In the 1800s, the smartest financial advice your grandparents could receive was: don’t save money, because it will probably go to zero. Stocks were considered scams. Real estate was the only real path to wealth. Crypto isn’t the future, it’s a replay of something that happened dozens of times before the Civil War. Dr. Joseph Moore is a historian, a New York Times bestselling author, and someone who has spent his career proving that what always worked was always changing. His book is How to Get Rich in American History, and this conversation will make you rethink at least three things you currently believe about money.
What You’ll Walk Away With
- Why grandparents in the 1800s told their grandchildren never to save money — and why that advice was completely rational at the time
- The crypto-as-past argument: why self-issued currencies have existed since before the Civil War, why they all eventually went to zero, and what the one thing is that actually made the US dollar trustworthy
- Why stocks beating bonds in the long run is only true since World War II — and what that means for treating any historical financial truth as permanent
- The go-ahead philosophy: why Americans used to define success as actively moving forward rather than passively not falling behind — and why that shift in language reveals something important
- Why financial gurus get a worse reputation than they deserve — and the German economist’s study that showed Dave Ramsey alone has saved the US economy the GDP of a mid-sized nation state
- The FIRE movement isn’t new: the original four-hour workday, a man with Ten Acres Enough in 1850s New Jersey, and what the Nearings’ Vermont maple farm story actually teaches about the selling of early retirement
- Fast time versus slow time: why the financial media is paid to tell you it’s always fast time, why it’s almost never fast time, and how to know the difference when it actually matters
- Why the 4% rule and the safe withdrawal rate are research findings worth knowing — and exactly why building a 30-year financial plan around a fixed number is still a mistake
- Five first-half 2026 lessons from the Stacking Benjamins mentor vault: creativity, adversity, mistakes, the go-ahead mindset, and compounding
- The compounding belief problem: why OG’s framework for trusting the math you’ve already lived is the most underrated motivational tool in personal finance
Why This Matters Now
Every financial truth that feels permanent right now — index funds always win, real estate always appreciates, crypto is either the future or a scam — is newer than you think and more conditional than it sounds. The investors who build real flexibility into their plans are the ones who survive when the conditions change. And the conditions always change.
From the Basement
Dr. Joseph Moore joins Joe and OG to pick fights with crypto, passive income, real estate mythology, Napoleon Hill, and the entire academic finance establishment — while making the case that financial gurus, properly understood, have done more measurable good for American wealth than all the finance professors combined. OG is in Colorado acclimating for a bicycle climb that has Doug genuinely concerned about whether a financial co-host counts as a dependent. Doug arrives with trivia tied to today’s birthday that connects Nintendo’s origins to something nobody expected. Five mentor highlights from the first half of 2026 close the episode — including clips from George Newman on creativity, Jim Murphy on adversity, Bola Sokunbi on surviving a very expensive rollover mistake, Beth Kobliner on why young people are gambling instead of saving, and Cody Berman on the compounding moment that changes everything.
Resources Mentioned
Stacking Benjamins Community — stackingbenjamins.com/basement
How to Get Rich in American History by Dr. Joseph Moore — New York Times bestseller; available at bookstores and on Amazon; josephmoore.com
Inner Excellence by Jim Murphy — referenced for mental strength and adversity; available wherever books are sold
Clever Girl Finance — Bola Sokunbi; clevergirlfinance.com
Afford Anything podcast — Paula Pant; referenced in first-half mentor recap
Retire by 30 by Cody Berman — retireby30book.com
Get a Financial Life by Beth Kobliner — referenced in first-half mentor recap
Stacking Benjamins Field Kit — stackingbenjamins.com/fieldkit
Stacking Benjamins Newsletter (The 201) — stackingbenjamins.com/201; write Joe at joe@stackingbenjamins.com with your favorite first-half lesson
Monday Mentor: Dr. Joseph Moore, PhD
Big thanks to Joseph Moore for joining us today. To learn more about Joseph, visit Joseph S. Moore – History Helps | Substack. Grab yourself a copy of the book How to Get Rich in American History: 300 Years of Financial Advice That Worked (& Didn’t)
Doug’s Trivia
- What product did Nintendo originally manufacture before becoming one of the biggest names in video games?
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Tune in on Friday when we dive into the question who should you trust when it comes to your money?
Written by: Kevin Bailey
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Episode transcript
[00:00:00] opener: Hello there. Peabody here, and this is the WABAC machine. We’re traveling through time. And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman.
[00:00:09] Doug: Hello.
[00:00:09] opener: Good boy.
[00:00:16] Doug: Live from Joe’s mom’s basement, it’s The Stacking Benjamins Show
[00:00:30] Doug: Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and on today’s show, you know all those lessons we should have learned from the last few thousand years? Today’s guest says, “Beware what you think you know.” He wrote a book that you’ve seen on the New York Times bestseller list the last few months, How to Get Rich in American History.
[00:00:48] Doug: It’s Dr. Joseph Moore. Plus, we’ll help you rocket out of the gate into the second half of 2026 by looking at some of our other top mentors from earlier this year. What were the best of the best lessons? We’ve compiled them for you. And then, don’t you worry, we’ll turn this whole lesson into a game with my money game trivia question.
[00:01:11] Doug: And now, two guys who are the Super Mario and Luigis of this podcast, it’s Joe and O, J-J-J-J-G.
[00:01:23] Joe: Hey there, Stackers. And it must be, uh, some Nintendo in the news, Doug. Nintendo in the news?
[00:01:30] Doug: Good chance.
[00:01:31] Joe: Somebody’s birthday today. The founder- At least
[00:01:34] Doug: Nintendo in the trivia …
[00:01:36] Joe: founder of Nintendo, I guess, OG sitting, uh, not across the card table today.
[00:01:42] Joe: He is in Colorado, where he’s getting ready to bicycle like his- Like
[00:01:48] Doug: Pee-wee Herman …
[00:01:48] Joe: legs depend on it. Yes, you’re bicycling away. Uh, but he’s getting acclimated. Mr. OG is here. Are you Luigi or are you Super Mario?
[00:01:59] OG: Hmm, good question. Um, so I’m pretty much the hero in all stories. Um, I’m gonna say Mario.
[00:02:08] Joe: Why did I even ask?
[00:02:10] Doug: How did you not see that coming?
[00:02:11] Joe: I don’t, I don’t know why I asked. Uh, well, the hero of today’s story was a guy that I’m very excited about for a couple reasons. A, he just is… Every time… Leading up to this interview, just getting ready to talk to Dr. Joseph Moore, it’s been so fun. He’s so engaging. He makes history exciting.
[00:02:30] Joe: Think about those great professors you had in college or the great teachers you had in high school, the ones that really landed. Dr. Joseph Moore, just even reading his book, prepping for this interview has been so big. He- You think OG gets salty, Doug? Uh, Dr. Joseph Moore, his, his, his chapter titles read like he’s just picking a fight with everybody in personal finance.
[00:02:53] Joe: Everybody, and then he brings it.
[00:02:56] Doug: MacArthur was a wuss. Fight me.
[00:03:00] Joe: Super excited for that reason, and then second because it’s always fun, you know. You and OG and I have worked together for a long time, and OG showed up at our team meeting one day going, “Hey, has anybody read this book?” And I had just booked him.
[00:03:11] Joe: I had just booked Dr. Moore, and so OG was all excited. So when we get a g- we can get OG excited, Doug, it’s a good day.
[00:03:18] Doug: It’s hard to do. Yeah.
[00:03:19] Joe: Yes. It’s a victory. But I think we did it. Hey, something else I’m excited about is this fantastic tool to track your money called FieldKit Finance. Not only does it have all the protections that the vault had, if you’ve heard us talk about the vault in the past, we have upgraded it.
[00:03:38] Joe: We had a Swiss Army knife called the vault, where it helped you with your privacy protections. It helped you with your credit and getting your credit on track, getting a debt strategy together, making sure that all of your financial life was protected, get rid of subscriptions, like all the things you see 50 other apps do, but it was all in one place.
[00:03:57] Joe: And now, the teams at Array and BudgetSimple, these teams work with credit unions. They work with banks. They have now built FieldKit Finance. So for your next- Big money hunting expedition, you’re gonna go out and not only do all those things, but now track your net worth, track your budget, set up spending alerts.
[00:04:20] Joe: It’s all there in one place. Why have eight different things when you could just have Field Kit Finance? You can get there by either going to fieldkitfinance.com or go to stackingbenjamins.com/fieldkit. We made a quick way to get there, and we’re happy to be on board with Field Kit Finance. So super excited.
[00:04:39] Joe: All the people that were using the vault are in the middle of their free upgrade, which is awesome. They’re moving over there, and you can join them, too. All right, we’ve got a couple of sponsors who help us keep the generator running here in mom’s basement so we can keep podcasting. We only have ad spots now and in the middle of Doug’s trivia while you contemplate the answer to the big question, like, uh, Doug’s apparently coming up with a Nintendo question as we speak.
[00:05:05] Joe: We’re gonna find out about that later, but we’ll hear from the sponsors. And then I’ll be back with the man sitting at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, Dr. Joseph Moore. He’s gonna show us how to get rich in American history.
[00:05:26] Joe: Look at this guy coming down the stairs. Joseph Moore is finally here. How are you, man?
[00:05:30] guest: I’m great. I’m great. Man, watch the steps coming down, though. You gotta be careful.
[00:05:33] Joe: It is that third one. Yeah. When Jean Chatzky came down, she was looking at her disability policy to see- … how that, how that was gonna go. I wanna start here, man.
[00:05:43] Joe: I think you’ve written one of the most dangerous personal finance books I’ve ever read, ’cause every chapter title looks like clickbait. L- let me just- … tell our Stackers some of these terms so everybody gets the pitchforks out. Diversification won’t make you rich. Compound interest is overrated. Real estate is terrible.
[00:06:03] Joe: Passive income, overrated. Debt isn’t necessarily dumb. Like, you spent 300 pages picking fights with the whole- … financial industry. Are you trying to get canceled, Joseph? Is that your goal?
[00:06:13] guest: My goal is to be part of the biggest pile-on on in internet, you know, online financial advice history- … and maybe I can, like, sneak out of it while they’re all fighting each other and see who I can turn on each other.
[00:06:23] guest: I also go against crypto, so I mean, like, I really like- I know … trying to upset as many human beings as I can in the online world.
[00:06:29] Joe: I mean, the president has a UFC arena in front of the White House. You’re, you’re putting a UFC arena around- … the whole personal finance world.
[00:06:37] guest: Yeah. I’m like, “Come on, I’ll take you.
