was introduced to choose fi from dominic cortuccio who you interviewed i was part of the men's group very fantastic stuff and then from choose fi i got on to afford anything um i love the group work that choose fi um puts together definitely um talk to me afterward but um my question is reflective towards both of you whoever wants to take it in terms of how do you view yourself and your audience in terms of the relationship how did that originally start and how has it transformed molded lastly how do you plan on seeing that like throughout and and as it continues evolving how do you hope for your audience and your relationship to the audience to change?

50:27I think that my audience, I hope that my audience trusts me as the nerdy big sister kind of a role. Like I want to be down to earth and relatable. I think I do that just by like, basically just like being myself down to earth and relatable, but without dumbing it down, you know, like, I want to maintain a conversation that is elevated, that is intelligent, that is nuanced, that is layered, a conversation that cares more about how we think rather than what we think, that cares more about the process of thinking than any specific conclusion that we reach. Those are the type of ideas that I'm bringing in.

51:16I like to say that Afford Anything is a show about critical thinking and decision making, a show about metacognition, about thinking about how to think, told through the lens of money. That's a very elevated conversation. But just because it's elevated doesn't mean that it needs to put on airs. I can have an elevated conversation while also personally being really down to earth. So that all plays into the nerdy big, you know, I'm your nerdy big sister. That's the relationship that I want to nurture with my audience. Yeah, I think for me, I've always wanted my community, which is the way that I think about it, is we are a community.

52:03And I never wanted to be the expert. I wanted to curate information. I wanted to provide clarity and ask those questions that I know people out there in the community want to ask. A lot of people are afraid to look silly or stupid, for lack of a better word. And they don't ask the simple question. And I feel like if I have the question, almost invariably, many, many other people are thinking that same thing. And unless you can actually understand it, you're not going to feel comfortable moving forward and taking action, which is the entire purpose of ChooseFI is to get you off the couch and take action just to make your life better in any way you see fit.

52:52So I am always thinking from like that white belt mentality of if I were someone just approaching this for the first time, what would I want to know? What would be the questions that I'd ask? And even if it means like I've actually gotten and I shouldn't look at the reviews for the podcast. I really, I try so hard not to. I really genuinely do. Like somebody basically saying like, this guy's a bozo. Like he just asked these silly questions. I'm like, that is literally the whole point. That is what I'm going for. Thank you. That's five stars. Please, you know, append it or amend it, I guess. That is what I'm going for because I want to ask the questions that people are looking for answers to.

53:36And that is not to say that I think of Chooseify as only elementary information. I was having this conversation with Steven earlier, which I think, frankly, and I totally get this. Your time is finite, et cetera. I think a lot of people look at a show maybe like ours and say, okay, I've learned it all. I'm going to move on. I don't know where you move on, but I'm going to go do my thing. I think the last 15 episodes that I've done since the beginning, certainly since the beginning of this year, have been maybe the best stretch of 15 episodes I've had in the entire run. And it's like because of little pieces of information.

54:14I had an episode with Sean Mullaney recently about, hey, how can you access your money before 59 and a half? And I suspect you see that title. OK, maybe I probably know all these things. And there was one little piece of information about the 72T and how it's recently become updated since, I guess, 2022. and he provided some like this one and i'm gonna leave this here as a dot dot dot but uh one piece of information that was just phenomenal and it was like i feel like i've heard it all with personal finance and i didn't realize that you could split iras and with this 72t you can keep doing this as like this iterative process and it was a total game changer and that's something if you think you know it all, I think there are times to check in.

55:03So I'm constantly thinking about my entire community. And it's hard. There is a wide range of people listening to each of our shows. And I think if you, I'm, I love Tim Ferriss. I've followed his, I've probably listened to every single episode he's ever put out. And he said something to the effect of, if I hit 10 % of my audience with each episode and only 10 % like it, but they absolutely love it. I'm doing something right. And that's a really interesting way to look at content creation. And I think, I don't think I've fully taken that to heart, but I think, I think there is a piece of that. And it's, it's finding these little, like just super interesting things.

