2030: How to Get Rich: 300 Years of Money Lessons

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2:05So money episode 2030, how to get rich 300 years of money lessons. You're listening to So Money with award-winning money guru Farnews Tarapi. Each day in a 30 minute dose of financial inspiration from the world's top business minds, authors, influencers, and from Farnews yourself. Looking for ways to save on gas or double your double coupons? Sorry, you're in the wrong place. Sicking profound ways to live a richer, happier life. Welcome to So Money. Actually, there's been some studies that show people do beat the market. So one of them, for instance, showed that fund managers who control $600 billion or more do indeed beat the market by one half of 1%. So they buy better than everybody else, but they tend to sell slightly worse in that average out to 1 half of 1%. On $600 billion, that's a lot of money. If I take that exact strategy and I put it on the average 401k balance, you can get an

3:06extra four to $600 a year for the work. Which is like a night of a hotel in Miami and hurricane season. What did you do to get that? What are those fund managers do? They worked a Yale paid four years of tuition. They had a grueling internship. They worked 70 to 80 hour weeks. And you do that for the extra $3 to $400 to $500. It's not worth it. Welcome to So Money, everyone. I'm Farnews Tarapi, and my guest today owns land on the moon. Now whether that land is going to fund his retirement is another question. It feels like the perfect place to begin a conversation about the very long and occasionally weird history of how Americans have tried to get rich. For roughly 300 years, Americans have speculated on land, chased gold, bought stocks, flipped houses, launched companies, piled into crypto, followed hot tips, and periodically convinced ourselves that this time, the rules will be different. Joseph Moore has spent hundreds of hours studying those cycles.

4:08He's a historian and professor who teaches the history of how Americans have built wealth. And eventually he began to wonder how much of the financial advice we hear today is actually useful and how much is just conventional wisdom getting recycled. So he began experimenting on himself. He founded a cryptocurrency. He systematically shorted Jim Kramer's stockpicks. He studied centuries of booms, busts, and speculative manias and applied some of those lessons to his own portfolio. Along the way, he became a millionaire. His new book is How to Get Rich in American History, 300 years of financial advice that worked and didn't. And some of his conclusions are going to make traditional personal finance people uncomfortable. He thinks investors should get better at timing risk. He thinks you can beat the market. And he argues that by the time an investment opportunity hits the front page news, you may already be too late. Here's Joseph Moore. Welcome to So Money. Oh, I am so excited to be here for news.

5:09Thank you for having me. All right. We got to start with this little factoid I saw buried in your bio that you own land on the moon. Okay. How did that happen? And just explain this to me, please. I find it so fascinating. I thought I'd like live to see all the different kinds of investments and real estate. But this is new to me. Lunar land was not on your big authority. Lunar land. Yeah. Okay. The premise of my book was I wanted to understand what Americans had done to try to get ahead for 300 years. What was the financial advice they heard? And could you do that today? Did it work? If it worked then did it work now, basically. And about a few years into the research, I decided to kind of pivot from being a traditional academic and say, okay, I am making a recipe book. And if I'm going to make a recipe book of all the things Americans whipped up to try to get ahead, then I should eat my own cooking. And so I just started to self experiment with everything I encountered within reason. And within reason was set by my wife saying, under no circumstances, which didn't happen

6:14as much as you think. But so credit to her. But anyway, okay. So in the early areas right before the space race, when it started to be conceptualized, one day we might actually get to the moon. Now at one point they thought it was going to be by Zeppelin, like the good year blimp would take you there. Some of the facts had not been ironed out. But people started rushing into to no republics and saying, I claim ownership of the moon. And trying to get like the first one to own it, well, there's two groups to this day that still claim they have the first title to the moon. So I go to one of them and I bought an acre on the sea of serenity, which was advertised as having phenomenal Earth views zone for tourism. And I was like, well, if it was zone for heavy industrial, that would definitely ruin the phenomenal Earth view. So I'll go with that. So I did this. I have a huge plaque with like the deed to the land in my office. Now why did I do that? One, obviously I don't, nothing I'm saying would stand up in court.