[00:06:39] guest: Just get in the ring. We go one on one. I beat you. Let’s go. Bring me the next guy.”
[00:06:43] Joe: What, what is the central idea, though, Joseph, that ties all these ideas together?
[00:06:47] guest: Uh, what always worked was always changing. We have this sense of history, and look, I’m a historian, right? That’s who I am at my core being. And we have this sense of history that I think is largely misunderstood, where it’s the thing that’s stable and we move through time.
[00:07:03] guest: But the mean gets to move through time too, right? The, people in the past were living lives of immense change too. It’s not just us and AI. It was them and the internet, them and the computer, them and railroads, them and air travel, them a- them and canal travel. Like, I, I mean, the, the world changes constantly, and therefore, what works in the world changes constantly.
[00:07:25] guest: And we have this illusion that history’s gonna tell us the, it, that history is like physics, that it’s, uh, there’s a gravitational pull, and it’s gonna pull everything back to this historical mean that always is true, and we’re just deviating over time until it whips us back, you know, almost like with elasticity.
[00:07:40] guest: That’s not how history works. And so the thing I want people to understand is there’s a lot of different ways to get ahead in America then and now. There’s not one thing that works. But there’s also a lot of things that we, um, we trust in a bit too much.
[00:07:54] Joe: What’s a piece of financial advice that back in history at any point, Joseph, people are like, “Oh, that’s common sense,” that now we would think you’re crazy if you believe that?
[00:08:03] guest: Don’t save money.
[00:08:05] Joe: Don’t, don’t save Wow, really?
[00:08:08] guest: This is, grandparents would tell their grandchildren in the ear- in the middle of the 1800s, “Whatever you do with money, don’t save it, because it is highly likely to go to zero.” So this is the point that I make in the book about crypto, is that crypto is not the future, it’s the past, because we have been here before.
[00:08:23] guest: Most American money was self-issued currency. It was not government-backed anything. And which meant if you went to work and got paid in Dogecoin, and I go to work and I get paid in Fartcoin, which by the way is a real thing, the first thing we’re going to do with our paycheck is spend it, because yes, okay, it could go up, but it could also go to zero, and this happened over and over in American history.
[00:08:46] guest: I, I put in there a reference to this, you know, very tragic story of this woman who worked for, she was an immigrant from Ireland. She shows up in Baltimore. She works for a year. She saves everything in cash. All of it goes to zero. And people look at her like, “Did nobody tell you that you don’t save money in America?”
[00:09:01] guest: That’s the dumbest financial strategy possible. The goal was to spend it as fast as possible, get it into real estate, get it into tools or getting into food. But you did not wanna be holding savings. In fact, the average American would not save more than $100 in a bank, and there were, there were pieces of advice that would tell you, “Once you hit $100, stop, because it’s too risky to hold savings.”
[00:09:21] guest: So I, if my par- if my dad told my kids that today, I’d tell Dad to lay off the bottle, right? Like, “Dad, that’s enough. Get away from my kids, ’cause I’m gonna tell them something else.” So, like, everything that we think is wise, they thought was foolish.
[00:09:35] Joe: Welcome to the Stacking of Benjamin podcast. Right? ‘Cause if you stack two Benjamins, you’ve gone way too far.
[00:09:41] guest: There you go, the Stacking Benjamins singular.
[00:09:43] Joe: Right. Stacking Benjamins. It’d be so, so, so wild. Yeah. That would change, that would change things a while. Is that the thing today, like if you were betting, is that the thing, Bitcoin or crypto, that is the piece of modern finance you think future Americans are gonna laugh at the most, or is there something else that we do today that we’re gonna go, “That’s crazy”?
[00:10:04] guest: Um, oh, so how many enemies do I wanna make in one day? Uh, I, definitely on crypto, I’m a crypto skeptic, not because I don’t think … You can make, everybody can make money in a bubble, and they have made money in bubbles since they were selling tulips. But because you can make money in a bubble doesn’t mean the bubble is worth your time and investment.
[00:10:22] guest: And I think crypto, the lesson of history is that all self-issued currencies in America eventually go to zero. Now, the eventually’s the hard part, and if you can figure out how to time it, I’ll invest in your fund. But I think people will look back and go, “Didn’t they know that that money that was backed by nothing was backed by nothing?”
[00:10:41] guest: I’ve known two people who had multimillion-dollar crypto wallet hacks where they lost their money in a hack.
[00:10:47] Joe: Oh, God.
[00:10:47] guest: Both of them went to the FBI to get it back. So how’s that non-government issued currency going for you? Right. Right? Like, not having the backing of the, you know, federal government and its authority and its laws and its protections, it can backfire, right?
[00:11:00] guest: And so that’s one. I do increasingly worry, and I don’t want it, but I don’t wanna be misunderstood ’cause I own index funds. But I do increasingly worry that the more people who pile into one assumption, the more weight that assumption has to bear, and at some point we transform the very thing that we’re assuming into something else.
[00:11:22] guest: And so I often kinda scratch my head when I hear people say that the stock market is there to give Americans a retirement. I’m like, “No, the stock market exists for the investment of capital for return, right, in business, right?” It’s, it’s a capital allocation mechanism, and it just so happens we have turned it into our retirement strategy, but that’s not what it used to be.
[00:11:45] guest: In fact, anyone in the 1890s, if you’d have told them Americans will retire on stocks, would’ve told you you’re absolutely insane. You must be on laudanum. Like, like there’s-
[00:11:53] Joe: They, they thought stocks were scammy, you, you, you
[00:11:54] guest: wrote. Oh, stocks were … They were scam. They, they literally … 1% of Americans owned stocks in the 1890s, and it wasn’t ’cause Americans were foolish.
[00:12:02] guest: For one, you couldn’t really buy them. This is … I, I see this over and over with this idea that like, well, stocks always beat bonds in the long run. No, they didn’t. The dataset that Siegel used to write Stocks for the Long Run, historians have kind of always known was probably flawed, and now McQuarie and Bernstein have gone back and done the real work of getting a dataset together, and we know that stocks and bonds, actually bonds beat stocks for most of the 1800s.
[00:12:28] guest: They were tied until World War II. So stocks have beaten bonds since World War II, which means that Stocks for the Long Run is only as old as our last two presidents.
[00:12:38] Joe: It’s … I remember talking to, uh, Josh Brown from Ritholtz Management and CNBC, and him talking about even the idea of retirement is so young.
[00:12:46] Joe: Yes. Like, you know, those of us that are out there researching and diving into retirement stuff, retirement’s only an idea that’s been around 50, 60 years.
[00:12:54] guest: Well, no, so there’s been retirement for much longer than the last 100 years, but the way we have it now scheduled as, as a guaranteed kind of human right for the masses is new.
[00:13:04] guest: People did retire before Social Security. I found a letter from the 1830s where a guy says, “I cannot wait to retire to my villa in Florida.” This is… There’s literally not a road to Florida when he writes that. You’ve gotta go by boat. People have been dreamily waiting for their chance to hit the beach shores for a long time.
[00:13:23] guest: I think what the idea that it’s expanded so much is fairly new, and so we’re really new at it. And, you know, as I tell people sometimes, a lot of these long historical truths are really only about 100 years old, and in my line of work, that’s a rounding error. So you, you need to be careful what you assume always worked because it, what always worked was always changing.
[00:13:42] Joe: Before we go forward, I think we have to dive into a key point that you make in one of your key constructs, which is the idea of a go-ahead philosophy.
[00:13:52] guest: Mm-hmm.
[00:13:52] Joe: You say Americans used to have this phrase, go ahead, and it didn’t mean becoming a billionaire. Right. It, it meant ending life in a better place than you started.
[00:14:00] Joe: Tell me about that idea.
[00:14:03] guest: I titled the book How to Get Rich in American History, which I really meant as kind of like a lighthearted joke. To anybody who knows much about history of finance, there’s all these get rich books. You know, how to get rich in candy making, how to get rich in cattle, how to get rich- I bet
[00:14:13] Joe: you know there’s a bunch of people, though, that picked it up because they’re sure that it’s gonna tell
[00:14:16] guest: them- This is how it’s…
[00:14:17] guest: This is it. This is how I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna use dead people. Um, the idea that most Americans had about getting rich was really going ahead. We say get ahead today, which is a little more kind of passive, but theirs was very active. They wanted to go ahead, and that literally meant to go where the opportunity was and to make a better lives than they had started with.
[00:14:38] guest: So rich was kind of a moving target, and I would argue for most Americans it still is. Like, my definition of rich, and I mean, I used to live in a mobile home with a rotted out floorboard. I guarantee you my definition of rich is lower than somebody who was raised on the Upper East Side. I’m not going to have the same expectations of what it looks like.
[00:14:57] guest: But people wanted to measurably move forward, and over and over again in America, they did. And that’s not a narrative that you actually hear a lot of anymore. In every single case, in every decade, in every century, Americans’ upward mobility was higher than at any other place on the face of the planet.
[00:15:17] guest: And so the reason people are getting on boats in China and coming to San Francisco to work in, you know, really hard conditions or in from Italy into Ellis Island or any of the many places people came from, was because they could actually get ahead here. Going ahead was doable. And believe it or not, American mobility is still alive and well today, despite all the kind of doom and gloom that you hear online.
[00:15:41] guest: And so people really did get ahead, and they felt like getting ahead was a personal experience, really for them and their family. It wasn’t defined necessarily just individually, but for them and their family to end life in a better place than they started.
[00:15:53] Joe: We look in the United States, you know, you look at, uh, GDP in different states, and people point to a state like Mississippi.
[00:15:59] Joe: We got a lot of fine stackers doing well in Mississippi. But a lot of people point to a state like Mississippi and go, “Look at the poverty that’s there.” And you go, “Yeah, maybe,” but Mississippi still rates really well versus a lot of other places in the world.
[00:16:13] guest: Thirty-seven dollars a day is generally considered the threshold for being able to live a kind of a at least a halfway decent life.
[00:16:18] guest: Like, you can survive on $37 a day. As a percentage of the country, less Americans go below that line than in the UK, so in Britain, France, Italy, or Japan. Like, if Great Britain was a US state, it would rank 51st in wealth, behind Mississippi, behind West Virginia, right? So you know- Yeah … France would be 53rd.
[00:16:40] guest: I mean, like 52nd or 3rd, depending on what other countries you wanna throw in the mix, right? Italy, Japan, places that we think of as, like, high culture, status countries are poorer than the United States. Now, why is it that we struggle to believe that? In part, it’s because w- the wealth that surrounds us is just the backdrop of life.
