Joseph Moore

Like if you wanna go ahead, you actually have to solve someone else's problems, so that's where most of the real money is made.

Secondly, is you do need to take some risks.

I think we're probably in the least risky age in American history, and yet we're more risk averse than we ever have been.

Third, you need to move more, especially if you're younger.

Most of the great opportunities in American history came from those who went or those who won, and you have to go where the opportunity is.

You live in the largest free market zone in the world.

There is an opportunity for you somewhere.

Marry well, that works in every era.

And by the way, that's not just marrying into money, that's marrying into the kind of character that helps a family build wealth over time.

And then finally believe that you can, because optimism is wildly over-rewarded in the American economy.

So from the George Washington administration until Michael Jackson's Thriller album, dividends were 90 something percent of returns and price movement was very little of a gain.

And since then, I think well over 70% of our investment returns come not from dividends, but from price elevation.

Yeah, thank you.

So I was getting a PhD in American history.

I came from a very rural, working-class family in the South, right?

My mother was brought home to a house with no flush toilet, and she was the sixth child, right?

So on my father's side, they were active resistors to capitalism, as it were.

These were mill strikers who had—the Communist Party had sent activists down South to teach people, you know, dumb rednecks to read the Communist Manifesto.

Those rednecks were micro—

my great grandparents and they like, you know, charge the mills and these kinds of things.