# The Stock Picking Philosophy to Find the Next Amazon with Motley Fool's David Gardner

An episode of [Masters in Business](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/730188152), 24 Apr 2026, 1 h 11 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/4e4cd910-40a1-4619-a5f3-ae2b0012ffff/4d002b6a-4aec-40fc-8d66-b4360159b185/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=5873a3cb-298f-40bc-b71f-ae2b0013000d

Barry speaks with David Gardner, Author and Co-Founder, at The Motley Fool. They discuss David's new book "Rule Breaker Investing: How to Pick the Best Stocks of the Future and Build Lasting Wealth." They also discuss the pros and cons of different investing strategies and trends. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:02] Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news. This is Masters in
[0:11] Speaker 1: Business with Barry Ritholts on Bloomberg Radio.
[0:16] Speaker 2: This week on the podcast, I had so much fun
[0:19] Speaker 2: chatting with David Gardner of The Motley Fool.
[0:21] Speaker 3: I remember The Fool back in.
[0:23] Speaker 2: Ninety three, ninety four when it first launched on AOL.
[0:28] Speaker 2: What a fascinating career. If you're a stock picker, if
[0:31] Speaker 2: you're someone who really is committed to finding the best
[0:35] Speaker 2: companies and then writing them for decades, you're gonna find
[0:39] Speaker 2: this conversation really fascinating. I thought his book was really interesting.
[0:43] Speaker 2: His whole approach so life to investing is really great.
[0:46] Speaker 2: I enjoyed our conversation. I think you will also with
[0:49] Speaker 2: no further ado, my discussion with the Mottley Fools.
[0:54] Speaker 3: David Gardner, Thank.
[0:55] Speaker 4: You, Barry. It's a delight to be with you. Thank
[0:58] Speaker 4: you so much.
[0:59] Speaker 5: I have a.
[0:59] Speaker 2: Vivid recollection of sitting on a trading desk and watching
[1:03] Speaker 2: you guys pop on to TV at various times, and
[1:07] Speaker 2: as soon as you guys showed up, I'm like, all right,
[1:09] Speaker 2: let me pull up and VIDI and Netflix. I knew
[1:12] Speaker 2: they would start running and then soon turn around and fade,
[1:16] Speaker 2: so as always.
[1:18] Speaker 3: I mean just in traday.
[1:19] Speaker 2: We'll get a little later to the difference between investing
[1:24] Speaker 2: in trading, Yes, sir, but first I have to go
[1:27] Speaker 2: back to your background because it's so unusual. University of
[1:31] Speaker 2: North Carolina on a Morhead scholarship focused on bachelors in
[1:36] Speaker 2: English and creative writing. I assume Wall Street was not
[1:40] Speaker 2: the original career plan. It actually was a career plan.
[1:44] Speaker 4: As I came to UNC Chapel Hill as a freshman,
[1:47] Speaker 4: I was telling people, I think I'm going to go
[1:49] Speaker 4: to work on Wall Street. I had a formative summer
[1:52] Speaker 4: in between my sophomore and junior year where I worked
[1:55] Speaker 4: at Solomon Brothers back in the day, the Good Friend era.
[1:59] Speaker 4: I think Michael Lui was writing Liar's Poker somewhere around
[2:02] Speaker 4: late eighties.
[2:02] Speaker 3: I think you first dropped.
[2:03] Speaker 4: The year was nineteen eighty six. Oh that I was
[2:06] Speaker 4: probably overlapped with him. At the same time it was
[2:09] Speaker 4: I don't recall Michael, and I'm really glad to see
[2:12] Speaker 4: where he's guys gone on to Great Heights. But that
[2:14] Speaker 4: was the summer I learned I was never gonna want
[2:16] Speaker 4: to go work on Wall Street.
[2:17] Speaker 1: Uh huh.
[2:18] Speaker 4: That was a really wonderful experience. I just realized it's
[2:22] Speaker 4: not a culture that I'm gonna probably spend time with
[2:25] Speaker 4: as a as an adult, and so that was so helpful.
[2:28] Speaker 4: I love the markets. I just wasn't a Wall Street person.
[2:31] Speaker 2: And you grew up in a household where markets investing
[2:34] Speaker 2: stocks were part of the daily conversation. Your dad helped
[2:37] Speaker 2: you win a high high school stock picking contest.
[2:40] Speaker 4: Tell us a little bit about that. Sure, it was
[2:42] Speaker 4: actually earlier than that, was fifth grade. It was fourth grade.
[2:45] Speaker 4: Real my dad probably did with other dads did pick
[2:48] Speaker 4: stocks for their son in this all boys school, Saint
[2:51] Speaker 4: Albans School I went to in Washington, d C. And
[2:53] Speaker 4: I remember he had Harcourt Brace Javanovich, he had Getty Oil.
[2:57] Speaker 4: This is bad. These companies aren't around anymore too much.
[2:59] Speaker 4: But that was my stock portfolio. And over the course
[3:02] Speaker 4: of three months, I outperformed my classmates and so I
[3:05] Speaker 4: won a gigantic Hrshey bar. Like to my ten year
[3:09] Speaker 4: old eyes, it was the biggest Hrshey Bar I'd ever seen.
[3:11] Speaker 4: But it was a wonderful introduction, you know. Back The
[3:14] Speaker 4: real exercise then, Barry was just to look in the
[3:16] Speaker 4: newspaper to write down sixteen and five eighths where the
[3:21] Speaker 4: stocks closed. We would do that once a week over
[3:23] Speaker 4: the course of three months and just start understanding the markets.
[3:26] Speaker 4: So that was an early experience, but really Dad was
[3:29] Speaker 4: so formative for me as an investor.
[3:31] Speaker 3: It's always it's always.
[3:32] Speaker 2: Fun talking to the youngsters who grew up with decimalization. Yeah,
[3:37] Speaker 2: because I vividly recall what's the price up a teeny?
[3:41] Speaker 2: You don't get that anymore. It's a it's a whole,
[3:44] Speaker 2: it's a whole.
[3:45] Speaker 4: Lot of your listeners, do Barry and I've seen.
[3:48] Speaker 2: Right, yeah, right up a stick up a half whatever
[3:50] Speaker 2: it happened to be. And then how did you end
[3:53] Speaker 2: up writing for Lewis Rukaiser's Wall Street newsletter?
[3:56] Speaker 4: Yeah? So I started out of college, took a couple
[4:00] Speaker 4: of years to read and write and travel a lot,
[4:02] Speaker 4: got married without a job, and then it was time
[4:05] Speaker 4: at the age of twenty four to get my first job.
[4:07] Speaker 4: And as it turns out, the newsletter that was supporting
[4:10] Speaker 4: Lewis Rukiser. You remember his show Wall Street Week, sure
[4:13] Speaker 4: longest running show on PBS, and he had a newsletter
[4:16] Speaker 4: with a financial newsletter, and I got to write the
[4:18] Speaker 4: back page of that newsletter for that first job. We're
[4:21] Speaker 4: reaching one hundreds of thousands of people, and I could
[4:23] Speaker 4: pick whatever topic I wanted, so it was really fun,
[4:26] Speaker 4: except it ended up not being fun. And the reason
[4:28] Speaker 4: it wasn't fun is because I would pick a subject
[4:30] Speaker 4: like discount brokers, which was a brand new, amazing thing
[4:33] Speaker 4: back then in nineteen ninety two, schwab what's that? Or Quicken.
[4:38] Speaker 4: There's now software you can DVD load onto your computer
[4:42] Speaker 4: and track your finances and your stocked. So I would
[4:45] Speaker 4: write these up and then the edited version would come
[4:48] Speaker 4: back with all of my jokes, color and fun stripped,
[4:53] Speaker 4: and the second half freshly written by my editor explaining
[4:57] Speaker 4: all the reasons you wouldn't want to use a discount
[4:59] Speaker 4: broker or Quicken. And that's because I was instructed. I
[5:03] Speaker 4: was never never took a journalism course, but I was
[5:06] Speaker 4: just an English major. But they told me, you know,
[5:08] Speaker 4: we have to balance it out here. David. In fact,
[5:11] Speaker 4: Rukeiser is the personality. He's the color of this newsletter.
[5:15] Speaker 1: Not you.
[5:16] Speaker 4: We're not we're stripping out of the color. And also
[5:17] Speaker 4: you gotta be you gotta talk about the downside of
[5:20] Speaker 4: discount brokers and quick and I was like, I don't
[5:22] Speaker 4: want to do that. I don't see downside.
[5:23] Speaker 2: Well, the downside is you're taking money out of stockbroker's
[5:27] Speaker 2: children's mouths.
[5:29] Speaker 4: I mean, what's the what's.
[5:30] Speaker 3: The downside of paying less to trade?
[5:33] Speaker 4: Yeah? Well I discovered that the downside was a job
[5:36] Speaker 4: that just was kind of creatively deadening. It doesn't really
[5:39] Speaker 4: reflect on Rukeaiser. It was the goal of that newsletter
[5:42] Speaker 4: just to you know, supplement his TV show and all
[5:44] Speaker 4: the rest. So, but after six months I quit the
[5:46] Speaker 4: job because I was just like, this is not fun.
[5:49] Speaker 2: There's an argument to be had that Rukaiser was peak
[5:52] Speaker 2: financial television and it's been downhill ever since.
[5:56] Speaker 4: Like an hour a week is plenty.
[5:57] Speaker 5: They was he a half.
[5:58] Speaker 3: Hour an hour? I don't even remember, you know, a week.
[6:01] Speaker 4: I think it was an hour a week. It was
[6:02] Speaker 4: generally Fridays. It would air different Friday mornings, but Friday night.
[6:05] Speaker 2: You know, I remember him from Friday Nights.
[6:08] Speaker 4: And you remember his wit. He always had a monologue.
[6:10] Speaker 2: Very yeah, right, let's go over to our what was
[6:14] Speaker 2: it elves wizards?
[6:15] Speaker 3: I'm trying to remember elves, right.
[6:16] Speaker 2: I think it was elves and It was always fascinating.
[6:19] Speaker 2: And you know, it's funny. I've seen as many of
[6:22] Speaker 2: those on.
[6:23] Speaker 4: YouTube decades later.
[6:25] Speaker 2: Yeah, uh that I saw as many as I've seen
[6:29] Speaker 2: live on Friday Night.
[6:30] Speaker 3: Okay, like I got no plans.
[6:31] Speaker 4: All right, let's see what Louis has to say. That's
[6:34] Speaker 4: really fun that you would go back and revisit. You know,
[6:36] Speaker 4: I'll just say he was he was a wit. He
[6:38] Speaker 4: was himself outside of Wall Street. I mean, he's sort
[6:41] Speaker 4: of a journalist, but he he he enjoyed bringing together
[6:46] Speaker 4: brilliant minds on Wall Street. You know, he had Peter Lynch.
[6:48] Speaker 4: He would regularly focus Lynch and others and Saunders. You
[6:52] Speaker 4: go down the list of people that he had.
[6:55] Speaker 3: I'm trying to remember.
[6:57] Speaker 2: Was it poll tutor Jones before the eighty seven crab?
[7:00] Speaker 2: Might well have basically saying I'm out of stock, so
[7:03] Speaker 2: I'm short. I think something terrible is about to happen,
[7:06] Speaker 2: and then Black Monday happened. Was like you there was
[7:10] Speaker 2: no other place to see stuff like that, except we
[7:12] Speaker 2: take it for granted today that, oh you want to
[7:15] Speaker 2: see something, it's out there.
[7:17] Speaker 4: Yeah, Bloomberg, the NBC, right, I remember f n N.
[7:21] Speaker 2: Was like CN player pre CNBC definitely, and then cnn
[7:27] Speaker 2: FN was another one.
[7:29] Speaker 3: You were right, and then so now.
[7:30] Speaker 4: We're going down memory lane? Is this what is this
[7:32] Speaker 4: what your audience wants? Bearing? No lane, I'm enjoying that.
[7:37] Speaker 2: But so so let's let's talk about you go from
[7:42] Speaker 2: ruke Heiser. Where did the idea with you and your
[7:46] Speaker 2: brother working in a shed in the backyard. Where did
[7:49] Speaker 2: the idea come from? Hey, I want to put my
[7:52] Speaker 2: own ideas with personality into a newsletter, Like, how did
[7:57] Speaker 2: that become an actual product?
[7:59] Speaker 4: Well, I quit that job with nothing to go to
[8:01] Speaker 4: and then my brother's best friend from Brown University. They
[8:04] Speaker 4: both went to Brown. Eric said, hey, David, I went
[8:07] Speaker 4: to Brown. But shockingly, I really know nothing about investing
[8:11] Speaker 4: in the stock market. I'm from great education, great family.
[8:14] Speaker 4: I'm a television sports producer. What's going on in stocks?
