Getting rich in American history with Joseph Moore

What did financial independence actually look like across 250 years of American history? And was the advice people were getting any good? Historian and bestselling author Joseph Moore joins Morgan to find out — and the answers might make you rethink everything your favorite finance influencer has ever told you.

They dig into why financial anxiety isn't new (Americans have been declaring the dream dead for centuries), why compound interest and passive investing are younger and less reliable than we've been led to believe, and why the stock market only started beating bonds after World War Two. If you have no say in the outcome, Joseph argues, it's not investing — it's gambling. And a lot of what passes for financial wisdom today is closer to the latter.

But this isn't a doom-and-gloom episode. Joseph makes a compelling case that the odds of getting ahead are genuinely better now than at any point in American history — and that your biggest wealth-building asset has always been you, not your portfolio.

The book is How to Get Rich in American History — check it out here https://www.josephmoorebooks.com/ 

Thank you for listening!

Visit my website to learn more www.MorganRanstrom.com... or keep up with the latest via social media:

LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and X. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

All right, so welcome back to Morgan on Purpose, the podcast, uh, where we get intentional about your financial life. Uh, this episode is particularly timely. Uh, we're in the heart of America's 250th anniversary summer. Think about that. Uh, and independence is everywhere. But what did financial independence actually look like across those 250 years? What advice were Americans getting? And was any of it actually any good? My guest today has spent years digging into exactly that. Uh, Joseph Moore is a historian, uh, a PhD, and the best-selling author of How to Get Rich in American History: a sweeping look at 300 years of financial advice in this country, what worked, what didn't, and what we've forgotten that maybe we shouldn't have. Uh, so Joseph, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 0:59

Hey, Borgant, thank you so much for having me. Glad to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Yeah, I uh it was serendipitous, it's gonna be backwards on the screen, but I'm holding up your book, uh, and it arrived on my doorstep the same day I got introduced to you uh by a fellow friend, uh Bogamil or announce. Yes. And I can't stop reading it. I haven't finished, I'll be honest. Uh kids, and you know, I read one again. But I understand it is phenomenal.

SPEAKER_01 1:27

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:27

And I think some of the credits are like, hey, this is one of my favorite personal finance books that I've ever read. And I have to agree, and I've read a lot of them. I've stopped reading them because I get bored, but because they're all kind of the same at some point, and maybe you could talk about that because you've read like 300 years of them. Uh this one stands out, and I I love it. I can't wait to buy it for people.

SPEAKER_01 1:46

Well, thank you. That that I cannot tell you what that means to me because, and especially with little kids, right? I I've told people, you know, spending a little bit of money on a book is pretty easy, but spending your time on a book is hard. And so I really wanted the book. I mean, thank again, like for the bottom of my author's heart, thank you, right? Because I understand that like what it takes uh for a reader to keep going, right, means that they're getting something out of it. And that's the biggest reward. And I always try to write with the sense that like the the reader doesn't owe me the next page, right? They don't owe me the turn of the page. And so I always want to make sure they feel like either something is really interesting and worth turning the page or really funny and worth turning the page. And that's kind of the goal that I set for myself. So that means that's the best compliment I've gotten all day. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 2:27

I can't wait to like yell paragraphs loudly at the kitchen table at my kids, being like, this is what Joseph said, you know. I think that's that's the way you instill financial advice, right?

SPEAKER_01 2:37

Yes, there you go. Father's Day wisdom.

SPEAKER_00 2:39

Exactly. Um, so let's kick it off. So um people today feel like we're living in unprecedented times. And I think if you're scrolling social media, you're reading the news, it's all bad, right? And it's harder than ever to get ahead. Um, AI is disrupting everything, everywhere, uh, volatile markets, political upheaval. Uh, and yet your book covers 300 years of Americans navigating massive change. And I think I just kind of was left with this is financial anxiety actually new? Um, or have we always felt this way?

SPEAKER_01 3:20

Oh, it's not new. I can guarantee. Now it's amplified. Uh, but let me let me kind of walk through some of the financial anxieties of the past, right? I can find people saying the American dream is dead roughly 300 years before I can find the phrase American dream, which only pops up in the 1930s. So in 1676, this is 100 years before Hamilton's gonna wrap on Broadway, the colonists of Virginia burned their own capital to the ground specifically because nobody gets ahead anymore. And in the 1800s, there were these big rallies with speakers, and the the primary speech they would give, the big crescendo line was the rungs on the ladder to success got sawed off by the people who got ahead of you, who got there first, right? There's no way you're gonna go ahead. And um, here actually I have it beside me. This is a best-selling book from the early to mid-1980s. It sold almost 100,000 copies. It says that the baby boomers will never be able to afford to retire and the middle class will be destroyed by the early 1990s. And it says it with such gusto, right? Like, it is a done deal. It's already baked in the cake. You get out while you can, okay? This this book was like national best-selling material. Um so, no, the anxiety is not new.

