In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy turns from the money machinery listeners build themselves to the machinery that gets installed before they arrive.

He starts with the default — what happens if you do nothing — and shows how much of a household's money moves according to settings that somebody at a company chose in advance. The workplace retirement plan serves as the rare example of a default that works in the saver's favor, along with a caution that plenty of employers are still exempt from it.

From there he takes up friction, the effort standing between wanting something and having it, and traces how the same business will strip every step out of a purchase and then build steps into the exit.

In this special edition of Money Lessons, Andy takes on a question that sits underneath most of personal finance: why change is so hard.

A complaint about his band's setlist leads to the research on why musical taste is set around age fourteen — and to the study showing that appetite for financial risk locks in the same way, set by whatever the markets were doing when a person first had money in play.

Neither one was a decision. Both feel like one.

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy opens up the machinery that moves money out of a household without ever passing through a decision.

He starts with the narrow definition psychologists use for the word "habit" — a behavior repeated in the same surroundings until conscious decision-making drops out — and walks through the 2002 wristwatch studies that measured how often people's minds were somewhere else while they acted.

He makes the case that habits are not a character defect but a feature that buys back mental energy, then shows why the same mechanism that makes a habit useful is what makes it nearly impossible to recall.

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy turns from the map of your personal economy to the thing that moves money across it — decisions.

He explains why good and bad decisions never arrive in the same size, and why one large mistake can undo a decade of quiet good ones.

The centerpiece is present bias, the mental shortcut that treats anything happening right now as far more important than the same thing months from now, illustrated by a study of 7,752 health club members who left roughly six hundred of every fourteen hundred dollars on the table.

Andy also revisits four biases from March 2025 that turn up constantly in money decisions, and hands listeners a question to carry through the rest of the series: what bias is this product designed to exploit?

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy launches a brand-new series on personal financial management by drawing the map: the six jobs your money has — earn, spend, borrow, protect, grow, and give.

He explains why spending feels so effortless in a consumer-driven economy where household spending makes up about 68 percent of everything the U.S. produces in a year. Along the way, he introduces the idea that will guide the entire series: managing your money is stewardship of your own small economy, held in trust for your future self and the people who count on you.

The episode closes with one simple assignment — watch the flow this week, and name the job each dollar is doing. New episodes every Saturday morning.

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy closes the series on equity by turning to the hardest part of owning stocks: holding on.

He explains why volatility is the price investors pay for the equity risk premium, and why the market's steepest falls and sharpest recoveries tend to arrive back to back — which is what makes market timing a losing game.

He looks at the evidence that the more investors trade, the less they tend to keep, and at how modern trading apps are built to encourage the very activity that erodes long-run returns.

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy makes the long-run case for owning stocks — why, over a lifetime, equities have rewarded the patient owner.

He unpacks the equity risk premium, the extra return stocks have paid over bonds and cash since 1928, and shows how compounding turns that yearly edge into life-changing wealth.

Andy closes with direct advice for young investors — start early, invest steadily, and give compounding the decades it needs to build the wealth a last-minute scramble never can. It's a lesson about patience, access, and the quiet power of starting now.

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy widens the map beyond American markets to make the case for owning international stocks.

He explains home-country bias — the natural pull to invest only in the companies of your own country — and points out that more than a third of the world's stock market value sits outside the United States.

Andy walks through the two practical ways an ordinary investor can own foreign companies: broad international index funds and ETFs, and American Depositary Receipts, or ADRs, for a single overseas company.

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy answers a question he has been holding since last year: if your stock trades are free, how does a broker make its money?

He explains payment for order flow — the arrangement where your broker sells your order to a wholesale market maker that fills it and pays for the privilege. Andy walks through why your everyday orders are so valuable, where the real conflict of interest hides, and what the 2020 Robinhood settlement revealed about the true cost of "free."

The takeaway: free isn't free — and the cost that matters most is the one that tempts you to trade too often.

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy tackles a phrase we lean on without ever defining it: "the market."

He explains what a stock market index is, where the Dow, the S&P 500, and the Nasdaq-100 come from, and how each one measures the market differently — the Dow by share price, the others by company size.

He unpacks the Dow's hidden divisor and the outsized power of a denominator, shows how a handful of giant companies can carry an entire index, and explains why SpaceX's arrival on the Nasdaq means millions of index-fund holders are about to own a stock they never picked. The lesson: an index is a set of choices, and a fund that tracks one hands you all of them.

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy uses the 2021 GameStop saga to reveal the hidden machinery that runs underneath every stock trade. He explains how a struggling video-game retailer became the most heavily bet-against stock on Wall Street, why ordinary investors banded together to buy it, and how its price rocketed from about $17 to around $483 in a matter of weeks. Then he answers the question that left millions of people furious: why did Robinhood suddenly stop letting them buy? The culprit turns out to be the market's plumbing — the two-day settlement delay, the clearinghouse that guarantees every trade, and the collateral deposit that exploded into the billions when prices swung wildly.

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy explores information asymmetry—the gap between what some market participants know and what others know—and the rules that try to keep that gap from getting too wide. 

He walks through the structural advantages built into the architecture of the market itself, the meaningful distinction between buy-side and sell-side analysts that financial pundits throw around without explanation, and the legal line that separates productive research from criminal insider trading. 

Andy then unpacks Regulation Fair Disclosure—the SEC rule adopted in 2000 that ended the worst of selective disclosure to favored Wall Street clients. The closing message: the retail investor is structurally on the wrong side of many information gaps, and the most reliable response is to focus on what you can actually control.