[8:17] Speaker 4: So would you teach me? So I spent a couple
[8:19] Speaker 4: of nights just sitting down with Eric, going, you know,
[8:21] Speaker 4: here's what I look at, here's what I do. I
[8:24] Speaker 4: was raised in a family where you buy individual stocks.
[8:27] Speaker 4: We're not just gonna index here, We're gonna be choiceful.
[8:31] Speaker 4: And we had so much fun. Eric's like why don't
[8:33] Speaker 4: we open up. This is a newsletter. You have no
[8:34] Speaker 4: job now, you just work for a newsletter. I was like, okay,
[8:36] Speaker 4: let's do that. And then I flipped through a book
[8:38] Speaker 4: of quotations one night, and I settled on a fool,
[8:41] Speaker 4: A fool, I see a fool in the forest, a
[8:43] Speaker 4: Motley fool, and I just thought, you know, Shakespeare, Shakespeare.
[8:46] Speaker 4: Those were as you like it at two seene seven
[8:49] Speaker 4: for those keeping score at home. But for me, this was,
[8:51] Speaker 4: you know, a character I loved studying, certainly going through school,
[8:54] Speaker 4: and everyone loves Shakespeare's fools. They could tell the king
[8:57] Speaker 4: or queen the truth, and they did so with humor,
[8:59] Speaker 4: the only one who could get away with it. That's right.
[9:01] Speaker 4: They were given license to tell the truth. So I
[9:04] Speaker 4: sort of loved it. Also, great lines like a fool
[9:07] Speaker 4: and his money are soon parted, you know, gave us
[9:09] Speaker 4: a steep hill to climb as we tried to build
[9:11] Speaker 4: trust with people. Why would you call yourselves fools? And
[9:15] Speaker 4: it started there, and it started as a print newsletter.
[9:18] Speaker 4: You mentioned that bar It was July of nineteen ninety three,
[9:20] Speaker 4: was the first issue, forty eight dollars a year. The
[9:22] Speaker 4: only people who subscribed our parents' friends. They were the
[9:25] Speaker 4: only ones who pay us forty eight bucks a year.
[9:27] Speaker 4: Our friends stre sure weren't going to for our financial
[9:30] Speaker 4: advice back then. But as we started that newsletter nineteen
[9:33] Speaker 4: ninety three early ninety four, we were signing on using
[9:37] Speaker 4: our modem our telephone onto AOL, Prodigy and Compu served
[9:42] Speaker 4: the big three in the early private online services battle,
[9:46] Speaker 4: and we were starting to discover this new medium and
[9:48] Speaker 4: getting fascinated by it.
[9:50] Speaker 2: And I recalled AOL as a stock was two or
[9:53] Speaker 2: three dollars in the early nineties, something really moderate before
[9:58] Speaker 2: it had a hillatious run.
[10:00] Speaker 4: Straight up for that whole whole decade.
[10:03] Speaker 3: What was it like? First of all, you guys got
[10:06] Speaker 3: fool dot com today.
[10:08] Speaker 4: Nobody else wanted it.
[10:09] Speaker 2: Every every proper down, every dictionary word is taken, although
[10:15] Speaker 2: who knows what what AI and the slow shift from
[10:19] Speaker 2: Google from SEO to AI is going to do to there,
[10:22] Speaker 2: you got all these domains, but like domains changed hands
[10:26] Speaker 2: for millions of dollars.
[10:27] Speaker 4: It's kind of crazy.
[10:28] Speaker 3: You went to get full dot com.
[10:30] Speaker 4: Nobody nobody's position, Yeah, nobody wants nobody wants full dot com.
[10:33] Speaker 2: Oh my god, would so the missed opportunity was a
[10:37] Speaker 2: domain squad every proper. Now, so you launched the website,
[10:42] Speaker 2: how long was it before it was got some traction?
[10:44] Speaker 4: So we really launched first of all, Barry, it was
[10:46] Speaker 4: August fourth of nineteen ninety four. It was just on
[10:48] Speaker 4: AOL because this is pre Worldwide Web. People were not
[10:51] Speaker 4: using that. Seven was Netscape, right, Yeah, I mean I
[10:54] Speaker 4: would actually say ninety six ish was when we started
[10:57] Speaker 4: coming online on the web. But no, it was just
[11:00] Speaker 4: were in fool on AOL. But AOL was going through
[11:03] Speaker 4: a period of dynamic growth, so it was fantastic for us.
[11:06] Speaker 4: We launched in August. By November we were written up
[11:09] Speaker 4: in the New Yorker in the Talk of the Town section,
[11:11] Speaker 4: and then we had agents and publishers saying, there's a
[11:13] Speaker 4: book here, guys, and we're on television. We're we have
[11:18] Speaker 4: a radio show coast to coast. We just we were
[11:21] Speaker 4: like the early pioneers who believed in this new medium,
[11:24] Speaker 4: and we were going offline as fast as we could.
[11:28] Speaker 4: Everybody else was trying to come on online exactly, so.
[11:31] Speaker 2: You were you were already and it's almost embarrassing to
[11:34] Speaker 2: use the preeze cyberspace so you were online, but.
[11:38] Speaker 4: You use on the information super Highway, but all.
[11:42] Speaker 2: The traditional media to point towards the website. How long
[11:46] Speaker 2: did it take before you kind of said to yourself, Hey,
[11:50] Speaker 2: this is real business.
[11:51] Speaker 3: I don't have to go get a job. I could
[11:52] Speaker 3: just build this.
[11:53] Speaker 4: We started at such a good time because AOL, as
[11:57] Speaker 4: you'll recall, was a pay hour service right in the
[12:01] Speaker 4: beginning anyway, correct, like three dollars twenty five cents. I
[12:04] Speaker 4: think there is it to four at one point, and
[12:06] Speaker 4: so the business model was remarkable for us. If somebody
[12:11] Speaker 4: spent an hour at keyword Fool, we would get ten
[12:14] Speaker 4: percent of that. So if they're paying a well four
[12:17] Speaker 4: bucks an hour, forty cents for any hour that anybody
[12:21] Speaker 4: would spend at our site. And so with a tiny
[12:24] Speaker 4: staff and a big dog that was mailing out CDs
[12:28] Speaker 4: and DVDs to get onto AOL that serves as cocktail
[12:32] Speaker 4: coasters at parties, we really benefited from that ramp, and
[12:36] Speaker 4: so we began to be able to hire other people
[12:39] Speaker 4: when the so when yeah, that was it.
[12:41] Speaker 2: When the CDs started getting mailing, I think they had
[12:44] Speaker 2: moved to like, oh, you can eat ten dollars a
[12:48] Speaker 2: month or something like that, we're like thirty bucks a
[12:50] Speaker 2: month twenty Yeah, I don't remember exactly what it was.
[12:54] Speaker 2: I just remembered that that was the end of surprise bills.
[12:58] Speaker 2: Oh it's infinite, Okay, great, I'm on twenty four to seven.
[13:01] Speaker 4: And that hurt our business a lot. And so it
[13:04] Speaker 4: also was a major inflection point, Yeah, because we had
[13:08] Speaker 4: built a site that was really fun to visit. We
[13:12] Speaker 4: had very active forums, we were publishing multiple times a day,
[13:16] Speaker 4: Lots of people were showing it. There were even chat
[13:18] Speaker 4: rooms back then, right, people were spending time online and
[13:20] Speaker 4: forty cents for every hour. So we were starting to
[13:22] Speaker 4: hire people. And then within a few years, AOL went
[13:25] Speaker 4: flat rate, and all of a sudden, we had been
[13:27] Speaker 4: the stars of AOL. They were putting us forth at
[13:30] Speaker 4: their partners conference. We were on the cover of Fortune
[13:32] Speaker 4: magazine just three years after we started a print newsletter.
[13:35] Speaker 4: We were right out front. And then we became kind
[13:37] Speaker 4: of poisoned for AOL in this sense, every hour that
[13:41] Speaker 4: anybody spent AOL had to pay connect fee.
[13:44] Speaker 3: Now it's a cost instead.
[13:46] Speaker 4: Yeah, they're only charging thirty bucks flat a month, And
[13:49] Speaker 4: so all of a sudden, magnet sites like ours were
[13:52] Speaker 4: not as popular. And then meanwhile AOL understandably no harm,
[13:56] Speaker 4: no foul here, but they were starting to launch AOL
[13:58] Speaker 4: Finance and AOL Stocks and competing directly with kind of
[14:03] Speaker 4: where we'd camped out and built our.
[14:05] Speaker 3: Hold might be.
[14:06] Speaker 2: Or we're going to launch our own website, whether people
[14:08] Speaker 2: access it through you or not.
[14:10] Speaker 3: Yeah, that's fine.
[14:11] Speaker 4: So and we know how the AOL story ended.
[14:17] Speaker 2: At that point, you're thinking, uh, oh, this is a
[14:20] Speaker 2: big issue. How long did it take before the website
[14:24] Speaker 2: hit the same sort of Oh, this is a self
[14:27] Speaker 2: sustaining business.
[14:28] Speaker 4: Yeah, So we launched the website alongside our AOL site
[14:32] Speaker 4: with our first book, The Motley Full Investment Guide, in
[14:34] Speaker 4: the summer of nineteen ninety six, and the website. AOL
[14:38] Speaker 4: took part ownership in US, so we gave a minority
[14:41] Speaker 4: interest in our company to AOL. And they're like, guys,
[14:44] Speaker 4: go out on the web, compete with your own site,
[14:45] Speaker 4: compete with us. Ted leonsis, who is a real visionary huh?
[14:49] Speaker 4: And TeV was like, guys, no one's making money on
[14:51] Speaker 4: the web. Show anybody how to make money here on
[14:53] Speaker 4: the web. And so we built our website and we
[14:56] Speaker 4: started pointing people to our both our website and our aols.
[15:00] Speaker 4: And as it grew and as AOO went flat rate.
[15:03] Speaker 4: The good news for us is a lot more people
[15:05] Speaker 4: came online at that point, thirty bucks a month versus
[15:07] Speaker 4: four dollars an hour a lot that's mainstream. And also
[15:12] Speaker 4: good news for us is that we could survive as
[15:15] Speaker 4: a free site, so we could now be free for
[15:16] Speaker 4: a lot of people. The bad news was we've shifted
[15:19] Speaker 4: business models straight up advertising right at that point, it's
[15:22] Speaker 4: all about eyeballs and clicks and your customer. Our customer
[15:26] Speaker 4: just changed because our customer had been the beloved fellow
[15:30] Speaker 4: individual investor who is taking a risk to even go
[15:32] Speaker 4: online back in the day. And there they were paying
[15:35] Speaker 4: four bucks an hour, and they loved us, and they
[15:38] Speaker 4: were our members, and they were paying us directly. All
[15:40] Speaker 4: of a sudden, they became the product that we sold
[15:43] Speaker 4: to advertisers, right, because that's obviously the free ad business
[15:47] Speaker 4: is your custom raise, your eyeballs are now your new product.
[15:51] Speaker 2: And as a reminder for the youngsters listening ninety six
[15:55] Speaker 2: ninety seven, wait you want me to give my credit
[15:58] Speaker 2: card to a random This is such like early days
[16:01] Speaker 2: of Amazon, early days of all. All right, there were
[16:04] Speaker 2: a handful of companies you might trust, but there's a
[16:07] Speaker 2: million websites.
[16:08] Speaker 3: I don't trust any of these guys.
[16:09] Speaker 1: I heard that.
[16:10] Speaker 3: Over and over again.
[16:11] Speaker 2: How long was it before you people felt, oh, we
[16:14] Speaker 2: could subscribe to this newsletter, we could give these people
[16:17] Speaker 2: money to manage what was the forward timeline?
[16:20] Speaker 4: So thank you for that memory, because this is very important.
[16:23] Speaker 4: Anytime a new technology shows up, it's generally we're fearful
[16:26] Speaker 4: about it. What is AI going to do to jobs?
[16:28] Speaker 2: Well, back back then, I had a tech buddy who
[16:32] Speaker 2: always used to tell me, if you want to know
[16:34] Speaker 2: where technology goes, watch the X rated stuff, because they'll
[16:38] Speaker 2: be the first with micro payments, they'll be the first
[16:41] Speaker 2: with faster than real time and streaming and things like that.
[16:45] Speaker 2: And it turns out that that's a big driver of
[16:47] Speaker 2: online business even to this day.
[16:49] Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think that's that's true. So you're right.