SPEAKER_00 4:44

It reminds me of like how many times have we seen the apocalypse predicted, right? And uh uh I think there's so much hope in the way you write. And so you're saying this isn't this isn't like a new thing?

SPEAKER_01 4:56

No, not at all. Now, what is new is how many microphones are being held by the people saying that the anxiety is is is is ever present. So I call this big woe, right? Uh, because they're always saying, woe is you, and woe is me, and everybody's woe is everything. It's a despair industrial complex. And the old, the the famous uh, I guess it's Charlie Munger quote, show me the incentives, I'll show you the behavior. Uh, I'm not sure if that's actually his quote, but somebody said it, right? And the you know, there's no clicks for journalists, there's no votes for politicians, there's no tenure for academics like me telling you the world is getting better. But we can do, we can get all of those things if we tell you somebody broke it, we know who did it, trust us to fix it. By the way, our solutions may make things worse. That's irrelevant. We'll still get what we want by telling you it's broken. And so we've we've told people with a very loud microphone that they cannot get ahead, that they cannot act on the world. And at some point, people start to believe you. And what I try to encourage people to do is step back for a minute and use history as a guide to say, well, what did other people encounter? Frederick Douglass, the famous abolitionist. The speech that we teach in class is What to the Slave is the Fourth of July. It's a tremendous speech. We should teach it. I have taught it. But that was not his most famous speech in his own lifetime. By far the most famous speech that he gave. Everywhere he went, white audiences, black audiences. And they would yell at him from the stands like it was a rock concert to play the hits, right? Like, do this one, like give that speech. And the speech they wanted to hear was called Self-Made Men. And the crescendo line is where he says, I can be prosperous. Our national motto, he says, is go ahead. I can become prosperous. And think about his audience, half of his audience used to be slaves. And they have that level of optimism about the future that you can go ahead. So as we get told everything is unprecedented, I promise you it's not. Um, and your chances for getting ahead are actually better than they've ever been.

SPEAKER_00 6:58

I think so, so one of my core virtues or values, especially thinking financially, is optimism. You have to believe in a better future. If you don't believe in a better future, it should all go under the mattress. You should stop trying. Uh it's not worth it, right? So you have to be optimistic. And I think I was just so struck with how your book instills that. And you seem to have gone through 300 years and become even more optimistic than maybe when you started. Oh, very much so. Yeah.

unknown 7:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:30

No, I thought this I was convinced all financial advice was a scam. Like that, that was where I started. It's not where I ended. Because at some point you you have to kind of face the evidence, and it's not doing what you want to. You can't torture the data for but for so long and make it do what you want to do before you start to say, well, maybe I'm wrong. So, you know, on this idea of optimism, there is there is this tendency, and academics are especially prone to this, and I'm especially guilty of this, to let pessimism parade as wisdom. And why? Because if you say, hey, don't believe it, be careful, it's all gonna go wrong, you sound like the person who's knows something others don't, and is not gonna get trapped by not gonna get sold a bill of goods. And sometimes that's helpful. I'm not being blindly optimistic here. However, over and over again, the lesson of American history is that the outsized rewards are paid to optimism and risk taking. And that's not to say blind risk taking, I'm not talking about crazy things, but over and over again, people who shouldn't have gotten ahead because of where they started in life did get ahead because they were bel, they started with the belief that they could. This is still true today. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau did two studies of people's financial accounts and like what created financial wellness, and they found that overwhelmingly, the number one predictor of financial wellness was what's technically called an internal locus of control. It just basically means believing that you can act on the world. That combined with the habit of savings, outperformed income and it outperformed inheritance as a prediction of financial wellness. So just believing you can, as cheesy as it may sound, and as much as the academic of me has a gag reflex to that, like, oh, it sounds so self-helping. But it is true. If you do not believe you can take the first step and it goes somewhere, then you don't take the first step.

SPEAKER_00 9:28

So then I guess we continue along with the book. You take on some sacred cows, right? And uh I I gotta warn listeners, uh, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, people are gonna flip here um as these ideas come out. But I mean, you you go after compound interest. Are you kidding me, Joseph? Uh you go after passive investing. What are the real estate gurus gonna say to all this passive investing stuff? Uh like walk us through your arguments on this.