7:15I would have to get Elon to give me a ride. There's all kinds of logistical problems. But I wanted to illustrate net worth as an idea as well. And this idea that like when you own something, or especially with real estate is another good example. I really say, because it's going to go up. Well, why is it going to go up? Because for most of American history, real estate did not go up in value. That's a little known fact. We've lived through it going up. You used to not do that. To make my acre on the moon valuable, I have to go oxygenate the moon. That's an expensive proposition. So I just wanted to kind of experiment with like what were Americans thinking when they pursued some of these wilder and weirder ideas? Yeah. You've covered 300 years of financial advice in your book, which is called How to Get Rich in American History. And I started with the moon story because I think, you know, and as you've articulated, it's a perfect entry point into your book because we have spent so many hundreds of years deciding, oh, well, if I could just get this piece of land or this commodity or I'm going to get in on this IPO, this technology, Bitcoin, the things that we speculate on have changed.

8:20But our psychology, not so much. Our rationale, our thinking, our rational air quotes around what's going to make us rich has not in a nutshell, describe the human investor, the, you know, and in America, I guess, because we are, we are special. Yes. Americans are a unique bunch. The reaction to my book in Europe has been pretty interesting. You know, like there's definitely the way Americans think is, is there's an algorithm we follow that not everybody does. What is the first original financial advice that is truly American? It is, hey, poor person who's been poor for generation upon generation upon generation for thousands of years. You see that wooden ship over there. If you get on it, risk it sinking, last 30 to 60 days on that ship, there is a place on the other side of that ocean, whether I'm talking to somebody in Europe or in China, on the other side of that ocean is a place that you have a chance to actually go ahead

9:21and your family, you and your family can actually move ahead financially. That is the first, peculiarly American financial advice. And it is what sets Americans apart, this sense that the belief that everyday people could indeed go ahead. If I go back 300 years, people would have told you, you're crazy. That sounded like a scam 300 years ago. And yet it has proven to be, America has proven to be for all it's good and all it's ill. It's that more everyday people have gone ahead from impoverished living to the middle class or above the middle class than at any place in the history of humanity. And I know a lot of people don't like to hear that because we're in a very pessimistic age. But the facts are the facts. More people have gone ahead believing in the pursuit of getting ahead in America than anywhere else in the face of the planet. It sounds like you need to have a really good relationship with risk. And at the same time, we hear a lot of advice today, a modern financial advice of like,

10:22yes, you have to understand that risk is part of the equation when you're investing. But it's not to say that you have to bet your house, your farm, everything, to buy a Bitcoin, right? And so talk about maybe like, what is the right balance? What have you found to be the right balance when it comes to our embrace of risk in our pursuit of becoming rich? So let's go back in what people would have said for hundreds and hundreds of years is they would have made a fine distinction between gambling and risk. Those two things were not considered to be the same. So gambling is basically when I take out a more, a HELOC on my house and put it all on Bitcoin. I have no control over the outcome. If you have zero control over the outcome of investment, it's on investment. It's a gamble. You can gamble if you'd like, you know, welcome to the world of sports betting online. That is not an investment. It is on a risk where you are sizing up the reward on the upside versus the downside and that you are taking that risk on yourself.

11:24Notice the part of I am taking it on. What people would have said is I am taking on that risk, meaning I have some level, nobody has all control, some level of control over how this turns out. And when the risk, whether it's a career risk, whether it's moving from one place in the country to another place in the country to pursue a better job opportunity, which by what you talk about how important mobility is for outcomes, but like it's those risks. Now, the thing that interests me is we're very risk averse right now. I actually think there's a lot of gambling in the headlines, but there's not a lot of people willing to take career and personal and financial risks. But you live in the least risky age in American history. Like, I promise you, however risky you feel, it's far less risky than it used to be. Your house and your spouse can all be insured. If you do fail and go broke, they are not going to haul you to jail. And by the way, they forgot to put this in Hamilton in the revolutionary era. If you went broke, they put you in jail and they put your family in jail with you. Your wife and kids, your gentleman demand are hauled into prison. And there's a section, there's a space in the prison for wife and children.