55:48Like I just recently had an episode on effective altruism. It was a total game changer. I've had people literally write me emails since it came out saying, hey, I took a giving pledge and now I'm giving 1 % of my income forever. It's like that is remarkable. Like that's I am creating this show so people take action. And I think it's just it's fun. It is really genuinely fun to find all these pieces of information from the far corners of not just personal finance, but health and wellness and just different aspects of living a better life. Because I think if FI was merely about the nuts and bolts of money, we all kind of would have wrapped up shop a long time ago and, hey, we've figured it out to some degree.

56:35But it's really it is it's kind of like a Trojan horse for or not Trojan horse, but the lead domino for living a better life. And that there is truly an endless amount of content for. And I think it's fun. I mean, I'm almost 650 episodes in and just keep on rocking and rolling. So, yeah. This question is for Paula. And one of the things that I think is interesting about the Five Movement is that we hear about people taking action and sometimes drastic action to live in like lower cost of living locations, etc. We're all in New York and we're all pursuing financial independence. And I know that you moved to New York.

57:15So my question for you is, what are the unique advantages of pursuing a financially sound lifestyle in a high cost of living space? choice and what were some of the motivators for you to make this choice to afford living in New York as part of your FI journey? I've always loved New York and I've always wanted to live in New York and I've never had any reason to do so. Like my only reason for wanting to live in New York was that I wanted to live in New York, but there was never any actual logical reason to do so. And there were plenty of logical reasons not to do so. It's expensive. It's cold. There's high taxes.

57:57There are rats everywhere. Like there were all these logical reasons not to. And so I could never like quote unquote justify or rationalize the decision to move to New York. I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. I left like the minute I graduated from high school, moved to Colorado, did my undergrad there, graduated, wrote for the Colorado Daily. I was a newspaper reporter at the Daily for a couple of years. I enjoyed Colorado while I lived there, but that was never going to be like my forever home. And then I wanted to live in New York, but again, there was no reason, specific reason to do so. And so I tried living in Atlanta.

58:36I lived there for five years and it was great, but it wasn't for me. And then I moved out to Las Vegas because I've always liked the desert Southwest. In 2019, I knew that was my fourth year of living in Vegas. And I was like, this, this just isn't right. You know, and at that point I'd spent four years in Vegas by that point. And then five years in Atlanta prior to that. like it had been 10 years of me like try really trying a city and just like, man, it's nice, but this doesn't feel like me. So I get to 2019 and I'm like, all right, it's time. I know it's time for me to leave Vegas. I don't know where I'm going to move next.

59:17I was thinking about what makes sense. And I was like, maybe Texas, like maybe I'll move to Austin. Everybody moves to Austin, you know, at some point. It's like a rite of passage. Maybe I'll move there. Right. It's warm. There's no state income tax. I had a bunch of friends who were there. I was like, okay, great. It checks all of these boxes, but I still wasn't that excited about it. And then 2020 came around and COVID hit. I became symptomatic on March 20th. So I got hit with COVID in the early, early, early days. And this is like, this is March of 2020. So this is before we knew anything. You know, this is the beginning of COVID.

59:58And there were these days, you know, with 103 degree fever, I was alone in my apartment, but I was just profusely sweating. I was exhausted. Like I remember there was one day when I changed my shirt, like my shirt was just dripping wet with sweat. And so I took my shirt off and I put a new one on. And that was my big activity for the day. and like I was so tired I had no energy I like after changing my shirt I had to take like a nap to recover from that and I remember thinking especially because it was so early COVID and we didn't know anything about it at the time I was like this might be it like this this might be the end of the road I traveled to 40 countries I'm happy with the the work that I've done and the impact that I've made.

1:00:47I was like, I'm happy with most of the things in my life, but I don't want to die in Vegas. I don't want my tombstone to be like, born in Kathmandu, died in Las Vegas. And I could imagine, you know, a tombstone that says born in Kathmandu, died in New York. Like, I'd be happy with that tombstone. And so that's why despite the high taxes, and the high cost of living and the rats. That's why I'm here anyway. I'm here for no other reason than I want to be here. Yeah. Yeah, that's amazing. I think very tactically, we had, so Liz from Frugal Woods, this is way back in early 2017. Don't quote me, it was either episode 12 or 13 of Choseify.

