Joseph Moore: How to Get Rich in American History: 300 Years of Financial Advice That Worked (& Didn’t) | #639

**Joseph Moore** (0:00)
In the book, I quote a grandfather sitting his grandson down and saying, now, I want you to understand, grandson, never save money. Like, get it out of your hands as fast as you can. Real estate did not always go up. A residential home in Pittsburgh, in Atlanta, in Houston, in most American cities, cost the same inflation adjusted in the 1990s as it had in the 1890s. Human traffickers moved into the house. We had hoarders with rats in one of the apartments. The hoarders pulled a shotgun on me. I had to leap out of the deck to try to run to my car to get away. It was like, oh my gosh. We have this idea that stocks always beat bonds. And recently some academics have gone back and put together the real databases for this and found out that is not true.
While I am having Jim Cramer yell at me like I am a child, I hear my wife holler, come quick, she's doing it. And I missed my daughter's first steps.

**Meb Faber** (0:58)
Welcome to a special series of The Meb Faber Show on the past, present and future of America. I'm sitting down with some of the most notable historians, thinkers, investors in US financial history, all tied to my new coffee table book, Investing in America, The Rise of a 250-Year Bull Market, out July 4th.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:19)
Meb Faber is the co-founder and chief investment officer at Cambria Investment Management.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:22)
Due to industry regulations, he will not discuss any of Cambria's funds on this podcast. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Cambria Investment Management or its affiliates.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:30)
For more information, visit cambriainvestments.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:37)
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**Meb Faber** (2:04)
Welcome back everybody. Happy summertime. Hopefully you're surviving the heat.

**Meb Faber** (2:10)
Today's guest is Dr. Joseph Moore, historian, former professor, spent over a decade in the archives studying 300 years of American financial advice and history. He explains in his new bestselling book, one of my favorite books of the year, How to Get Rich in American History, 300 years of financial advice that worked and didn't. Joseph, welcome to the show.

**Joseph Moore** (2:32)
I'm so glad to be here.

**Meb Faber** (2:33)
I figured we'd start with just thinking about currencies, thinking about how people historically, the relationship to money in the 19th and the 20th century, the concept of saving and investing, which it feels quite a bit different than the narrative today.
It's a pretty broad-based question. I'll let you kind of get started on it and think about. But the main concept in my mind was that a lot of people didn't want to hang out in the currencies for too long because most of them didn't last.

**Joseph Moore** (3:10)
So one of the things I really wanted to do with this book was explain how to really think about change over time, which is what historians do. And most popular histories don't really wrestle with the idea of time and how much change occurs in every era and how you can't necessarily just compare one era to another because that era offered with totally different fundamentals than we have today. And so in the way that kind of the behavioral economists, Morgan Housel, Daniel Crosby, some of these folks who have kind of explained how psychology kind of disrupts the idea of the rational investor, I wanted to disrupt the idea that you can just easily compare times without understanding how the fundamentals have shifted over time. And money is one of the biggest of those. So as the cryptocurrency rage got started, I was the person in the back with my hand up going, we've done this before, we've had this before. And I was like, no, this is new. This is the future. I was like, this is the past. So if you go to the 1800s, the United States does not print money. The federal government does not print money. It's not something it does.
It offloads that in various ways to banks and even to individuals and companies. And you can find these on auctions today. You can find, you know, I own a $20 bill from the Canal Bank of New Orleans. And money was issued on the authority of the issuer. And as long as that person could redeem it for whatever they would redeem it for, be it other dollar bills or be it gold or silver or silverware or your wife's wedding ring, as long as you could give someone something for it, you could issue money with it. And this is how people got paid. And the people who learned quickly how that worked, this is the advice you'd get from your grandparents. Don't save money.