Christian Foundations of American Prosperity (w/ Joseph Moore)

On this episode, we’re joined by Joseph Moore.  

Joseph Moore is an author, historian, and investor whose self-experimentation with history’s wildest financial strategies made him financially independent in his mid-40s.

His writing blends deep, unconventional insights with some of history’s most hilarious stories and has appeared through HarperCollins, The New York Times, and other major outlets. His first book, from Oxford University Press, was praised as “extraordinary” and “witty.”

He’s the author of the new book, How to Get Rich in American History: 300 Years of Financial Advice that Worked (And didn’t).

https://www.josephmoorebooks.com/

Christian Business Leader is the podcast for marketplace Christians seeking to explore and apply God’s will for business for the purpose of cultivating Christ-Centered Companies.

Full Episode Transcript

Heads up: This transcript was created with AI, so you might notice a few typos or small mistakes. We recommend listening to the episode for the best experience!  

SPEAKER_01 0:02
Welcome to the Christian Business Leader Podcast, where Christ following business leaders explore God’s will and ways for business. This show is a ministry of the Center for Christianity and Business at Houston Christian University and features conversations with today’s Christ-centered business leaders who are representing Christ faithfully in the business world. I’m your host, Darren Scheer, and if you want to make your work, leadership, and company’s culture more Christ-centered, you’ve come to the right place. On this episode, we’re joined by Joseph Moore. Joseph is an author, historian, and investor whose self-experimentation with history’s wildest financial strategies made him financially independent in his mid-40s. His writing blends deep, unconventional insights with some of history’s most hilarious stories and has appeared through HarperCollins, The New York Times, and other major outlets. And he’s the author of the new book, How to Get Rich in American History: 300 Years of Financial Advice That Worked and Didn’t. Joseph, welcome to the Christian Business Leader Podcast.

SPEAKER_00 1:09
Darren, I’m so glad to be here. And I’m getting to celebrate with you. It’s one of the first shows I’ve done since we hit the national bestseller list. So um yeah, this is a really exciting week to be talking to people about this uh this this content. So thanks for taking some time. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 1:23
That’s huge. Well, as a book publisher, I know that that is a mountaintop experience for an author. So congrats on that. So, Joseph, when did you first realize God wants to be involved in your work and business?

SPEAKER_00 1:38
It’s a great question. Um, yeah, I was raised uh in a Presbyterian family. So, you know, one of the great things about Presbyterians is we’re we’re pretty sure that God’s got it under control no matter what. So don’t be too anxious about anything, right? I think the thing I’ve heard my grandmother say more than anything else was that uh it’s all predestined, so calm down. Now, whether or not you agree that theology is kind of not the point, but I think there is this kind of spiritual calm that comes from the sense that God’s got it, God’s under control. You’re pretty small, so don’t get worked up. And and so then with that freedom that comes from not being anxious, go ye therefore and prosper, right? Like go out and and do what you feel called to do. That’s one of the big uh theologies of Calvinism, is this idea of calling, right? Like uh that you need to you need to pursue your calling and pursue it with excellence and and just try to do the best you can. And God’s God is ultimately going to bring about what God wants for his glory anyway. And he’s not he’s not waiting for you to succeed or fail so he could decide if it’s gonna work out for him, right? Like, and so I I think that that that really informed my risk taking. Like that I knew that I was gonna take risks in business. You cannot make money without taking risks in business. And I did not know whether or not it would succeed. It wasn’t like, well, because I believe in God, therefore I will win. It was I have faith that God knows what is going to happen and that I it will be revealed to me in time, and it will all be for a higher purpose than just my success. And so I’m gonna try to do the best I can every day at what I’m doing to succeed, and we’ll see where it goes.

SPEAKER_01 3:16
Yeah. So you so there wasn’t a sense where I’ve got my business doings over here, and and then my church life is over here. And as as long as I’m making a profit, that’s what matters. Monday to Friday. On the weekends, you know, that’s that’s kind of where God fits in. But God, you saw God as being just permeating in everything that you were doing.

SPEAKER_00 3:41
Yeah, no, I think that the the the Calvinist uh theology of calling is really important, right? At least in my tradition, that you know, you are called to be excellent at the work God has called you. Maybe, maybe that’s being a brickmason or maybe that’s being a business leader. It doesn’t really matter. You’re called to excellence in the craft God has given you to be part of. And so I I don’t think of that as like, oh, on Monday we check out of that and we’ll come back again, you know, sometime Sunday morning. It it it’s it permeates the culture that you you kind of create around yourself, around the people you work with, around the people you employ, around the people that you have at home. I mean, it’s it’s part, it’s part and parcel of the life that you have built and and are trying to live.