1:01:38And she actually had like an interesting retake or rethink on what is it? Is it truly that expensive to live in a city? In their case, it was Boston. But, you know, kind of same deal, essentially. Obviously, the rent is significantly more expensive than living in Richmond, for instance, where I live, or pick any number of places. But there are thousands of free things going on, especially in New York City, every day. So I think it's opening the aperture to what exists. And it's stepping outside of your comfort zone and saying, oh, wow, I have literally the greatest city on earth at my fingertips here.

1:02:27How can I explore? How can I maximize this? What can I find that's not just in the normal day to day? And I suspect there are dozens of, again, we're not the frugal community anymore, the ultra frugal. So it doesn't have to be free, frankly. But I guarantee you, if you look in the next, you know, spring is coming, then I'll be in slowly here in New York, right? Find one or two free things that you've never explored before in New York City in the month of May. That would be my challenge to you. I guarantee you're going to come back and say, wow, that was really cool. I'm glad I did that. What does it look like when I do this in June and July and August?

1:03:09Because, again, this is New York City. There's everything in the world here. Just go out and explore. This is a little bit more about your process when you're interviewing people. I know sometimes you do ask difficult questions. And how do you, I guess I won't make you reveal anything, but I'm sure there are some other people have never, they're like, forget it, I'm not answering that. Or there are people who are like, don't ask them this. But how do you, if you ask a difficult question, how do you kind of recover from it or just make sure that the rest of the conversation continues to flow and that they are still open, even though you've kind of broached a difficult topic?

1:03:45How have you, how do you work through that? I think the way so the way that I do it is I'm always asking questions from a place of curiosity and from a place of wanting to like really understand. And so the the spirit of the question is never like a gotcha, whereas there are other reporters that practice like gotcha journalism. But for me, the spirit of the question is like, hey, help me understand this. You said X, Y, Z, but I'm also noticing ABC. see, how do we square the circle? And so I think it comes across to the guest that I'm not asking a challenging question. Like I'm challenging them with the question, but not in an aggressive way.

1:04:29You know, I'm challenging them in a way that like is asked with a spirit of curiosity. And so I think the guests can just sort of pick that up, particularly because they, If they're a guest on my show, they've done 30 other interviews. And so they've seen the whole range of interviewers that are out there. And I'll say probably 80 % of interviewers haven't really done their homework and they haven't prepped. And that comes across. And so they're just repeating the same stock talking points over and over because they're talking to an interviewer who doesn't know their material. and then there's a small sub-segment of of interviewers who are not exactly got maybe some of them are gotching but some of them just have like a predetermined there's an outcome that they want there's a certain set of answers that they want the guest to give and so they're like pushing the guest to give those answers and so then the guest has to like push back to you know and so then they're like fighting over what the answers are going to be so like the get by the time the guest has come on my show, they've done all of those other interviews.

1:05:39And what they get from me are questions that challenge them for sure, but that come from a place of like, no, I really want to understand what you're saying. So help me get this.

1:05:54Hi. This question is for both of you. So if you look at the landscape of personal finance and I guess financial media. Are there certain topics or subjects you think that are overtold and you gladly don't think we need to cover them again? And on the flip side, are there topics and subjects and stories you feel we really do need to pay a little bit more attention and care to? You know, anything that disempowers people, I think is dangerous. there are narratives out there that are basically like woe is me this sucks initially it was like millennials can never get ahead and now it's like Gen Z can never get ahead and soon it's going to be Gen Alpha can never get ahead basically any type of narrative that makes people lose hope or that disempowers them I don't see what good that's doing I don't see how that's helping anybody so I'd like to see less of that and more of like, hey, here's what you can do.

1:06:54Here are all of the opportunities that you do have. Here's everything that's working in your favor. I'd like to see more of those. Yeah, I think also, frankly, that's what makes our podcasts listenable. That we, there's a different locus of control as opposed to there's some elusive they holding you down. We always talk about how can you take action to make your life better? And instead of the retirement calculator saying, or Susie Orman of the world, you know, good old Sus, saying you need$10 million and maybe you'll be able to retire. We change that entirely and say, this is under your control, right?