SPEAKER_01 9:55

Okay, so the the one of the core themes of the book is that what always worked was always changing. And and one of the core ways you navigate capitalism is by remaining adaptable. Uh and and so a lot of things that we think are very old are actually fairly new. And a lot of things that we think are fairly new are actually very old. So let me, let me, let me, since I'm I'm going around making enemies of all sides, right? Because everybody's like, you're taking on my sacred cow. They don't mind the chapters where I attack the things they don't like, but it's when I get into their investments and I start, you know, messing with their portfolio that things get messy. So let's take on crypto, because that's one that probably most of your listeners are aware of, but also maybe a little skeptical of. And the skepticism is warranted. I say in the book, crypto is not new. It's very, very old. We have had self-issued currencies, that is, say, outside of government control, for hundreds of years. It was the predominant way Americans got paid for the first half of the country's history. At the dawn of the Civil War, there were 10,000 of these things floating around by thousands of issuers. You could issue currency, anyone could issue currency based on anything. You could issue it based on your wife's wedding ring as an IOU that would float around town. I tell the story in the book of a runaway slave who gets stuck in Michigan. And to fund his journey to New York, he issues his own currency, good at his barber shop, and it floats in in Monroe, Michigan for like a year until he's able to like trade it out for better currency and get out of town. What happens to his currency? He gets to freedom, it goes to zero. And so Americans have had this before, and here's the lesson of the past. All self-issued currencies in American history eventually went to zero. And so if I had asked grandma and grandpa in 1850, what do you tell your grandkids to do with money? They would have said, don't save it. Which blows our minds, right? But this was universal advice because if you went to work and got paid in Dogecoin, and I go to work and get paid in fartcoin, which is, by the way, a real thing, the first thing we're gonna do is spend it because we know it could go to zero. And that's the world Americans lived in. And now the crypto bros want to take us back to that world. Uh, I would say it's fine if you want to have fun floating on a bubble and think that you can time the pop. Good for you. Have fun. But we've seen currencies like this before they went to zero. Now let me flip to the sacred of all sacred cows, compound interest. Um compound interest has this almost, and I hope your audience will forgive this, almost kind of like a pornographic uh power, right? Let's like, ooh, how big does this thing get? And I don't even have to work for it.

SPEAKER_00 12:32

It just, you know, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. We have quotes from misattributed quotes from Einstein about uh compound interest is what, the seventh wonder of the world. Yeah, wonder of the world. Oh my gosh, it just does it on its own.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

It's like okay, here's the problem with that. Um, that only solves you and your needs. And I think a lot of it the idea of investments is the way I'm gonna get riches by solving my needs. No, no, no. The real money in American capitalism is made solving somebody else's needs, right? You make money because you solve a problem, preferably at scale, preferably a very profitable problem to solve. Now, compound interest has been known about for centuries. I could find references to it in the 1500s and 1600s. What you can't find is everyday people getting rich this way. Because you need two things for compound interest to work. You need time and you need assets that compound. And Americans for half of our or over half the history of the country didn't have those two things. 99% of Warren Buffett's wealth comes after his 60th birthday. That's a birthday most Americans never lived to see because the life expectancy was too short. So you didn't have the time to compound your way into your 70s and 80s because you weren't gonna live that long. The second thing is most Americans' wealth was in land, and land doesn't compound, right? Land has an upward limit placed on it by how much labor you can add to it. And so um and then the other part of this is the idea that you're gonna invest 10% in the stock market and compounding is gonna do the work for you. Well, the stock market's a very different place than it used to be. So if you had done that strategy, kind of the boomer strategy of save 10% in the stock market for 40 years, okay, if you run that scenario from the American Revolution to yesterday, it fails in over 40% of the experiences. So in almost half of the time, saving 10% in stocks would not have funded a retirement. Um, it has started to work a lot more recently. And so what the reality is when they put the data sets back together with the all the stocks that went to zero, the bonds beat stocks for all the 1800s. They were tied until World War II. So stocks for the long run and compound interest solving all your problems is only as old as our last two presidents. Now that's fine, that's a that's a long time, but it's not a historical law of physics that has to repeat forever. So compound interest working is fairly new, and that surprises a lot of people because we're told it's very old.

SPEAKER_00 14:59

Yeah, it's kind of like when we fix the survivorship bias uh and the indices. Yes. Um I think the longevity piece is what gets me. And I always think about social security. So when Social Security is launched, uh, I think the I think it starts at age 65 at that point, and 65 is older than expected longevity of any individual. Um now, obviously, we have this retirement, or social security starts in our you know, mid to late 60s, let's say, uh as early as 62. But you know, if you've lived to 62, 65, you're expected to live well into your 80s. And I think that's also where you know you can you kind of speak to this. Compound interest is great over 40, 50, 60, 90 years. Over 10 years, it's much more about uh human capital. And I and I saw that as like kind of a theme of your book of uh, you know, if you can leverage leverage yourself to a career that compensates well, frankly, or kind of presents some opportunities, running a small business, um, other things, but it's really about skills and future earnings power. And I think that future earnings power is something that we underappreciate. Um even retirees, where if you think about making an extra $10,000 or $15,000 a year in retirement, shaking hands at Home Depot, uh meaningfully different retirement outcome to that. Uh and you kind of talk about that too, like renting little you know, rooms in your house or whatever. I'm just wondering if you could, you know, talk about the precedent of uh it's about you and kind of you incorporated, for lack of a better word.