SPEAKER_01 4:17
Yeah. So we figured out at the beginning of this, uh before we started to record that you and I are from rival high schools in the Columbia kind of mid-state uh South Carolina from back in the in the 90s. And and and and and but we had pretty different um upbringings, it sounds like. Right, right. Not not as an academic exercise.

SPEAKER_00 4:59
So right, uh so yeah, so the fact that this book is like an ode to the success of capitalism for everyday people is more surprising to me than to anyone else, because that’s not where I started. So, like if you’re I’m assuming your typical audience who’s in business are like pretty, pretty keen on the idea that business success is part of how people get ahead and it’s part of how what has made America a special place. And by the way, they are correct, but I did not start out believing they were correct. So, to my background, uh, one side of my family comes from the upstate of South Carolina around York, South Carolina, and then Gaston County, North Carolina. Sorry, we’re at the border region. And in the 1920s, uh in a place called Gastonia, North Carolina, in a place called LaRay Mill, there were workers in the mills who were getting upset about their working conditions and they formed a union. The American Communist Party sent uh organizers down to teach them the communist manifesto and strike tactics. And on of all things, April Fool’s Day, 1929, which is really a historically bad moment to pick, they they caused one of the largest labor strikes in American history. And it was a disaster, by the way. And like my family is from, when I say from there, like my great-grandmother was literally born in the mill village houses, no, no hospital, just in the houses. Um, and so there’s this small, very, very small minority of Southerners who kind of can trace back to that and still kind of have that anti-capitalism streak alive, if that makes sense. And so, like growing up, my dad would vote for communist for president in Lexington, South Carolina, which is risking your job. That’s not something like dad, keep that under your hat. You know, we don’t talk about that. Um, and so I went on to become kind of a lefty humanities professor, where I mean, I didn’t assign Adam Smith, I don’t think, once in my college teaching days, but I assigned Karl Marx on day one. And so, which is if you’re in if you become a PhD in history and you’re kind of live in the the wonky academic world, that’s just normal. This isn’t like I was a standout. This is like, oh what, me and the act, the academy really does kind of like start in the middle left and then go out to the extreme left. And it’s just a matter of finding where you fit in that in that spectrum. And so I was uh I was a you know, lefty humanities history professor, assigning telling, telling students that the American dream is not real. It’s a big fad, uh sorry, a big uh fraud perpetrated on you to keep your eyes off your chains. I’ve lectured on this, you know. And so I actually have students who’ve reached out to me like, wait a minute, you told me the opposite when I took your class. And now you’re like, you’re talking about how great capitalism is. Well, here’s what happened. I started out on this research project to understand what Americans had been told about money for 300 years, assuming I was going to write a takedown on all of it and that it was all a scam. And everywhere I turned, the research kept going in the other direction, right? I mean, you can torture the data all you want and make it say what you want, but at some point you realize you’re the one doing the torturing of the data. And I had to start admitting I’m finding all these people throughout American history, succeeding when I thought they wouldn’t, overcoming what I thought they couldn’t. And this went up to the present day. And I was interviewing people like business people across the country, uh, and realizing these people have actually succeeded too. And they didn’t cheat, they didn’t break the rules. They actually are better people. There, they see primarily the way they got ahead as serving the needs of their customers. They’re actually getting rich, helping other people. This doesn’t compute, right? And so at some point uh in the research, I started to self-experiment with the financial strategy of the past in the present, thinking this would be a good way to kind of test out history’s lessons. And one thing led to another, before I knew it, against my better judgment, I was now a business person, which was not the plan, right? Like I now owned a business and I realized that investing is mostly running things like a business. And it took doing all that for me to start to realize I’ve been wrong. And if you actually want the real lesson of history, it’s that capitalism has done more to advance the cause of everyday people living great successful lives than anything in the history of the world. That the United States is a peculiarly blessed nation where people have seen the fruits of that labor in a way they never would have before. And and we actually do live in a blessed place and a blessed time. And that had that forced me to write a book that I wasn’t planning to write, which was that everyday people really can and do go ahead all the time.