[16:52] Speaker 4: Premium experiences in premium services are where the web has
[16:56] Speaker 4: ended up. However, there was a whole shift ninety eight
[17:00] Speaker 4: nine to two thousand. You really couldn't charge for anything
[17:03] Speaker 4: on the web. If we had tried to say you
[17:05] Speaker 4: now shall pay for our site or there we have
[17:07] Speaker 4: a subscription service, we would have been laughed at. At
[17:10] Speaker 4: the same time, though, as a stock picker, I was
[17:13] Speaker 4: picking AOL stock saying I think this is an amazing company,
[17:17] Speaker 4: and it sure enough was. It ended up being one
[17:19] Speaker 4: hundred and fifty bagger at its top. Didn't end there,
[17:22] Speaker 4: but it was still a remarkable investment, and lots of
[17:24] Speaker 4: people had followed us into AOL and other stocks like
[17:27] Speaker 4: the Amazon, and it was really going against conventional wisdom
[17:32] Speaker 4: at the time to say by Amazon, by AOL. And
[17:35] Speaker 4: so I want people to remember that because now it
[17:38] Speaker 4: looks so obvious. I mean, al did n well. Amazon
[17:41] Speaker 4: has ended really really well. It hasn't ended right. So
[17:45] Speaker 4: it's important to remember those moments because we tend to
[17:47] Speaker 4: forget that. We also forget the dawn of AI. This
[17:50] Speaker 4: is first dating in this ballgame, and people will look
[17:52] Speaker 4: back and go it's also obvious in.
[17:54] Speaker 3: Retrospec It's always obvious in retrospect.
[17:56] Speaker 4: It is.
[17:56] Speaker 2: Indeed, it's at the time, it's really challenging. So last
[18:01] Speaker 2: question in this segment, if you were starting the Motley
[18:04] Speaker 2: Fool in twenty twenty six instead of nineteen ninety three,
[18:10] Speaker 2: So we have social media we have free trading, we
[18:13] Speaker 2: have ETFs everywhere the world is so different today than
[18:18] Speaker 2: it was forty years ago.
[18:20] Speaker 3: What would you do thirty years ago? Anyway? What would
[18:22] Speaker 3: you do differently?
[18:23] Speaker 2: How would you build a site and a business today
[18:26] Speaker 2: this time around?
[18:27] Speaker 4: Well, I think, first of all, one thing that we
[18:30] Speaker 4: know today that we didn't do back then that I
[18:32] Speaker 4: think is very helpful in every era is to be
[18:34] Speaker 4: a purpose driven business and to state what is your mission,
[18:38] Speaker 4: what is your purpose, and really hue to that, and
[18:40] Speaker 4: breathe through that, and hire for that and promote because
[18:43] Speaker 4: of that. And conscious capitalism is one of my themes
[18:47] Speaker 4: as an investor in a board that I've served on.
[18:50] Speaker 4: So I now have those eyes that I didn't have
[18:52] Speaker 4: back then, and I think that that is such a
[18:56] Speaker 4: strong thing. Most of the best companies I know look
[18:59] Speaker 4: at crazy business of fast food chicken. Chick fil A
[19:04] Speaker 4: is an amazing company. I wish it were a public
[19:06] Speaker 4: market company. It would have been one of my stock picks.
[19:08] Speaker 4: But they just fundamentally act differently than McDonald's and their competitors.
[19:12] Speaker 4: And it's because it's like a leadership academy. Masquerading is
[19:16] Speaker 4: a chicken joint and still closed on Sunday, Yeah, exactly,
[19:19] Speaker 4: which is their choice radical And so those are the
[19:23] Speaker 4: kinds of companies that I admire, and like, that's what
[19:24] Speaker 4: I've always wanted the Motley Fool to be. So I
[19:27] Speaker 4: would do that in earnest today in a way that
[19:30] Speaker 4: I think would cut through a lot of the noise
[19:31] Speaker 4: and people saying there's too many choices and all the
[19:33] Speaker 4: rest standing for something and then living that every day.
[19:37] Speaker 4: Most of the best companies that I can think of
[19:39] Speaker 4: do that, So I would be trying to do that
[19:41] Speaker 4: very But yeah, it is a different world. I mean,
[19:44] Speaker 4: one thing that's changed, I think for the worst. And
[19:46] Speaker 4: I'm an optimist. Almost everybody's mailing it in with index
[19:49] Speaker 4: funds these days. Like I was raised in an era
[19:52] Speaker 4: where it was kind of normal, at least in my family,
[19:55] Speaker 4: buy a stock. These days, the conventional wisdom has become
[19:58] Speaker 4: you'd be crazy to by individual stocks, that's so risky,
[20:03] Speaker 4: just index And while I admire Jack Bogel deeply and
[20:07] Speaker 4: I appreciate indexing, and the Motley Fool has always been
[20:09] Speaker 4: a big support of index funds, have we really got
[20:13] Speaker 4: an era where you shouldn't even pay attention or care anymore?
[20:16] Speaker 4: And you can't probably beat the market because it would
[20:18] Speaker 4: just be locked to pick Chick fil A over Kentucky
[20:20] Speaker 4: Fried Chicken. I don't think so. I didn't think so
[20:23] Speaker 4: back then, and so I would be definitely sounding that
[20:25] Speaker 4: loud and clear. Today there's even more big dumb money
[20:28] Speaker 4: slashing around than ever before, because so much is just
[20:30] Speaker 4: throwing it at everything and not discerning this one versus
[20:33] Speaker 4: that one. Huh, really really interesting.
[20:35] Speaker 2: Coming up, we continue our conversation with David Gardner, co
[20:39] Speaker 2: founder of The Motley Fool, discussing his book Rule Breaker Investing,
[20:44] Speaker 2: How to pick the best stocks of the future and
[20:46] Speaker 2: Build Lasting Wealth.
[20:48] Speaker 4: I'm Barry Ritholts. You're listening to Master's Business.
[20:51] Speaker 5: On Bloomberg Radio. I'm Barry Ridhault.
[21:04] Speaker 2: You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My
[21:07] Speaker 2: extra special guest is Dave Gardner. He's the co founder
[21:11] Speaker 2: of The Motley Fool and the author of the book
[21:14] Speaker 2: Rule Breaker Investing, How to Pick the best stocks of
[21:16] Speaker 2: the future and Build Lasting Wealth. So I want to
[21:22] Speaker 2: talk a little bit about the philosophy around rule breaking
[21:28] Speaker 2: investing and stock selection. One of the things that jumped
[21:32] Speaker 2: out of the book from your framework was top dog
[21:36] Speaker 2: and first mover, customer love, visionary leadership discuss.
[21:41] Speaker 4: Yeah, well, thank you. These are some of the traits
[21:44] Speaker 4: that I'm looking for in stocks, and I think before
[21:46] Speaker 4: we start this, Barry, I should just again underline I
[21:49] Speaker 4: believe it is a worthy thing to choose stocks. I
[21:53] Speaker 4: really want to find the best companies of our time,
[21:57] Speaker 4: and I want to own them for a long period
[21:59] Speaker 4: of time. And actually it's for many people. It's actually
[22:02] Speaker 4: easier to find Amazon or eBay back in that era,
[22:05] Speaker 4: or Nvidia more recently. But to actually hold them, to
[22:10] Speaker 4: hold them to allow them to multiply in the way
[22:12] Speaker 4: that they will if you do. In my experience, that's hardest.
[22:16] Speaker 3: Let's talk about that, because.
[22:19] Speaker 2: Amazon, after the dot com crash plummeted to single digits.
[22:23] Speaker 4: Yep.
[22:23] Speaker 3: Apple has had.
[22:24] Speaker 2: More near death experiences than I can count in Vidio,
[22:27] Speaker 2: go down the list, Google, Facebook, testable.
[22:30] Speaker 3: Facebook's IPO was a disaster.
[22:33] Speaker 2: It got cut in half like within a few months
[22:35] Speaker 2: of that, and then they kind of unlocked mobile and
[22:38] Speaker 2: it was off to the races. Yeah, Tesla, these companies
[22:42] Speaker 2: trade more like cryptocurrencies than companies. How do you find
[22:48] Speaker 2: the confidence and the commitment to stay with something down
[22:51] Speaker 2: forty sixty eighty percent, So thank you.
[22:55] Speaker 4: And I would say, first of all, it's not worth
[22:57] Speaker 4: doing that for every investment. If it were some dodgy crypto,
[23:02] Speaker 4: I wouldn't be holding. But you used an important phrase
[23:06] Speaker 4: a minute or two ago. You said top dog and
[23:08] Speaker 4: first mover. So when I look at important emerging industries
[23:12] Speaker 4: and I see a company with a large customer base,
[23:16] Speaker 4: they may not be profitable yet, but they're doing good
[23:18] Speaker 4: things in this world, a world I want to live in,
[23:21] Speaker 4: and there's stocks down, there's stock's been cutting aff what's
[23:25] Speaker 4: the reason? Sometimes it's the CEO, like Howard Schultz back
[23:29] Speaker 4: in the name of Starbucks, was just occasionally conservative and
[23:32] Speaker 4: the analysts were surprised as he under promised. And then
[23:36] Speaker 4: the stock drops fifteen percent, you know, and we told
[23:39] Speaker 4: a story about this going on the View.
[23:42] Speaker 2: Yeah, the stock ends up down thirty percent, and that
[23:44] Speaker 2: was your last appearance.
[23:46] Speaker 3: And then what happened to the Starbucks.
[23:48] Speaker 4: It went up thirty times a value and we've never
[23:49] Speaker 4: been back on the View. But and by the way,
[23:52] Speaker 4: I'll return it at any time. We'd love to close
[23:54] Speaker 4: the loop on that story. But yeah, that was nineteen
[23:56] Speaker 4: ninety eight early TV appearance, we picked a stock for
[23:59] Speaker 4: the the ladies of the view and uh and then
[24:02] Speaker 4: it was Starbucks. That's the punchline. By the way, I
[24:04] Speaker 4: shouldn't have given that, but yeah, the stock dropped thirty
[24:07] Speaker 4: percent in just a couple of months, and we went
[24:10] Speaker 4: back on the show to update the story and they
[24:12] Speaker 4: booed us good naturedly, and they're like, oh well, and
[24:16] Speaker 4: we're like, keep holding though, keep holding. And then they've
[24:19] Speaker 4: never invited us back since, and it's gone up thirty
[24:22] Speaker 4: thirty three times a value from our first appearance, not
[24:24] Speaker 4: even including the thirty three percent drops. So, I mean,
[24:27] Speaker 4: that was an iconic moment. I didn't realize it at
[24:29] Speaker 4: the time, but as I wrote Rule Breaker Investing, I
[24:32] Speaker 4: was just thinking, that's my story, because that's what most
[24:36] Speaker 4: people miss. Most people are following the headlines instead of
[24:39] Speaker 4: following real progress, and they're chasing stuff. And if you
[24:43] Speaker 4: just look and ask who are the movers and shakers
[24:45] Speaker 4: delivering products and services electric cars, robotic surgery, coffee houses,
[24:51] Speaker 4: better fahitas, the list goes on.
[24:55] Speaker 3: Who are the thinking striker Chipotle, Tesla?
[24:58] Speaker 4: Yeah? Well actually intuitive so okay, yeah, yeah, but yes,
[25:02] Speaker 4: you're thinking exactly the.
[25:03] Speaker 3: Company using the robot that did my surgery.
[25:06] Speaker 4: Ah, very happy to hear that.
[25:08] Speaker 2: And when I'm recall walking into the surgical theater and
[25:13] Speaker 2: looking around and saying, oh, this is where the future is,
[25:16] Speaker 2: I've just gone twenty years forward because this whole thing
[25:20] Speaker 2: is here's the big robot with all the like, Oh,
[25:22] Speaker 2: now I understand like the rest of the world we're
[25:25] Speaker 2: living in the past. This technology is as cutting edge
[25:28] Speaker 2: as it gets. It's it's really amazing.
[25:30] Speaker 4: I love that and I'm so glad to hear that
[25:32] Speaker 4: for you in successful surgery, which is what we all want,
[25:35] Speaker 4: robot or human. But yeah, it turns out there are
[25:37] Speaker 4: lots of advantages to robot assisted surgery, and Intuitive Surgical
[25:41] Speaker 4: has really been the pure place small companies. Striker is
[25:44] Speaker 4: a more bigger, diversified company. Yeah anyway, but.
[25:47] Speaker 2: For each of these like I just have been remember
[25:49] Speaker 2: with the little logo on the side, the last thing
[25:52] Speaker 2: I saw, that's a good thing to do. They're like,
[25:54] Speaker 2: this will help you relax. And then the next thing
[25:56] Speaker 2: I know, I'm in recovery. But the last thing I
[25:58] Speaker 2: saw was the Striker logo.
[26:00] Speaker 4: Great story, and you know, so it's funny you mentioned
[26:03] Speaker 4: the future and feeling like you're living in the future.
