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

**Farnoosh Torabi** (0:00)
Hey, friends, if you've been sitting on a book idea and wondering could this actually become something, this is your moment. Join me in New York City on October 9th for Book to Brand. This is my intimate full-day immersive, designed to help you turn your idea into a clear, compelling, pitch-ready book concept. You will meet the insiders, agents, publishers, and recent authors who can help bring your book to life. Spots are limited, and early bird tickets are on sale now. Head to booktobrand.co to reserve your spot. So Money Episode 2030, How to Get Rich, 300 Years of Money Lessons.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:37)
You're listening to So Money with award-winning money guru Farnoosh Torabi. Each day, get a 30-minute dose of financial inspiration from the world's top business minds, authors, influencers, and from Farnoosh herself.

**Joseph Moore** (1:04)
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 $400 to $600 a year for the work, which is like a night of a hotel in Miami in hurricane season. What did you do to get that? What do those fund managers do? 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 3 to 4 to $500, right? It's not worth it.

**Farnoosh Torabi** (1:55)
Welcome to So Money, everyone. I'm Farnoosh Torabi, and my guest today owns land on the moon. Now, whether that land is going to fund his retirement is another question, but 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. He'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 Cramer's stock picks. 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.
Joseph Moore, Welcome to So Money.

**Joseph Moore** (3:32)
Oh, I am so excited to be here, Farnoosh. Thank you for having me.

**Farnoosh Torabi** (3:34)
All right, we got to start with this little factoid that you 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 this 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.

**Joseph Moore** (3:54)
Lunar land was not on your bingo card? Yeah.
Okay, so 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 as 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 Goodyear Blimp would take you there. So some of the facts had not been ironed out. But people started rushing in to notary publics 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.