SPEAKER_01 9:15
Yeah, yeah. And and so I typically think of Marxism as being kind of yoked with with atheism. Have you found that? Was that but that wasn’t the case in in your life because you were you still were a follower of Christ, or at least a believer in Christ, and you believed in the sovereignty of God, and but communism doesn’t exactly square with the scripture or certain ways to what you’re saying is completely correct about 90 plus percent of the time.

SPEAKER_00 9:49
And I just happen to be in that small single-digit minority where it was not. So there are strains of Christian Marxists, that’s just a thing. And so, you know, if you go to the late 1800s, there’s these uh, especially Catholic priests who were who were both labor-organizing radicals and then doing mass for the labor organizers who had struck from the bills. So there’s these like small minority strains, especially in the progressive era. So we forget how Christian the 19 teens and 20s were when many of those political policies were with what we would call today somewhat hardcore to the left. So there are these minority strains in history of Christian leftism, uh political left, uh, but still Christian. And they’re not, they’re not the majority. You’re completely correct about that. The vast majority of Marxism has been at war with faith traditions throughout Europe, throughout Asia, throughout America, but there are smaller strains that I just happen to be pocketed in one of those. Where now that I should point out though, that the other half, you know, I was talking about my dad’s side of the family. There’s another half of my family, which was my mother’s side. My mother was like playing the organ in church every single Sunday, and we were there every single Sunday when they opened, when they closed. So, you know, I was kind of getting my political ideology from one side of my family and my faith ideology from another. If that does that make sense, it’s so you know, we don’t always we don’t always fit into neat boxes like we’re supposed to. That was my experience.

SPEAKER_01 11:16
So interesting. So in your in your research over the last several decades and and in particular particular writing this book, how have you noticed Christianity in the church shaping views about wealth building over the past 300 years?

SPEAKER_00 11:31
Yeah, well, let’s start back with this idea that there’s a wide diversity of Christianity. So, like, you know, you and I will both could both rattle off friends of ours who are people of faith, Christ followers from wildly divergent theological traditions, right? And and thankfully, we live in an era where that’s okay. We forget that there used to be times when the those disagreements could get really violent. Uh, and we are thankful to live in an era when some of my best Christian friends don’t go to a church anything like the church that I go to, right? And so if you take theology, if you think theology is is important and you take it seriously, then what you would expect to find is what you find, which is that different Christian theologies kind of veer to different views of money and different views of wealth building. So I have uh I have, of course, growing up in the deep south, as you did, uh, I had plenty of friends whose faith tradition was very revivalistic. It was very, you know, Turner Byrne. And as they would say famously, you do not polish the brass on a sinking ship, right? We are not here for this world, we are here for the next. And what we find is that faith traditions like that tend to also not build a lot of wealth in the in the current era because they’re putting their faith right where they say they are putting it, right? And they’re putting their energy behind it. And that’s why some of those traditions tend to lag behind financially, other traditions. Now, on the other end of the spectrum, you have faith traditions, and again, this is like Presbyterianism is one of these, right? That that is is kind of trying to live in this balance between the future and the present, right? The present God has put you in and the future glory that you’re pointing towards. And that sees life as very generational, that you’re, you know, the children and grandchildren are going to sing these hymns and psalms. We’re Presbyterians, so we sing psalms, right? So, you know, they’re gonna sing these psalms and these hymns one day. And so you are trying to build out a life that leaves them a legacy so they can, they can also continue in perpetuity this mission on on earth of sharing the gospel, living a life of calling. And so that’s a long-winded way of saying there’s not one Christian way that Christians have handled money. There’s different traditions with different the from different theologies. Most mainline Protestant Christians tend to be in that camp I was just talking about. It’s kind of the now and the not yet. Yes, there is a future, yes, there is an eternity that we’re pointing towards. But for right now, we have been told to be diligent in this field, to grow, you know, to grow crops on this field. I’m using that, of course, metaphorically. And and and that that sense of calling that actually does highly correspond to wealth building. And so what we find is that main like Christian traditions in that kind of wide swath in the middle are actually outperform other groups, including, by the way, atheists, for financial success. We would think that like if financial success is a secular phenomenon, well, then shouldn’t atheists be the number one financial producers? And they are not, and it’s not close. Uh, it’s actually those people who take faith very seriously, but whose faith teaches them this kind of now and not yet balance of being diligent caretakers of the world God has put them in charge of for now.