SPEAKER_01 16:41

Yeah, yeah. And I, you know, I think that we have, because of the financial industry's obsession with getting people to, you know, constantly invest their money, you know, dollar cost average, all these things. And I'm not, I'm not saying, please don't hear me saying none of this works. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying it's pretty new. And I'm saying it has only started working recently. And that's not a promise it'll work forever. It's just a phenomenon. And as a historian, a hundred years is a rounding error in my line of work, right? So I'm trying to think through what people do and did that actually work. And that's why in the book I kind of lay out 25 lessons that stood the test of time and seven things that typically failed no matter when you did them. And one of the one of the real lessons here that you're talking about is that the real big money is made in investing in yourself. And so uh I would much rather take a young person and say, if they gave me the option between saving a small amount of their income or taking that small amount of their income and investing in, say, becoming a certified uh airplane technician. And I actually use this example of the book because I actually know a guy who this who this corresponds to. Like, you know, I'm I live in Atlanta, there's a big Delta hub here. And every now and then they have to take the whole airplane apart and put it back together. And this is the guy who didn't go to college, but you can't put that plane back together until he says you can. And he and and he's achieved all the certificates that it took to get to that level in his career. He makes a really good living, right? Because he invested in himself. And now he can retire by saving a sizable portion of a much bigger income than if he had just stayed at the bottom of his career field. And so human capital is wildly underrated. If you actually, most Americans can probably tell you their net worth, they're probably wrong, but they can at least give you a guess. But the actual term, the economics term that applies to them, it's it's what is your what is your actual augmented wealth when you factor in all the benefits you're eligible for, like social security? Nobody ever puts their social security into their net worth.

SPEAKER_00 18:41

Forget it, like they always forget it.

SPEAKER_01 18:42

Yeah, but then what is the value forgetting it? Yeah. Yeah. And what is the value of your human capital? Which is to say, how much earning power do you have over time? And that's a lot of money. And in fact, if you took the the um the augmented wealth and the human capital, if you just took the human capital of the American workforce, it is wildly larger than the market cap of the stock market. Like just Americans' earning power is their single greatest financial asset. And you talk about retirement. Like statistically, people who work part-time in retirement live longer, right? So it's not just that you're making money, you get to enjoy that money for longer because you're active, you're moving, you're doing something. So yeah, I'm a big fan in people focusing on investing in their human capital. They're they're us ink if you're married, you're me ink if you're single. And um, that's where a lot of the wealth really comes from. And and and throughout history, in every era.

SPEAKER_00 19:34

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um flipping the script a little bit. So, critique you hear a lot today is that we're a very financialized society. Uh, and I would say maybe 2008, this is a really bad thing for 10 years. Uh now we're maybe seeing it as a little positive light, especially like in a speculative framework. Um, but it's kind of like this idea that too much of life runs through markets and financial products and whatnot. And then it obviously it's made things worse too, right? Um and I would just say you seem to push back on that a little bit and also believe that it's easier than ever to get ahead. Uh I'm just wondering like, what's the historical precedent that would make you feel that way?

SPEAKER_01 20:16

Yeah, so it's uh that's definitely not the argument you hear most places, right? That it's easier to get ahead, not harder. Uh if you statistically just wanted to move, you know, to be in the middle and stay in the middle, the easiest time to do that was like the 50s and 60s because there were a lot of middle class jobs, right? But if you wanted to statistically move from behind to ahead, it's getting easier and easier over time. Now, I'm not telling young people that they have it so good because their challenges are real. There's a housing challenge that they face, there's there's AI, there's all challenge, but every generation faces challenges. So my point is, I'm not saying that it's easy for you, I'm saying it used to be a lot harder. And so, you know, let's let's just think about uh you know mobility. One of the biggest indicators of financial success is how mobile you are, especially in younger years. Uh, and if you're retiring, how mobile you are in terms of can you geo-arbitrage to a cheaper part of the country to live to make your money go farther? All right, well, your ancestors had to get on a wooden or steel ship to get here. Let's start there, and it took 30 to 45 days. Even in the steamship era, it took over two weeks to get from Italy to here. Um, in World War I, right around World War I, the U.S. Army decided to try to drive across the country. This is just over 100 years ago, just to see, like, hey, there's a global conflict about to come, and we need to see if we can actually move our army. To get from the West Coast to the East Coast took them two months. Two months. The U.S. Army, Dwight Eisenhower was the young like officer in charge. You could put everything you own in a U Haul right now and be anywhere else in the continent US in 48 hours or less. And you probably know somebody who's done it.