[00:16:59] guest: Like, we’re just used to this. This is normal for us. And I have to tell people who’ve never really traveled abroad, nothing you’re seeing is normal. Like, the level of wealth you are surrounded in is mind-blowing, both by historical standards. Your great-grandparents would be overjoyed at the life you’re living.
[00:17:16] Joe: I had a client from Ethiopia back when I was a financial planner. He said, “I never wanted anything in Ethiopia, and then I got here,” and I saw, to your point, Joseph, “I saw all this success around me, and all of a sudden I wanted everything.” And he was one of the best-dressed people I knew. He would always walk into my office in the best cashmere sweater.
[00:17:33] Joe: Like, I was so envious of just his clothing. Like, he, he definitely grabbed onto this wealth idea that you’re talking about.
[00:17:42] guest: And that’s a generation. People had did that generation after generation after generation. But most people who showed up here, they wanted a better life for themselves and their children, and they were able to find it here in a way you just couldn’t find it in the rest of the world.
[00:17:53] guest: Now, it’s hard for people to believe that these days, right? We’re so inundated with negativity, and I tell people, I can find the American dream is dead about 300 years before I can find the phrase American dream. The phrase American dream pops up in the 1930s, but in the 1670s, the colonists of Virginia burned their capital to the ground because they said nobody gets ahead anymore.
[00:18:14] guest: Like, in the 1800s, they’re like giving these speeches, the rungs on the ladder to success got sawed off by the people who got there before you, and I mean, I’ve got a… Where is it? It’s right over here. I’ve got a book from nine- the mid-1980s. Sold almost 100,000 copies.
[00:18:28] Joe: Wait, what’s it called? Hold it up again.
[00:18:29] guest: Making- It’s called Making Money by Howard Ruff, who was a gold bug. It sold nearly 100,000 copies, and it says the baby boomers will never be able to afford to retire, and the middle class will be destroyed by 1992. How’d that work out? Like, we hear… We’ve heard this all before, all the negativity, but now it’s louder, and we’re inundated with more of it, and it gives the sense that you can’t act on the world when the reality is you can act on the world.
[00:18:59] guest: My favorite example of this is Frederick Douglass, the, the great abolitionist. What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July is his most famous speech, and it should be. We teach it in schools. I’ve taught it. But that was not his most popular speech. In his own lifetime, his most popular speech, the premier line in this speech was, “Go ahead.
[00:19:17] guest: We, our motto as Americans is go ahead.” The title of the speech was Self-Made Men, and he is… Everywhere he goes, like it’s a rock concert, people are hollering from the back, “Do Self-Made Men.” Like, you know, like he’s, like he’s a rock band- … and this is the hit, you know? And, and what I love about that-
[00:19:36] OG: Free Bird.
[00:19:36] guest: He, yeah, Free… He, he gave that speech more than, by far more than anyone in his life, and half of his audience used to be slaves. The, you wanna talk about being disempowered and, and told you can’t get ahead, and people were hungry for this message that I can actually go ahead, and Douglass believed that they could.
[00:19:56] guest: Whatever we think we’re up against, we ain’t up against that.
[00:20:00] Joe: Wow. Why did we stop using that language? Like, why do we say get ahead now? Do you have any idea why we don’t say go ahead, why we’re get ahead?
[00:20:10] guest: I don’t know, but I’m gonna philosophize a, a generic answer that I’m gonna pull out of my backside. I, but mean, I don’t really know the answer if I’m being honest, but I do have a suspicion And that is that we have become increasingly comfortable in our wealth, and therefore our definition of success has moved from an ambition to move forward and more of a fear to not fall back.
[00:20:31] guest: Mm. And so I don’t know if you saw this Gallup poll, I think it came out early this week, that said, how do Americans define the American dream? Interestingly, people whose parents, who they were born in the United States and their parents were also born in the United States, over 50% defined it as not falling behind.
[00:20:51] guest: But for people whose parents had been born abroad or they were born abroad and had come here and become Americans, they defined it as the chance to go after opportunity. So there is something that has happened. You know, we’re a nation of movers, a nation of strivers, a nation of people willing to get up and go where the opportunity was, but for some of us, we’re now four or five generations into that, and so now we’ve kind of arrived where grandma and grandpa strove to go, and I think we’re more passive about it.
[00:21:18] guest: Of I want… You know, getting ahead is something that happens to you, instead of go ahead is something you get up and do.
[00:21:25] Joe: Wow, the stick is more, uh more of a motivator than the carrot-
[00:21:30] guest: Yeah …
[00:21:30] Joe: so to speak. Let’s make the crypto people angrier.
[00:21:35] guest: I might as well. What, what do I need to do except have my Twitter handle blow up today?
[00:21:39] Joe: You say that crypto is not the future. Speaking of the future. You say that crypto is the past.
[00:21:46] guest: Mm-hmm.
[00:21:47] Joe: What do you mean by that? Because clearly you’re not really talking about crypto.
[00:21:50] guest: Well, I mean self-issued currencies, which is basically what a cryptocurrency is. What is a cryptocurrency? It’s a self-issued currency whose authority is from the issuer only and the user only.
[00:22:00] guest: Like, are you willing to use this as a currency? What makes it unique is that it’s on the blockchain, and therefore it’s verifiable. Well, guess what? Self-issued currency was also verifiable. This was, this is not… You know, they had different technologies then. And in fact, I own two self-issued currencies from the 1800s.
[00:22:17] guest: One is a legitimate $20 bill from something called the Canal Bank, and the other is a counterfeit.
[00:22:23] Joe: Oh.
[00:22:24] guest: Right? So yeah, so Americans knew how to verify self-issued currency, and they did not need the blockchain to do it. So to kind of walk through this, we’ve had self-issued currencies in America for a long time.
[00:22:36] guest: By the dawn of the Civil War, there were about 10,000 separate currencies with over 1,000, well over 1,000 issuers of those currencies. These were called different things. Some were called shinplasters. This is basically tokens at stores that you could then reproduce for other stores. I mean, if this… Like, basically go to Chuck E.
[00:22:53] guest: Cheese with your kids and imagine you could go use that at, you know, to pay for gas. That would be what that economy would be like. Some were floating IOUs. I could get really in the weeds on the details of this, but, uh, you as an individual could issue a currency, so long as you could back it up with your word that you would pay it back.
[00:23:09] guest: My favorite example of this is a runaway slave named William Wells Brown. He gets out of Kentucky. He makes it as far as Michigan. He gets stuck He knows no one. He has no job. He’s gonna starve. And a local landlord takes pity on him and says, “Hey, look, I’ll try to help you out. I will give y- I will rent out to you on the cheap this storefront area I have, and you can become a barber,” which is a fabulous idea.
[00:23:34] guest: It only has three problems. Number one, he has never cut hair. Number two, he does not own scissors, and number three, no one in town can pay him ’cause the town doesn’t have enough money floating around. And this is the, the thing we don’t understand. We live in a world with too much money. They lived in a world with too little.
[00:23:48] guest: And so the first one he solves, he doesn’t tell anybody he’s never done this. In fact, he paints a sign saying he’s one of the best barbers east of the Mississippi or something like that. And then he gets- This feels like
[00:23:59] Joe: TikTok.
[00:24:00] guest: Yeah. He borrows some scissors, and then he goes to a local printer and he says, “Will you print money for me?”
[00:24:05] guest: This is a runaway slave with a pair of scissors, and they print money for him, backed by his willingness to give haircuts for it. And then he goes around town and he basically says, “Hey, look, this is good for a haircut. Can I use this for food and lodging?” And these start to pass around town as legitimate currency for a year in Monroe, Michigan.
[00:24:24] guest: And so by the time he’s able to successfully do this, he starts trading it out for slightly better buddies, slightly better money until he has enough, and then he actually makes it to New York and freedom. By the way, his money goes to zero, right? Sure. ‘Cause he’s not there to back it up. And so we’ve seen this so many times before Color me a crypto skeptic simply because what happened in the Civil War was that Americans, like I said earlier, they’d spend their money as fast as possible ’cause no one trusted the money.
[00:24:51] guest: It could go up, it could go down. Well, when the US dollar comes along, it’s good for two things. The government says, “By law, you can pay your debts with it, and you can pay your taxes with it.” And those two promises, Americans start flocking to the greenback dollar. They’re like, “Oh my gosh, I can hold this thing.
[00:25:10] guest: I can use this to pay my debts and pay my taxes.” And you can use Bitcoin to do neither. Now, you can create some kind of cockamamie scheme where you can say, oh, look at this weird county in Kentucky that’ll… or Ohio. They’re not taking your Bitcoin. They’re taking a trade, and they’re trans- they have a, you know, a third-party company trade it for dollars.
[00:25:29] guest: You’re not using crypto to pay for anything. That basic promise that you can use the dollar for those two goals has made the US currency the envy of the world. Now, here’s where cryptocurrency, I think, will have its long tail, where it will work for the long term. It will help the dollar. Because what we’ll see is dollar-backed stablecoins that for every dollar of this stable- this coin on, on the blockchain, there’s a US dollar of- or treasury dollar behind it.
[00:25:59] guest: What does that mean? It means that I can be in Ecuador, and I can use dollars. I can be in Argentina, and I can use dollars. I can be in Zimbabwe, and I can use dollars. And so if people are going to use crypto, the most likely end use case is that it helps the dollar. It strengthens the dollar. Because what people across the world get to do is basically trade in dollars.
[00:26:20] guest: They’re just doing it on the blockchain.
[00:26:22] Joe: Like a central bank digital currency.
[00:26:24] guest: Something like that, yeah.
[00:26:25] Joe: Yeah.
[00:26:25] guest: Yeah.
[00:26:26] Joe: I think there’s even a bigger thing here, though, because everybody thinks that the new is new, and all the way through this book, you’re saying, “Listen, th- this new thing isn’t new.” I mean, you even go, you even take on, speaking of taking on everybody, you take on the idea of the FIRE movement, which a lot of FIRE practitioners are like, “Wow, there’s this new thing that I wanna retire early.”
[00:26:48] Joe: You’re like, “Yeah, I saw the FIRE movement, like, way, way, way back when.” The FIRE movement’s been a thing, it seems, Joseph, for a long, long time.
[00:26:55] guest: Yeah. It is absolutely not new. Now, the selling of it has gotten a little interesting, right, over time. So I talk in the book about a guy named Sylvester Judd. Judd is basically born the year the Constitution is ratified and dies the year before the Civil War.