SPEAKER_01 14:43
Yeah. So have you noticed that that the Presbyterian Puritan theology work ethic has has really made an outsize influence on overall economic understanding in this country over the last 300 years? I mean, certainly there are uh there are exceptions and and those that have more of an escapist view, like if we’re just talking about Christians specifically, and and and more of a view of you know, this world is not our home, so we’re gonna sell everything we have, we’re gonna be, you know, have social gospel, um, which that was um that was back right around like the 20s, like you were talking about, that led to a lot of the the labor unions and and the temperance movement. Um, but but what what if what would you say would be the predominant theological views that have informed our economic views overall in this country?

SPEAKER_00 15:45
Yeah, well, Puritanism has a very long shadow, right? And so um you know it’s it’s kind of popular to kind of push that off to the side right now and kind of the historical narratives, but you know, I used to point out to students that if you actually look at the uh the genealogical lineage of pretty much everyone who moved to the Midwest, so Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, like everything except Minnesota, most of those people were coming from Puritan, New England. Like they could almost all trace their ancestry back to the first or some of the first uh ships arriving in New England. So Puritanism really stamped the American consciousness on in terms of what the role of the individual person and the community and the economy should be. This idea of mutuality, uh, this idea of uh of service, this idea of economic freedom, like some degree of ability to pursue one’s calling and to go where that opportunity would be. Um, now, you know, we don’t want to say like all financial success is Christian because that wouldn’t be factually true. Like there’s plenty of uh, I know plenty of broke Christians and I know plenty of plenty of rich, you know, Buddhists. I mean, like there’s there’s there’s money that people make in all kinds of systems. But in terms of setting the field of play, think about like the game of, you know, whatever game you play, baseball, football. There’s rules, and everybody knows those rules. And some of the rules are very explicit, and some of them are just traditions, but we all kind of know what we’re supposed to be doing on this field. And the the long shadow of Puritan theology about how Christians operate in the world, kind of set the rules of the game in many aspects of the American economy for centuries to come, even for those who weren’t themselves Puritans or Christians. And so I think we we we need to to to be aware of that, that we’re living kind of in under the benefit of the way they kind of set the system up.

SPEAKER_01 17:38
Yeah, yeah. One of the observations that I I found really fascinating that you pointed out is something that we’ve really missed about Frederick Douglass. Um what was that? And probably a lot, I’m sure.

SPEAKER_00 17:54
Yeah, well, it’s I mean, you know, Douglas is certainly one of the most important American uh speakers of all time, I mean, and should be. And we teach uh in class uh his high schools, colleges, what to the slave is the fourth of July speech. That’s an important speech, and by the way, one that all Christians have to wrestle with. I think if you’re oh not all Christians, all American Christians have to wrestle with. Like, okay, if if if I say that this benefit of freedom is for everyone, then you know, at some point I got to wrestle with the fact that it wasn’t a benefit for everyone, and we need to, and we need to be aware of it. And yet that was not the most famous speech that he ever gave, and not even close. Everywhere he went, white audiences and black audiences begged him to give the speech. What to the uh sorry, get begged him to give the speech, self-made men. And people would call this out from the stands, you know, like you’re at a rock concert, like play whatever song, you know. They would have like, yeah, freeware. Like they were like, do self-made men, right? That was his most popular speech. All right, well, what is that speech about? And he says, our motto as Americans is go ahead. I can be prosperous. And think about the audience that he’s giving that speech to, right? This is the half of the half of the the audience literally were slaves. And so we we have, I think, looked back on our history and made it much more negative in and whereas the people living it were much more optimistic. Like they were, they were for fo they were forward-facing to our you know, to a future where they could actually succeed, they could actually go ahead, and they believed they could, and they often did, and they did at rates that blew the rest of the world away. You know, the reason all those boats were teaming with people coming in from China, coming in from Italy, coming in from Scotland, is because Americans were getting ahead, or to use Frederick Douglass’s phrase, going ahead, they were going ahead at rates that were wildly, wildly more common than they were in Europe and China. So, whereas the upward bound of upward mobility in 19th century Europe was like 20, sometimes a little higher than 20%, that was the lowest bound in any American city. And there were places Americans, three out of 10, 4 out of 10, even five out of 10 born at the bottom were making it up. And so uh we we’ve forgotten just how optimistic Americans used to be against much, much harder circumstances than we face.