1:07:41It's based on what does your life cost? And then we just do a simple multiply by 25 and there's the 4 % rule of thumb. And, you know, we're not going to argue about that tonight, but it gives you that North star, right? It gives you some certainty as opposed to like Paul is saying, there's all this doom and gloom, doom and gloom sells sadly, but empowerment is what inspires. And I think that's why you guys are here. I think that's why you listen to our shows because it makes your life better. It just simply does. Right. And to actually answer your question, my particular pet peeve is the, oh, those fire people, like, that was always bound to fail.

1:08:26Or, oh, I tried the fire movement and it just didn't work for me. Or, you know, just all this nonsense just to vilify, in essence, the fire movement. And they always focus on that RE. And it's such a distraction. FI, in my estimation, is a universal good. There is no one that I can think of that has pursued financial independence, not even reached, because the reaching that we can put that aside, it's pursuing financial independence. I think your life is invariably better by pursuing financial independence. Hard stop, end of story. Again, I'm not like an anti-media person by any means. But it's easy to vilify people in their 20s and 30s laying on a beach doing nothing.

1:09:12But that's not what we aspire to. That's not what our community is about. Our community is about changing the power dynamic in your life to accrue more power in your life so you can enjoy life on your terms. And it's not just about money, obviously. We wouldn't be here. This would be boring if it was just about money. It's about living a better life. And I think that is a message that really resonates with people all across the country, all across the world. And I think that is what I focus on. That's the message that I would love to see more of. Hey, guys. So this is more question for Paula. So you mentioned you've been doing this a long time.

1:09:52And you also mentioned you're an immigrant yourself. Just kind of putting some things together. You've been doing this a long time. Obviously, you've had to network, Brad Choose If I, Joe Salcihai from Second Benjamins. I heard you on Mad Scientist. That's how I actually came to you. How did you, as a young immigrant woman, overcome not just the scarcity mindset, but also like some type of imposter syndrome is what they kind of go together when you went into these spaces like the Camp FIs or the FinCons to be able to grow and extend your brand to what it is today? I don't know if the imposter syndrome ever goes away.

1:10:30I just keep doing it in spite of the imposter syndrome. I think the imposter syndrome, for me, at least speaking for myself, the imposter syndrome is always there. But I've just learned to not listen to it. Like I've learned that like, this is a little voice in my head. Just because I think it doesn't necessarily mean it's true. I've learned not to believe a lot of the things that I think. When I get that voice in my head, the imposter syndrome voice, I've learned to tune it out or I can't fully tune it out, but like to just like later, we'll talk later, you know, we'll talk in the shower. And then I just focus on what I can do.

1:11:13And I focus on the next step ahead. Then it's just like, all right, what is within my control? What is the next step forward, you know, one day at a time, one relationship at a time, like one step at a time, one next project at a time. Is there a moment in an interview, like recently, that you've been able to look back on how far you've come as an interviewer that you're particularly proud of? I recently interviewed Cal Newport and this was maybe I think the third time that I interviewed him so he is a he's a computer science professor at Georgetown University and he has written eight books so I recently interviewed him he had a new book come out and I was in DC and so I interviewed him he has a like an in-person podcast studio and so I went to to his studio in DC I was thinking about the distance between the first time that I ever interviewed him, which was six or seven years ago versus now.

1:12:21And six or seven years ago, going back to the imposter syndrome, I was like, I can't believe I'm interviewing Cal Newport. I was beside myself at the idea that I would be able to get somebody like Cal Newport to come onto my show. Whereas when I went and interviewed him in DC, it was just like talking to an old buddy. I was like, Cal, you know, like walked into his studio and I'm like, and it was our first time actually meeting in person face to face. And I was like, Cal, finally, it's like took forever. I can't believe we haven't met each other face to face. And we sat down and we chatted for a long time.