12:27So like, that doesn't happen. Like you're not, you're going to be fine. And so I think we live in this, this incredibly risk averse age, which is kind of ironic, because there's never been a better time to take a chance. Speaking with risk, you talk about this concept in your book about timing the risk. This is actually something that you recommend we try to get better at, to improve our outcomes. Can you talk about, when you mean time, do you mean like timing the market or do you mean like, hey, you're a young person, you can take on more risk now. And maybe somebody who is older and has more on their plate and more responsibilities. That's a great question. And I'm actually working up an essay to kind of expand from the book on this on my sub stack because I have this concept of fast time and slow time. And what I mean by that, and it's not so, it is better to take more risk when you're younger. That is certainly statistically true. But in general, time, financial time speeds up and slows down.

13:28And it's kind of a not intuitive way of understanding it. But you'll know this, if you've ever talked to business people and they'll say, you work and you work and you work and you work and nothing happens and nothing happens. And then eight years later something blows up to the upside, right? And so financial time, when we, nobody's, let's be honest, even people in business and finance don't go around thinking about time. Like history is kind of a boring subject generally. That's just why I try to make the book as fun and entertaining as possible, right? But if you do think about it, you think about what it's night, it's always 1929, it's always 2008. Everything is changing everywhere all at once. And the lesson you take away is, oh, only a few smart people saw it coming. I don't want to be the dumb people who don't see it coming. Here's the problem with that. Those books and movies that we can all think of are meant to entertain you. They are, that's why you know about them because they're fun and entertaining. You were supposed to yell at the screen. He's behind you. The subprime mortgage lender is behind you. Run away.

14:29But that's not there to teach you what to do with your money. And so actual most of financial history is what I call slow time, where everyone is telling you it's going to blow up. Everyone is telling you it's going to go up or down. But actually, mostly nothing happens when I'm giving public talks, like, you know, public talks and lectures and you know how to just, you know, you get asked to come and speak to a group. And I'll put, I'll put two New York Times headlines on the screen. And one essentially says, depression imminent, right? Or recession, a depression imminent. And the next one says no sign of depression. And I'll tell people these are three months apart headlines of the New York Times. Wow. Now, guess the year. And people will say, 1928, 1929, 1939, 207, like I'll get all these things. It's 1948 or sometimes I'll use one from the 50th. I just pick it random because this is shooting fish in a barrel as his story. There's all these people telling you it's going to go up or down. And actually, mostly like 1948 is one of the most boring financial years in American history. What was, what even made the news out here?

15:30Dewey defeats Truman. Like, no, anybody could come up with it. Yeah. So my point is, when we think about time, you think about what you do in slow time is actually where most of your outcomes are going to come from, your outcomes will generally appear in fast time. It's going to get stress tested at some point and you don't know when. But you have to put in the work and the risk and the investments in the slow time that can pop in fast time. And over and over. Go ahead, go ahead. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm following you and I want to maybe illustrate this for the audience. Like I'm thinking 2008, those who came out on the other side of that with more money, a better job, despite the fact that it felt like the sky was falling in 2008, 2009. Everybody was losing their jobs and the people were losing their homes. What was it about that person, the profile of that person who was able to not just endure and make it through there, but actually come out richer potentially. And what was the, what were the muscles that they had been flexing up until that point

16:32to kind of support them and carry them through? So there's a, to answer that question about that crisis, let's go back and look at the biggest crisis of them all. Like the granddaddy is the Great Depression. Sure. And I talk about a guy in the book who on paper isn't supposed to succeed. One of the first black men to break the race barrier on Wall Street. He's born into Jim Crow. Like this man has every headwind in his face you can have. And for most of the roaring 20s when everybody was making all that money, he was just basically limping along, making, you know, paying his way through college as a railway porter, studied banking law. Nobody's going to give him a job. Like he's starting at the very, very bottom. He learned, he got experience. He took the, he took opportunities wherever they arose and he learned, he just learned. He was constantly learning and building his skill set.