SPEAKER_01 20:13
Yeah. It’s so surprising that that would be the predominant emphasis of his message on on being a self-made man, considering the atrocity that had been perpetrated against a whole race of people. I mean, you would you would think that his overall focus would be on uh the injustices, which uh a lot of it was for sure, but from from what I’m hearing you say, the the the predominant character of his message was on this message of being a self-made man and pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps and and the kinds of things that um are uncomfortable for a lot of people to to hear today, especially in view of an injustice like slavery.

SPEAKER_00 21:04
Well, I mean, that’s what that was an injustice of of immense magnitude compared to anything else we can come up with today, right? Right. And yet their message and and Douglas’s brilliance, and by the way, you know, it worked out some and it didn’t work out in other places, but it nonetheless, his brilliance was to understand a grievance culture is looking backward in time and a growth culture is looking forward in time. And for the people that he wanted to see go ahead in the world, the only way was to go forward. And and some grievances are completely legitimate, and yet we have to deal with them while trying to move forward, not backward. And I think that’s one of the great misunderstandings of the current era is that we we want to kind of use history as a thing to obsess on so that we don’t have to focus on going forward. And and look, I’ve been as guilty of that, literally been as guilty of that as anyone. I’ve written lectures that sound very much like what I just critiqued. But over and over in American history and in the present, the people most likely to go ahead were the people who got. And went ahead, and who believed that they could. And that sounds very self-helpy, which you know, I think we all have kind of a little bit of a gag reflex against too much self-helpy, you know, optimism mindset kind of stuff. Here’s the problem the statistics play out that it actually works. So the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau did two studies, and they found that the single biggest predictor of financial wellness, and it outperformed income, and it outperformed inheritance, was a positive attitude combined with a habit of saving. Like just believing you could get ahead, and then taking the steps to start getting ahead was more predictive of income or inheritance that for getting ahead. And then somebody else went back and did another study of 150,000 financial accounts and found that that was strongest for the poor. So the anything that disempowers people that makes them think they cannot get ahead is hurting them. And Douglas’s brilliance was to understand as hard as my audience has had it, I have to point them to the future because the future is where the rewards are.

SPEAKER_01 23:01
Yeah. Wow. One of the other observations you’ve made is the role of marriage in building wealth. Um, what would you say about that?

SPEAKER_00 23:11
So you do not pick the family you start with, which makes the family you start the single most important financial decision of your entire life. And and everyone in history knew this, by the way. This is not new to us. This was very old wisdom. The single most common financial advice you would find throughout American history was not picking a stock, it was picking a spouse. Um now, why is that? Because over and over again, families understood this was the big financial decision that every family had to make, both for the male and the female. And so there’s a card game that in the 1840s families would play. They’d sit around at night. And keep in mind, they’re again longer work days than we face, and they don’t have electrical lighting. So if they’re sitting around by oil lamps or candlelight or by the fire, and families are playing a card game, but this card game has like attributes of a spouse. It’s like a 19th-century hot or not. And and parents are playing this with the kids. And the goal is to like figure out you know what? If I end up with the bad breath card, but I also got the work ethic card, maybe that’s okay. And like maybe I could win the game. And so the the goal here was like families wanted to teach their children your spouse is the most important win of your life because a bad marriage can destroy your finances then and now, and a successful marriage can catapult you. And that is still a truth today. And so I think we’ve we have, I think the era we’re in is I I hate the word unprecedented because I tell people like everything you tell me is unprecedented, and I can find every other era. But maybe one of the few is the breakdown of the of the ideal of marriage as something to pursue. Because earlier generations would have told us it was going to end exactly where we’re going, which is lower home ownership rates, you know, less financial stability, because marriage is designed to provide that kind of stable launching pad for success. Um, this is still true today. Marriage confounds everything you can throw at it for financial success. Married black men earn more than single white men. Married women earn more than single women. Married men at retirement have 10x the net worth of single or divorced men. So marriage then and now is a superpower because capitalism is a team sport. And trust me, you want to play with two players.

SPEAKER_01 25:24
Yeah. Yeah. So that’s that’s one of the that’s something that’s new. Like you said, there’s not a lot that’s new. Uh Solomon said there’s nothing new under the sun, but at least in America’s relatively short history, this breakdown of the family unit is going to make a significant impact on people’s financial future going forward. Uh, I mean, do you think do you think uh younger folks are gonna be okay going forward? I mean, considering this trend, considering AI uh replacing people’s jobs, um, what because I know that you you’re you’re pretty bullish on despite all that’s going on. I mean, Americans have overcome a lot, uh, but there’s some pretty pretty daunting things in our present.

