ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Dr. Joseph Moore is a historian who spent a decade testing every financial strategy Americans have ever tried: he Airbnb'd every room in his house, bought land on the moon, founded a cryptocurrency, and invested in a startup that went to zero — to write How to Get Rich in American History: 300 Years of Financial Advice That Worked and Didn't. He started the project as a "lefty humanities professor" trying to prove the American Dream was a myth. Ten years of evidence later, he'd changed his mind completely. We're all about changing your mind when you know better.
We get into why the boomer playbook of saving 10% for 40 years would have failed almost half the time since the American Revolution, why health insurance companies run under 3% margins while funeral homes and self-storage run 10-15%, and the five things that actually predict getting ahead. Joseph also tells the real story of how he got rich — including the tenant who turned out to be running a human trafficking operation out of his first rental property, and the two-block real estate bet that nearly bankrupted him before it made him a multimillionaire.
The opportunity was never gone, it just takes longer to find than the get-rich-quick books tell you, and it won't be easy or passive. This is an optimistic view of America from a historian who did the research in books and in his own life.
Order the book: https://www.amazon.com/How-Get-Rich-American-History/dp/0063464586
Subscribe to Joe's Substack: https://www.josephmoorebooks.com
Quotes
"You can make five to seven times as much money holding people's junk, throwing it away, or putting them in the ground than you can keeping them healthy." — Joseph Moore
"Nothing will change your political opinion so much as having to make payroll." — Joseph Moore
"The rungs on the ladder to success were sawed off by the people who went ahead of you." — Joseph Moore, on 19th-century complaints about opportunity in America
"It's a despair industrial complex — there's no clicks for a journalist, no votes for a politician, and no tenure for academics like me if we tell you the world is getting better." — Joseph Moore
- 02:14 — Where Joseph starts when people ask him how to get rich, and why most finance books say the same thing in one page
- 04:19 — The famous "$10,000 in 1929 becomes $10 million" chart, and why it's a lie
- 06:39 — Becoming a historian: the musket that hooked him at 10, and the 2005 housing bubble he didn't see coming
- 08:46 — Selling the house right before 2008: "the last two people off the Titanic," and the decision to write the book
- 11:04 — Confession: "I'm a lefty humanities professor," and why making payroll changes your politics
- 13:14 — What changed his mind: the American Dream "myth" as unquestioned academic dogma
- 15:22 — Health insurance runs under 3% margins. Funeral homes and self-storage run 10-15%
- 17:33 — People have said "you can't get ahead anymore" since 1676 — and a 1984 bestseller predicting the middle class would vanish by 1990
- 19:52 — The "despair industrial complex"
- 22:03 — The five things that actually predict getting rich
- 24:26 — Marriage confounds everything
- 26:44 — Risk vs. gamble - how do you know the difference?
- 29:00 — Why index funds are for saving, not getting rich
- 31:10 — The first investment is in yourself
- 33:23 — Corporate career vs. entrepreneurship, and the P.T. Barnum quote about dentists
- 35:11 — Should you "buy a boomer's business
- 37:33 — Passive income as "financial pornography"
- 39:45 — How inflation killed real passive income
- 42:01 — Slow time vs. fast time, and the most boring year in American financial history (1953)
- 44:06 — Kim Basinger bought an entire Georgia town to build a movie studio. It happened — just decades late
- 48:45 — Entitlement culture: wages are up 30-50% since the 1970s and nobody believes it
- 50:56 — The question that stops academics cold: "Where'd you go to high school?"
- 53:16 — How Joseph actually got rich
- 1:00:15 — Practical advice if you're 45-55 with $100,000 and feel behind