17:32Then the Great Depression happens. Now the story of the Great Depression is supposed to be Woody Guthrie songs and, you know, black and white pictures of, you know, families looking off in the distance, wanting how they're going to survive. And it's actually in the Great Depression that this man, his last name is McGee, like he, makes his first fortune because he sees the crashes happening in front of him and he understands banking law and he goes into buys basically 100 properties for $0 down because they're cheap and he holds on for their life and lets the rent spend. He does all the things that people in 2010, 11, 12, 13 did. Right. And why? Because these are the people who kept their wits about them and kept learning and growing and building skill sets so that when an opportunity showed up, they could act. If you were just acting, acting, acting, acting, acting all the time, risking, risking, risking, risking all the time, eventually going to blow up. But if you're building your skill set and your awareness that time kind of moves in slow and fast modes, then when it shows up, you can act. Compare contrast that to say investing in Bitcoin in the early, you know, in 2008 when it,

18:38like, first arrived on the market was it 2008, 2009. And we give those people the same kind of credit because I just feel those people were lucky. There are so for every crypto currency, there is some other, there's a, there's a plot of land on the moon. You know what I mean? Exactly. Exactly. You know, that did it. So what is it about that kind of getting rich? Like, what do you say to that person who's like, you know, I'm a crypto millionaire, you know, it's like, what I tell him is worked so hard for that, you know, it's like what's that? Yeah. Well, first thing I tell him is that I'm a crypto billionaire. So back off. Um, so one of the things I did in the book was I found that a cryptocurrency, a token called billionaire. Yeah. And the reason I did this was to illustrate this exact point of what is crypto and is it really the future? And my argument in the book is that crypto is not the future. It's the past. We actually had about 120 to 150 years of self-issued currency in America prior.

19:39To the US greenback dollar. There was no US dollar. All currencies were issued by private just like Bitcoin or if you went to work and got paid in in Dogecoin and I went to work and got paid in fart coin, which is by the way, real. Um, what's the first thing we would do that we would spend it as fast as possible because it could go up, but it's probably going to go down and this happened all the time. And I wanted to illustrate, I mean, I have the story in the book about a runaway slave named William Wells Brown, who basically finances his journey to freedom by self-issuing his own currency. And for a year in Monroe, Michigan, his currency is considered valid tender. Like this guy's a runaway running from slavery for his life and like issues of currency and it circulates for a year. Now when he left and actually got to freedom, the currency went to zero and that happened all the time. And we see this happening in crypto markets. Now Bitcoin. Now I have a particularly controversial vision of Bitcoin. And I've, I wrote an essay that's gotten a surprising amount of traction called Bitcoin is a Zeppelin, which is back to that.

20:40And I argue in that in that essay has been the first technology and a thing can get people very excited and in a lot of investor money can flood in. That doesn't mean it's actually the best technology for the future at point you to. So believe it or not, it's like a 20 year period when Zeppelin sort of the way people fly, the right brothers haven't done anything yet. So there's not an airplane. And so everybody's like, this is so cool. We're going to go to the moon on a balloon, right? And there's millions of dollars. So this is the night, you know, 1890s. That's a lot of money. It's equivalent to billions today. Flooding into Zeppelin industry. Uh, H.E. Wells, his follow up war book to War of the Worlds where we're invaded from aliens. It's called War in the Sky where Zeppelin's invade the United States and win. So like this was people's minds. This was their imagination. This technology will change everything. And then a better technology came along. And that's what's probably going to happen to Bitcoin, a better technology will eventually come along. Now for the people who got in early, wrote it up and have the presence of on to get out

21:40at a good time, good for them. Good for you. Yeah, but we've had speculative booms before. I can, I mean, I could have spent an entire podcast just rattling off speculative booms where somebody got lucky, like just somebody got lucky. And then the next person to do the exact same thing made no money or lost it all. And so it's, you can't, it's random. And there's association with like, well, because it happened to one, it should happen to me. And that's not true. Hmm. Um, remember the segue. Uh, I, I, I, I remember watching a 60 minutes episode and it was like coming up the technology that will change the world. And we already had the internet. So I was like, um, what's a high bar? What's left, you know, robots aliens, uh, the metaverse, the metaverse. But this was like the 90s. So early 90s, maybe, but anyway, you mentioned the New York Times, uh, articles and the comparison and, and, and there's a line from your framework, which is read the newspaper backwards.