SPEAKER_00 26:17
Yeah, so there’s a couple of things in there. So we break them down. One, we’ll talk about young people in marriage and maybe pivot to tech technology. Uh young people in marriage, I because I’ve taught a lot of college through the years, and I get kids coming up to me and asking questions. I’m like, look, I would not want to have to date in your era, but I will tell you this, you only need one. Like, that’s that’s universal. And so, you know, I I’m not the person to dispense dating advice, but I am, I am, I would tell people to like, yeah, especially young people, like, you need one good one, and you can find one good one. And so, whatever, and and the the rewards to finding one good one are actually going up. Like the rewards for marriage are actually increasing, not decreasing. The less people do it, the more the people who do it and who do it successfully get a larger and larger section of a segment of the pie. And so the the good example of this I talk about in the book is that believe it or not, upper middle class marriages are starting to resemble working class marriages from history. Because one of the great misconceptions is that men and you know, men used to work and women stayed at home. That’s just not true. It’s it is a what happened is there’s a kind of blip of time when factory jobs are all in a factory and you know the suburban housewife ideal pops up. But if you go back to working class families in the 1800s, nobody didn’t work. Everyone worked all the time, right? Even the kids are working. I mean, you’re on a farm, there’s no not working. And uh, and so families were constantly working, and we we’ve been able to track, historians have been able to track that. And they’ve realized that wives’ income, it’s like husbands basically would make enough to survive on. And then wives would find ways to create income for the family with butter churning, selling eggs in markets. They would rent out rooms in the house called taking on borders. This was, by the way, the primary mortgage payoff strategy for most of American history, and it was entirely run by women, right? They’re doing all this labor, but we don’t say it’s income, right? Because they’re not taking it from an employer, but they’re about 10, 15, or in some cases 20% of the family take-home pay. And that is the energy from the wife, like the Proverbs 31 woman. It is her income that is the difference from most American families between surviving and thriving. So the families that we find saving, investing, buying houses, paying off houses, that’s families where the woman is making up that 10, 15, 20% margin that’s leaping them ahead. And so now in the modern era, families that are marrying are largely becoming upper middle class because they have two incomes, right? They’re they have two people succeeding, and they have people who can support one another. They can say, hey, you want to take this business risk, which happened to me. This literally happened to me, right? Like you see this business opportunity, you’ve laid it out in front of, I’m talking, I’m in the voice of my wife here, right? Like you’ve laid it out in front of me. Okay, take the risk because I have a job. I’ll help us make if it goes wrong, we’ll be okay. Take the risk. And that risk paid out literally millions of dollars over the course of my life. All because my wife was like, yes, I’m here to support you taking that risk. And that is actually an old working class family model. Um, and so we’re seeing bigger rewards from marriage than we’ve ever seen because less and less people are doing it. All right, that’s the first part. Second part is AI. Believe it or not, most of the tech, most of the money in technological revolutions is made working in it, not investing in it, because most technological revolutions don’t do nearly what the advertisements say they will. Uh, the the big thing was canal building in the 1800s. Like the Erie Canal opened, and suddenly every city in America was gonna have a canal going all the way to Nebraska. And so investors pour into this. It’s the future. 93% of the money went to zero, like absolute total loss. The people who made the real money were the people who suddenly had all these increased wages digging ditches. And this is what you’re seeing now with AI, right? Like there’s there’s electricians making$200 plus thousand dollars a year, and they can’t keep them on the job sites to build the data centers because they’re getting poached to another data center. So there’s a lot of opportunity in these technological revolutions for young people, especially in the trades, to like really pursue wealth. Um, and this comes to what I talk about in the book. One of the parts of the book that a lot of business people and financial people are responding really strongly to is a chapter on fat, what I call fast time and slow time. And in fact, we have this idea that all financial history is fast time, right? AI is going to move everything so fast, right? It’s all changing everywhere all at once. It’s always 1929, it’s always 2008. And all the smart people saw it coming, and the rest of us, you just don’t want to get killed by not seeing it coming. Here’s the problem with that history: it is not written to teach you what to do with your money. It is written to entertain you. These are these are murder mysteries. Like you are supposed to watch the screen or flip the page and go, he’s behind you. The subprime mortgage lender is behind you, run away from the mortgage, right? Like you it is there for your entertainment. But most history is most financial history is lived in what I call slow time, where the decisions that you get that you make, who do you marry? What job do you choose, what profession, how good do you choose to get in that profession? How what do you get addicted to? What how what lifestyle choices do you arrange so that when fast time comes and it is stress tested, you have the opportunity to go ahead while others are falling behind. And so for young people in AI, my encouragement is to not assume the future will get here tomorrow. It is going to get here. It is also going to take its time. And in the in between time, you can make a lot of money building the road to the future.

