For years, I've been connecting with interesting people and documenting insights that might help my clients and myself. What was once private is now (mostly) public.
People often ask: "How do you know all these people?" and "How do you connect these (re: random) ideas?" The answer is simple: consistent relationship cultivation and thoughtful note taking. My north star is trusting my instincts, my maps are the constellations in these reflections.
This approach to multidisciplinary networking has helped dozens of clients, colleagues, and friends strengthen their networks and unlock new opportunities. Feel free to steal these ideas directly - that's what they're for! I can't promise you'll learn FROM me, but I guarantee you can learn something WITH me. Let's go. Count it off: 1-2-3-4!
Introducing... Joseph Moore!
Do you know Joseph Moore? He's a historian, professor, and the author of the national bestselling book How to Get Rich in American History - a 300-year tour of financial advice that worked, didn't work, and changed dramatically along the way. He writes at josephmoorebooks.com, and if you sign up there he'll send you chapter one for free so you can decide for yourself.
If not, allow me to introduce you. Joseph didn't set out to write a personal finance book - he set out to question the premise of every personal finance book ever written. He's a historian who tripped and fell his way onto the national bestseller list, sold out his first print run, and is already thinking about the next mountain.
I wanted to connect with him again because Joseph is one of those people who can take a clip you show him cold and immediately find the thread nobody else would pull - and then follow it somewhere completely unexpected.
Our conversation is LIVE now on the Just Press Record YouTube channel (and this Cultish Creative Playlist). This is a special "Oh Snap, Guess What I Saw" episode - I showed Joseph a clip from Vic Ruggiero and Christina Garnett's Just Press Record episode and got his take on an idea I simply couldn't shake. Listen and you'll hear a historian defend mass-produced culture, dismantle taste hierarchies, and somehow make you feel better about every cheap print that ever hung on a wall.
THREE: That's The Magic Number of Lessons
In the meantime, I wanted to pull THREE KEY LESSONS from my time with Joseph Moore to share with you (and drop into my Personal Archive).
Read on and you'll find a quote with a lesson and a reflection you can Take to work with you, Bring home with you, and Leave behind with your legacy.
WORK: The Average American Heard Live Music 20 Times a Year
The average American in the 1800s listened to live music roughly 20 times a year, and usually all of those in like a compact, like a week full of music and harvest festivals and this kind of stuff. And most if not all of that music would've been played by the same three or four musicians. If you think about the life of the everyday person, they lived their entire lives and never heard a masterpiece, not once. And so then you get Sears Roebuck, and you get radio, and you get how-to guides. You get cheap guitars that are made in a factory, and that is how famous musicians learned to play the guitar - one of whom was B.B. King, who learned to play guitar from a book that he ordered through a Sears Roebuck kind of magazine. So when I hear commodified art, I'm like, "Yeah, isn't that awesome that everyday people get access to this?"
Key Concept: The conventional complaint about commodification assumes it degrades something pure - but Joseph flips the frame by asking who actually had access before it. For most of human history, art and music weren't democratized; they were scarce, local, and largely the same. Commodification didn't cheapen culture - it distributed it. The historian's move here is worth borrowing at work: before you criticize a system for what it lost, ask who it let in.
Personal Archive Note-To-Self: I love the reminder that everything always happens because we're standing on the shoulders of the giants that came before us. Of course B.B. King is only playing guitar because of Sears and mail order and railroads - or hey, the Beatles never hear American rhythm and blues without records. And why would we think we're doing anything but standing on a new breed of giants today?
You have to ask all this. And then you have to ask "so what" for today. Because clearly nobody saw B.B. coming. Nobody saw the Beatles coming. We won't see who's next either.
I like thinking about how the current starting conditions always contain a handful of individuals who will break from what we thought was possible, or was even an option. The joy I get from looking for them, and the unconventional ways it shows up, is one of the reasons I do Cultish Creative at all - I just want to catalogue these interests and funny connections I see. Making sure to point this stuff out, and not just whine about it, is real (exciting) work that I knew Joseph would deliver on when we pressed record.
Work question for you: Before you criticize something for what it lost, have you asked who it let in?
LIFE: Whose Emotional Reactions Count?
You can walk into a mobile home and then walk into another mobile home, and they're entirely different families with entirely different values. And there's a lot of those homes that you'd be shocked how neat and nice they are - this is the pinnacle of their American dream. And on the wall is some of the cheapest mall art you will ever see, and they are so proud of it. Or you could go to my grandmother's house, which was a 900 square foot ranch bought on the GI Bill loan that my grandfather was stressed out to try to pay off early. It is nothing anyone would've ever noticed driving by it, and yet it was spotless. And on the wall were mass-produced prints of Italian Venice art - because that was the thing in the '50s and '60s that people would go to the mall and buy. I guess my point is, whose emotions count? And if it isn't the thing that moves the artist among us, but it moves the masses, does that count? To me, it does, 'cause I'm from those people.