22:42Oh, yeah. Can you talk about that? Because I, as a journalist, I find that one interesting. So, and I'll be very clear because I could say something like this and people could be like, oh my gosh, this guy's a genius. No, I, I, I, I was a history professor. All right. I don't know if you know this about professors. We don't get paid with money. Uh, we get paid in prestige, right? It's like, here's your maybe middle class income and also we'll talk about you like you're really important. And so I didn't have a lot of money doing this experiment. Now I've since been able to take some of these lessons from history and do apply them and do very well. But one of the things I took away was that most of the front page of a newspaper is old news by the time you read it. By the time you actually absorb the information is available and to you, it's all through by the way available to everyone else. And you can absorb it. It's already been acted on, right? Even if you're on the subway heading into Manhattan, somebody already made that trade. And so where I found more interesting insights was people who, if, if by definition you want

23:44to invest in the future, if you want not the move that just went up, but the move that hasn't gone up yet, then you kind of have to peek around the corner of the future. And the way you do that is in the science and technology sections. So if you read the Wall Street Journal, if you read the economists, it's especially good at this, not no shade to anyone else. I'm sure there's other great science writers for the other outlets. But they have a really good science, some of the best science writers in the world work for those organizations. And they can talk to you about the technology that's around the bend. And so one of the experiments that I was running in the background of this with very small amounts of money, and very clear about that, was investing in the stock market, right, in making very speculative plays. And I got this idea that I, investing in the front pages, doing me no good, because it's already been all the money's made. But I can invest what's in the back. And so when there were articles, for instance, on battery and storage technology, which kind of was like, this is what's going to be required for this future. I started to, so like one of the big ones was, hey, there's this new thing called a large language model.

24:45And it requires a lot of compute. And right now, mostly what you could do is make hangman, right? You can tell it to make hangman and it will kind of do it. But if it's going to be anything bigger, they're going to need a lot of compute. And there's only so many companies that do that and one of which is Nvidia. And so all of this came to me from all of it. Is this your way of telling me you're an Nvidia billionaire? No, no, not Nvidia, but again, I want to emphasize the tiny amounts of money that I was playing with. But it was basically, yeah, it was this basic. Actually, the millionaire thing came from real estate, so I have to all of that. Oh, but, but, but it was that it just is inside of like, okay, everybody's talking about today and maybe tomorrow, I want to know about five years from now. And that's in the back of the newspaper in the science and technology sections. You know, when you find a few pieces in your closet that immediately become part of your regular rotation, that's been quince for me lately. I recently picked up this Italian leather crossbody bag that I've been carrying everywhere. It looks polished. It goes with basically everything and it's one of those pieces that makes an outfit feel

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27:53Walden's online programs are designed for working professionals like you. You'll gain hands-on skills to take on real-world challenges and succeed. Your future is waiting and Walden is here to help you achieve it. Take the first step to make your impact. Visit WaldenU.edu. Walden University, set a course for change. Certified to operate by chef. Do you think everyone should have a little bit of a speculative portfolio in addition to like their 401k? If they have extra... I get this question a lot, Joseph. It's like, I'm doing all the things. I have my 401k. I have an O'Roughlyer right. I have a savings account. I... I'm paying all my bills on time. I don't have any debt. I'm getting an inheritance or I'm getting a raise. What should I do with this money that's not going to be necessarily lifestyle creepy? But that I want to put my money to work. And I wonder, you know, we have Jim Kramer in common for different reasons. I used to work with him. He used to short-hist stockpicks as some of them.

28:56And we would talk about speculative plays as part of like a healthy way of kind of diversifying your approach to investing. It's not your primary way of investing. But if you have... It's like a game. If you like baseball, maybe you'll be... You know, it's like that. I think everyone would be a strong word. That's probably a bridge too far from me because I know plenty of people who don't want to think about money ever. And they just want it to work. So for those folks, no. I mean, just, you know, but there are people who have the itch. And if you have the itch, you know what I'm talking about. Like this just sense that maybe you could know something or see something others don't see. And usually that doesn't end well. We can talk about you can't actually beat the market by the way. That is a doable thing. But do you really want to? Let's say you really want to, then sure. You need to take one to five percent of your net worth and put it in a... But draw a red line that you never cross. It never becomes your big thing. Just to get it out of your system bluntly. Yeah.