SPEAKER_01 31:35
Yeah, yeah. I mean, but you got Elon Musk saying five to six years, basically anything that can be replaced by AI will be replaced by AI, and and that um the that apps are gonna be a thing of the past, and and and it’s uh it’s a little scary, you know, for especially for he said basically if anyone who does their job at a computer gone um is is essentially what what he was saying. Um and so and then I’m thinking also about just how accessible everything becomes and how easy and convenient everything comes digitally at that point, that that people uh we already have such high rates of attention deficit and so on. It’s it’s gonna be so hard for so many people to be able to, like you’ve been talking about and they’ve been talking about throughout history, Frederick Douglass, to get up and go, get up and go do something to be to be self-made. Uh I mean, there’s there’s so much distraction now. And and so it seems like, don’t you think that gap is one of the the most significant challenges that future generations will have to overcome?

SPEAKER_00 32:54
It’ll be a challenge. Don’t hear me saying it’s not a challenge. That’s one of the things I have to tell people about my book is I’m not saying it’s not hard. I’m just saying it used to be a lot harder. So uh, and so I my thought on that is that, and I think you and I have the advantage that younger people don’t have of having lived through an adoption cycle or two. And once you’ve seen a radical new technology that’s going to change the world, take its time to change it, you start to see, oh, okay, yes, some of it was true, right? Um, that there’s no longer uh floor after floor after floor of Manhattan offices with typists in the middle of the room, which used to be a job. You know, computer used to be a job description, not a thing you have in your book bag, right? And so those jobs went away, but but only because of this. For AI to replace jobs, it must first increase our productivity. And for it to increase our productivity, it must make us richer. And so only when a only when a technology so increases productivity that it becomes more advantageous to use it than to not, and therefore creates new wealth with new margins, right? Then all that all those people who used to be doing those other jobs are able to find jobs doing something else. Now it’s not always the same person, and that’s where the the pain points. So when you are 25 years into a career that gets eliminated, and it’s hard to retrain for the new jobs. But the women of the 1940s were largely, I mean, one of the most popular jobs was telephone operator. Like you literally called the operator, right? And you said, I’d like to connect to this. And they would pull a thing and connect it over here, and then it’d go to Cincinnati and they’d connect it somewhere else. And what did away with that is the modern area code system that ATT invented, where they were like, okay, we’re gonna make 803, the first three digits, for the middle of South Carolina or whatever. And then you could suddenly hit the buttons and you could skip all those people, and it went right to the phone. Well, that did not lead women to mass unemployment. It made phones more productive, made them cheaper. It therefore made using technologies like the telephone more easily adopted for businesses, which then dropped rates of, you know, the it was just why we end up with not you, you and I remember making a long-distance phone call and it costing a lot of money, right? Like you’re yelling, mom yelling at you, get off the phone. It’s you know, that’s not a free call. And so for AI to change the world, it has to make us more productive. And if it makes us more productive, it’ll make us wealthier. And if it makes us wealthier, there will be opportunity somewhere.

SPEAKER_01 35:22
Yeah, yeah, that’s well said. I mean, again, there’s there’s nothing new under the sun, Solomon said it. And uh, and and so hopefully we don’t have to be that we shouldn’t be that scared about AI replacing uh. I mean, I my uh we do publishing, and so uh it’s it’s intimidating, I’ll say that. Uh, but we’re we’re still able to leverage a lot of the AI technology and benefits, um, but it at some point do we give up too much?

