Aug 16, 2026 · 52 min · 11 segments
We dive into the psychology of money and discuss behavioral biases that explain why we make the financial decisions we do, even when we know better. In breaking down some of these common behavioral…
And we're going to talk about some core behavioral biases that can sabotage us financially.
And we are going to give you some actionable tactics to try to like outsmart our own human nature as best as we can.
These brains, they need wrangling.
You got to keep them in line.
There's so many people who said this well before me, but I just like to repeat it, that the difficult part of managing your money and improving your finances is not learning the math, right? It has little to do with that.
The basics are spend less than you make, invest the difference, right? That's not rocket science.
The difficult thing is... actually doing that, right? Actually spending less than we make.
our brains will, not just our brains, but there's people spending hundreds of millions of dollars to try to convince our brains to do things and to take advantage of these behavioral biases, which I mean companies out there marketing to us and apps and the way they're designed, social media and everything else.
And so we need to do our best to understand these biases and then learn how we can You know, fight against them sounds like a strong word, but, you know, to combat them.
That also sounds like fight words, you know, combat.
But you know what I mean?
Yeah, I do.
We got to just – self-awareness is really the key.
Like just being able to sort of recognize some of these sort of little tricks that your brain tries to play on you and then being able to have self-awareness about it.
Even like a big aha moment.
I had just in the last year or two was learning that there's a name for what you just described, like knowing what you need to do, but then actually doing it, like the insight action gap and knowing that that's a real psychological phenomenon and it's been studied and like this is a real human thing.
And just having the awareness that that's a thing, that knowing what to do and actually getting yourself to do it is... a real problem is helpful.
Do you remember where you read about that and feel like you finally had the like, aha?
I can't remember.
I don't know if you already know the answer to this.
No, I actually want
to know the answer.
Shankar Vinantham is a genius.
And we're going to talk about some core behavioral biases that can sabotage us financially.
And we are going to give you some actionable tactics to try to like outsmart our own human nature as best as we can.
These brains, they need wrangling.
You got to keep them in line.
There's so many people who said this well before me, but I just like to repeat it, that the difficult part of managing your money and improving your finances is not learning the math, right? It has little to do with that.
The basics are spend less than you make, invest the difference, right? That's not rocket science.
The difficult thing is... actually doing that, right? Actually spending less than we make.
our brains will, not just our brains, but there's people spending hundreds of millions of dollars to try to convince our brains to do things and to take advantage of these behavioral biases, which I mean companies out there marketing to us and apps and the way they're designed, social media and everything else.
And so we need to do our best to understand these biases and then learn how we can You know, fight against them sounds like a strong word, but, you know, to combat them.
That also sounds like fight words, you know, combat.
But you know what I mean?
Yeah, I do.
We got to just – self-awareness is really the key.
Like just being able to sort of recognize some of these sort of little tricks that your brain tries to play on you and then being able to have self-awareness about it.
Even like a big aha moment.
I had just in the last year or two was learning that there's a name for what you just described, like knowing what you need to do, but then actually doing it, like the insight action gap and knowing that that's a real psychological phenomenon and it's been studied and like this is a real human thing.
And just having the awareness that that's a thing, that knowing what to do and actually getting yourself to do it is... a real problem is helpful.
Do you remember where you read about that and feel like you finally had the like, aha?
I can't remember.
I don't know if you already know the answer to this.
No, I actually want
to know the answer.
Shankar Vinantham is a genius.
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