29:56You kind of like teased this. And I want to know what, how do you beat the market? My father, who's a physicist, is in retirement. And he's been just kind of, you know, toying with apps a lot of his last few years because he can. And he likes to do it. And he's like, I think I've developed it out that can beat the market. I feel like Charles Schwab would have beat you to it. But go ahead. Let me see. Dad definitely needs to keep the one to five percent red line in place so that everything doesn't go in on this thing. Right. And that's a good lesson of history too. By the way, people who think they figured out how to beat the market. You can. The problem is it's episodic. And so whatever here's a general rule of thumb about all investments. The more it works, the more people will do it. And the more people who do it, the less it will work. And so anybody who finds the glitches in the matrix, eventually people pile onto that assumption that assumption has to carry a ton of weight. And it changes the very nature of what the market is. And therefore it eventually changes the wishes. I can see this all the way to Iowa farmland.

30:56Right. So if you find something that works, that's great. Do it till it stops working. Okay. Can you beat the market? If I go into Barnes and Noble and I close my eyes and I reach up on a gravel, what kind of shelf? Nine out of 10 shot. It's going to say buckle up and buy an index fund. Because you can't beat the market. The other one in 10 is Robert Kiyosaki's rich headboard. Right. Like everything else is going to be like buckle up by the index fund. And now for 199 pages, I've got to make you this interesting and fun for you. They all have the same assumption. You can't beat the market. Actually, there's been some studies that show people do beat the market. So one of them, for instance, showed that fund managers who control $600 billion or more. Do indeed beat the market by one half of 1%. So they buy better than everybody else, but they tend to sell slightly worse. And that averages out to one half of 1%. On $600 billion, that's a lot of money. If I take that exact strategy and I put it on the average 401k balance, you can get an extra four to $600 a year for the work,

31:59which is like a night of a hotel in Miami and hurricane season. What did you do to get that? What are those fund managers do? They worked, they went to Yale, paid four years of tuition. They had a grueling internship. They worked 70 to 80 hour weeks. And you do that for the extra three to four to $500. Right? It's not worth it. To illustrate this, I took on Jim Kramer. So there's a famous econ paper called the Kramer Bounce. And it shows it under a very strict set of criteria. I have to say over and over, not everything he says, a very strict set of criteria. When Jim Kramer recommends to buy a stock, it will bounce for 50 to 55 days. You can short it, it will come back to earth and you can make the money. So for three months of my life, I sat glued to the television watching mad money, trying to wait for all this to happen. And technically, now net a fees because I was playing with not that much money. But net a fees I lost. But I actually beat the market on my trades. Wow. While I am staring at Jim yelling at me like I am a child, setting off a alarm sirens.

33:00I hear my wife, Holler, come quick. She's doing it. And I missed my daughter's first steps. Oh. So you can beat the market. Is it worth it? It's not worth it. Yeah. Like for what you would actually get out of it as the average American. When you would, the margin you would squeeze out is like 500 bucks. Yeah. So what are we doing here? So index funds all the way. Still all those books. Oh. So, so here's the problem is I have another controversial essay coming out. Taking on index funds called the index fund was an American revolution. When will it turn French? And you know, like when when will the guillotine stop chopping off head? So I have some thoughts on that that probably are not ready for prime time. But I think I think I own index funds. I think they're perfectly safe vehicle for a solid chunk of your retirement. I but I do think we are we are like what I said earlier. When everyone piles into the same investing assumption, that investing assumption has to carry more and more weight. And the more weight it carries, the more it changes the dynamic of the market.

34:02And eventually that assumption will break. And we've seen that for 300 years. Has that also proven true for real estate? Because I feel like you said earlier real estate wasn't to this asset that grew in value. And then it started to and then the lens through which people were looking at real estate probably changed to like this is this is something to buy and trade as opposed to buy and hold. Yeah. There's three myths about real estate. Number one, it always goes up. Number two, it's passive. And number three, this is how the really big fortunes get made. No, it didn't. No, it isn't. No, they didn't. So if you go to now put New York and LA off on the shelf because they're kind of different ecosystems. But if you go to most American cities, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Atlanta, Houston, just you know, rattle off all the nations major mid cities. A home in the 1990s cost the same inflation adjusted as it had in the 1890s. For 100 years, most American cities real estate did not go up in value.

