Historian Joseph Moore Wants You to Know It's Never Been Easier to Get Ahead in America

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