[26:05] Speaker 4: That's generally where I try to be as I pick
[26:08] Speaker 4: my stocks and just for the fun of it. One
[26:11] Speaker 4: of my best stock picks in the last fifteen years
[26:13] Speaker 4: been Tesla, which I picked in twenty eleven, still holding
[26:15] Speaker 4: and I bought. I've owned a number of Tesla since.
[26:18] Speaker 4: And I was driving around in Tesla in twenty thirteen.
[26:21] Speaker 4: My license plate in Washington, d C. Is future like
[26:25] Speaker 4: no one else thought of it. So I'm watching out
[26:27] Speaker 4: for the future in Washington, d C. And I'm driving
[26:29] Speaker 4: around going I really am inside the future, and I'm
[26:32] Speaker 4: surrounded by not just other cars that aren't yet, but
[26:35] Speaker 4: a whole industry, gas stations, etc. Of things is not
[26:39] Speaker 4: as much maintenance needed. So that's a great iconic example
[26:43] Speaker 4: of for me. Whether it's Starbucks back in the day,
[26:46] Speaker 4: which was questionable for a lot of people because it
[26:48] Speaker 4: looked like a fad. That was the big wrap on Starbucks'
[26:51] Speaker 4: early nineties. Where have coffee houses ever come from? In America?
[26:55] Speaker 4: There's no background for this. This is such a fat
[26:57] Speaker 4: paying five bucks for coffee? Are you serious? Right? So
[27:01] Speaker 4: AOL was all just chat rooms, so all gonna be hype.
[27:04] Speaker 4: No one will ever give their credit card over the internet.
[27:06] Speaker 4: Tesla electric cars will never work intuitive, surgical. Why would
[27:10] Speaker 4: you have a robot when humans can do it just
[27:12] Speaker 4: as well? Dot dot dot. The list goes on all
[27:14] Speaker 4: the way around.
[27:15] Speaker 2: Why would you have a human when a robot can
[27:17] Speaker 2: do it that is indeed more not only just as well,
[27:20] Speaker 2: but more consistently. Yeah, and it doesn't matter if they
[27:23] Speaker 2: had a bad night. It's it's fine the next day.
[27:26] Speaker 4: And minimally evasive and speak of the next day. You're
[27:28] Speaker 4: walking home the next day, two days.
[27:30] Speaker 2: Oh, no, same day you walk out of the hospital.
[27:32] Speaker 2: It's kind of terrifying, although you're still on a lot
[27:35] Speaker 2: of drugs at that.
[27:36] Speaker 5: Yeah.
[27:36] Speaker 4: Well, one of my heroes is Clayton Christiansen, who wrote
[27:39] Speaker 4: The Innovator's Dilemma, And he's somebody who helped me understand
[27:42] Speaker 4: and think about disruptive innovation. And I've always invested in
[27:45] Speaker 4: the innovators. And back to your earlier question, Barry, you
[27:48] Speaker 4: know I can keep holding my Netflix when it loses
[27:51] Speaker 4: two thirds of its value when I believe in Netflix,
[27:54] Speaker 4: and I see visible proof every day of how important Amazon.
[27:59] Speaker 4: Back in the day, Netflix Tesla. The list goes on
[28:01] Speaker 4: the companies we've mentioned, so that helps me hold these companies.
[28:04] Speaker 4: If you follow the company as opposed to the zigs
[28:07] Speaker 4: and zags on the stock charts or the headlines, you're
[28:10] Speaker 4: going to be much more patient, I think as an investor,
[28:12] Speaker 4: and that has been my that's been a superhero power
[28:15] Speaker 4: for me.
[28:15] Speaker 2: So walk us through your stock picking process. How does
[28:19] Speaker 2: a company first land on your radar? What sort of
[28:22] Speaker 2: analysis do you do? When do you decide you're comfortable
[28:26] Speaker 2: to put it on your buy list? And are there
[28:29] Speaker 2: any non negotiable checkboxes that you say Nope, that's a knockout.
[28:34] Speaker 3: They don't have this.
[28:34] Speaker 4: I mean every one of those questions I could possibly
[28:37] Speaker 4: fill your ears up. So I will try to be brief.
[28:39] Speaker 4: I love the questions in reverse order, by the way,
[28:42] Speaker 4: I'll say any non negotiables. I don't invest in companies
[28:45] Speaker 4: whose fundamental business is to take money from other people.
[28:48] Speaker 4: And so you'll never see me recommend a so called
[28:50] Speaker 4: gaming stock. And I think sports betting is a joke
[28:54] Speaker 4: and it's while I think it always should have been legal,
[28:57] Speaker 4: I think it is a sad waste of money for
[28:59] Speaker 4: anybody who does the math and so that would not
[29:01] Speaker 4: be on my list. No Madleyful member has ever received
[29:04] Speaker 4: a gaming recommendation from that, and they have.
[29:06] Speaker 2: Been very destructive, primarily to college age men. There's a
[29:11] Speaker 2: growing gambling addiction problem, and these companies just that's their
[29:16] Speaker 2: that's their clients.
[29:17] Speaker 4: Yep. And I will say I love sports. I know
[29:20] Speaker 4: you do too, and I'm happy making a bet with friends.
[29:23] Speaker 4: But if you really do the math of a fifty
[29:25] Speaker 4: to fifty prospect where the house takes out it's ten percent,
[29:28] Speaker 4: and you just do your expect to return and play
[29:30] Speaker 4: that forward with all your money, I know where that goes,
[29:33] Speaker 4: and you could have had nine to ten percent annualized returns.
[29:36] Speaker 2: There's a huge knuckleheads. There's a huge difference between doing
[29:40] Speaker 2: a box for the Super Bowl or something. Man, it's
[29:44] Speaker 2: fun and betting on free throws. I mean, it's it's
[29:48] Speaker 2: just it has nothing to do with sports. That's just
[29:51] Speaker 2: the medium by which they are tickling your adrenaline and dopamine.
[29:55] Speaker 2: It's it's so and yet these have become giant bastiness.
[29:59] Speaker 4: Yeah. And you know, even something as innovative as prediction markets,
[30:02] Speaker 4: which I am fascinated by, are also being turned into
[30:05] Speaker 4: quick quick money and or sometimes questionable who can influence
[30:09] Speaker 4: the outcomes of prediction markets. So these are unfortunate things
[30:12] Speaker 4: where I think they're fascinating to follow. But if you're
[30:15] Speaker 4: serious about your own money and you would like financial
[30:17] Speaker 4: freedom one day, you're making a huge mistake if you
[30:19] Speaker 4: go there. So back to your question, that's non negotiable
[30:22] Speaker 4: for me. I don't like businesses that just fundamentally lead
[30:25] Speaker 4: people who don't know math to give their money away regularly.
[30:29] Speaker 4: I don't feel great about that if I'm a shareholder.
[30:31] Speaker 3: So let me roll you back a little bit.
[30:33] Speaker 2: How does a company typically find its way onto your radar?
[30:38] Speaker 2: Is it something you're using or something you hear about? Like,
[30:40] Speaker 2: where do most of these ideas come from? So the
[30:43] Speaker 2: ideas come from?
[30:44] Speaker 4: First of all, I'm an early adopter, So I've got
[30:46] Speaker 4: a closet full of things where I bought the thing
[30:48] Speaker 4: early first jen and it's not really working or wasn't
[30:51] Speaker 4: relevant anymore, and so but it also meant I bought
[30:54] Speaker 4: Tesla very early on, and I tried online services with
[30:58] Speaker 4: my scratchy phone that sound we can all here if
[31:00] Speaker 4: you're over forty years old today of logging onto AOL
[31:03] Speaker 4: so I love the new I'm excited by AI and
[31:07] Speaker 4: that's not an industry, by the way, that is a
[31:09] Speaker 4: plate tectonic shift for our society that's going to create
[31:11] Speaker 4: many industries many of us don't even exist yet. Just
[31:14] Speaker 4: as we were excited about the Internet with Amazon, where
[31:16] Speaker 4: my cost bass today is sixteen cents still holding. Uber
[31:20] Speaker 4: hadn't even shown up yet, Google hadn't shown up yet.
[31:22] Speaker 4: I mean it's it will be years before AI companies
[31:25] Speaker 4: that are amazing, that are great stocks show up, So
[31:28] Speaker 4: no one should feel anxious that they don't have an
[31:31] Speaker 4: AI portfolio yet. But anyway, so I'm an early adopter,
[31:35] Speaker 4: and then I'm connected to a community, the Motley Fool community,
[31:38] Speaker 4: our forums, discussion boards, meeting people at book signings, this
[31:42] Speaker 4: conversation right now, you mentioned Striker. I probably need to
[31:45] Speaker 4: look back at that one. I'm curious how it's done.
[31:47] Speaker 4: So I'm just always listening. Of course, social media is
[31:49] Speaker 4: full of these kinds of opportunities. So intellectual curiosity is
[31:54] Speaker 4: the flame that will burn my whole life long and
[31:55] Speaker 4: in many of my fellow fools, and I think my
[31:58] Speaker 4: host today as well. So I think that if you're
[32:00] Speaker 4: curious and you're asking questions about where society is headed,
[32:03] Speaker 4: and you're specifically looking for products and services that will
[32:07] Speaker 4: improve our lives and our kids' lives. You're going to
[32:11] Speaker 4: be looking, You're going to be fishing in the right pond.
[32:14] Speaker 2: So once something falls on your radar, you have six
[32:18] Speaker 2: rule breaker criteria. Walk us through those six Yeah, really,
[32:21] Speaker 2: that's the heart of the analysis that you do, right
[32:24] Speaker 2: it is.
[32:24] Speaker 4: It's six traits that I'm looking for, and that's the
[32:26] Speaker 4: middle of my book. And I didn't start the book
[32:29] Speaker 4: that way, And we can talk about that later if
[32:30] Speaker 4: you like, But let me just rattle right now through
[32:32] Speaker 4: my six traits of rule breaker investing. And by the way,
[32:35] Speaker 4: I have used these now into my fourth decade. I
[32:37] Speaker 4: didn't just come up with these yesterday. This is exactly
[32:40] Speaker 4: what caused me to pick AOL, Amazon, Tesla, and Nvidia.
[32:44] Speaker 4: The list goes on, and some of them are so contrary,
[32:47] Speaker 4: which is why I think it works. Number one, top
[32:49] Speaker 4: dog and first mover in an important emerging industry. We
[32:52] Speaker 4: already spoke to that one. We could go deeply.
[32:54] Speaker 2: So for today, that might be in Nvidia, it might
[32:57] Speaker 2: be Broadcomb, it might be ASM lithographer, it might be AMD,
[33:01] Speaker 2: it could be any of the semiconductors or some of
[33:04] Speaker 2: the software companies Google, Microsoft, whoever.
[33:07] Speaker 4: Yeah, and also, by the way, restaurant companies, retail. I
[33:11] Speaker 4: mean in every industry, I'm asking who's the innovator. I
[33:15] Speaker 4: want to know who the innovator? And if you honestly
[33:17] Speaker 4: just only focus your stock market attention on the biggest
[33:21] Speaker 4: innovator in each industry. Some of them are small emergent,
[33:24] Speaker 4: some of them are big, you're going to do so
[33:26] Speaker 4: much better.
[33:26] Speaker 2: So Starbucks, the third place that was the big driver
[33:30] Speaker 2: of them, Chipotle, they came up with a way to
[33:33] Speaker 2: assembly line fresh food. Yeah, the fat quality, the fact
[33:37] Speaker 2: that it happens to be Mexican based is almost relevent irrelevant.
[33:41] Speaker 2: You see Kava today doing the same thing with Mediterranean
[33:45] Speaker 2: and I'm sure there are dozens of others coming up.
[33:47] Speaker 4: There are. And by the way, not all of these
[33:48] Speaker 4: workout as stocks. I certainly have a closet full of
[33:53] Speaker 4: bad stock picks as well, and we could talk about
[33:54] Speaker 4: that later, but that's very important. If you have sort
[33:57] Speaker 4: of a venture capital mentality as you look at the
[33:59] Speaker 4: public markets, which is how I describe myself, you need
[34:02] Speaker 4: just like a VC, you need to be comfortable with losing.
[34:05] Speaker 2: In other words, it's you're looking for here, one hundred
[34:09] Speaker 2: investments fifty mark in a workout, thirty'll do okay, but
[34:13] Speaker 2: it's the top two or.
[34:14] Speaker 3: Three that make it worthwhile.
[34:15] Speaker 4: Yeah, and I truly go into all hundreds saying I
[34:19] Speaker 4: like this company, I believe in it, and I hope
[34:20] Speaker 4: it works out. But I'm never loading up on one,
[34:23] Speaker 4: et cetera. So top dog and first mover an important
[34:25] Speaker 4: merging industry. Of my six traits, that's the most important.