[00:27:08] guest: He literally lives every year of Antebellum America. He works for half of it. Now, why? Because he builds a printing business, sells it for a good profit, looks around and says, “I’m not wildly wealthy, but I have enough, and enough is enough for me.” And then he spends the rest, the back half of his life doing what he wants to do, which is, it turns out, is penning histories of New England, which is why we know about him Now, I would actually argue that was pretty common.
[00:27:33] guest: There’s like one or two people in every town in America who are doing that. They don’t become famous ’cause they’re not trying to sell anything. They’re just like, “Oh, I have enough.” A lot of early science was done by these people, right? A lot… Who, who has time to sit around and do the early versions of scientific experiments?
[00:27:49] guest: It’s people who are financially independent. And so they’re using that time productively, just not for income. Now, what is new is how we’ve developed the aura of FIRE, right? Oh my goodness, the dream of FIRE. You know, Thoreau, Thoreau goes out into the woods and hacks a cabin out of logs and like a real man, you know.
[00:28:08] guest: And Emerson floats around Europe writing essays about not letting work own you. And there’s this, uh, what I call, uh, back to the land movement. There’s a guy in New Jersey who, like, leaves the busy city of Philadelphia, gets 10 acres, and he says, “I have 10 acres and it’s enough.” That’s the title of his book, Ten Acres Enough.
[00:28:27] guest: It’s a national bestseller in the middle of the 1800s. This happens again. Uh, there’s a couple called Helen and Scott Nearing. They leave New York City, they go to Vermont, they start a maple farm. They say they work four hours a day. This is the original four-hour work week was the four-hour work day, right?
[00:28:44] guest: Take that, Tim
[00:28:44] Joe: Ferriss. You are going after everybody, man.
[00:28:47] guest: I am. Why not, right? While we’re at it. And The New York Times just drools over the Nearings. Like, oh, they found the way back to Thoreau’s Walden Pond. They sell these bestselling books in the ’50s and ’60s. People flock to Vermont to learn how to do it.
[00:29:00] guest: All right, let’s go back through that. Thoreau’s mom was bringing him food so he would not starve Emerson’s worse. Emerson’s wife died. She had a trust fund. The family said, “Well, it belong, it falls back to us.” He sued her family. On the day that he won the trust fund, quit his job, went to Europe, and wrote essays about not working too hard.
[00:29:23] guest: The guy in New Jersey, it turns out, they did an investigative r- report. He was a real estate agent selling farmland in New Jersey that just happened to be the 10 acres he was trying to tell you to buy. Oh,
[00:29:32] Joe: weird.
[00:29:33] guest: And the Nearings, people went to Vermont and started to starve, like literally starve. They could not figure out, like, “They’re working four hours a day, and they’re living a beautiful life, and I’m working 12-hour days and I’m about to die.”
[00:29:44] guest: Well, comes to find out that both of them had, had received not one but two massive inheritances, which makes, you know, farming on four hours a day a lot easier. So what, what I tell people is, like, FIRE is very old. People have been retiring in, early in America to pursue something worth doing with their time for a long, long time.
[00:30:04] guest: But the selling of FIRE is what you have to watch out for because people will try to sell you something. Now, I’ve been … I basically fail upwards, right, as I’m trying to do all these experiments, and I ended up falling into financial independence almost by accident, right? And j- I am to this day blown away that of all the idiots in the world, I f- I somehow walked through that door.
[00:30:24] guest: Okay, but I … So I live in a very nice neighborhood outside of Atlanta. There’s a lot of Falcons football players and, you know, Major League Baseball players and C-level celebrities and me, you know, this weird historian walking around telling everybody about dead people. And in my neighborhood for a while, there were these crypto dudes or, you know, TikTok bros, and they were all on TikTok, and they were all telling you about their amazing life and how their investments…
[00:30:48] guest: So they’re, like, 26. “And I’m, man, I go, I’ve got n- I’ve got all this money.” And they’d always show you their car. “This is my new ride. These are my friends.” That was the tell. “These are my friends. They’re over to hang out.” Okay, it was, like, 12 guys living in a mansion, renting it. The cars, which they all claimed was their new ride on their own TikTok channels, were rented from a buddy of mine who has a car collection, and, like, every month, he’d drive over a new car they could all claim was theirs.
[00:31:13] Joe: For, like, an hour.
[00:31:14] guest: Yeah, for an hour. They drive it around. You know, they’re renting it by the day. And, like, so just be careful for what they put in the FIRE because it, some of that stuff is toxic. But don’t let that discourage you from the fact that people have been retiring early for a very long time, and you can too.
[00:31:28] Joe: If it- Well, we went after all these people. Let’s go after you now, huh? Huh? Okay, let’s do it. We’re going after you because- Yeah … you turn around then and say, “Okay, you got these TikTok people, right? They’re, they’re, they’re telling you about how rich they are.” You’ve got a whole chapter about you say gurus are selling something, and we sh- we should buy it.
[00:31:46] Joe: What’s that all about? If we shouldn’t believe them, why should we believe them, Joseph?
[00:31:50] guest: We need to distinguish between the I-want-to-be-famous-on-TikTok bros from the real high-level gurus who have kind of shaped the way Americans think about money. It’s evolutionary. The people who follow your advice have to survive financially to keep following your advice and tell others to do it, right?
[00:32:08] guest: And at some level, the people who have succeeded this space are the ones who have been able to give people the kind of advice that actually works in American capitalism. And I say in the book, and I t- you know, I’ve taken on people. I’m an academic. I’m taking on academics, right? Because the people I say in the book are really wrong are like the finance professors, because they’re selling equations that work really well on a spreadsheet, but the moment they leap off the page, they fall apart.
[00:32:32] guest: Whereas gurus are selling hope, and hope, as it turns out, has a pretty high ROI in the American economy. Gurus understand that jobs go overseas, Super Bowl ads work, birthday sex leads to baby number three. Like, they understand that you live in an unpredictable world and you’re trying to figure it out as you’re moving, but there’s no academic equation for a midlife crisis or a child with special needs, right?
[00:32:57] guest: So what gurus… I mean, I’m thinking about the high level, right, is they give you this basic sense that if you follow some simple rules of thumb, you can act on the world. And as it turns out, if you follow some simple rules of thumb, you can act on the world. My favorite example of this is Dave Ramsey, who I know everybody has strong opinions of in this comm- in all- I know.
[00:33:15] Joe: Let’s not go after the firebrand all at once here.
[00:33:17] guest: Yeah, no, let’s not. Yeah, let’s, let’s start lower than that. No, there is a academic paper talking about how dumb Dave Ramsey is in literally every academic discipline in the university world, sociology, finance, economics, history. I could find anti-Dave Ramsey papers in every economic field, okay?
[00:33:37] guest: Because, oh, he promises 12% returns, and paying off your debt in that order is foolish, and all these things. All right, that’s fine. You, you have your opinion. Here’s the reality. An economist in Germany who did not have a dog in the fight had the idea to overlay zip code level credit card data with where the Ramsey show first appeared in Metros.
[00:33:58] guest: And what he found was that when the Ramsey show showed up, credit card spending went down 1.3%.
[00:34:04] Joe: Huge number for any community.
[00:34:06] guest: I mean, 1.3% on total credit card spending is a lot of money. But now correlation is not causation. How do you prove this? So he had the ingenious idea, AM radio waves do not go through mountains, and so he tested zip codes where the mountain blocked the signal, and sure enough, the credit card spending stayed the same.
[00:34:24] guest: Which means if you do the math on that, Dave Ramsey has saved the US economy, the GDP of a mid-sized nation state, just by yelling at people to sell the car. You know? I mean, like, the man has made a measurable impact beyond the scale of all the US finance departments put together, which by the way, one of those finance departments are the one that came up with the, the Black-Scholes rule that ended up nearly bankrupting the economy, you know, losing $4 billion in a single quarter.
[00:34:52] guest: Ramsey’s done a lot of good for this world, and even people like Kiyosaki. Whatever you think of Kiyosaki- What I think most people’s takeaway from that book was, was, “Oh, this light bulb went off. I actually need to spend my money on things that make me money, and I don’t need to count things that cost me money as wealth.”
[00:35:09] guest: If you just boil that book down to those insights, buy things that make you money and things that cost you money are not wealth, then you kinda have the takeaway of the book. And he has helped more people see that than all the Econ 101 classes, you know, this’ll be on the exam, you know, have ever done. So I think gurus get a bad rap
[00:35:29] Joe: I wanna end by talking about an- one more fascinating idea that you have, and it’s this idea of fast time and slow time.
[00:35:39] Joe: And I think this is a really important concept because you say that w- a lot of the time people think we’re living in one of these times- Mm-hmm … when we’re really not, and this is when fortunes are lost because we don’t have the ability to distinguish between fast time and slow time. And by the way, as I was reading this, Joseph, this was even, as I was reading along, it was a concept, I, I even halfway through the chapter I’m like, “Now I’m not sure I get this yet.”
[00:36:03] Joe: It took me, took me a little while to understand what you were talking about.
[00:36:07] guest: And I have an essay I’m working on for Sub Stack to try to clarify that, ’cause this is the, this is the topic that most people in the world of finance, so certified financial advisors and professionals, this is the one they’re getting…
[00:36:18] guest: They come to me as like, “This makes a lot of sense to me.” Yeah. Like, this feels very powerful once I can wrap my mind around it. So I wanna do a good job of explaining it, breaking it down, and giving people a way to kind of conceptualize it. But what I realized as I was studying financial history was that people largely misunderstand financial history.
[00:36:34] guest: So most of the financial histories that we read or that we watch on movies or screens are what I call fast time histories. Everything is changing everywhere all at once, and all the smart people saw it coming, and you’re terrified to be the dumb person who got caught holding the bag. And so it’s always 1929.
[00:36:51] guest: It’s always 2008. Okay, here’s the problem with those histories. They are not written to tell you what to do with your money. They are written to entertain you. They are murder mysteries. You are supposed to yell at the screen, “He’s behind you. The subprime mortgage lender is behind you. You’ll run away from the mortgage.”
[00:37:13] guest: That’s the goal of the authors of those books, and that’s fine for entertainment value. But most of the work that you do financially is in what I call slow time. Now, by the way, slow time is very loud. Everyone is telling you it’s gonna crash. Everyone is telling you it’s gonna boom. But most of the volatility stays within a range.
[00:37:31] guest: And so for the financial professionals out there, what I’m really talking about is the, is Mandelbrot’s concept that volatility speeds up and slows down time. And I… You know, if you really wanna know about that, read the footnotes, ’cause that’s where I put that. ‘Cause my editor was like, “Ah, this may be for the professionals.