unknown 21:59

So

SPEAKER_01 22:00

So you have the opportunity to go where the opportunity is. And I promise you, you live in the largest, most successful free market zone in the history of the world. There is an opportunity for you somewhere. It may not be where you are, but you have the ability to go and get it. Let's talk about poverty, poverty rates. You know, we think of that as a big issue today, and it is. But understand that in the 19 teens and 20s, as late as then, roughly one half of Americans were technically right around or below the poverty line. By the 1950s, it was still one in three. This was one of the big issues in John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign was rural poverty. Today it's basically one in 10. Depending on how you count it, it may go as high as 16%, but it's one in 10, which is why when we see encampments and we see housing crises and these things, it offends us so much because we have so much less of it than we've ever had. And so we feel like there shouldn't be any. And I'm all for it. I want us to have less poverty. But there's less poverty, you're more mobile, your housing is not as affordable as it has been at times, but it's still accessible. Um, your money is stable, and your barrier to entry to the market. Think about when I was coming up as a kid in the 80s and 90s, to buy a stock, that was a big deal. Like you had to go through a lot of hurdles to actually go through the process of buying a stock. You can click on your app today and buy an index fund right now.

SPEAKER_00 23:21

Yeah, one thing that that makes me think of. So my grandfather, uh farm in northern Minnesota, grandma of five kids, my dad's one of them. Uh, he has polio and he dies tragically in a farm accident. Uh and I was reading your your book, as I was reading your book, I I found myself reflecting on this because um, well, there's no life insurance. Uh when he had polio and can't do labor on the farm anymore, and that's how he died is he couldn't move out of the way when a tractor uh was advancing toward him. Um there's no disability income, right? He he owns the farm, but like his employer isn't sending him a disability check or whatever. Uh you know, I don't I think that's it's definitely pre-Social Security disability, right? Um and I think that's the world without financialization, right? So like there is no uh fallback plan, so to speak. And I think if we go back to the 19th century, you say this in the book, there's a recession one out of every four years. This is why stocks aren't working in the 19th century, right? There's a recession, there's no point in monetary policy, there's no Federal Reserve, there's no backdrop at that point. Um, obviously, we're we're we have these things now. So, so like at what point do Americans start getting access to these tools? Uh, whether that's insurance, savings products, and and also at what point do they become trustworthy? Or at least we think they are now? Um, so yeah, is there a turning point in this, in this historically?

SPEAKER_01 24:57

Yeah, I mean, like we live in the least risky financial age in American history, and we're probably more risk-averse than we've ever been, which is kind of an irony. But uh your, you know, your house and your spouse can all be insured. And those are financial products that really matter. Now, they actually are pretty old. If you like go back to the early 1800s, you start to see fire insurance is the first one that really takes off. Merchants have shipping insurance, and then you start to get workmen's insurance in the 1850s and 60s, especially popular with railway workers, because that's a really dangerous job. And what you find is that that quickly becomes the one of the first steps in financial uh plans for everyday families. Step one was try to have a little bit of cash for an emergency, preferably in a charity bank in US government dollars, not private dollars, like we just talked about. But the second thing was to have an insurance policy. Like that was the literally the number two step. And Americans love their insurance policies, and that was really their primary savings vehicle for a long time. Now, the insurance industry has kind of fallen by the wayside as the stock market has become bigger and more robust and easier access for everyday people because the returns are lower, right? And and so the general advice became invest in stocks because your upside is higher. But insurance is there for the purpose of protecting your downside. It's not for your upside, it's for your downside. And we have uh more insurance than we've ever had. And I think we probably need to have a good, robust national debate about how the insurance companies can do a good job rehabilitating their their uh image for not selling products that are that are overpriced for no good reason, except their bottom line, and how Americans can start to worry a little bit more about protecting that downside because it allows you to chase your upside in your career, which is where your real income and benefits are gonna be. So, you know, I have it, I have an essay coming out probably on my Substack here in a little bit called Um Make Insurance Sexy Again. Because I think that if you go back in time, you find Americans understood the value of protecting your downside, was it allowed you to take the risks for your upside. Um, and so for people like your grandfather and people in my own family life, I mean, my I had a grandfather who struck by lightning and died. Uh, and that's why my great, I'm sorry, my great grandfather, and that's why my grandfather had to drop out of school in the eighth grade. Because he had to, somebody had to work. And, you know, there were younger kids than him who had to eat, and so he had to go to the mills. And so that's the kind of thing that we we've lost sight of, just how difficult and risky the climb up used to be. And now ever everything that can go wrong, you can at least hedge against, even if you fail. I mean, Americans did not have bankruptcy for over half of our history. And in the brief time that we tried it, for about two years, over 40% of the people who filed were able to bounce back and be financially successful. So for half of American history, people who could have bounced back were denied that opportunity. So even if the worst case happens, you've got a better shot than the generations before you. So, you know, we live in the least risky age in American history. So maybe take a little risk.