SPEAKER_00 35:54
And and then we kind of I definitely think that AI has, I think the real risk for AI for me is not about the the the the again, I think as an as a financial tool, it will probably be a net positive. The danger, and it’s all we were already dealing with it, AI is just gonna make it even more dramatic, is in the way we educate. And so we have to find a way, you know, and look, the calculator was supposedly gonna ruin the mass skills of Americans, and then we, you know, sent people to the moon. So it it ended up being okay. But we are risking leaning on these technologies too heavily to do all the training for young people so that they are not used to thinking without the tools, and therefore the tools are doing the thinking. And I do think for me, that’s one of my bigger concerns, and I that’s both as a as a historian, as a parent, you know, as a as a believer, like when you start to offload your cognitive burden so heavily that you don’t have one anymore, then you’re not doing the weightlifting, right? You get muscles by being in the gym, and we need young people who are building their mental muscles by actually doing the hard work of thinking. And as long as these tools help them do it better, that’s great. But if for you and I, it’s like a tool that enhances our skill set because we had to learn to write without it. We had to learn to do the math without it, we had to learn how to write a business plan without it. But when you’ve never done that and you only know how to tell the tool to do it, then there is an area that we need to watch out for.

SPEAKER_01 37:21
Yes. So the book is How to Get Rich in American History 300 Years of Financial Advice That Worked and Didn’t Already a national bestseller, I believe. Was it on which list was on?

SPEAKER_00 37:33
We hit USA Today and Publishers Weekly. Uh, we narrowly missed the famous, more famous of the three, but we hit two of the three, and I’ll I’ll take it, you know.

SPEAKER_01 37:41
For wait, so you’re not talking about number one in one of Amazon’s 16,000 categories for Oh no, we’re currently number one.

SPEAKER_00 37:48
You’re talking about you’re talking about an actual number one. Yeah, we were an instant, yeah. Listen, this caught us all off guard, by the way. Nobody thought a history of personal finance was going to shoot up the rankings. Uh, be I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t think it was gonna shoot up the rankings. In fact, I I just recently wrote a substack on on the topic of like, well, that’s it didn’t see this coming. Uh, but people are responding to the book because here’s the thing it’s an optimistic book in a pessimistic age. And people are kind of, I say out there, this there’s something I call big woe, a despair industrial complex because there are no clicks for journalists, there are no votes for politicians, and there are no, there’s no tenure for academics like me telling people the world’s getting better, even though it is, even though every single stat tells you it is, they don’t get rewarded for that. So they get rewarded for a message of pessimism. But you, me, the rest of us, we get disempowered, we get penalized for listening to them. And so surprisingly, an optimistic uh message in a pessimistic age has really resonated with people. And we’re, I’m feeling incredibly blessed and humbled because uh it’s it’s an outpouring of energy for this book that I did not see coming. Uh, I think right now, of course, algorithmically, all this changes, you know, hour to hour, but right now we’re the number two economic history on Amazon, period. Like it’s you know, Andrew Ross Orkins 1929, and then how to get rich in American history. Uh yeah, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, we’ve we’ve been blessed beyond measure to see people supporting the book. And I and I hope I hope people who are believers and who are believers that God has given us a particular wonderful time to be alive and that capitalism has done more for everyday people than than it’s given it is given credit for today, can respond, can read the book, and can say, hey, look, I always knew this was true. And now somebody’s actually put the history together to show it’s true.

SPEAKER_01 39:28
Yeah. Well, you are a fascinating guy, Joseph. And uh, I’ve been really engaged by this conversation. I know our listeners have as well. Um, I’m looking forward to getting into the rest of the book. I’ve I’ve already heard a lot of your ideas on as I was preparing for this this interview, but uh I’ve got to get get deeper into this book uh because we need it right now. And you’ve been on both sides, you know, the the the optimistic and the pessimistic side, you know, being raised a Calvinist communist.

SPEAKER_00 39:58
I mean, that’s just I’ve got to be like that’s a single digit percentage of humanity.

SPEAKER_01 40:02
Exactly. Yeah, yeah, less than that, I’m sure. Um, so what do you want to send people to connect with you? Certainly to go get the book.

SPEAKER_00 40:11
Yeah, I certainly hope people will get the book and read it. And also, if you read it and you like it, hand it to somebody else who might need to hear that message, especially young people who are told they can never get ahead. They can get ahead easier than ever before, and no one’s telling them that. So I hope so. If you want to find me, I’m at josephmorebooks.com, which is my substack, which is where I put I publish essays uh generally about once a week and videos kind of taking down some of these myths that nobody ever gets ahead. Awesome.

SPEAKER_01 40:33
JosephMoreBooks.com.com. Yep. All right. Well, Joseph, thank you so much for being so generous with your time and your expertise with us today. Appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 40:43
Thank you, Darren.

SPEAKER_01 40:44
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