[00:37:44] guest: They’ll wanna read the footnote.” So this is the idea that as volatility speeds up, so do financial transactions and their consequences. But for most of our life, volatility stays at the same range, and so the distance between our financial actions and our financial consequences are different. And if you think you’re living in fast time, you think you’re gonna get your consequences really quickly, especially the good ones.
[00:38:05] guest: But oftentimes it takes a long time to get there, and there’s a lot of people who go broke slowly, right? And then if you understand what fast time looks like, which I talk about a guy named McGee who had every headwind in his face, but he lived through fast time, and he knew it when he saw it, and he knew to take decisive action because he knew the distance between his action and his consequences would be pretty compressed.
[00:38:26] guest: So fast time is what gets all the attention. Slow time is where you make most of your moves. And
[00:38:32] Joe: what- So this is- Yeah … th- this is just to clarify, 2007, 2008 is fast time. Correct. Money’s being made, fortunes being lost because you moved or you didn’t move. This is when things- Mm-hmm … really, really are going to matter that you make the right decision.
[00:38:48] Joe: Just in 2025, quote, “Liberation Day”, right? And the stock market doing the jackknife. If you move, which we warn people against, and we saw so many people make stupid moves during that time ’cause we thought maybe this inflationary period was gonna last for a long time. Ended up if you did that, it was a big mistake.
[00:39:05] Joe: Mm-hmm. That was fast time. But the fact that we see fast time around every corner-
[00:39:10] guest: Right …
[00:39:10] Joe: and the media does, doesn’t mean it’s actually occurring. I
[00:39:14] guest: almost called a organization by name. So the media, the financial media… Oh, I had to catch myself there. I can’t, I can only anger so many people in one interview.
[00:39:22] guest: The financial media are paid in… They get their clicks by telling you it’s constantly fast time, and that it’s about to happen, and you better be paying attention ’cause that keeps you logged in, it keeps you on that channel, it keeps you reading those articles. Most of time is not fast. Most of time is slow, and the decisions you make in slow time, they will get stress-tested by fast time.
[00:39:43] guest: You know, what career do you pick? How good do you get at that career? Who do you marry? Do you invest in that marriage? What do you get addicted to? What financial strategy do you put together so that when there’s an opportunity, you can leap at it, and/or when it starts to crash, you’ll be okay and you won’t panic?
[00:40:00] guest: ‘Cause I think we all grossly overestimate our ability to not panic when everyone starts to say panic. When everyone else starts to say panic, you usually panic, too. And so do you put something in place that keeps you from doing that? Because over and over, people will tell me, “This is fast time. This is fast time.”
[00:40:15] guest: And I had to say, “No, it’s not. No, it’s not. This is slow time.” I, I used to do this thing for y- when I was, was still teaching. I would put up headline quotes from the newspaper And on one column it would be, “Everything’s about to go to the toilet. The world is coming to an end.” And then I would show the next column, and it would be, “Things are about to go to the moon.
[00:40:35] guest: We have … You’ve never had such an incredible opportunity in front of you in your life.” And then I would say, “These are all from the same year. These are all from newspapers in the same year. Same newspaper, same year. Now, guess the year.” And it would al- I would always make sure it was some, like, innocuous, weird year no one could remember, like 1954 or something.
[00:40:53] guest: You know, like, like, “Well, nothing happened.” Well, exactly. That’s my point. Right. This was slow time, and everyone thought it was fast. So that’s one of the real values of history, is learning that change is inevitable, but the future usually takes its time to get here, and so you don’t have to panic when everyone else is panicking.
[00:41:13] Joe: I would like to end with a little rapid fire ’cause I think- Sure … your answers to these are gonna be interesting, and I think ambushing you with this, forcing you to think about it on the spot is gonna make it even more fun. But with your wealth of knowledge, I think it will be a good time. So here we go.
[00:41:27] Joe: What historical money guru do you think would fit best in mom’s basement with us?
[00:41:32] guest: Ooh, historical guru. Well, the question is do you wanna tear ’em down a notch, because the absolute worst was, uh, Napoleon Hill, and I would love to see him get in the basement and get pummeled, uh, because that book is horrific.
[00:41:47] guest: Uh, that… I mean, that man was on the run from the law f- for securities fraud. Let’s leave aside his other peccadillos, which we won’t bring ’cause this is a family show, and meanwhile writes a book saying that if you just believe in success you’ll find it, and actually does by convincing other people to buy his book.
[00:42:03] guest: So I’d, I’d love to see it, that, just so I could see you, you know, go after him.
[00:42:06] Joe: So we can watch OG just take him down. Yeah. Uh, what historical financial influencer would be the first one banned from TikTok?
[00:42:14] guest: Uh, well, see, now I’ve already used Napoleon Hill. There’s…
[00:42:17] Joe: Yeah.
[00:42:17] guest: Actually, he wouldn’t be banned from TikTok.
[00:42:19] guest: No, he’d be- They’d love him there.
[00:42:20] Joe: Yes. Um- He’d have a million followers …
[00:42:23] guest: uh, so
[00:42:24] Joe: there’s a- By the way, he didn’t know any of those people. He said he interviewed, uh, Carnegie, and he didn’t know any of those people.
[00:42:30] guest: No, they were all dead by the time he did that. Yeah. He, you know, it’s all, it’s completely made up, that book.
[00:42:35] guest: He just completely invents it. When you wrote
[00:42:36] Joe: that, I was like, “Wow, he didn’t know any of them.” That shocked the heck out of me.
[00:42:38] guest: Yeah. So, uh, there’s… I think about this one. He forced his way into a convention and d- had hi- someone take a picture of him with Thomas Edison, and Edison is as surprised as anybody ’cause he didn’t know-
[00:42:49] guest: the guy was coming. And so you can see it in Edison’s face, like, “What is this?” And that’s the one he actually met. So who would’ve gotten banned? So there was a guy named Victor de Villiers. In the 1910s he writes the first fire book. The, he has a book called Financial Independence at 50, and of course we’ve spent the last century just trying to get the number whittled down as lo…
[00:43:06] guest: A book is coming out called Financial Independence at 10. Like, it’s gonna happen. Like, how you can finan- you know, financial independence before puberty is gonna have to be at the next phase of this pushing the line. So Financial Independence at 50 goes through multiple printings. He’s being raved about in the press, and then immediately collapses for securities fraud.
[00:43:26] guest: Uh, he starts selling a, a medical treatment that ends up just being sweetened chocolate, and ends up having to, you know, lose everything. So probably he would’ve pushed the envelope too far even for TikTok.
[00:43:37] Joe: What’s a modern financial trend that would make our guru, Ben Franklin, uh, roll his eyes?
[00:43:45] guest: Uh, the belief that real estate or any investing is passive.
[00:43:48] guest: Franklin could not stand that mantra, that you’d have anything called passive income. Because in Franklin’s mind, to not have your eye on the business was to leave it open to losing all the money. And so you might be slowly getting money in over time, but what he would argue is you’re, you’re eroding your returns over time, ’cause eventually it’s gonna, like, fall apart ’cause you’re not paying attention to the business.
[00:44:07] guest: So Franklin was a big believer in knowing what was going on in the businesses you invested in.
[00:44:12] Joe: It’s interesting, because for me, you know, I was about to ask you which financial myth refuses to die. Passive income, I think for me, might be the biggest one, but do you have a, do you have a different one? Is there a- another financial myth that just does not die from hundreds of years ago through today?
[00:44:27] Joe: The Egyptians believed it. We still believe it, and it’s crap.
[00:44:31] guest: The belief in real estate is the ultimate be-all, end-all of, of investing. So there’s three myths about real estate. Number one, that it is passive. Number two, that this is how the really big fortunes get made. And number three is that it always goes up.
[00:44:47] guest: It does not always go up, it is not passive, and most of the big fortunes were made doing something else. I think that’s one of the things that as, especially as somebody who’s made a lot of money in real estate, I, I like to make sure people understand, like, if you wanna make money in real estate, you can.
[00:45:00] guest: Understand it’s unusual and it’s active.
[00:45:03] Joe: Joseph’s book is, uh, rocking all the worlds. I not only am seeing your book all over the place, I have friends talking about your book all over the place, which is really cool. When I’m at a party, they’re like, “Oh, you gotta interview this guy.” I’m like, “Well, guess what?
[00:45:19] Joe: We are interviewing this guy.” The book is called How to Get Rich in American History. Heck, if you don’t see it out front at your bookstore, you need to tell your bookstore there’s something wrong ’cause yeah, it’s everywhere, Joseph. Correct?
[00:45:32] guest: Uh, thank you. Pl- I- you know, I will tell you a fun story about that, which is that to everyone’s great surprise, we hit the national bestseller list on launch week, which caught all of us off guard to the point we were out of stock for a week.
[00:45:44] guest: So like- Oh my God … people were like, “Where can we get the book?” I was like, “I don’t know either and I wrote it.” So we’re back in stock now everywhere, and please do tell your local bookstores to carry it. We’d love to have that. And, uh, but you can find it on all the Amazons.
[00:45:56] Joe: It’s fabulous. Joseph, thank you so much for mentoring our Stackers today and helping us not repeat history.
[00:46:04] guest: Joe, I cannot tell you how much I’ve enjoyed this show for years, so to get the chance to be here and talk with you is a real joy. Now, my knees aren’t so great anymore as when I started listening to your show, so now I gotta figure out how to get up those stairs.
[00:46:15] Joe: We’ll have Doug push you from the back.
[00:46:23] Doug: Hey there, Stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. July 15th marks the birthday of Fusajiro Yamauchi, the founder of Nintendo. You know, Nintendo’s given us some pretty memorable characters over the years. You got Mario, Donkey Kong, Princess Peach, and Luigi, proof that every family has one sibling who gets all the attention while the other spends Thanksgiving saying, “No, really, things are going great.”
[00:46:48] Doug: But long before Nintendo was convincing kids that blowing into a game cartridge was legitimate repair work, the company spent nearly a century making something completely different. So here’s today’s trivia question: What product did Nintendo originally manufacture before becoming one of the biggest names in video games?
[00:47:09] Doug: I’ll be back right after I go blow on my cartridge.
[00:47:20] Doug: Hey there, Stackers. I’m undefeated Mario Kart champion and guy who still thinks Princess Peach is a dancer I met out on Route 5, Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. Before the break, I asked you what Nintendo originally made before they became one of the biggest names in video games. The answer? Playing cards. Yep, Nintendo started out making handmade hanafuda playing cards back in 1889, which is kind of amazing when you think about it.
