Joseph Moore

It was like, who gave us a mortgage?

We have no money.

And so we put our house on the market on, I think, a Friday or Saturday.

It sold the next Saturday in a bidding war.

Our neighbor put her house on the market the following Saturday.

It never sold.

We were the last people off the 2008 Titanic.

And I was floored and humbled and embarrassed that I thought I knew so much history.

And a friend's class in a church basement had taught me

more than any book I was reading.

And I thought there has to be a history here.

And so I set out on a quest to understand, like, what were people told to do with their money?

For 300 years, Americans have been told, this is how you get ahead.

But what were they being told?

Was it always the same thing?

Did it change?

And what I discovered, the longer I explored it, was actually people really did get ahead, which I was actively in the process of teaching students you couldn't do.

And that seemed like a problem, right?

And so then I started experimenting with these various things.

I thought, well, if people did it in the past, I'm going to try it in the present.