[34:29] Speaker 4: So number two, we're looking for a sustainable competitive advantage,
[34:34] Speaker 4: a mote as Buffett likes the sume you bet, And
[34:37] Speaker 4: because we're holding stocks for a dead minimum of three years,
[34:42] Speaker 4: preferably three decades, sustainable competitive advantage really really matters, and
[34:48] Speaker 4: that takes many forms. We could talk about that number three.
[34:52] Speaker 4: So the first two are about the company. The third
[34:53] Speaker 4: is about the stock. And this is I'm looking for
[34:56] Speaker 4: a strong, stellar past price appreciated in the stock.
[35:01] Speaker 2: In other words, you're not looking for the cigar stub.
[35:03] Speaker 2: To use Ben Graham's the opposite phrase, You're looking for
[35:07] Speaker 2: something with a little momentum and where more and more
[35:11] Speaker 2: investors are stepping in.
[35:13] Speaker 4: There's a chapter in my book and it was an
[35:15] Speaker 4: eye opener as I wrote it and realized it where
[35:18] Speaker 4: I listed out seven of my best stock picks from
[35:21] Speaker 4: Intuitive Surgical to Netflix, to Apple, to Amazon, to Nvidia
[35:24] Speaker 4: and a couple of others, and I noticed, and I
[35:26] Speaker 4: only realized this in retrospect, that in the three to
[35:30] Speaker 4: nine months leading up to my first pick of them,
[35:34] Speaker 4: on average, they had risen thirty to ninety percent, and
[35:40] Speaker 4: a lot of people, I think most people, when they
[35:42] Speaker 4: are researching the stock goes up fifty percent, they're like, oh,
[35:45] Speaker 4: that missed it, thirdy right right done? Yeah. And so
[35:48] Speaker 4: part of the reason rule breaker investing works is because
[35:51] Speaker 4: I'm willing at that point not just to buy it,
[35:53] Speaker 4: but to actually be more excited about it. Because clearly
[35:56] Speaker 4: the market is noticing what's happening now. And when companies rise,
[36:01] Speaker 4: reflexivity starts to show up Barry, they start having more resources,
[36:04] Speaker 4: they're getting mentioned on Bloomberg Radio. All of a sudden,
[36:07] Speaker 4: a lot of good stuff starts coming to them that
[36:09] Speaker 4: strengthens them. That's not a reason to look for another
[36:12] Speaker 4: cigar butt and ignore Nvidia. So that is trade number three.
[36:16] Speaker 4: Stellar past price appreciation in a world where most people
[36:19] Speaker 4: are like by low sell high. I'm looking at the
[36:22] Speaker 4: fifty two week low list friends, not the fifty two
[36:24] Speaker 4: week high. And when I say friends, I mean that's
[36:27] Speaker 4: the average person speaking. I'm looking for the fifty two
[36:30] Speaker 4: week high. Give us four, five, and six. Sure, so
[36:32] Speaker 4: number four. It's all about the people. We're looking for
[36:36] Speaker 4: smart backing and excellent management. So it's the human capital.
[36:40] Speaker 4: And this is again in some ways obvious. Yeah, we'd
[36:43] Speaker 4: love to have Steve Jobs be our CEO. Yeah we're
[36:45] Speaker 4: glad that Jeff Bezos is our CEO or Warren Buffett.
[36:49] Speaker 4: But keep in mind, and this is a really hidden
[36:52] Speaker 4: in plain site, I think, profound insight that most people
[36:56] Speaker 4: don't see even though it's hidden in plain site. There
[36:59] Speaker 4: is no number to express the value of the CEO
[37:02] Speaker 4: running companies. So we have a whole Wall Street world
[37:05] Speaker 4: that's built on valuation ratios, generally off of earnings or
[37:08] Speaker 4: cash flow, sometimes off of assets, and they're not including
[37:12] Speaker 4: that Elon Musk is the CEO of the company. And
[37:15] Speaker 4: by the way, there are a lot of CEOs who
[37:17] Speaker 4: are subtracting value from their companies and there's nothing to
[37:21] Speaker 4: express that, and so we have a whole world driven
[37:24] Speaker 4: off algorithms. That increasing is computer trading. It's not even
[37:28] Speaker 4: humans anymore, and they're not noticing or caring. I think
[37:32] Speaker 4: about trade Number four, who the heck's running this thing
[37:35] Speaker 4: and who's backing it? That matters deeply to me, especially
[37:38] Speaker 4: if I'm holding, as I do for three decades. Number five,
[37:41] Speaker 4: we're looking for strong consumer brands. I love companies that
[37:45] Speaker 4: have raving fans, and it doesn't mean every time that
[37:48] Speaker 4: they are consumer brands. Striker Drilling, Intuitive Surgical, these are
[37:52] Speaker 4: not consumer brands per se. Although Intuitive Surgical with its
[37:56] Speaker 4: Da Vinci surgical robot, you will hear your local on
[37:59] Speaker 4: your local radio. If you still listen to it, you'll
[38:01] Speaker 4: hear an ad for the hospital bragging in some cases
[38:04] Speaker 4: that they have a da Vinci, So there is some
[38:06] Speaker 4: brand recognition there. But Starbucks, Netflix, Amazon, These are all
[38:10] Speaker 4: my best stock picks, and I bought them years ago
[38:12] Speaker 4: and still hold them today, and they all exhibit that
[38:15] Speaker 4: strong consumer appeal. And the final probably my favorite secret sauce.
[38:21] Speaker 4: So if you're following us, the first two are about
[38:24] Speaker 4: the company, that third was the stock. Then the next two,
[38:26] Speaker 4: four and five the people and the brand are about
[38:29] Speaker 4: the company. Number six is about the stock, and it's
[38:32] Speaker 4: specifically that the stock is generally considered capital o overvalued
[38:40] Speaker 4: by the world at large, by Wall Street commentators, by
[38:42] Speaker 4: people in Barns, CNBC, never Bloomberg Radio, so little contrarian perspective.
[38:48] Speaker 4: We are specifically wanting people to call out Tesla as
[38:51] Speaker 4: ridiculously overpriced. Amazon will never make money, intuitive surgical. When
[38:56] Speaker 4: I first recommended it over one hundred bag or ago,
[38:58] Speaker 4: it was at seventy three times. There are people, if
[39:01] Speaker 4: they even do pay attention to stocks anymore, that say
[39:04] Speaker 4: I would never buy a stock with a price turnings
[39:06] Speaker 4: ratio of seventy three. The list goes on.
[39:07] Speaker 3: So a lot of.
[39:08] Speaker 2: Times when we see stuff, especially with a company that's
[39:11] Speaker 2: relatively young, you start to see the company grow into
[39:17] Speaker 2: their evaluation. And video is a great example. It was
[39:20] Speaker 2: a semi maker, then it was a floating point chip
[39:24] Speaker 2: maker for gaming before it did the pivot. It's a
[39:28] Speaker 2: full AI because FPUs turns out to be better than
[39:32] Speaker 2: CPUs for large language models, and I don't pretend to
[39:37] Speaker 2: be a WIZARDPUS then GPS, right, that's right. I don't
[39:41] Speaker 2: know what f is floating point unit. But GPUs that's
[39:44] Speaker 2: exactly right. But you know, two years ago video was
[39:49] Speaker 2: like a seventy five pe. Now it's like a forty
[39:52] Speaker 2: pe in falling. Can't some of these overpriced companies just grow?
[39:58] Speaker 3: Apple is another sample.
[40:00] Speaker 4: For the longest time, people looked at Apple in the two.
[40:03] Speaker 2: Thousands when that newfangled iPod came out and said, oh,
[40:08] Speaker 2: they don't have any profits whatsoever? Why would I want
[40:11] Speaker 2: to own Apple in four or five?
[40:15] Speaker 4: So I think that, first of all, let's be clear,
[40:17] Speaker 4: there are things that are overvalued that you and I
[40:20] Speaker 4: would not want to buy. But if you're following our conversation,
[40:24] Speaker 4: if you're buying a top dog and first mover in
[40:27] Speaker 4: an important emerging industry with a sustainable competitive advantage, stellar
[40:30] Speaker 4: pass price appreciation, excellent management, smart backing, strong consumer appeal,
[40:35] Speaker 4: it has all five of those things in place. And
[40:38] Speaker 4: then some guy on CNBC is telling you it's blatantly overvalued.
[40:43] Speaker 4: It's crazy, No one should ever buy that stock. Amazon
[40:45] Speaker 4: dot Bomb cover of Barns. That is the special sauce
[40:49] Speaker 4: that causes me to say, bam, now we're buying. Well,
[40:53] Speaker 4: the contrary the.
[40:54] Speaker 2: Amazon Dot Bomb was I want to say January two
[40:58] Speaker 2: thousand and we did. I'd see a giant collapse. What
[41:02] Speaker 2: was the cues fell about eighty two percent pize trough.
[41:05] Speaker 2: That's a pretty big I experienced it all the way.
[41:07] Speaker 2: In fact, our cost basis sixteen cents. It had gone up.
[41:10] Speaker 4: It was a thirty bagger. And again, when I'm picking stocks,
[41:13] Speaker 4: this is not for my this is not for my
[41:15] Speaker 4: own portfolio, This is not this is lots of people
[41:18] Speaker 4: following the Motley Fool. These are people subscribing to us.
[41:21] Speaker 4: So when I pick a good stock, it feels really good.
[41:24] Speaker 4: It's not about me. When I pick a bad stock,
[41:26] Speaker 4: it doesn't feel very good. It's not about me or.
[41:29] Speaker 2: A big a good stock that hits a buzz sol
[41:31] Speaker 2: when a market gets sill act exactly, you could own
[41:34] Speaker 2: anything during the financial crisis, everything still got cut in
[41:38] Speaker 2: half more or less.
[41:39] Speaker 3: It was quite a quite a crash.
[41:40] Speaker 4: You're right, Barry. And the truth is that if you
[41:43] Speaker 4: follow any of these companies. I've littered our conversation with
[41:47] Speaker 4: fifteen to twenty company names that are really fifteen to
[41:50] Speaker 4: twenty generationally great stocks. Every single one of these stocks
[41:54] Speaker 4: has lost fifty percent or more of its value. More
[41:56] Speaker 4: than once, which means that if you'd followed motley ful advice,
[41:59] Speaker 4: depending on your timing, you might love me or not
[42:02] Speaker 4: like me. You might be like, yeah, I got in there,
[42:04] Speaker 4: but got cut in half and I got out. We're
[42:08] Speaker 4: holding all the way through. We're buying and we're holding.
[42:11] Speaker 4: So I have watched Amazon go. This is kind of
[42:15] Speaker 4: pre split. It was at three when we first recommend
[42:17] Speaker 4: it went to ninety five down to seven during that
[42:22] Speaker 4: you're sure in cross splitz soon after. Yeah, yeah, it's
[42:25] Speaker 4: now split down to sixteen cents, which, by the way,
[42:27] Speaker 4: is also my cost base is on Nvidia. Thanks to
[42:29] Speaker 4: the magic of stock splitz. They both got me at
[42:32] Speaker 4: my sixteen cent cost bases still holding. So but to
[42:36] Speaker 4: do that, like Nvidia just three years ago lost half
[42:39] Speaker 4: its value in one here, this is one of the
[42:40] Speaker 4: largest time. It was like four months in half. Yeah,
[42:43] Speaker 4: so this is just gonna happen twenty two. This is
[42:47] Speaker 4: not gonna happen for companies that are not dynamic. This
[42:49] Speaker 4: is not going to happen so much for cyclicals. I
[42:51] Speaker 4: mean there will be some cyclicality. These are rule breakers.
[42:54] Speaker 4: These are stocks that, by most popular view, were blatantly
[42:59] Speaker 4: over value. You should never bought Amazon all the way
[43:01] Speaker 4: through et cetera, and so they're going to be more volatile.
[43:04] Speaker 4: Netflix was going to get put out of business by Walmart.
[43:06] Speaker 4: I don't know if you remember this, but back in
[43:08] Speaker 4: the day of the red envelopes, all of a sudden,
[43:09] Speaker 4: Walmart said, hey, you can just drop it off at
[43:12] Speaker 4: your Walmart your DVD. You don't have to mail it
[43:14] Speaker 4: back to Netflix. And that was going to Netflix was
[43:16] Speaker 4: supposedly toast then, so I've AOL was going to be toast.
[43:20] Speaker 4: It eventually was kind of toast, although it sold out.
[43:23] Speaker 4: The merger was the Yeah, but I've watched it's such
[43:26] Speaker 4: a key indicator trade number six. When people say it's toast,
[43:30] Speaker 4: that not for every stock, but for the rule breakers,
[43:34] Speaker 4: that is magic. It has been for me.
[43:37] Speaker 2: So I want to ask you about the first stock
[43:42] Speaker 2: you purchased where you said, oh, this checks all six boxes.