[00:47:50] Doug: Imagine being at the board meeting. “Hey, sales are down.” “Uh, boss, should we make better cards?” “Oh, hell no, but hear me out. I met this dude named Mario.” To be fair, Nintendo tried a bunch of businesses before video games. They experimented with taxis, uh, instant rice, even love hotels. Let me repeat that: love hotels, which makes me feel a lot better about the time I tried to turn my van into a tiki bar.
[00:48:18] Doug: Sometimes you just have to keep throwing spaghetti at the wall until one of the noodles grows an amazing mustache. And now back to two guys who love talking money, Joe and OG.
[00:48:30] Joe: I don’t even wanna ask more about love hotels. Want, wanna know nothing more about that, Doug. But how about that Nintendo and playing cards?
[00:48:39] Joe: It’s funny that what’s old is new again, because they started off in just regular table games, and then video games became all hot and table games kind of went away, and now you’re seeing, like, the last 10 years, like, this big resurgence in board games.
[00:48:54] Doug: Yeah. It’s a whole bunch of… I mean, there’s a lot of really old companies in Japan that, talk about, uh, staying power.
[00:49:01] Doug: And, uh, a lot of them started off with products that were vastly different from where we know them now.
[00:49:09] Joe: Talk about pivoting, you know. Pivot. A big thanks to Joseph Moore for talking about, you know, some of the pivoting that’s happened. I love Joseph Moore shining the light on that which worked in the past isn’t what’s gonna work in the future.
[00:49:24] Joe: The conditions are always gonna change. The rules are gonna change. So it’s probably a better idea to have a well-diversified portfolio.
[00:49:32] OG: Yeah, I think when you’re considering asset classes and trading strategies and that sort of stuff, I think that’s gonna change depending on the timeframe that you feel like using.
[00:49:41] OG: But the big overarching umbrella policy of owning companies is better than lending to them, which is better than having your money sit in a shoebox. So, like, those big broad brushstrokes are still going to endure over the next forever generations, you know? So it’s like you can drill down into some details around that, but if I’m looking at this like a long-term investor, and I know he wasn’t necessarily focusing on investing in so much as just overall wealth creation in his book, but it’s like if you’re looking at this as an investor, who are the people that are the most successful investors?
[00:50:20] OG: Who are the people that are most successful families in terms of wealth? Well, it almost always could be traced to they created something of value that a lot of people wanted.
[00:50:29] Joe: Throughout history, the people that created value were the winners.
[00:50:33] OG: Yeah. Yeah. So if you can’t do that, you, the next best thing is to own the people that are doing it.
[00:50:39] OG: You know? It’s like-
[00:50:40] Joe: Yeah. Well,
[00:50:41] OG: in thinking that- I can’t, I can’t create the next iPhone. I’m not smart enough to do that, but the next best thing for me to do is make sure I own the companies that create iPhones.
[00:50:49] Joe: But I think about things, and I think things like, uh, safe withdrawal rate is important research, looking historically.
[00:50:56] Joe: Listen, and I think, you know, I just busted on risk
[00:50:59] OG: parity- Well, except till then a second ago Except that it was largely accepted that it was 4%, although taken wildly out of context across the board. But now even the person who did the research went, “Eh, we’re 5.” Well, and if you f- Five and a half. So, like- Well, no,
[00:51:16] Joe: and that’s my point.
[00:51:17] Joe: I think it’s important to know that this is out there and this is what it’s been, but I love Dr. Moore’s point that, listen, this is, this, j- just because it’s been 5% doesn’t mean in the future it’s going to be 5%. Like, hanging your hat on, “This is going to be my expense because this is the number”-
[00:51:35] guest: Mm-hmm …
[00:51:36] Joe: is not a way to build a financial plan.
[00:51:39] Joe: Build a financial plan, I loved much more than that when Dana Anspach was just on and talked about, you know, something, OG, you believe in. You just, you gotta remodel every couple of years. Mm-hmm. You gotta remodel and see, okay, is my spending holding up? Is, is this, can I afford to spend more? Can I take more risk?
[00:51:55] Joe: Do I need to take less risk? Do I need to spend more? Do I, should I spend… L- like, reevaluating over time and replanning, far, far, far better than saying that risk parity worked in the past, so it’s gonna work in the future. Or the 5% rule or 4% rule, whatever, I’m gonna do that for the next 30 years. Big effing mistake if you’re a, a fan of, uh, Joseph Moore.
[00:52:19] OG: Well, just solve for flexibility. That’s really
[00:52:21] Joe: the name of the game. Solve for flexibility. Amen. Speaking of flexibility, man, we had a lot of great mentors the first half of 2026. And on Monday with, uh, Mr. Limpenzo, we talked about the market returns over the first half of 2026. But I also wanna do something that we devoted a whole episode to last year, but we’ll just devote a few minutes to this year, some of the top lessons from 2026.
[00:52:46] Joe: Because if you look back in the rearview mirror and you haven’t done much, well, you know what? No time to get started like right now. So let’s look at five lessons from the first part of the year. I wanna start with income generation because, you know, OG, I think the reason you and I always like to start with income is because make as much money as you can doing a job that appeals to you.
[00:53:13] Joe: Either it’s something that you enjoy or it’s something that pays the bills, but earn as much as you can doing that thing, and then lock down your expenses so that there’s a big moat between the two, and save the rest. Dr. George Newman is an associate professor at the University of Toronto. He’s one of North America’s stars in the area of creativity research.
[00:53:36] Joe: When you’re looking at these income streams, you’re looking at new ideas, new ways to make money. How do you come up with a really creative idea? He proved at the beginning of this year that that idea might not be where you think it is. Uh, let’s hear a clip from our time spent with George
[00:53:55] guest: The cool part is that we’re not great copiers.
[00:53:59] guest: That I think we can’t help but put our own spin on things. And even if you sit down, you know, just, just try it. Like, you know, if you’re a musician, take your favorite musician and, and try to redo their song or visual artist or, or writing or whatever, or even a business proposal. In trying to copy it identically, you will inevitably put your own spin on things.
[00:54:21] guest: It has to kind of come out in a different way. And so I think there’s an acknowledgment that we’re imperfect in doing that. The other big thing that I argue is that copying is largely about learning, and that even if you try to do a one-for-one copy, what you’re really doing is stepping in inside the mind of that person.
[00:54:42] guest: Why did they make certain decisions? You know, why did they make these choices? Why did they follow one step with this next step? And it’s not until you really get in the weeds and start trying to make the thing yourself that you realize, “Oh, okay, like, there’s a lot of stuff that I didn’t necessarily appreciate about this process.”
[00:55:00] Joe: What I love about that discussion, OG, is that we often think that to make more money, we need this wildly creative idea that comes out of the blue, and that the smartest people on earth go off in the woods and they come up with this thing, when generally the most creative things, he proves, are things where they took something and just put a little different spin on it and it took off.
[00:55:23] Joe: But even if we’re not creative, we still think often that to make more money we gotta get really creative. And I love what he’s saying there is that you don’t. If you copy what the best investors of all time have done, and you learn the lessons, you’re gonna put yourself in their shoes. And sure, you’ll probably make some mistakes, and we’ll get to mistakes later, but a great place to start isn’t by going, “Oh, I gotta come up with a new way.”
[00:55:49] Joe: A great place to start is to go, kinda like what Joseph Moore did earlier with, “What have the smartest people already done? Let’s go try that.”
[00:55:57] OG: I mean, unless you’re literally a chef who’s been classically trained in all the different ways to cook French food, if you’re a stay-at-home dad and you’re trying to make French food, just frigging read the recipe book.
[00:56:14] OG: It’s just easier to do than trying to do something s- from scratch right out the gate. Now, I do agree that after you’ve perfected that thing, right, like once you go, “Okay, this is how I make the cake, and I’m really good at this, but this time I’m gonna try chocolate chips.”
[00:56:32] Joe: Right.
[00:56:32] OG: Yeah, here you go. Like, have fun.
[00:56:34] OG: Like, do your thing. But, but you’ve taken a thing that’s 98% of the way done… And I think the other piece of this when it comes to, like, adding your own flavor to it, which is largely overlooked in just about everything, but I was reminded of it the other day, a little anecdotal story. So my daughter is a softball player.
[00:56:55] OG: She’s 10, and she is, uh, amazing at softball. She’s really good. She practices all the time, six days a week. She throws 100 pitches a day. Like, she is locked in on training, and she has a coach. And so she, um, was going to this coach, a conditioning practice, and the guy posted on Instagram that he purposefully gave them a task that they, he knew that they would fail Because he wanted them to just basically be like, “Okay, I, I just, I h- I cannot do this.”
[00:57:27] OG: And it was something like, based on what I could picture based on the picture he put and then the words, it was something like, you know, like a weight, like a small weight, like a two-pound weight or something like that where you just like hold it out in front of yourself, you know, and you go, “Oh, that’s easy.”
[00:57:42] OG: And then, you know, a minute into it, you’re like, “Not as easy.” And then like two minutes into it, really not ea- You know what I mean? Like a plank or so- You know what I mean, like those types of isometric-type things. And I was reminded of this by him in this post that basically he said, “Every so often we have to remind ourselves that it’s okay to fail.”
[00:57:59] OG: So if you’re making the cake and you are like, “Okay, I’m gonna put these chocolate chips in there,” and it sucks, it’s okay. It’s totally fine. Like throw that thing in the trash and like take a half a step back, build it the way you know how to build it, and start over again. Failing is acceptable too, and I think a lot of times people are afraid of that, like that’s some sort of death sentence.
[00:58:19] OG: But it sounds cliche, but that’s really the only, only time you have any learnings anyway.
[00:58:24] Joe: Well, and we know, OG, that even if you are successful, that there’s gonna be roadblocks, and even when you’re not successful. And I think about when I was doing very poorly with money, I had this negative self-talk going on in my head, and I just needed to be inspired.
[00:58:43] Joe: I need to remind myself that I could get through this. And sometimes the advice that I get that really hit home for me was different than what I expected to be, and maybe that’s why it hit home, was because the advice that I got was so eye-opening and so out there that it really changed my personal trajectory.
[00:59:07] Joe: We talked to a gentleman named Jim Murphy, and he wrote maybe the only book that was so good a player had it with him on the sidelines at the Super Bowl and was actually reading it during the Super Bowl. And that book, OG, I think you’ve read this book.