1:12:59It was like talking to an old buddy. And we collaborated together on the open and how the open would transition into the rest of the interview and so it was like having a collaboration with a friend and so seeing that contrasting the two that was a big moment for me paula first and foremost congratulations to 500 on it on 500 episodes my money's on the over to pass choose if i in like the next two years so anyone i want to take gambles on that i'm open to that um from i i wasn't aware of your background so that to hear that Afford Anything was in the works for a decade plus, 13 years total is like a huge milestone in and of itself.

1:13:41I figured that there's a lot of obstacles that came along the way that I guess no one prepared you for or you might not have seen. I wanted to ask if you could speak on those obstacles, whatever boundaries that you were trying to surpass or those things that looking back on them now, they might have been glaringly obvious as a fellow creative such as myself that we may not have seen in the moment. Can you speak on some of those? If you could speak to yourself back in 2011 when you were just first starting out, what would be the precautions that you placed upon yourself as to what the things that no one tells you about that became glaringly obvious the more expert you became?

1:14:17Yeah, that's a great question. All right, if I could talk to myself back in 2011, a few things. One is that I was told, listen to your audience, take feedback from your audience. And there's a certain truth to that. But when on the internet, there are a lot of like comment trolls, commenters. Yeah, there are a lot of trolls. And so on the internet, every troll is technically also part of your audience. And if you listen to them, you drive yourself crazy. And so I spent way too much time listening to the trolls for years and years and years, because there was part of me that was like, well, maybe if I overlook the delivery, if I ignore the delivery and focus on the actual content of their message, maybe there is something constructive within the content of their message.

1:15:10And so I would read the troll comments, try to ignore the delivery and try to see if there was some type of constructive element within the content. But honestly, sometimes there is. Honestly, sometimes there isn't. And also, a random smattering of internet comments is just not a good feedback mechanism generally. Because it's not a representative sample of what your audience really is thinking. So even if you try to take the kind of mature, high-minded route of like, what constructive nugget can I pull out of this? Even that can still lead you astray. There were people who would post on my Instagram who would be like, we want to see less of you and more pictures of houses.

1:15:55That's fundamentally a comment that's like, we know what your content should be better than you do. What you're posting we don't like, here's what you should be posting instead. And there are a lot of people who will tell you that you should listen to that feedback from your audience. And I'm here to actually tell you, like, no, you shouldn't. Because your real audience, your true audience, like if you're genuinely going to listen to feedback from your audience, send them a survey. Have a newsletter, like have an email list and send out a survey and say, hey, here's a Google form. Tell me within the survey, what do you want to see more of?

1:16:32Or even on Instagram, put out an Instagram poll or something or on YouTube. Do it like that. Don't just like read the comments because that's going to lead you astray. Yeah. Yeah, I would agree with that. Reading the comments, it's like it's soul crushing. I mean, like truly soul crushing. And it's interesting how the human mind works that no matter how many emails I receive of something to the effect of like, wow, my life has changed for the better dot dot dot after finding. It is very hard to tune out the one out of 200 that's negative, even slightly negative sometimes. And it's like, that is what your mind focuses on.

1:17:21And it never goes away. So I think it's not, it's hard because there's no, I have yet to find a good answer. Have somebody else read all my emails. If there's something negative, just get it out of the way or something. But like my mind focuses on this. I mean, even as recently as this week, I got this email and it was like, it wasn't even intended as negative probably as I took it. But I was like, oh, something about this just really bothers me. And it was stuck in my head for over a day. And I'm like, this is just taking up mental space that I should not allow it to take up. Even if you get 99 % positive and the 1 % negative is what you're going to focus on.

1:18:05It's very, very hard to continue creating when, if you allow yourself to focus on any type of comments. And I think that's maybe going back to the, you know, in the trademark new fire is like psychology. I think everything comes back to psychology. And this is why I kind of asked Paul about the sleep well at night test. I think personally for me, it's okay to be suboptimal, if you will, in a lot of respects in my life, if it passes that sleep well at night test. So that is what I'm kind of optimizing for at this point. And I'm okay if that means I have a little extra money in my checking account or a lot of extra money in my checking account because I don't want to have to deal with it.