[43:45] Speaker 4: This is my rule breaker. It was AOL.
[43:49] Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely, nineteen ninety one, four or five.
[43:52] Speaker 4: We literally picked it the day we launched on AOL
[43:54] Speaker 4: nineteen ninety four, August fourth, nineteen ninety four. And from
[43:57] Speaker 4: that point I watched AOL and and again we were
[44:01] Speaker 4: I mean, we're always fully transparent. People are like, wait,
[44:03] Speaker 4: you guys are on AOL. Is there a conflict of
[44:06] Speaker 4: interest you're recommending AOL stock. Oh, we know what it
[44:08] Speaker 4: is because we're on it. We see what this can
[44:11] Speaker 4: do for investors and what the future of the companies
[44:14] Speaker 4: is pretty self evident. You know you're right, And yet
[44:17] Speaker 4: not everybody would have felt that way back then. But
[44:19] Speaker 4: it was I mean, we had no inside view of AOL.
[44:22] Speaker 4: We were separately domicov, but we watched AOL grow and
[44:28] Speaker 4: it was such an object business lesson as an entrepreneur
[44:30] Speaker 4: for me, but as a stock picker, I was watching
[44:34] Speaker 4: it get called out as the most overvalued stock repeatedly
[44:38] Speaker 4: by august bodies like the world economic It's not the
[44:42] Speaker 4: world like a foreman today, but basically all the economists
[44:45] Speaker 4: in the world. We get together every summer, and two
[44:47] Speaker 4: summers in a row, it was like ninety six and
[44:48] Speaker 4: ninety seven they voted the most overvalued stock, and it
[44:52] Speaker 4: was the stock that we had backed. And our members
[44:54] Speaker 4: are like, guys, they're calling the most overvalued again. We're like,
[44:57] Speaker 4: this is an amazing company. It went up one hundred
[44:59] Speaker 4: fifty times in value, and I learned so much from
[45:02] Speaker 4: that experience, and as we mentioned, it didn't end there.
[45:04] Speaker 4: It started to drop back and fell back and eventually
[45:07] Speaker 4: just kind of got taken over. And you know, you know,
[45:10] Speaker 4: merge with time time warner.
[45:12] Speaker 2: When people stop calling stuff over valued and every analyst
[45:16] Speaker 2: on the street has a strong buy on it, that's
[45:18] Speaker 2: usually when you want to.
[45:20] Speaker 3: Be on the other side.
[45:20] Speaker 4: That right, that can that can be true. I will
[45:24] Speaker 4: also always but no, no, no, I definitely appreciate the sentiment,
[45:27] Speaker 4: and I smile at that askance with you as well.
[45:30] Speaker 4: I will say that we typically just hold well longer
[45:33] Speaker 4: than whatever analysts are thinking or saying. We don't really
[45:35] Speaker 4: pay attention.
[45:36] Speaker 3: So you're not is that what you say? Yeah?
[45:39] Speaker 4: No, I mean we love following business. By the way,
[45:41] Speaker 4: one thing you asked me to think a little bit
[45:43] Speaker 4: about is is there anything that people should be talking
[45:46] Speaker 4: more about, especially if something that troubles me? And a
[45:49] Speaker 4: quick example would be, I really think we should have
[45:52] Speaker 4: companies reporting every three months their financial results. And you
[45:54] Speaker 4: may know there's a movement of foot to allow some
[45:57] Speaker 4: companies just to report twice a year. I think that's
[45:59] Speaker 4: really bad, bad decision, and I hope we don't do that.
[46:02] Speaker 4: I hope companies will self report and choose to be
[46:05] Speaker 4: transparent on a regular basis with their results.
[46:07] Speaker 3: I'm going to take it a step further than you
[46:09] Speaker 3: and say.
[46:10] Speaker 2: And I wrote this before AI was ubiquitous. If you
[46:15] Speaker 2: want to get rid of quarterly reporting instead of going
[46:17] Speaker 2: once or twice a year, make it real time and
[46:21] Speaker 2: twenty four to seven really cool because you could update that.
[46:24] Speaker 2: You could set up technology to update Here's where we are,
[46:28] Speaker 2: Here's how close we are, here's our range. You can
[46:31] Speaker 2: Monty Carlo what we would likely to do each quarter.
[46:34] Speaker 2: And so the problem is the focus on quarterly. If
[46:38] Speaker 2: it was all the time, like you can look at
[46:42] Speaker 2: your portfolio or your checking account of twenty four seven.
[46:46] Speaker 2: You shouldn't, but you can, and it's made I remember
[46:50] Speaker 2: in the nineties or in the two thousands, we would
[46:53] Speaker 2: be printing stuff out, folding them up, sticking them in an envelope,
[46:56] Speaker 2: sending them out, and the quarterly report was the When
[47:00] Speaker 2: I was a junior having to do that crap in
[47:03] Speaker 2: the mailroom, it was a big deal to quarterly report.
[47:07] Speaker 2: Now nobody really thinks about your portfolio quarterly because you
[47:11] Speaker 2: can access it whenever you want. It's kinda I think
[47:14] Speaker 2: it's absolutely heading in the wrong direction. Yeah, well, so
[47:17] Speaker 2: more transparency is you know the theme here. But so
[47:22] Speaker 2: for me, I think a lot about you know, what
[47:25] Speaker 2: is going to be in the best interests of armchair
[47:27] Speaker 2: investors like me, because Barry, we are we're individual investors,
[47:31] Speaker 2: and so I'm there representing anybody who is in an
[47:34] Speaker 2: investment club or was given a portfolio of stocks and
[47:37] Speaker 2: they're trying to figure out how to.
[47:38] Speaker 4: Make better decisions. And I think it's so rewarding to
[47:41] Speaker 4: pick stocks in a world where it's increasingly called out
[47:45] Speaker 4: as crazy talk to actually buy an individual stocks.
[47:49] Speaker 2: So we talked earlier about stocks like Apple and Nvidia
[47:53] Speaker 2: and Netflix and Amazon that have.
[47:55] Speaker 3: All gotten cut in half repeatedly.
[47:58] Speaker 2: How do you tell the difference between a stock that's
[48:01] Speaker 2: just going through sort of regular volatility versus ge got
[48:07] Speaker 2: sliced in half we look at I'm not even talking
[48:10] Speaker 2: about the Lehman Brothers or the world Comms of the world.
[48:13] Speaker 4: I mean just.
[48:14] Speaker 2: Stocks that their best days are behind them. How do
[48:17] Speaker 2: you know the difference between just a regular stumble and
[48:22] Speaker 2: beginning of the end?
[48:23] Speaker 4: Well, first of all, I'd say you can't know. I mean,
[48:25] Speaker 4: it would be too headstrong of me to say, here's
[48:28] Speaker 4: what you do, here's how you know. So for me,
[48:31] Speaker 4: I just like to keep my stocks in place and
[48:34] Speaker 4: recognize someone are going to trip. I love horse racing metaphors,
[48:37] Speaker 4: and not every horse is gonna win the race. No
[48:39] Speaker 4: one's gonna make the race. Some get out to a
[48:41] Speaker 4: great start and don't finish well, and I can't always know,
[48:44] Speaker 4: but by holding I allow the ones that clearly will
[48:48] Speaker 4: win to win so grandly. You know, when you make
[48:51] Speaker 4: more than a thousand times your money on Amazon or Nvidia,
[48:54] Speaker 4: it doesn't actually matter that you had some dogs in
[48:57] Speaker 4: your portfolio. So you can be wrong, and that's okay,
[48:59] Speaker 4: because being right is so much more valuable. I will
[49:03] Speaker 4: also add, though, to answer your question a little bit
[49:05] Speaker 4: more directly. Usually the companies that fall and don't come
[49:10] Speaker 4: back are being disrupted. Earlier I mentioned Clayton Christensen innovator's dilemma.
[49:14] Speaker 4: You can usually kind of see it that the world
[49:16] Speaker 4: is changing. The company might still be best in class,
[49:20] Speaker 4: and it may have a famous CEO that everybody loves,
[49:23] Speaker 4: but all of a sudden, there's this upstart, might be
[49:25] Speaker 4: a whole industry of new players. And when I see
[49:28] Speaker 4: that in a company going down, I may not want
[49:30] Speaker 4: to hold onto that stock. But if Netflix, which has
[49:33] Speaker 4: been a sendent now for twenty plus years every time,
[49:37] Speaker 4: if it's down two thirds of its value, which has
[49:39] Speaker 4: happened more than once, including Quickstar, I keep holding that one. Right.
[49:43] Speaker 4: So the question is, does this company remain a rule breaker?
[49:47] Speaker 4: Is it a top dog and still a first mover
[49:50] Speaker 4: in an emergent industry? And when it is, I'm going
[49:53] Speaker 4: to keep holding that stock.
[49:55] Speaker 5: Coming up, we.
[49:55] Speaker 2: Continue our conversation with David Gardner, co founder of The
[49:59] Speaker 2: Motley Fool, discussing his book Rule Breaker Investing, How to
[50:03] Speaker 2: Pick the best stocks of the Future and Build Lasting Wealth.
[50:07] Speaker 4: I'm Barry rid Holts.
[50:08] Speaker 2: You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.
[50:26] Speaker 5: I'm Barry Ridhults.
[50:27] Speaker 2: You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My
[50:30] Speaker 2: extra special guest is David Gardner. He's the co founder
[50:34] Speaker 2: of The Motley Fool and the author of the book
[50:37] Speaker 2: Rule Breaker Investing, How to Pick the Best Stocks of
[50:39] Speaker 2: the Future and Build Lasting Wealth. When did you realize
[50:45] Speaker 2: that Blockbuster was being disrupted by Netflix and ps At
[50:50] Speaker 2: one point in the two thousands, Netflix tried to sell
[50:54] Speaker 2: themselves to Blockbuster for fifty million dollars and they turned
[50:57] Speaker 2: them down.
[50:58] Speaker 4: Yeah, it's like Yahoo could have bought Google. You love
[51:00] Speaker 4: those stories. But you know, I would say that I
[51:03] Speaker 4: never really thought too much about Blockbusters as a stock.
[51:06] Speaker 4: I remember we had the CEO on our Motley Ful
[51:09] Speaker 4: radio show and at that time Blockbuster maybe had twenty
[51:11] Speaker 4: five million customers and Netflix had one million, and he
[51:14] Speaker 4: was like, you know, we were watching what they're doing.
[51:17] Speaker 4: It's neat what they're doing. I don't think it's a
[51:19] Speaker 4: it's not a big scaling thing. You know, it's kind
[51:21] Speaker 4: of a niche thing. Do you want to mail your
[51:23] Speaker 4: DVD back and forth? And that I think it was
[51:26] Speaker 4: John Antiaco, but I mean good Man probably, but wrong.
[51:29] Speaker 4: He was wrong. And so it wasn't so much that
[51:32] Speaker 4: I ever cared to love Blockbuster. I just was watching
[51:34] Speaker 4: this rule breaker emerge and it was doing crazy stuff
[51:38] Speaker 4: like you can't just drop it off two blocks away
[51:42] Speaker 4: your Blockbuster. You have to mail it and keep a
[51:44] Speaker 4: queue and send it back and forth. But the Q
[51:47] Speaker 4: is half the value of it.
[51:48] Speaker 2: Here's all the movies I want to see, which, by
[51:51] Speaker 2: the way, every time I roll into Blockbuster, it's rented
[51:54] Speaker 2: and I'm not even talking about a Saturday night, like.
[51:56] Speaker 3: On a Wednesday. What do you mean you don't have this?
[52:00] Speaker 3: So instead.
[52:03] Speaker 2: Just working through the queue, Netflix was like, so the
[52:07] Speaker 2: initial question is, wait, you want me to nail DVDs
[52:10] Speaker 2: back and forth to Oh, I see how this works,
[52:13] Speaker 2: but this will never replace Blockbuster to no late fees?
[52:17] Speaker 2: Oh my god, why do I want to give anything
[52:20] Speaker 2: to Blockbuster? And it was super disruptive before online streaming.
[52:25] Speaker 4: And as a as a master of Business administration, actually
[52:28] Speaker 4: I don't have an MBA, but I know I'm on
[52:30] Speaker 4: your master business kind of beautiful. But as students of
[52:33] Speaker 4: the game, as people who love business, what actually was
[52:36] Speaker 4: happening was Netflix was changing the business model of the
[52:39] Speaker 4: consumer proposition in the whole industry, right because, as you
[52:42] Speaker 4: just pointed out, Blockbuster was a transactional, late fee driven
[52:46] Speaker 4: and all of a sudden, you're subscribing to Netflix. You're
[52:49] Speaker 4: now in a subscription relationship. Very disruptive. There was no
[52:53] Speaker 4: there was really no precedent for that in that industry.