[00:59:20] OG: Well, I haven’t read it. I actually have it because I was like, you know, if I was gonna read a book about overcoming like s- like strife and like hardship- That was the book
[00:59:29] OG: and mental strength, I better read this thing in the next week and a half as I’m about to pedal my, uh, fat ass up a couple of mountains.
[00:59:35] Joe: Yeah. People who don’t know, OG is embarking on quite a quest there. And that book, OG, is called…
[00:59:41] OG: Inner Excellence. Yeah. It’s, um, I haven’t cracked it yet, but I imagine it’s great.
[00:59:46] OG: It’s got a picture of a mountain on the front, so
[00:59:48] Joe: it’s gotta be- It’s gotta be good. So the person who I think is the best person to follow Dr. Newman in getting creative is the guy who has talked some of the biggest business leaders, some of the biggest sports stars through adversity that naturally is gonna come in the next step.
[01:00:07] Joe: He had his own adversity in his life and, well, he’d just written Inner Excellence, and this is, uh, what Jim Murphy told us.
[01:00:17] guest replay: Five years full-time writing, researching the book. I get a New York City literary agent. I get a major publisher and get some bookstores around the world. And so dream come true for authors.
[01:00:26] guest replay: I’m in Barnes & Noble. But I’d spent my life savings. I’m ninety thousand dollars in debt. I’d isolated myself for five years. I was in downtown Denver, and I’m thinking, “Okay, you put all your eggs in one basket. You’ve got no money to hire someone to market the book. You don’t know how to do marketing, and you don’t like promoting yourself or talking about yourself.
[01:00:45] guest replay: It’s not a good marketing plan. If no one hears about the book, no one’s gonna buy the book. And if no one buys the book, then Barnes & Noble will pull it off the shelves, and this could happen in a few weeks, and your whole dream, all that five years, that hundred thousand dollars plus, down the drain because you’re gonna be a total failure.
[01:01:00] guest replay: Everyone will know it, and no pro athlete will hire you because that’d be stupid to hire a failure to coach them. So then you’re gonna have to get a regular job, but this is a s- a recession in two thousand and nine, end of two thousand and nine, so you’re not gonna get a job anywhere. You’re gonna end up homeless on the street.
[01:01:13] guest replay: You’re gonna die alone on the street.” This was my mind spiraling out of control on this day in February two thousand and ten. This is what happens when you don’t have someone to tell you the truth and you isolate yourself. We’re created for relationship. We need people in our lives to tell us the truth about who we are and what’s possible for us.
[01:01:31] guest replay: I called my friend. I said, “Tell me what to do.” I believed in God, but I was lost, and he’s like, “Find a homeless person and help him.” It’s not your common advice. Like- … okay, you really need s– I need something right now, and I need, I need to make some money. I need to make some phone calls. Like, get me somebody, something that’s gonna leverage.
[01:01:48] guest replay: And he’s like, “Go to the least leverageable person in the world, a homeless person.” And, uh, I turn around the corner, and there’s a homeless guy playing a harp. You know, it’s not a common sight. I don’t know how many homeless harpists you’ve seen, but I’d never seen one before.
[01:02:03] Joe: I’ve never, ever seen a homeless harpist.
[01:02:06] guest replay: Yeah. So I listened to him play this beautiful music. I’m sitting on the curb. I still remember his holey shoes, and he got a grocery cart full of stuff, and I look in my wallet, and there’s a hundred dollars, which means I must have taken a cash advance out. Most of my credit cards were maxed. But I gave all that money to him, and I left, and I end up sitting in this Starbucks, and I’m just staring off into the abyss.
[01:02:24] Joe: Can we stop there, Jim, for just a second? Because I was wondering this when I was reading it. What’s going through your mind as you’re handing him your last hundred bucks?
[01:02:34] guest replay: It, it’s very emotional for me to, um, to recall this story because of the miracles that happened. You know, I mean, when you’re ninety thousand dollars in debt, and you’ve got no money, um- $100 is nothing.
[01:02:50] guest replay: You know? It’s like, it’s not gonna save me. It’s not, it’s not gonna do anything. And so I was willing to do anything
[01:02:57] Joe: He was willing to do anything at that point, and obviously Jim ended up okay. But sometimes the advice, OG, to stop, uh, get out of your head, get out of your emotional rollercoaster and go help somebody else, it’s great first piece of advice.
[01:03:15] Joe: Like the spiraling, how often do we all do that?
[01:03:19] OG: Yeah, I mean, I don’t have much more to add to that ’cause that was a pretty good story. But the great thing about… This is a little bit pro-USA here for a second, but, you know, there’s all this stuff going on with World Cup and all the… At least my feed, your feed, Joe, is all financial influencers talking garbage.
[01:03:35] OG: Mine is, like, Australians going like, “Have you guys eaten at this place called Waffle House? This is freaking awesome.” Have you been to
[01:03:42] Joe: Buc-ee’s?
[01:03:43] OG: Like, “This is the most amazing breakfast in America.” You guys would take over Australia. Like, just the, the sheer… And, and I don’t know how much of it’s staged. Do you know what I mean?
[01:03:51] OG: But the sheer energy that’s around like, “I went to a steakhouse. It’s like a pretty good one called Texas Steakhouse, Texas Roadhouse. It was like a really good steakhouse.” And you’re going, “Wait, what?” Like, “It was awesome. They give you free bread.” You know? Like, just the, you know… Get out of your own way. And I think what, what I think is great about the abilities that we have in our country is that you can control your own destiny in so many different things, and I know there’s gonna be people that are like, “Well, you don’t understand.”
[01:04:19] OG: I get it. Like, there’s always asterisks to what I’m saying, to say here. But as soon as you take away your own agency from the next thing, that’s the helplessness stuff, right? But as long as you still have that control of like, “Okay, I could do something with this. I can fix this. I can be in charge of this.
[01:04:39] OG: I can,” you know, whatever. You take the ownership, like that gives you the power and energy back to do those things. And one way to kind of remind yourself of that is to just go do something for somebody else. You know, I think in every instance that I can recall, and I’m sure you guys are the same way, any time that you did the whole like $100 to the homeless guy, whatever version of that story you guys have, somewhere down the line, something like that came back to you in, you know, in multiples.
[01:05:07] OG: Maybe not dollar for dollar, but like in s- in experience or in terms of something, right? Like, you got more out of that $100 donation so to speak, times infinity, than it ever cost you. And sometimes it’s a monetary reward, sometimes it’s just, you know, whatever. But if all it does is get you back into the head of like, head space of going, “You know what?
[01:05:26] OG: I can fix this. I got some energy around this,” you know? Well,
[01:05:30] guest: the other thing I like too
[01:05:31] OG: is, you know, stuff- You can’t be… Hold on a second. You can’t be… Sorry, I, I… That was a pause strategically- … not an end sentence. It was like a semicolon. It wasn’t a period.
[01:05:41] Joe: And?
[01:05:42] OG: You cannot be simultaneously grateful and anxious at the same time.
[01:05:48] OG: You can’t.
[01:05:50] Joe: That’s 100%.
[01:05:51] OG: 100%. So, so if you go to… And, and I’m not much for, like, writing down, like, my five gratitude things or, you know, people have all those things. I don’t do much of that stuff. But you can’t have those two things in your brain at the same time. You can’t be like, “I’m so grateful, I’m so happy, I’m so in love, I’m so…
[01:06:06] OG: Also, I’m so stressed.” Like, you can’t, can’t put those things together.
[01:06:10] Joe: Well, and I love the idea, too, is he’s only got $100. Don’t think about $100. Think bigger, think longer. Think, “$100 is not gonna save me, so why wouldn’t I continue this idea of helping other people, about being, about thinking bigger?” So often we miss, we miss where the river’s headed because we’re stuck in the weeds of $5 and $10 things, and then we get into the spiral that Jim talks about.
[01:06:34] Joe: You know, it’s funny, we talk about talking long term and about avoiding obstacles, OG, and about the World Cup. There’s so many young people that are betting, and no less than Scott Galloway, who we played his greatest hit last week on the show, uh, have talked about how with the, with the struggle to get that first down payment on homes in America, that you’ve got Kelsey Apps and DraftKings going crazy the last six months especially.
[01:07:02] Joe: You see the numbers just growing and growing and growing because people are going, “Yeah, that house down payment’s beyond me.” Well, Beth Kobliner was here, and Beth Kobliner has helped not, not once but twice has helped American presidents talk to the public about personal finance. She came back down to the basement and actually talked about housing and this thing that’s happened a lot lately, just more and more people instead of investing, they’re betting.
[01:07:32] beth replay: You know, one study showed that they think the reason young people are gambling more is because housing market seems so far away from them. The typical first-time home buyer now is 40 years old. That’s been something that they hear, and they’re like, “Well, I’m never gonna buy a house. I might as well just, you know, take a flyer on some sports team and hope for the best.”
[01:07:53] beth replay: Yeah. And that’s a mistake, and I would say very strongly that although there’s a lot of fear out there, there’s also a good horizon. And generation to generation to generation, there’s always a bad time. I remember when I graduated in the ’80s, they’re like, “Ugh, it’s the worst job market ever.” You always hear the bad.
[01:08:14] beth replay: This is a particularly tough time, but there are things this generation could do, and I think they’re really smart, and I’ve seen it again and again. Take a breath and do some basic things. You know, get out of debt, start to save automatically, put your money in your 401plan, and you will be like that 70-year-old person 30 years from now.
[01:08:35] beth replay: I’ll meet you on the street, and you’ll have to talk really loudly- … because I won’t be able to hear and say, “Thank you.” And I’ll say, “For what?” And they won’t know who I am now. But I think I’ll be 90, which, who knows? Maybe I’ll be like a cool 90-year-old.
[01:08:51] Joe: Absolutely.
[01:08:51] beth replay: But yeah, we both will be. I’ll come see you in your basement.
[01:08:54] beth replay: I’ll find something to compliment you on your
[01:08:57] Joe: basement. We’ll have to figure out, Beth, how to get down the stairs and
[01:09:02] Joe: But Beth makes a g- a big point, OG, that we hear these obstacles, and it’s always the worst time for something, right? Ev- it’s always the worst time. And, uh, if you think about the obstacles, you’re never gonna go anywhere. You’re gonna end up on the betting apps just going, “Well, screw it,” instead of doing what Beth’s talking about, which is s- just start building that foundation.
[01:09:22] OG: I saw a post the other day that said that we’re betting $168 billion in 2025, and, uh, it would be far better if we told everybody just to day trade stocks.
[01:09:34] OG: ‘Cause at least there you’ve got a chance to, like, like, a reasonable chance to win. Yeah. Right?
[01:09:39] Joe: That’s wonderful.
