Joseph Moore is a crypto billionaire.

That’s technically true, and it means almost nothing. He printed over a billion tokens of his own currency, bought a sliver of the supply for a few hundred dollars, watched the exchange multiply that price by every token in existence, and became a “billionaire” on paper.

He hollered up the stairs to tell his wife. She reminded him the kids needed a ride to track practice.

Joseph is a historian who spent over a decade testing 300 years of American financial advice on himself — the good, the bad, and the outright illegal — to figure out what actually worked, what didn’t, and why “everyone knows” changes every generation.

We get into why your great-great-grandparents were told to never save money, why “stocks always beat bonds in the long run” is barely older than the two of us, and why — despite what every headline says — Joseph thinks this is one of the best times in American history to get ahead.

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Key Takeaways
  • Money Used to Be Whatever You Could Get Someone to Accept: Before the federal government issued a standard currency, over 10,000 private currencies circulated in America — including one printed by a runaway slave, William Wells Brown, who paid his rent with IOUs for haircuts he didn’t yet know how to give.
  • “Never Save Your Money” Was Once Completely Sound Advice: With no stable national currency and rampant counterfeiting, saving cash was a good way to watch it evaporate. The advice was to spend it immediately on something tangible — real estate, tools, even food — before it lost its value.
  • “Stocks Beat Bonds in the Long Run” Is Barely 80 Years Old: A full accounting of 1800s market data shows bonds actually beat or tied stocks for most of that century. The “stocks always win” era really only starts around World War II — which means the rule an entire industry is built on is younger than Social Security.
  • Inflation Is the Single Biggest Force Shaping “Timeless” Money Advice: Nearly every modern financial strategy — real estate gurus, index investing, the FIRE movement — traces back to the same five-year stretch (1912–1917) when U.S. prices doubled for the first time anyone alive had ever seen.
  • You Don’t Get Rich Solving Your Own Problems — You Get Rich Solving Somebody Else’s: Joseph started his research convinced the American Dream was a scam built to keep the working class distracted. A decade of evidence changed his mind: the people who get ahead are almost always the ones who found a real problem and solved it well.
  • Every Generation in American History Has Declared the Dream Dead: Joseph can trace “you showed up too late, the system is rigged” rhetoric back to the 1670s — three centuries before the phrase “American Dream” was even coined in the 1930s. The one thing that reliably makes life better for people at the bottom isn’t a slogan; it’s a growing economy.
Resources

Joseph Moore’s site — his book, essays, and more: https://www.josephmoorebooks.com
Joseph’s new book — How to Get Rich in American History: 300 Years of Financial Advice That Worked (& Didn’t): https://amzn.to/4cKjQui
Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin & Joe Dominguez: https://amzn.to/4ha7Yo1
The Latte Factor by David Bach: https://amzn.to/4cxdz5j

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Chapters

Note: Timestamps are approximate and may vary across listening platforms due to dynamically inserted ads.

(5:18) How a runaway slave built his own legal currency
(6:52) How he legally declared himself a crypto billionaire
(13:22) Why a fifth of the Smithsonian’s money collection is fake
(15:52) The bestselling book that told readers to commit fraud
(20:10) The decades when bonds quietly beat stocks
(26:04) How his grandfather secretly became a bond millionaire
(31:09) Why that “$10K in 1929” chart is misleading
(48:02) Why wages are up 50% and nobody believes it
(1:06:39) Why most Americans once owned one shirt
(1:23:48) The rent control law that backfired for renters

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