SPEAKER_00 28:02

Yeah, yeah. It's interesting that you bring up bankruptcy, you know, because we think of ourselves as uh, you know, being so overly capitalistic, I think, in some ways. But you look at plenty of other countries and they they don't have that bankruptcy protection, and it's really, really hard to get away from creditors if you've made some mistakes or had some bad luck along the way. Um, which is almost like a harsher form of capitalism, if you ask me. Um I think that's just like it's all with this navel gazing that we tend to do, and uh probably every person in every country does in their own way. Um one of the themes in your book is you call it slow time versus fast time. Uh and I and I love this, and it kind of reminds me of Daniel uh Kahneman, I think I'm pronouncing the name right, the behavioral psychologist, where you know you got slow thinking, fast thinking, but the slow time, fast time. And I found what when you you call fast times, and it's more uh I don't know, more diverse of a concept than this in your framing. Um but I started thinking about lottery thinking a little bit. And it's this idea that I think right now we certainly saw this coming out of the pandemic of uh if I make the right bet, the right moment, the right tip, it's all gonna change everything. And obviously, we you know, if you watch a sports game, it's all about gambling and betting right now. It's like this has become prevalent, uh probably not for the first time, and I'm sure you can tell us about that. Uh, but it sure feels prevalent right now. So, how far does that go? This kind of these speculative times. Why do they happen? Where do they come from? Um, and like how do we cycle out of this? And is there good in that too?

SPEAKER_01 29:42

No, that's that's a profound question. I'll try my best to answer it. So I'll start with fast time and slow time. So, what happens in the way that we tell financial history is that we skew the past for people and they think that the way they should handle their lives now is the lessons they take are very different than they should take. So, if you think about most of the financial history most people encounter, it's always 2008, it's always 1929, everything is breaking everywhere all at once, and all the smart people saw it coming, and the rest of everybody, and you just don't want to be the dumb people who get wiped out. And so you're constantly on the lookout for the thing that's gonna break and everything's gonna change, whether that's to the upside or to the downside, right? To your point, you're gambling on the next Bitcoin explosion from $100 to $10,000, or you're gambling on the next 2008. All right, here's the problem with that. Those histories are not written to teach you what to do with your money. They are written to entertain you. They are that's why they're bestsellers, right? Like they're entertaining. And the point is for you to look at the screen and go or read the book and be like, the subprime mortgage lender is behind you. Run, run away from the mortgage, right? You're being entertained. That's not teaching you what to do. So those fast time histories where everything is changing all at once are actually rare in history. And what I call slow time, which is by the way, very loud, somebody's always telling you it's gonna burst, and somebody's always telling you it's gonna go up. But the volatility stays within a certain range. One of my favorite things I did uh recently in an essay, this is also on Substack, was I listed out all these quotes of like things are about to pop to the upside and things are about to crash and then show you they're all from the same papers and all from the same year, you know, because that that but in slow time, while everyone is telling you that something crazy is going to happen, that's when most of your real decisions get made. That's what actually will get stress tested one day in fast time. But what you what career you pick, how good you get at it, who you who you marry, what you get addicted to, the way you put your portfolio together, those are the slow time decisions that really matter. And that's where most of your life is going to be lived. So let's start there. Is it like you need we need to reframe people to thinking about am I in slow time or fast time? Fast time's very rare. If somebody's telling you you're in fast time, there's a good chance you're not. Right? Because everybody's freaking out all the time. So we we want to reorient people to thinking about where do I sit in this huge economy and how can I make myself less vulnerable if fast time comes. But also, I can make decisions now that get me ahead over the slow 10 years ahead. Um, in terms of gambling, that is not new at all. It is getting a little worse now that the laws have changed. But in the 1800s, there were things called uh bucket shops. And young men would lose a lot of money, sometimes all their money, betting on stocks. Now, in the 1800s, stocks were too expensive to buy if you were an everyday person.

SPEAKER_00 32:34

Notice you said uh young men. Yes, that's what's happening right now.

SPEAKER_01 32:38

It's always young men, right? Now, occasionally you do find women getting uh hooked on this stuff as well, right? But it's mostly young men, and they would go to these bars and you couldn't buy the stock. So they bet on if it was going up or down. The ticker tape was the original iPhone, and so they're like getting the updates by the minute, and like, I bet it's gonna go up and I'll wager this much. And they would always lose, right? Like, you know, you'd win a little, lose a little, you'd chase it. Next thing you know, you're broke. This is what's happening with sports betting today. We've got young men going on apps. We've got a shocking number. I think it's over half now of men under the age of 30 are on a sports betting app. And they are trying to, they're dreaming of winning big. And I talk about this in the book. We've we've had this what they called speculitis uh before. They've had we've had this addiction before. And you know, I'll leave it for other people to decide what the political outcomes of that should be, but the financial outcomes are rarely good.