[01:09:40] OG: Go back to picking individual stocks, everybody. That’s a, that’s a way better strategy than, um, prediction markets.
[01:09:47] Joe: And as we get more tactical here, as you’re building that foundation, you take the breath that Beth talks about, you think longer term, you start doing things like putting money in your 401, building the emergency fund, paying down the debt, versus getting on the, on the betting apps, and there’s gonna be times that you make mistakes, and you might be inclined to beat yourself up about those mistakes.
[01:10:07] Joe: We talked to the wonderful creator of Clever Girl Finance, Bola Sokunbi, about that. She’s one of my favorite people, partly because of her leadership on going, “You know what? I’ve made mistakes, and yet I’ve done really well.” And well, she shared a doozy on the show.
[01:10:26] Bola replay: A lot of my mistakes were lack of knowledge and a lack of intention around my goals, right?
[01:10:31] Bola replay: So I did the right things. I went to the HR meeting when I got my first job. I contributed to my 401. I got the match. I was putting money every paycheck, and it was growing and growing, and I got a new job, and I did the right thing. I didn’t leave my money at my former employer. I didn’t roll it into my new employer’s 401.
[01:10:47] Bola replay: I opened up a rollover IRA so I could be exposed to the entire market, and guess what Bola did.
[01:10:52] Joe: You bought individual stocks.
[01:10:54] Bola replay: No. I was like, “Send me the check. I’m just gonna put it in my bank account, and I’ll roll it over to my IRA later.” And then I forgot, and I didn’t realize there was a 60-day window in which you had to make that rollover.
[01:11:04] Bola replay: I also didn’t realize that I didn’t need to get that check. I could’ve just had my employer’s brokerage just send it over to the new brokerage directly. But Bola kept the money in her bank account, and then at the end of the year, when it was time to file taxes, not only did I get hit with income tax of whatever percentage, I got hit with the penalty, and I lost almost 40% of that savings.
[01:11:23] Bola replay: And I’m like, “What did I do wrong?” What I did wrong was not having the knowledge, and a, a little bit of irresponsibility sprinkled in there. So when it comes to mistakes, we cannot beat ourself up. We have to assess what went wrong, take the lessons, and just move forward
[01:11:39] Joe: Bola has the best laugh on earth.
[01:11:42] Joe: Her ability to make a really boneheaded move, like have the check sent to you, OG, and survive that move shows that you know what? Go make the move. Go do the thing. I would do what we talked about on Monday. I would talk to a human being about what your strategy is before you go do it, and obviously there’s a lot of resources.
[01:12:04] Joe: But you’re gonna make mistakes along the way, and you can’t beat yourself up and learn the wrong lesson. Keep moving, keep laughing, and Bola’s doing great.
[01:12:14] OG: Well, it’s better to make a mistake with four years of retirement money that you accumulated early in your career than 45 years of retirement money you created for your entire career.
[01:12:25] Joe: Yeah, or to make the mistake of never saving at all.
[01:12:28] OG: Well, there’s that. Yeah.
[01:12:29] Joe: Yeah, yeah.
[01:12:30] OG: I’d hate to make a mistake, so, uh, I better not do anything
[01:12:34] Joe: We’re gonna bring this home with Cody Berman, who is a gentleman who was wealthy at a young age. He had this aha at a young age. And it doesn’t matter how old you are, but I think that this aha that Cody had is one that could change the world for all of us.
[01:12:48] Joe: I remember I got this aha from a book called Rich Dad Poor Dad. There are some, some lessons in the book, like trading, trading penny stocks, that’s a bad lesson. Uh, for some people getting into real estate is not the right lesson. But the lesson around your money making money, Cody actually learned that early on, and, uh, well, let’s listen to Cody’s aha.
[01:13:14] Joe: Mom was the one that had you read that.
[01:13:17] Cody replay: Yeah, so she had me read The 4-Hour Workweek. I was 19 years old, and that book just kinda changed my whole worldview on money, on side hustles, on everything that I thought up to that point. Up to that point, Joe, I thought the richest people were the people who made a lot of dollars per hour.
[01:13:32] Cody replay: Doctors make $200 an hour. A lawyer makes $300 an hour. But the richest people, the wealthiest people, like Warren Buffett can sit on his hands for a year and make billions. He’s not making dollars per hour. He’s just making dollars. And that was the light bulb moment that shifted everything for me, was like this notion of passive income.
[01:13:48] Joe: Well, and even more than passive income, what I like is that, oh, gee, you get that investment started, that dollar you invest earns money, and now you’re earning money and that dollar’s earning a mo- earning money. And now then that $1.10 is earning money the next day or the next year or whatever, and you’re making money.
[01:14:06] Joe: And then the next day, that money and the money on top of the money’s making money, and you’re making money. To learn that lesson at an early age that your pile of money can make money so that you can buy that flexibility you talked about earlier I think is a huge lesson. Doesn’t matter what age you are.
[01:14:23] Joe: Learn that lesson.
[01:14:25] OG: Well, and, and the important thing here is, is that it’s very difficult to believe compounding in the future. The only evidence you have of it is in the past. So if you’re just starting out, like set those mini milestones for yourself of like, “I can’t wait until I have my accounts worth 10K.
[01:14:44] OG: And then once it’s worth 10K, I wanna, you know, I wanna see how fast it takes me to get to 20. And once it’s worth 20, I wanna see how fast it…” You know. And then you measure backwards from year to year, not to pat yourself on the back and say, “Look at how great I am,” but more specifically around being able to start believing it.
[01:15:03] OG: That’s the hardest thing in this whole process is just believing that it works. I saw a post the other day, um, which I’ve known and we’ve undoubtedly said that on the show, but, you know, if you’re saving money, you know, whatever, $1,000 a month, let’s say, or $500 a month, when you get to $300,000, you’re halfway to a million Because of the way compounding works.
[01:15:24] OG: That doesn’t logically make sense, but the amount of time it takes you to get to 300,000 is half the time it takes you to get to a million if you continue your investing and compounding If w- half the people listening to this are like, “I do not believe this. I’m gonna put this in ChatGPT and double-check.”
[01:15:41] OG: But the math is the math, and it’s just very difficult to believe it without experiencing it. So if you’re sitting there and you’re going, “Yeah, I, I got 100 grand in my 401and that’s, you know, s- I guess it’s awesome, but, but I can’t touch it for 40 years, and somewhere, somehow, this is supposed to turn into, like, millions of dollars,” don’t believe that it’s going to a million.
[01:15:59] OG: Believe the fact that a year and a half ago it was worth 50K. So you already have the recipe for how to double money. It’s already exists. And so when people… When, when I talk to people and they’re like, “Well, I believe that I can get from a million to two million. I don’t believe that it’s go- gonna go from a million to 10 million.”
[01:16:16] OG: And I, I’ll, I’ll say to them all the time, “Why wouldn’t you believe this? You’ve already demonstrated your capabilities here. There was a time in the not too distant past where you had $100,000 and now you have a million. You’ve already 10 times your portfolio. Why do you believe that all of a sudden you’ll stop knowing how to do that, or it will stop doing those things in your favor?
[01:16:35] OG: You’ve 10 times’d it already. Why won’t you 10… Okay, fine. Don’t believe me that you can 10 times it. Do you believe that you can five times it?” “No, I don’t. Maybe double once,” right? It’s like, it’s like, you’ve already done it, so it’s easy. Just keep doing the thing that got you to this point.
[01:16:49] Joe: Well, it just brings us back, in this wheel of life, OG, to Dr.
[01:16:53] Joe: George Newman and creativity where we started, which is you don’t have to go out into the woods and find a new way. The way people have done this is they built that pile of money. And whether you can see it or not, and I 100% agree, most of us can’t see it, just do what they did. And the way they did it was they swam that moat, and, uh, you don’t have to recreate the wheel to get where you wanna go.
[01:17:18] Joe: Those were five of my favorite lessons. I’d love to hear which of our mentors during the first six months were on your favorites list. We didn’t have Haley Sacks on there, we didn’t have the, the maestros that I talk about all the time, the stock market maestros. So many great, great, great people. Ben Carlson on just before the break, uh, Dana Anspach, so many people.
[01:17:41] Joe: Write me, Joe@stackofbenjamins.com. Tell me what your favorite lesson was, and maybe one… W- what’s a lesson that you used from the first six months of the year? Maybe we can inspire each other. And Doug, you can talk about ’em on a future Back Porch segment. We would normally, by the way, have, uh, Doug, you would do that now, but we, we had a beautiful long interview with Joseph Moore, and we had wonderful time going back in hist- we went, went back the last six months in history and the last several hundred years in history, so I think we’ve got enough lessons for today.
[01:18:13] Joe: If you know somebody that learns best from history, this would be a great episode to share with them. And if you’re the type of person like me that needs to do something to learn it, you definitely wanna take one of your favorite lessons from today and go implement it. Implement it right away so that you don’t forget it.
[01:18:32] Joe: We’ll have show notes and links at stackingbenjamins.com. Doug, you’ve compiled your top three things we should learn from today’s episode. What would those be?
[01:18:42] Doug: Well, Joe, first, take some advice from Dr. Joseph Moore. That bedrock advice you think you know, maybe think a little longer term than, “Bitcoin has always been great,” or, “Nvidia has always been the world’s best stock,” and you’ll make better financial moves.
[01:18:58] Doug: Second, working on your financial plan? I hope you were inspired by some of our mentors who joined us in mom’s basement during the first six months of 2026. Look creatively at your situation, throw off adversity, go ahead and make mistakes, and build long-term plans. You’ll be stacking Benjamins like a pro in no time.
[01:19:20] Doug: But the big lesson, don’t tell Joe’s mom your big idea for Game Boy love hotels. That started a whole discussion I wasn’t ready for. Apparently, my dad skipped a few important things when we had the talk. Now I’m, I’m, I’m blushing a little bit. Okay, okay. Let’s, let’s just get to the credits quickly so I can go wash up.
[01:19:42] Doug: Blegh. Thanks to Dr. Joseph Moore for joining us today. You’ll find his New York Times Bestseller How to Get Rich in American History at the front of just about any bookstore you walk into. We’ll also include links in our show notes at stackingbenjamins.com. This show is the property of SB Podcast, LLC, copyright 2026, and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy.
[01:20:08] Doug: You’ll find out about our awesome team at stackingbenjamins.com, along with the show notes and how you can find us on YouTube and all the usual social media spots. Come say hello. And oh yeah, before I go, not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know.
[01:20:27] Doug: This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and we’ll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamins show
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