1:18:59I want everything to just operate without me stressing about it because I know my default state is an anxious state. I think it's okay to just give yourself a little bit of grace of, all right, look, I have to understand how my brain works first and foremost, and I make decisions accordingly. And at the margins, I think that's perfectly defensible. And I think it's not just defensible, but I think it's a smart strategy. Hi. So hopefully this detracts from whatever negative email you got. But I do want to start off by saying that I started listening to you both around 2018. and you have quite literally changed my life for the better.

1:19:40This is very full circle.

1:19:45What I like about you guys, to your point in some of your answers, is that you do create content that you want to create and that your little niche of the audience of the internet wants to listen to and wants to hear. And I really like that you tell me what I can do, not what I can't do. There's so many personal finance creators and a lot of them do focus on why you can't do things. So anyway, I think a lot of people come to you guys for what's a 401k? How do I maximize or optimize my 401k? And we really stay because we love hearing about the bottom line, which is the life that we're all trying to build.

1:20:21Like, how are we building a life that we want to retire to? So I know, Paula, you're doing some things like you moved to New York and you went back to school, right? And that's you building the life that you want to retire to. And I'm curious, what are you doing right now, anything like super recent that is in line with that goal. Yeah, I know this was addressed to Paula, but this is actually the perfect example of what I'm doing is I'm really trying to, after so many years of really not going to events, I'm just trying to travel more. I'm trying to say yes to things. For so long, my default has always been no.

1:21:00I can't do that because I have young kids or I feel guilty about being away or whatever, whatever the answer is. And I think it's just sometimes just really fun to say yes. And this really started for me. I've talked ad nauseum about the book Die With Zero. So if you've listened to episode 500, I spent a lot of time talking about it. So sorry about this. But I think that has reoriented how I look at life and how I look at seasons of life. And it was something I needed. And I read it at the right time. And just like this, literally last year, I've taken a whole bunch of trips, just like spontaneous trips.

1:21:47And if you know me for your whole life, for my whole life, spontaneous is probably the last word that you would ever use to describe Brad Barrett, like literally the last word and actually my buddy from elementary school was here for the earlier session and like and we were talking about i came last year to new york for a sub 24 hour trip i wound up seeing bono it was a pseudo book tour slash concert slash one man play was a super interesting thing. That's a once in a lifetime thing. And the reason why I'm not going is because A, I've always said no, and B, it costs some amount of money. Those would have been the old stories that I ran in my head.

1:22:36And this time it was, yes, how can I make that happen? And that felt fantastic. You know, again, my buddy who was here, he's like, I've known you for a very long time. This is the only spontaneous thing I've ever seen you do in your whole life. But I'm trying to do more of that. I'm just, again, trying to say yes. So I'm going to Vegas next week with the Donegans. I'm going to Bali in the fall with Amy Minkley's Five Freedom Retreat. I just went to Cincinnati. I'm here. Paula asked me. And it was a no-brainer. Yes. Not, do I have to think about it? What are the logistics? Everything that my brain would normally default to.

1:23:17How am I going to get there? How many nights do I have to stay? I could come up with every excuse in the book. But the answer was just yes. And it feels really, really, really good. So that's kind of where I am right now. And I would say, having gone back to school, during that time, I was basically on hiatus from Afford Anything. I was still putting out a podcast episode every week, but that was literally all I was doing, even though that's the most public facing element of what I do. It is like the tip of the iceberg in terms of all the management and everything else that goes on behind the scenes.

1:23:58I was essentially on break from Afford Anything for that year. To me, that was actually really telling because during that entire year, I had all of these ideas for things that I wanted to do with Afford Anything, but I just couldn't do them because I was in school. By the time graduation hit, I was like chomping at the bit to come back because I had all these ideas of things that I wanted to implement, which for me was a really good sign of like, cool, this is really what I want to be doing. Because when I was nine months, 10 months away from it, I was just thinking about it all the time and I really wanted to come back.

1:24:33So that was a really good test. In terms of Afford Anything, for the last eight years, we've prioritized the audio podcast, but we haven't really put any effort into YouTube. Up until about six months ago, the bulk of our YouTube videos were audio only with a static thumbnail. And so it's only in the last six months or so that we've started putting actual videos on YouTube. And as part of that, recently in the past two, three months, we've started insisting that the bulk of our interviews are done face-to-face in studio, in person, because we get richer video. Our audio audience versus our YouTube audience is like a ratio of 20 to 1.