[52:57] Speaker 4: So it looked like this crazy thing and it was
[52:59] Speaker 4: easy to mock. Why wouldn't you just drop it off
[53:01] Speaker 4: a block away mail it to these people, and yet
[53:05] Speaker 4: it fundamentally changed the business model forever. And then we're
[53:08] Speaker 4: not even talking about streaming, which we don't have to.
[53:10] Speaker 4: But they keep innovating.
[53:12] Speaker 2: And the you know, the interesting thing is you meant
[53:15] Speaker 2: we were mentioning late fees. You know, if you get
[53:18] Speaker 2: a late fee from your bank or a bounce check
[53:21] Speaker 2: fee or something, it's part of your statement.
[53:23] Speaker 3: It's not the same.
[53:24] Speaker 2: Thing as showing up and having someone say, give me
[53:27] Speaker 2: another seven bucks. What do you mean, give you another
[53:30] Speaker 2: seven bucks? It was just like so annoying and alienating.
[53:36] Speaker 2: Like I think it's a good rule of thumb, try
[53:38] Speaker 2: not to really piss off all of your clients, all
[53:41] Speaker 2: of your customers.
[53:43] Speaker 4: Not a good long term strategy. I have a small
[53:45] Speaker 4: confession to make that Wall Street summer I referenced when
[53:47] Speaker 4: I went to Solomon Brothers. We did We had a
[53:50] Speaker 4: video out from Blockbuster, and we kept it the whole summer.
[53:53] Speaker 4: We just kept not returning and we were irresponsible at
[53:56] Speaker 4: college sophomores. And at the end of the summer, I'm
[53:58] Speaker 4: not even sure, like we racked up a triple digit
[54:01] Speaker 4: late face and the video is twenty bucks to buy
[54:04] Speaker 4: exactly by another one. So we had a friend of
[54:06] Speaker 4: ours who was British go in with a British accent
[54:09] Speaker 4: and explain to Blockbuster that we were renting his place.
[54:12] Speaker 4: He doesn't really know about it, but here's this video
[54:14] Speaker 4: that he found, and so we kind of got out
[54:16] Speaker 4: of that one. It wasn't totally about board. So I'm
[54:19] Speaker 4: happy now to admit that this is helpful for me.
[54:22] Speaker 4: But yeah, that was kind of the state of things,
[54:24] Speaker 4: the anxiety, the angst around returning a video late and
[54:28] Speaker 4: not feeling great, you know, from a consumer branding standpoint, right.
[54:32] Speaker 2: So yeah, Netflix love them. So let's talk about rule
[54:35] Speaker 2: breakers today. They're gonna be in different spaces Biotech, defense tech, obviously,
[54:42] Speaker 2: AI and a lot of these areas don't have a
[54:45] Speaker 2: whole lot of earnings and they do have a massive
[54:48] Speaker 2: cash burn. So how do you think about valuation in
[54:51] Speaker 2: the space. Does it not matter if the growth is there?
[54:54] Speaker 2: Define the modern era of rule breakers.
[54:58] Speaker 4: So I would always be first of all looking at industries,
[55:00] Speaker 4: and you just did that some and you know, even
[55:03] Speaker 4: something like biotech, which you said, right, that's as you know, Barry,
[55:08] Speaker 4: that's multiple industries. I mean, so the internet was never
[55:12] Speaker 4: an industry AI is not in this industry. So we're
[55:15] Speaker 4: talking about again, huge technologies. I was saying earlier, plate
[55:19] Speaker 4: tectonic shifts for our society, and you're looking for the beneficiaries,
[55:23] Speaker 4: and you're looking for the visionaries who were starting something
[55:25] Speaker 4: that might sound a little crazy, like mailing DVDs back
[55:28] Speaker 4: and forth or an electric car, and you want to
[55:32] Speaker 4: get invested in those, assuming that you agree with the vision,
[55:35] Speaker 4: you think the person is great. You and I were
[55:38] Speaker 4: referencing Investment Research Circle nineteen eighties nineties, an annual report
[55:43] Speaker 4: being mailed to you through the mail that was about
[55:45] Speaker 4: all you had. There weren't online forms or anything. These days,
[55:48] Speaker 4: you can watch long form YouTube videos watching any CEO
[55:51] Speaker 4: be interviewed and learn a lot about their character, which
[55:55] Speaker 4: carries which matters deeply to me. I'm a big character person,
[55:58] Speaker 4: so I want to feel really good about the people
[56:01] Speaker 4: I'm invested in across my portfolio. So we're looking at
[56:03] Speaker 4: important emerging industries and we're not trying to force things
[56:07] Speaker 4: that don't exist yet. There's no ultra AI stock, I mean,
[56:10] Speaker 4: and Vidia has been an amazing hold for us now
[56:12] Speaker 4: twenty one years in counting. It was not an AI company.
[56:15] Speaker 4: When I first recommended it. But we're still holding But
[56:18] Speaker 4: you know, these things are going to emerge. I already
[56:20] Speaker 4: mentioned earlier things like Uber Airbnb didn't show up till
[56:23] Speaker 4: more than ten years after the Internet had really started
[56:26] Speaker 4: to penetrate American life. And so for me, it's just
[56:31] Speaker 4: keeping our eyes out, whether it's genomics or some duo lingo,
[56:38] Speaker 4: a video game on your phone where you're learning languages. Again,
[56:42] Speaker 4: all of these are from different industries, but they are
[56:45] Speaker 4: the innovator. And so yeah, we're staying focused in the
[56:48] Speaker 4: modern day go forward on what are the companies that
[56:52] Speaker 4: are going to add value to our world in a
[56:55] Speaker 4: way that is consumer noticeable. And when they're called overvalued,
[56:59] Speaker 4: that's even better for us as rule breaker investors.
[57:01] Speaker 2: So let me share some criticism that you share with
[57:05] Speaker 2: Warren Buffett of all people. When I'm doing my research
[57:09] Speaker 2: for this conversation, one of the things that came up
[57:12] Speaker 2: was you have this really good long term track record,
[57:16] Speaker 2: but if you've been involved in more recently in the
[57:19] Speaker 2: past ten to fifteen years, well, all those amazons, Netflix
[57:24] Speaker 2: apples from the early two thousands are driving most of
[57:27] Speaker 2: your gains.
[57:28] Speaker 3: From what I'm hearing.
[57:29] Speaker 2: From you, you're implying that doesn't really a hold true
[57:34] Speaker 2: if you look at the Teslas and the Ubers and
[57:36] Speaker 2: the more modern positions respond to that criticism, Hey, if.
[57:40] Speaker 3: You weren't in it No.
[57:41] Speaker 4: Three, you really didn't get any benefit. Well, first of all,
[57:44] Speaker 4: I would say that invest every day of your life,
[57:47] Speaker 4: every two weeks if you can. Young people, the first
[57:49] Speaker 4: thing you should do is open account if you haven't
[57:51] Speaker 4: already saved, and with every paycheck, try to put up
[57:54] Speaker 4: to ten percent away and put it in. If you want,
[57:57] Speaker 4: you can index, but I think you should be buying
[57:59] Speaker 4: stocks as well alongside that and learning as you go.
[58:02] Speaker 4: And anybody who's playing the long game in the markets,
[58:06] Speaker 4: as they start to hit their thirtieth or fortieth year,
[58:08] Speaker 4: which is where I am, it's always going to look
[58:11] Speaker 4: like all your big winners were the first ten years,
[58:14] Speaker 4: because of course they. I mean literally, Amazon is now
[58:18] Speaker 4: more than a thousand times of value. For me, I'm
[58:19] Speaker 4: not trying to be Amazon guy. You don't walk me.
[58:22] Speaker 4: You don't see me walking around going I'm the guy
[58:24] Speaker 4: who had Amazon sixteen cents. I also have that for Nvidia.
[58:28] Speaker 4: But just by the nature of compounding, Barry, which I
[58:31] Speaker 4: think you understand as well as anyone. It's always going
[58:34] Speaker 4: to look like all your big winners were early. But
[58:36] Speaker 4: you know, whether it's Tesla picked in you know, twenty
[58:40] Speaker 4: eleven or Shopify in twenty sixteen, these are all rule breakers.
[58:45] Speaker 4: They're not going to hit right away. Shopify has been
[58:47] Speaker 4: up and down, but mostly up. It's a great example
[58:50] Speaker 4: of a rule breaker circa the last ten years, not
[58:52] Speaker 4: the first twenty years. But I never want people to
[58:55] Speaker 4: forget we were right there at the beginning with AOL,
[58:58] Speaker 4: and we were picking AOL and Amazon and Starbucks. By
[59:02] Speaker 4: the way, the list goes on. So I would just say,
[59:04] Speaker 4: compounding numbers are always going to make it look like
[59:07] Speaker 4: all of your big winners are early in your career.
[59:10] Speaker 2: So before I get to my favorite questions, is just
[59:13] Speaker 2: one question I'm excited to ask you when you're looking ahead,
[59:17] Speaker 2: what trends, what businesses, what ideas generally get your curiosity going?
[59:23] Speaker 4: Well, this is this is in the same way that
[59:27] Speaker 4: seven up was the on Kola back in the day.
[59:29] Speaker 4: This is an unanswer because.
[59:31] Speaker 2: By the way, you're talking to a generation I know
[59:33] Speaker 2: that has no idea what that means.
[59:35] Speaker 4: But you, you and I do, though, and we got
[59:37] Speaker 4: some of our peeps listening, So yeah, I should have
[59:43] Speaker 4: just answered the question. So I look for companies that
[59:48] Speaker 4: are conscious capitalism kinds of companies. I want companies that,
[59:53] Speaker 4: first of all, are doing good in this world. By
[59:55] Speaker 4: my perception, a lot of people think it's a trade
[59:57] Speaker 4: off in life. They think capitalism is greedy and e
[1:00:00] Speaker 4: and you know you're abusing workers and it's all about
[1:00:03] Speaker 4: maximizing shareholder value. I completely disagree in many cases. Sure
[1:00:07] Speaker 4: that exists in the world, but that's not the story
[1:00:10] Speaker 4: of Amazon. Amazon is a big, beautiful, amazing enterprise that
[1:00:14] Speaker 4: helps save lives during COVID. And yes, they'll get criticized
[1:00:17] Speaker 4: for some of the things that they've done. And Jeff
[1:00:19] Speaker 4: Bezos is considered an egomaniac by some, but net net please,
[1:00:24] Speaker 4: Amazon is a huge value contributor. So that's an example
[1:00:27] Speaker 4: of a company. Read Hastings and what he created a Netflix.
[1:00:30] Speaker 4: I mean, there's a whole eighty page slide. A lot
[1:00:32] Speaker 4: of entrepreneurs have seen about how Netflix does culture that
[1:00:35] Speaker 4: they just kind of share out and you could see
[1:00:37] Speaker 4: why they're so successful because how they treat their employees
[1:00:40] Speaker 4: and the standards that they hold where doing good actually
[1:00:44] Speaker 4: leads to doing well. And again many people think that's
[1:00:47] Speaker 4: a trade offer. They don't actually think that's real. So
[1:00:50] Speaker 4: I specifically want you and I to make our portfolios
[1:00:53] Speaker 4: reflect our best vision for our future. And so every
[1:00:56] Speaker 4: company that I already like invade against an entire industry
[1:00:59] Speaker 4: the gaming in the street earlier, Sorry gamers, but by
[1:01:02] Speaker 4: the way, I'm a gamer, but I play video games
[1:01:04] Speaker 4: and board games. Not fifty to fifty in the house
[1:01:06] Speaker 4: takes ten percent game. But I would say that you're
[1:01:10] Speaker 4: looking for the people who are doing good or within
[1:01:13] Speaker 4: their industry. They're admired for how they treat their employees,
[1:01:16] Speaker 4: how they win for their customers, and how their partners
[1:01:19] Speaker 4: and suppliers are proud to be associated with them. And
[1:01:22] Speaker 4: guess what, Usually the stocks end up outperforming in a
[1:01:25] Speaker 4: world where many people think it's too risky to even
[1:01:27] Speaker 4: buy individual stocks. So the more there's big dumb money
[1:01:31] Speaker 4: slashing around out there, Barry, the easier it is for
[1:01:34] Speaker 4: stock pickers like me, like you, if you like, like
[1:01:36] Speaker 4: anybody listening to us, to actually pick and discern the
[1:01:40] Speaker 4: good companies hold them longer than Wall Street, longer than
[1:01:43] Speaker 4: the headlines than CNBC will be talking about and do
[1:01:47] Speaker 4: really well.
[1:01:48] Speaker 2: So let's jump to our speed round our favorite questions
[1:01:51] Speaker 2: in the last five minutes we have starting with who
[1:01:54] Speaker 2: your early mentors who helped shape your career.
