Joseph Moore

And not once did they touch that money.

Like that's not the real world people were living.

So compound interest does work.

I'm not saying it doesn't work.

I'm saying how powerful it is is actually fairly new to our experience.

Things like crypto we say are very new are actually very old.

So we've had self-issued currency in America for most of our history.

At the dawn of the Civil War, there were 10,000 separate currencies privately issued in America.

My favorite example of this is there's a runaway slave named William Wells Brown.

He gets out of Kentucky.

He makes it as far as Michigan.

He gets stuck.

And a local landlord takes sympathy on him and says, look, I'll rent you this space in my shop and you can start a barbershop, which is a fabulous idea with just three problems.

Number one, he has never cut hair in his life.

Number two, he does not own scissors.

And number three, no one in town has enough money to pay him.

So he, number one, doesn't tell anybody he's never done it.

Number two, he borrows some scissors.

And then he goes to a printer's office and says, will you print money for me?

And it's basically money good at my barbershop.