Key Concept: Joseph's question - "whose emotions count?" - is deceptively simple and quietly radical. It's a challenge to the assumption that taste hierarchies are neutral, when they're actually a kind of gatekeeping: deciding in advance whose response to beauty matters and whose doesn't. The grandmother's house isn't a consolation prize for people who couldn't afford better. It's a complete world, cared for on its own terms. The insight travels anywhere you're tempted to dismiss what moves people who aren't like you.
Personal Archive Note-To-Self: Emotional gatekeeping is not an expression I had on my bingo card for this conversation. It reframes the "we are not thinking machines, we are feeling machines that think" idea for me. And because there's a gate here, I have to talk about the trailer park gate where we went on vacation.
So, obviously, you can't just let anybody into your trailer park. If you want it to feel like a gated community, you need a gate. Which means you need a card to get in, and you need those spiky "do not reverse or tire damage" spikes to drive over so people know you mean business. And if you organize and call them condos, you basically convert a campsite turned trailer park into a trailer park turned condo association in 3 generations or less - which is exactly what happened at the place I grew up going to for vacation.
Language is meant to communicate what's going on between people - but it works in levels, and the level you're standing on shapes what you think you're seeing. It's far better to stay curious about what's going on and why than to assume your read on someone else's status is the whole story. Life gets a lot more fun once you let go of the base descriptors.
Life question for you: Whose emotional reactions have you been discounting - and what would change if you took them as seriously as your own?
LEGACY: Taste Is a Signal Marker of Status
I just wonder to the degree to which taste is a signal marker of status to say, "I cannot like what everyone else likes." My ability to have and like what no one else can have or like, what the average person would not yet like - my ability to like it when they don't even know that it exists, much less that they should want it - is part of my status. And I've just observed that in music, in fashion, in art, throughout history. There's just a class of people who, as soon as something becomes wildly popular, must have something else that sets them apart. And the music point is brilliant because it doesn't map onto economic class. There's people who put on boots for work and scrubs for work and suits and ties for work, all of whom feel like they knew what the great punk band was before anybody else. So what I love about that point is that it doesn't map to any other social status we have except taste.
Key Concept: Joseph is naming something most people feel but rarely articulate - that taste isn't just preference, it's positioning. The status signal isn't "I have expensive things," it's "I knew first." And because that signal lives entirely in taste rather than wealth, it crosses every economic line - the person in scrubs and the person in a suit can both feel the same sting when their favorite band sells out. What you choose to love, and when you chose to love it, is its own kind of currency.
Personal Archive Note-To-Self: If you want to help more people be happy, you find ways to teach them this lesson. You help them let go of all these other comparison points and worry more about their experience first, and then find ways to stay curious about the experiences of others second.
To be clear about my childhood trailer park vacations, I thought they were totally normal, and, dare I say, kind of luxurious? I mean, we got to eat out a little, go to a beach, hang out on a boardwalk, and the only status comparison I really had was vacation-life to regular-life - in which case vacation-life was the clear and obvious victor.
The cracks that started to show up were things like "I go to Ocean City" and people would say, "Oh, Maryland? We love to summer there," and I'd say "No, New Jersey," to which they'd reply with a disappointed, "I see. I never heard of that one. I'm sure it's quaint." I knew better than to explain the trailer park. Once in high school a buddy of mine and I drove to Ocean City, Maryland for a couple nights to stay with his mom. I remember thinking it was a nice place - just not my place. Their boardwalk was lower and fancier, but didn't have the same vibe. I appreciated learning what the fuss was about, and I appreciate that Joseph is helping me revisit these memories.
Stay curious.
Legacy question for you: What's something you loved before everyone else did - and what did it feel like when the crowd arrived?
BEFORE YOU GO: Be sure to…
Connect with Joseph Moore on LinkedIn, Substack, and X
Check out his book How to Get Rich in American History and grab chapter one free at josephmoorebooks.com
Watch the original Vic Ruggiero and Christina Garnett Just Press Record episode that sparked this whole conversation
Take a moment to reflect on all these ideas!
You have a Personal Network and a Personal Archive just waiting for you to build them up stronger. Look at your work, look at your life, and look at your legacy - and then, start small in each category. Today it's one person and one reflection. Tomorrow? Who knows what connections you'll create.
Don't forget to click here and tell me who you're adding to your network and why! Plus, if you already have your own Personal Archive too, let me know, I'm creating a database.
Want more? Find my Personal Archive on CultishCreative.com, watch me build a better Personal Network on the Cultish Creative YouTube channel, and listen to Just Press Record on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and follow me on social media (LinkedIn and X) - now distributed by Epsilon Theory.
You can also check out my work as Managing Director at Sunpointe, as a host on top investment YouTube channel Excess Returns, and as Senior Editor at Perscient.
ps. AI helped me pull and organize quotes from the transcript, structure the three lessons, and sharpen the Key Concepts. If you're curious about how I use AI while keeping editorial control and my own voice intact, I wrote about my personal rules here: Did AI Do That: Personal Rules