35:07It was just it just it just tracked inflation. And so there's these myths about real estate that this is and that's by the way, not one of the top 100 fortunes in the world or America were made in real estate. That's just not where the big money is. Now, why what people thought for most of history was that you could make real estate more valuable. It was a good investment, but you had to make it more valuable. That's what we started with lunar land, right? You would actually have to oxygenate the moon to make my acre on the sea of serenity worth something more. You know, right now when I get as a good cocktail party story, but like to actually in like flip it, I've got to do something to it. Johnny Appleceed is famous for doing this. Like what he was really doing was going in land improvements and flipping land. So the assumption for most of history was if you want to invest in real estate, you can, but you have to do something to it to make it more valuable. Now what has happened starting late in the 90s and then just put on steroids by the 2008 crisis was that we stopped building enough land and really what we stopped doing was zoning enough land.

36:11So we simply don't have enough land and on that land houses. And therefore we have a shortage with a supply issue. And that is, it's made something unique. Since 2008, we have a national home market, a national real estate market. I think that's starting to break apart, but that would, nobody thought about that for 250 years. Americans did not think, you know, housing is national. No, it was always local. I think it is still very local in some ways. You could still make that argument. I mean, just based on the fragmentation of, of, and you said New York L.A., I feel like it's so many more areas too that are hot versus not. And of course New York L.A. are like the hottest, but I live in New Jersey. And my town is the second hottest town in the country somehow for property values. But we're not, you know, it's, it's, so it's like already in a bubble. What's going on? No, there's nothing to sell. And so the two homes that come on the market, they will, you know, they'll sell in a fire in a bidding war.

37:17So that's very different than, you know, three zip codes away in the same state. So it's just really interesting. Yeah, that's all, and that is, that is historically the norm is that real estate would be extremely local. And no one thought about the national housing market until after really the, the lead up to the 08 bubble and after. So no, it's, it, real estate is a very misunderstood asset class. I have a lot of people who tell me like, because I made a lot of money in real estate. One of the experiments I did, by the way, we had housing shortages before. We do have a housing shortage in this country. Let me make no mistake. I will take anybody on Twitter who wants to argue with the, including who says there isn't wet wood. Oh, there's a few, and Clare, one guy who's pretty smart, I'm not going to name him, but he and I kind of went after a little bit. But like, I just, at the end of the day, there is a housing shortage, but it is not the first, nor is it the worst, the worst statistically was in the 1940s, like 1948, 50, when it was almost twice what it is today in terms of a shortage. Because all of these GIs coming back from war, there weren't enough houses.

38:18The houses we had were really crappy, thrown together condition from the war. And so a young man returns from World War II and decides to run for Congress. His number one platform issue is housing affordability for his generation. His name is John F. Kennedy. So, like, there was, that's how big an issue it was. It launched JFK into national, you know, his family was rich and all that, but like, that's his big issue. Interesting. In 1981, because of interest rates, a brand new mortgage, 51% of household income. For the, for the median house, for the median family, if you bought that house with a median mortgage rate, you're taking over half of your paycheck to buy the house. It's not, today it's like 39, 38%. Like, it's high, but it's not that high. The title of your book is How to Get Rich in American History. Joseph, have you noticed too that our idea of what it means to be rich has also evolved over these last 300 years? Because if you wrote this book How to Get Rich, you know,

39:20it's like, well, what's driving people to even want to get rich? What is their definition of rich? Now we're talking about the first trillionaire, you know, making six figures was rich, you know, 20 years ago. Now that's not even middle class, depending on where you live. You can't even buy a house or rent a house for that, for that matter. The cost living has soared. So like, talk a little bit about what you've unearthed about this concept of richness and rich. So in the book, I talk about what the phrase used to be compared to what it is today. We say nobody can get ahead. What they talked about was go ahead. They changed the way the verb worked was that you actually had to get up and go and do it. And we've now kind of transitioned our mindset. It's something that happens to you. Instead of this idea that it's something you go out and you happen to it. And as self-help is that may sound, look, I'm an academic at heart. You know, I'm a humanities professor. Self-help is stuff kind of makes me cringe. And yet sometimes some of it does hold true.