SPEAKER_00 33:29

And I think it comes back to this idea that you espouse throughout the book, which is you don't actually have to get rich fast. In fact, it's kind of the work you do during these slow periods can lead to a quick advancement that that does happen, but it's it's focusing or helpful to focus on the now. And and once again, I read this. I'm not a 25-year-old kid anymore, but I'm not immune to the Zeitkist. Um, and I found it centering of oh, I can just focus on the now, continue to build. It's okay if I take that course or read that book or write that book. Things that take a long time, uh, that still has always worked and it'll continue to work. I just left with that confidence. And I was just really grateful to you for that. Um, that you you know wrote through that message. Um one other sacred cow. You write that diversification is overrated. Uh you're you're killing everybody here.

SPEAKER_01 34:35

I'm just asking my entire Twitter handle to blow up with people telling me how wrong I am.

SPEAKER_00 34:40

Um yeah, to the extent it's a bestseller, it's because they actually don't even know that you're going after this stuff, right? Um anyways, going to raise some eyebrows. And it and it should, right? And I but I love your argument. So your argument is essentially uh you concentrate to build, right? So focus, concentrate, and then ultimately diversify to protect. So how did you land on that? Like what led to you kind of thinking through this progression?

SPEAKER_01 35:06

Well, kind of back to where we uh I said earlier, what I what I thought I was gonna find was not what I found. Like I kind of assumed that most of the lessons we learned, I think 300 years, we've kind of figured this thing out by now. And what I found was that the farther in history I went, the less this thing held, the less some of our sacred cows were so sacred. And you know, on this one in particular, you find over and over again, and I by the way, I went out and interviewed, you know, a lot of this book, I would take all these lessons from the past and apply them to myself and see did they still work in the future or in the present. You know, one of the big things of the 1960s was buying land on the moon. And that I will tell you, that's not very profitable because I tried it. But like one of the things I try to do is interview people today who were succeeding in this kind of American dream story of having gone from behind to ahead and trying to read the biographies of these people in the past. And over and over again, they tell you I didn't get here by diversification. In fact, most of the financial gurus, and I won't name names, but all of them who tell you the way you get rich is by steadily diversifying into the market, that's not how any of them actually got wealthy. They all got wealthy building a business and selling it, or possibly selling the financial advice itself. But not a single one of them actually just slow went their way to wealth by diversification. So my favorite example of this is um, well, there's two, Andrew Carnegie's famous quote, you know, everybody says, don't put all your eggs in one basket. I say, put all your eggs in one basket, then watch that basket. And that was that's how and he knew a thing or two about how to climb from behind to a head. And P.T. Barnum, who knew a thing or two about how to separate fools from their funds, said that when a dentist hears that he can make money doing literally anything other than drilling teeth, he's gonna lose all his money in South American bonds trying. Uh, and he that that was an actual experience that was happening at the time when he should have just been focused on being the best at drilling teeth, right? And so don't confuse what the rich have with what the rich did to have it. You've you limit yourself to an area that you know you can get really good in. Then you concentrate on being the absolute best you can be at that thing or that arena. And after a while of slow time, and most people will tell you back to slow time, fast time, most truly successful people will tell you they got, they worked and grinded slowly for sometimes decades. And then in a blip of fast time, a month, a year, two years, suddenly it the payout was there. And so it's you you grind away at concentrating on this and being great at it. Then when the payout comes, then you diversify. And over and over again, that's the that is what people who went from behind to ahead have done in American history for 300 years. So you you you get rich, then you diversify.

SPEAKER_00 37:53

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So I think this idea connects a lot to a book I'm working on that I hope to publish uh 2026, um, a book called Don't Die at Your Death. So helping business owners think about growing their business, expanding it, um, and ultimately exiting, right? Something that they built and it are very attached to, right? Um and a business owner, any business owner is by definition highly concentrated, right? Like all their eggs are in that basket. And that's why I think the trip typical financial advisor is like, oh, you gotta diversify. And they're like, I'm fine, right? Like, I'm gonna keep reinvesting in my business. Uh, because I trust this, I don't trust that, too. Like, and that's uh that's the classic framework. And I'm a business owner and I I think about that with my own net worth uh and how I do things. So so here's the classic questions. Like, when we're talking about concentration, I do want what what people might be hearing is something much more speculative, which is I'm gonna become a Bitcoin.

SPEAKER_01 38:56

Right, no, yeah, not saying that.