[1:01:57] Speaker 4: So my father, who at the age of eight teens said,
[1:02:00] Speaker 4: here you go, David, I've been investing in this for
[1:02:02] Speaker 4: you from birth. This is all you're ever getting from me.
[1:02:06] Speaker 4: And I've taught you out of value line that big
[1:02:08] Speaker 4: black tome, the numbers of investing. And I know you
[1:02:11] Speaker 4: love sports statistics. Another of my mentors, Bill James, the
[1:02:15] Speaker 4: awesome baseball statistician. Actually he was a journalist, but James
[1:02:20] Speaker 4: who influenced Moneyball of course. Of course, so who I've
[1:02:23] Speaker 4: met before, But you know, these these are early people
[1:02:26] Speaker 4: who convinced me of the fun of life and that
[1:02:29] Speaker 4: it could be counted with numbers. I'm an English major,
[1:02:32] Speaker 4: but there's a there's a big left brain going on
[1:02:34] Speaker 4: with me with loving loving numbers and baseball stats and
[1:02:37] Speaker 4: college basketball stats. Ken Palm, by the way, Ken Palm
[1:02:40] Speaker 4: that is a twenty five dollars subscription any sports fan
[1:02:44] Speaker 4: would enjoy. So so Peter Lynch, I'm thinking about Clayton Christensen.
[1:02:51] Speaker 4: I mentioned. These are all people who really have helped
[1:02:54] Speaker 4: me think about what wins.
[1:02:56] Speaker 2: Look, you mentioned money ball. Let's talk about books. What
[1:02:59] Speaker 2: are so some of your favorites. What are you reading
[1:03:01] Speaker 2: right now?
[1:03:02] Speaker 4: Yeah, so, first of all, I'm reading right now The
[1:03:06] Speaker 4: Score by ten when and the score is an amazing
[1:03:11] Speaker 4: but I think the subtitle is something like how to
[1:03:13] Speaker 4: stop playing somebody Else's Game? And Nuen is a games philosopher,
[1:03:19] Speaker 4: so people are you know, philosophers about ideas or art.
[1:03:23] Speaker 4: He specifically looks at games, and his book talks about
[1:03:27] Speaker 4: how social media, for example, is sort of a game,
[1:03:30] Speaker 4: like as soon as you start imposing likes and follows,
[1:03:34] Speaker 4: you're playing somebody else's game. You're playing Twitter X's game
[1:03:37] Speaker 4: or Facebook's game. When you have to accept GPA as
[1:03:41] Speaker 4: a measure of how well you've done in college, and
[1:03:43] Speaker 4: it becomes big and bureaucratic, and everybody's using that. You
[1:03:47] Speaker 4: are unfortunately playing somebody else's games. Sometimes you have to
[1:03:50] Speaker 4: do it, but being self aware of what is motivating you.
[1:03:55] Speaker 4: It is an amazing book and I highly recommend this score.
[1:03:58] Speaker 4: I've had my podcast a couple of times. Love the guy.
[1:04:02] Speaker 4: I mean, we just couldn't geek out about board games.
[1:04:04] Speaker 4: But that's what I'm reading right now. But you know,
[1:04:05] Speaker 4: when I think about books, I mean it's a motley
[1:04:08] Speaker 4: array of books, Barry, Indeed, I mean The Inevitable by
[1:04:12] Speaker 4: Kevin Kelly's a great book about the future. I'm a
[1:04:14] Speaker 4: big Kevin Kelly fan. He founded Wired magazine. He's a genius.
[1:04:18] Speaker 4: I enjoy Arthur Brooks's columns in the Atlantic. He writes
[1:04:21] Speaker 4: about happiness. I really loved his book Love Your Enemies,
[1:04:25] Speaker 4: talking about the divisiveness in our country and how to
[1:04:27] Speaker 4: solve that. And I would love to see more of that.
[1:04:30] Speaker 4: Stephen Pinker and all of his data accumulation around technologies,
[1:04:35] Speaker 4: trends in our culture. It seems always to be smart
[1:04:38] Speaker 4: to be a pessimist. You always sound smarter when you
[1:04:41] Speaker 4: talk something down. And yet we're pinch yourself that you're
[1:04:44] Speaker 4: living today. I know we have a lot of problems.
[1:04:47] Speaker 4: We have many many better problems. There were many worse
[1:04:50] Speaker 4: problems in over human history. Stephen Pinker reminds us of that.
[1:04:54] Speaker 2: Right our world and data. Yeahns Rosling saying, there you go, Barry, exactly.
[1:04:58] Speaker 2: I was rudely using my phone to get the exact
[1:05:01] Speaker 2: name of a book that I'm gonna recommend. To you
[1:05:03] Speaker 2: because it's sitting on my desk and the author is
[1:05:06] Speaker 2: Danny Funt. Everybody loses and it's all about the tumultuous
[1:05:13] Speaker 2: rise of American sports gambling and why it's such glad
[1:05:18] Speaker 2: he wrote that. So it's literally waiting for me to
[1:05:22] Speaker 2: it's next up. This this giant I love, but it's writing,
[1:05:29] Speaker 2: your writing, your moo. I mentioned earlier some streaming time,
[1:05:34] Speaker 2: we've been talking about Netflix and Amazon, So tell us
[1:05:38] Speaker 2: what are your favorite Netflix or Amazon Prime videos or
[1:05:42] Speaker 2: what podcasts are you listening to?
[1:05:43] Speaker 4: Thank you? I you know, I really enjoyed Apple's Player
[1:05:46] Speaker 4: of Us. If you saw that, it's also in my queue.
[1:05:49] Speaker 4: Next up to totally recommend that that's just season one.
[1:05:53] Speaker 4: I mean, we had a lot of British comedy fans
[1:05:56] Speaker 4: in my family, so shows like Mitchell and Webb the
[1:05:59] Speaker 4: Comedy do. Their clips are all over YouTube, but it
[1:06:03] Speaker 4: crawt hilarious show streaming. Totally recommend that, not as funny,
[1:06:08] Speaker 4: but very British. All creatures great and small, just very
[1:06:10] Speaker 4: interesting light exactly, just such a slow horses, great great
[1:06:16] Speaker 4: show Apple and or sure I love sci fi. I
[1:06:20] Speaker 4: love all the Marvel stuff. By the way, Marvel's been
[1:06:22] Speaker 4: an amazing stock for me. It got bought out by Disney,
[1:06:25] Speaker 4: so these days we have a very low cost basis.
[1:06:27] Speaker 4: You couldn't have gotten because when Disney bought Marvel at
[1:06:30] Speaker 4: a huge premium, we Marvel shareholders, we happy for you
[1:06:33] Speaker 4: buying a rule breaker that looked over valued. We've ended
[1:06:36] Speaker 4: up doing really well. So but you know, and are
[1:06:38] Speaker 4: obviously star Wars and I love brands, and I love
[1:06:41] Speaker 4: family entertainment.
[1:06:42] Speaker 2: So those are some that come to mind. I just
[1:06:44] Speaker 2: flew back from San Francisco. On on the flight, I
[1:06:46] Speaker 2: rewatched Deadpool and Wolverine, and it's like I forgot how
[1:06:50] Speaker 2: much fun that movie? Yeah, really really blessed our final
[1:06:54] Speaker 2: two questions, What sort of advice would you give to
[1:06:57] Speaker 2: a recent college graduate interest did in a career and investing? Well,
[1:07:02] Speaker 2: I would first of all say that you should pick
[1:07:04] Speaker 2: individual stocks, and you should pay attention to the game,
[1:07:07] Speaker 2: and you.
[1:07:07] Speaker 4: Should love it. You should have a lot of fun.
[1:07:09] Speaker 4: I mean, I love sports. We've talked to I know
[1:07:11] Speaker 4: you do too. We've talked about that. A lot people
[1:07:13] Speaker 4: follow their sports teams day to day. I follow the
[1:07:16] Speaker 4: markets day to day. And the difference is you actually
[1:07:19] Speaker 4: can make serious money by learning and following the market
[1:07:22] Speaker 4: in a way you never will as a sports fan.
[1:07:24] Speaker 4: And I love sports, and you know sports can be
[1:07:26] Speaker 4: a little bit more fun day to day, but the
[1:07:28] Speaker 4: markets are open every day. Your NFL team only plays
[1:07:31] Speaker 4: on Sundays. And starting to figure out what wins in
[1:07:34] Speaker 4: the marketplace, and why is that app on your phone
[1:07:36] Speaker 4: not somebody else's app, what's in your fridge, what are
[1:07:39] Speaker 4: you wearing? Noticing the things that go on around you.
[1:07:42] Speaker 4: This is going to lead to riches, but it's also
[1:07:43] Speaker 4: going to open your mind to awareness of what's happening
[1:07:47] Speaker 4: in our society. And I do think that people who
[1:07:49] Speaker 4: are taught to index and not really care are kind
[1:07:52] Speaker 4: of walk and blind in society when they could be
[1:07:55] Speaker 4: poking their feelers up seeing what's happening in genomics or
[1:07:59] Speaker 4: robotic surgery or whatever. And I'm an English major and
[1:08:01] Speaker 4: I care about these things and profiting as a consequence.
[1:08:04] Speaker 4: I would also say that any young person start investing yesterday,
[1:08:08] Speaker 4: and our final question.
[1:08:10] Speaker 2: What do you know about the world of investing today?
[1:08:12] Speaker 2: Might have been useful back in nineteen ninety three when
[1:08:15] Speaker 2: you were first getting started.
[1:08:16] Speaker 4: I would just say that when I first got started
[1:08:18] Speaker 4: nineteen ninety three, investing was more of a math exercise
[1:08:21] Speaker 4: for me. I was taught by a dad. I mentioned
[1:08:23] Speaker 4: value line, lots of ratios that we know. I never
[1:08:26] Speaker 4: learned financial statements until I bought how to read a
[1:08:29] Speaker 4: financial statement the year after I graduated college, thinking, you know,
[1:08:34] Speaker 4: I kind of missed that. I never really did that,
[1:08:36] Speaker 4: and so I was very numerically driven. I think what
[1:08:39] Speaker 4: I've realized is that using your right brain in a
[1:08:43] Speaker 4: world where many people are just using their left brain,
[1:08:46] Speaker 4: is where the real values added. My favorite chapter in
[1:08:49] Speaker 4: my Rule Breaker investing book points out that most of
[1:08:54] Speaker 4: the things that win in business are not actually on
[1:08:57] Speaker 4: the financial statements. We've already talked about a few of them.
[1:08:59] Speaker 4: Who's running the company That is incredibly important. How about
[1:09:02] Speaker 4: the brand value of a company? Most of those are
[1:09:05] Speaker 4: never expressed anywhere in the financial statements. The culture of
[1:09:08] Speaker 4: the company can it innovate? Those four things are the
[1:09:12] Speaker 4: bedrocks as an entrepreneur. I know I see it in
[1:09:14] Speaker 4: my own company when we fail and when we succeed.
[1:09:17] Speaker 4: None of those is being captured in the financial statements.
[1:09:19] Speaker 4: And we're living in a left brain driven algorithmic world
[1:09:23] Speaker 4: and so I think here now I see and I
[1:09:26] Speaker 4: only think longer term than I ever did before when
[1:09:28] Speaker 4: I was thirty years ago. I think longer term today
[1:09:30] Speaker 4: at the age of fifty nine than twenty nine, and
[1:09:32] Speaker 4: I use my right brain.
[1:09:34] Speaker 2: David, thank you so much for being so generous with
[1:09:37] Speaker 2: your time. This has been absolutely fascinating.
[1:09:40] Speaker 4: We have been speaking with David Gardner.
[1:09:42] Speaker 2: He is one of the co founders of the Motleygue
[1:09:46] Speaker 2: four and author of the book Let's See If I
[1:09:49] Speaker 2: can spit this out, rule Breaker Investing, how to pick
[1:09:53] Speaker 2: the best stocks of the future and build lasting Well.
[1:09:57] Speaker 4: If you enjoyed this conversation, well.
[1:10:00] Speaker 2: Check out any of the six hundred and twenty seven
[1:10:02] Speaker 2: we've done over the past dozen years. You can find
[1:10:06] Speaker 2: those at YouTube, Spotify, Apple, Bloomberg, wherever you get.
[1:10:11] Speaker 3: Your favorite podcasts.
[1:10:12] Speaker 2: I would be remiss if I didn't thank the crack
[1:10:15] Speaker 2: team that helps these conversations come together each week. Alexis
[1:10:19] Speaker 2: Noriega is my video producer. Sean Russo is my researcher.
[1:10:25] Speaker 2: Anna Luke is my podcast producer.
[1:10:28] Speaker 3: I'm Barry Ridults.
[1:10:30] Speaker 2: You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio

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