40:22What the general definition was was it was never a rarely defined by a number. It was defined by getting from where you were to where you wanted to be for you and your family. And there was a way to get to something better financially, more stable, with more resources, with more abundance, whatever it was. And most families believe they could go ahead. They could act a Frederick Douglass, the famous abolitionist. His most, the speech we all remember is what to the slave is the fourth of July. It's an incredible speech with teaching in schools. I have taught that speech. But that was not even close to his most famous speech in his lifetime. Everywhere he went around the country, people would ask him to give the speech called self-made men. Now he didn't mean it gendered. It was men and women is what he's talking about. And the crescendo line of his speech was our motto as Americans is go ahead. I can be prosperous. Prosperous wasn't defined by a number. It was defined by a pursuit of something better. And think about his audience, half of whom used to be slaves.

41:23And people are calling out for the speech like it's a rock concert when he shows up in town. Do self-made men! Like that is that go ahead spirit. This sense that I can go from where I started to where I want to be. Now I think something probably pivoted. I think I put it in the cable era with like lifestyles of the rich and famous. Remember that show? Oh Robin Leach. Yes. This is lifestyles of the rich and famous. Lifestyles of the rich and famous. Yes. Yes. And so there's been this kind of like commodification of wealth as something that you can consume as someone who's not themselves that wealthy. And as we've, you know, the algorithms has taken over it. I think a lot of that is noise. What most Americans want is to move from where they are to where they want to be. And that's infinitely doable. Far more than people think it is by the way. I make the argument in the book. There's actually historically speaking never been an easier time to get ahead than right now. Which you're not going to hear that on any channel, on any tick tock, you know, account nothing. Because it's true. It is historically the best time to get ahead is right now. So might as well get going.

42:24Get going. And we didn't even get into the benefits of being mobile. Yes. You know, that research, it was I think at the cover of the Atlantic. Mm-hmm. Where they looked at, you know, I didn't realize this. That there was actually a holiday called moving day in America. Yes. Yeah. It was in May. May 1st. May 1st. And it was this thing that you look forward to to sort of to your point, like go to go from a one bedroom, tenement apartment to a three bedroom, tenement apartment. And somewhere along the way, we just, you know, we lost interest in doing that. It's hugely, I have a chapter on this in the book. We're going to talk about immigration and like the importance of that. And we could, whatever your political opinions are, right? Being willing to get up and go, you know, the rewards in America have always gone to the strivers. Those willing to get up and go. And so, you know, I look in the book, I talk about 25 historical lessons that kind of stand the test of time. They work in every era, seven things that fail in every era. So don't do those. But I can summarize them pretty much as, you know, here's the big takeaway.

43:26Number one is you got to solve somebody else's problems. You know, most of our financial advice industry is built on solving your problems, which keeps you from going broke. It doesn't help you get rich. Most of the big monies in solving problems. The other one's risk more. We talked about that. The other one is we just talked about move more. One in five Americans used to change addresses every year as late as the 1950s. Wow. As late as the 50s. Today it is one in 13. And a lot of the one in that 13 is old people going to Arizona. So it's like, it's not people chasing what's next or chasing go ahead. It's they're done. They've gotten where they want to be. So we need more mobility. You live in the largest free market zone in the history of the world. There is an opportunity for you somewhere. The fourth is Mary Will. That's a, that's a, this one gets me in a lot of hot water. But like historically one of the clear lessons of history is the importance of marriage. Not just marrying into money, but marrying it as certain characteristics and character traits. And then finally, it's believing you can. We live in this pessimistic age.

44:26It's not doing anybody any good. And while everybody's getting told they can't get ahead, you might as well get up off your couch and try. Joseph Moore, thank you so much. I love this conversation. I want everyone to read your book. How to get rich in American history. 300 years of financial advice that worked and did. And thank you for that quick summary. Thank you for all the storytelling. I'll be watching your lunar portfolio. Thank you for new shit. Thank you for everything you do to help people summit. You do so much good in the world and like help people figure out what's next. And you know, figure out what to do with their money and how to get ahead. So thank you for helping them. And it's really a pleasure to be on your show. Thank you so much. Thanks so much to Joseph Moore for joining us. His book is How to Get Rich in American History. 300 years of financial advice that worked and didn't. I'll see you back here on Friday for Ask Far News. And I hope your day is so money. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

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