1:25:21We have a very small audience on YouTube compared to our audio audience. But I'm not letting that scare me and I'm not letting that stop me. Like it's one of those, you've just got to be okay with being a beginner again. And so we're sort of a beginner at that medium, but cool. I'm down with being a beginner again. We're also talking about doing more, you know, right now we only have one course, a year for strength to property. We want to build out more courses. We want to build out more, in addition to courses, workshops, both like digital and in person. we'd like to start doing trips like week-long trips with the audience so there used to be this thing called the Chautauqua and that has pretty much gone away and so we want to kind of step in and fill that space and do week-long trips outside of the country with our audience so all of that is like all of those ideas are percolating behind the scenes and that's all like just new and exciting.

1:26:22And then in my personal life, so travel has always been really important to me. I've been to more than 40 countries, just over 40 countries. And for me, I don't count myself as having been to a country unless I've spent a minimum of one week there, because that's my commitment to making sure that I'm always doing what I call slow travel. I don't just want to touch down in a place and check it off the list. I want to commit to minimum of one week so that I can make sure I'm really absorbing it. And when you do that, you find that like a week is really not even that much time, but it's at least a minimum for me.

1:27:04I've been thinking about like the next decade. What are my travel goals? I've actually never said this publicly. So I've set the goal of I'd like to travel to 100 countries in total within the next 10 years. And so which means basically about just shy of 60, like 57, I need 57, 58 countries within the next decade, which is an average of what, five to six countries, we'll say six countries per year, which is really a commitment of six weeks per year. You know, and that's an average. So I'm sure there's going to be some time where I take like three months or four months off and I'm like, all right, I'm just taking these four months and I'm going to do nothing but travel for four months.

1:27:51So yeah, in 2034, hopefully I'll be sitting on this stage or a stage somewhere. And by that point, hopefully, if all goes according to plan, I will have been to 100 countries. Episode 1500, give or take? Yeah, something like that.

1:28:14Thank you for listening to episode 501, which we recorded live at a comedy club in Brooklyn. And a huge thank you to Brad Barrett from the Choose FI podcast for joining me for these incredible episodes and just this incredible celebration. It was so special to be able to share this milestone with not just him, but with all of you, with everyone in the Afford Anything community. And I want to say thank you to everybody who was there, as well as to everybody who wrote, who emailed, who DMed, who left comments saying, hey, congrats. I can't be there physically in person, but as a longtime member of this community, I'm there in spirit.

1:28:58A huge, huge heartfelt thank you to everybody who reached out and shared in the joy of episode 500 with us and episode 501. All right, we will be back to our normally scheduled programming on Friday with a First Friday episode that is an economic update. There is an enormous amount going on in economic news right now, so we have a lot to cover. Make sure that you are following this podcast in Apple and Spotify so that you don't miss that episode. Check us out on YouTube. You can watch today's episode on YouTube, see us live and in the flesh. And while you are on YouTube, just search for Afford Anything on YouTube.

1:29:39While you're there, please subscribe to the podcast and hit the notification bell. If you enjoy our show, if you get value from this show, please share it with a friend or with a family member. That's the single most important thing that you can do to spread the message of financial literacy and financial independence. If you want to chat with other members of our community, go to affordanything.com slash community in which you can talk to other people in this community about anything that's on your mind, whether it's index funds, debt payoff, real estate investing, retirement planning, world travel, whatever it is that's on your mind.

1:30:15You'll find like-minded people at affordanything.com slash community completely free. There is no cost to you. We make this available at no cost because digital communities matter. Finally, subscribe to our newsletter. go to affordanything.com slash show notes. There you will get not only synopses of every episode, but also longer deep dives that we take within the first principles newsletter. Again, that's affordanything.com slash show notes. And we also make it available at no cost. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you for being part of this community. My name is Paula Pant. This is the Afford Anything podcast, and I'll meet you in the next episode.

1:31:00Good night.