The Scout Mindset, with Julia Galef

Afford Anything | Make Smart Money Choices

Paula Pant | Cumulus Podcast Network

Entrepreneurship, Investing, Business

4.7 • 3.6K Ratings

🗓️ 1 June 2021

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

#319: Julia Galef is an acclaimed expert on rational decision making. She’s hosted the Rationally Speaking podcast for the last decade, and she’s passionate about good reasoning. Her book, The Scout Mindset, highlights the importance of looking at situations objectively and honestly. This is something a lot of people struggle with -- humans are often irrational -- but Julia argues that this is a skill that we can develop with self-awareness. In this interview, she shares the difference between what she calls a soldier mindset versus a scout mindset. She explains why we often default to the soldier mindset of defending ideas we desperately want to believe, and details several thought exercises that we can use to instead train our brains to scout for the truth. Good decision making and ensuring you look for high quality sources of information can help when weighing trade-offs, and it can also save you from making costly investment mistakes. Julia and I also discuss specific examples of when having a scout mindset can prevent you from risk of ruin. For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode319 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You can afford anything, you just can't afford everything.
0:11.2	Every choice that you make is a trade-off against something else.
0:13.9	So how do you make better choices?
0:15.8	How do you make better decisions?
0:17.3	That's what we're going to talk about in today's episode.
0:19.6	Now why is that important?
0:21.0	Because the choices that you make impact your money, your time, your attention, your energy,
0:27.8	the choices that you make impact any limited resource in your life, saying yes to something
0:32.5	implicitly means saying no to all other opportunities.
0:36.1	And so we want to make rational decisions, but oftentimes we get carried away and make
0:41.4	emotional decisions and we don't necessarily know that we're doing it.
0:45.3	I'm not saying emotions are wrong or bad.
0:47.1	Of course, emotions are information, but understanding how to think clearly through
0:53.9	a problem, understanding how to think in terms of expected value, how to recognize our
0:59.2	cognitive biases, how to forge mental models that can help us avoid expensive mistakes.
1:07.2	That's how we make clear decisions about how we spend those limited resources, our money,
1:13.3	our time, our energy, our attention.
1:16.0	And that allocation of resources, thinking through that allocation clearly, that's what
1:20.2	this podcast is here to explore and to facilitate.
1:24.2	My name is Paula Pant, I am the host of the Afford Anything Podcast.
1:27.8	And today, Julia Gaelif joins me to discuss rational decision making.
1:34.0	Julia is the host of the rationally speaking podcast and an acclaimed expert on reasoning.
	...

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