SPEAKER_00 38:58

Yeah, I'm choosing, uh, and this is not financial advice, I'm choosing Nvidia or something like that, or the next Nvidia, whatever that is. What I hear you saying is build that business, build that uh human capital, right? Talking about future earnings again, uh, you know, housing opportunity, whatever that is. Can you kind of separate that concentration versus speculation framework?

SPEAKER_01 39:26

Yeah, and it's an important point. I'm glad you made it. So the the the dividing line between risk and gambling is actually pretty simple. Do you have any say in the outcome? You cannot help the Minnesota Timberwolves win a basketball game.

SPEAKER_00 39:44

Are you saying that to me directly right now?

SPEAKER_01 39:46

I'm saying it to any fan anyway. Are you attacking me right now? That was a bad that was a bad pull. I should have said the Wizards, right? Like, you know, you can help the Washington Wizards win a basketball game. Uh, and apparently neither can anyone else.

SPEAKER_00 39:58

Goodness.

SPEAKER_01 39:59

But uh, but you can affect the outcomes of how good you are in your career, whether you show up early, stay late, do the work, get the credential, whatever it is. You can affect, not you don't have all the power over whether you're not your business succeeds, but you have some of it, or that your career succeeds, but you have some of it. You don't have all the power over what a rental property investment does well, but you have some. You can decide what you're gonna do and put the smart money in. And like you get some say in the outcome. If you have no say in the outcome, it's gambling. And so, you know, when you talk with people tell me, well, I invested in in Bitcoin at, you know, 2000. Well, good for you, but you gambled and you won. And I've met plenty of people who've gambled and lost. By the way, I would have bought Bitcoin. I think I I go in the book about describing like I in the early days I tried to figure out how to buy it. I was like, I can't even fit, this is a hazing ritual. I can't figure this thing out. And I missed my, you know, my generation's quote unquote greatest investment opportunity. Okay, but I also missed all the NFTs and I missed We Work and all the other hot trends everyone else leveraged how to bet on and lost. So I don't regret it in the least. Um, so don't gamble. This is especially important for young people. Like, put the money on risk where you have some say in how the outcome's gonna go.

SPEAKER_00 41:18

Um, yeah, I mean, and once again, if you invest in yourself and that equals $10,000, $20,000 or more of income per year, uh, vastly more important than um investing a thousand bucks and maybe having a double, but most likely going to zero or something like that.

SPEAKER_01 41:35

Or yeah, you know, or chasing rich, you know, you lost and now you're chasing it. I mean, it's just I've seen people ruin their financial lives over this. I tell the story in the book of a young girl who was a waitress. This is a real story. I'm sitting there reading a financial book, and people would just come up and ask me questions, you know, about money and because you're reading a book. And she's like, Do you know anything about crypto? I was like, a little. I founded one, which I talk about in the book. But, you know, I said a little, and she said, Well, I and she just sits down and starts crying. And she had invested all of her money in these speculative coins that her dead mother had left her, and then they went, they crashed. And she had thought she was going to make her family, her working class family, rich, and now she couldn't even go to school. And that was supposed to be her college tuition money. And I did, I looked up the coins, and after about four years, they bounced back to where she had them. But she had not been in school for those four years. So if she had just paid for the tuition, right? Um, and so that you have these tragedies that that happen over and over again. Everybody tells you about the winner, nobody tells you about the losers. And there's a lot more speculative losers than winners. So I encourage people to take risks, but risk in yourself, in us incorporated, in, you know, in a in a in your marriage, in your business, in your career. To your point, let's say that you take a credential and you work really hard at your job and you get two promotions. And those two promotions come out to say a total of 25,000 extra a year. All right, well, you just made yourself over half a million dollars. So if I told somebody, hey, I took $5,000, invested it, and I made $500,000, everybody would want to have me on for their show to talk about my great speculative skills. But like, no, I just got a credential and it paid out. Uh, it's not not as exciting, but it's far more profitable.

SPEAKER_00 43:12

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um and I think just to kind of bow tie this all, you do have those themes at the end of the book, the the things that have never worked and the things that are have timelessly worked. And honestly, it's worth buying the book just for those lists, um, because there's so there's such a helpful framing. Um, and I really appreciate it. So, Joseph, this has been a wonderful conversation. I'm so grateful you've given me a lot to think about uh and more to read, right? I'm gonna finish this book. Um, but I suspect our listeners too are kind of chewing on some of these good ideas. The book is it's a national bestseller How to Get Rich in American History. Uh, Joseph S. Moore, PhD, is the author. We'll have links to that below and more about Joseph in the episode notes, uh, where to find them. Your Substack, perhaps. And if you haven't already, subscribe to Morgan on Purpose so you stay up to date on hopefully the more timeless financial advice, especially for business owners, that actually holds up. And don't end up as a cautionary tale in someone else's book, right? We don't want the the future Joseph to be writing about you. And that's why we're gonna read this book. So until next time, thank you for listening.