Live from Joe’s mom’s basement, we hand you a mission you’ll actually want to accept. Today we welcome Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner for a fast, fun masterclass on investing in individual stocks. Whether you are index-only or you like picking a few favorites, David shows how learning the language of great businesses can sharpen every investor’s game.
David walks us through his six core habits, from letting winners run and adding to strength to thinking in three-year horizons and capping new positions at 5 percent. He shares the Starbucks on The View story, why “long-term investor” is redundant, and how purpose-driven companies often end up winning for everyone. We talk Chipotle, Netflix, Nvidia, and the difference between real investing and guessing. You will leave with a clearer lens for spotting excellence and the patience to let it compound.
In our headline, we look at how the advice industry is changing and what that means when you choose your next advisor. Plus, Doug straps on his harness for a Mission Impossible trivia moment that takes us sky-high over Dubai. Buckle up, stacker. This one is equal parts education and entertainment.
FULL SHOW NOTES: https://stackingbenjamins.com/stock-trading-with-motley-fools-david-gardner-1736
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/201
Enjoy!
Today’s Mentor: David Gardner
Big thanks to David Gardner for joining us today. To learn more about David, visit Team – Fool Community Foundation. Grab yourself a copy of the book Rule Breaker Investing: How to Pick the Best Stocks of the Future and Build Lasting Wealth
Our Headline
- Understanding people is key to how financial advice has to evolve (InvestmentNews)
Doug’s Trivia
- What famous building did Cruise rappel down in Mission Impossible 4?
Have a question for the show?
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- Check out The 201, our email that comes with every Monday and Wednesday episode, PLUS a list of more than 19 of the top money lessons Joe’s learned over his own life about money. From credit to cash reserves, and insurance to investing, we’ll tackle all of these. Head to StackingBenjamins.com/the201 to sign up (it’s free and we will never give away your email to others).
Other Mentions
- A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Best Investment Guide That Money Can Buy
- Liar’s Poker (Michael Lewis’ first book)
Join Us Friday!
Tune in on Friday for a special roundtable discussion LIVE from FinCon!
Written by: Kevin Bailey
Miss our last show? Listen here: 4 Culprits Wrecking Middle Class Retirement (SB1735)
Episode transcript
Opener: [00:00:00] Hello, honey, I’m at the mall now and I found this beautiful leather coat. It’s only a thousand. Can I get it? Well, sure if you like it that much. Okay. Um, I also stopped by the Mercedes dealership and saw the new model. You know, the one I really like. How much? 120. Well, at that price I want to put all the options.
Great. Oh, and, and one more thing. The house we wanted last year back on the market, they’re, they’re asking 1.5. We’ll make them an offer, but come in at, uh, 1.4. Okay? I love you, baby. I love you too. Okay, bye. Um, does anybody know whose phone this is?
Doug: Live from Joe’s mom’s basement. It’s the Stacking Benjamin [00:01:00] Show, and your mission, if you choose to accept it, is simple. Learn how to invest in individual stocks. Whether you plan on sticking with index funds or you’re diving into buying your favorite companies, knowing the basics will help you steer the ship better.
Today we say hello to the guy who knows Stock Trading Inside and Out. He’s co-founder of the Motley Fool, David Gardner, and in our headline segment, the Financial Advice Industry is in the headlights. Who should be your next advisor? One piece has thoughts and so do we. And now two guys who are your mission briefing expert, stacker.
It’s Joe and O Ju g Joe. Take that ridiculous add-on.
Joe: Heck no. ’cause we’re celebrating the Motley Fool coming down to the basement today. Hey everybody, I am the court jester today until David gets here. Joe saw, see hi. And across the car table. And you can hear me jingle by the way.
Doug: Yeah. [00:02:00] People
Joe: can only see this
Doug: hat.
Joe: You have no shame. There’s zero shame anywhere in your body. This was my hat when I was on the main stage of FinCon too. That was fun. Uh, the man who has no shame across the car table from me, Mr. OG is here.
OG: I’m with Doug on this one. I, um, I think the hat should, uh, find its way into the circular file.
Joe: You didn’t love it when the Motley Fool guys came out and they would wear the jester hats everywhere.
And have just a great time. I mean, they, they shook the world really of investing because here, you know, before the Motley Fool, I think everybody took it so seriously.
after show: Yeah. And
Joe: here comes David and his brother Tom, with these ridiculous hats doing all the morning shows and talking crazy about making money trading stocks and how fun it can be.
It was, uh, I
Doug: discovered them shortly after I met you, Joe. It was in our investment club days and we would have to research stocks and we would present each month at, if you, it was your month to present, you had to do some research. And that’s where I first met [00:03:00] you. You came to speak and I thought, this guy’s totally a fool.
Uh, but then, uh, and then I found the Motley Fool. I’m like, this has to be that guy Joe who came to speak to us. It’s gotta be. No, it’s my brother by another mother, David Gardner. But my point is they’ve been around a long time, Motley Fool, because that was a long time ago that I was in an investment club.
Joe: They have been, uh, in the late eighties. David was a writer for a guy who was huge at the time. On PBS. I don’t know if either one of you remember Louis Rue. Remember Louis Rue Wall Street Week? Yeah. This show would come on and I’d immediately turn it. ’cause I thought this guy was so boring until I got interested in stocks.
Then in the late eighties, then all of a sudden he became a guy who had a show that I really liked to watch. But David Gardner, he’s still boring, but at least there was good content and information. He was, he wasn’t like Bill Brinker, who could be very interesting. Bob Brinker. You remember Bill Brinker?
Bob Brinker. Bob Bob. See, I didn’t even, yeah, there you go. Didn’t he host prices, right? Uh, [00:04:00] maybe not. However, I’m very confused. Uh, great times back in my early days in financial planning and learning how stocks worked. So David Gardner og, coming down to the basement. Sweet. Yeah, gonna be a fun show. Plus, as Doug mentioned a headline, we got action packed times ahead.
So let’s introduce our mentor for today. David Gardner is the co-creator of The Motley Fool, which I’m sure I would believe most of our stackers have heard of the Motley Fool. In the early days, as we referenced earlier, these guys made a big splash by talking about how fun individual stocks could be, and about how diving into individual stocks was not as not as difficult as a lot of people wanted to make you think that it was.
And so I remember in my early days, even in financial planning, taking out the early Motley Fool books and diving into them to read and get as much insight on all the fun ways that I can dissect a [00:05:00] stock and learn about stock investing. However, David and his brother Tom had not been without their share of criticism no less than Jason.
So IgE, the Wall Street Journal has talked about how their advice sometimes outlandish showed gee, sometimes like their headgear, sometimes slightly outlandish. Yes, lately, and their claims that you can crush mutual funds at 50 minutes a year. Jason wrote dubious at, at best. But regardless of all that, their ability to make investing interesting and fun created tons of new stackers over the years, even before we coined the term stacker.
So we are fans of David’s ability to entertain and teach. So coming up in just a minute, the David Gardner, but before we get to him, we’ve got a couple of sponsors who make sure we can keep on keeping on. So, uh, we’ll hear from them. And then David Gardner from the Motley Fool joins us.[00:06:00]
And I am super happy he’s coming down to the basement. Look at this guy. Oh, wait a minute. As, as you’re sitting down, David, we gotta make you feel comfortable.
David: You are looking awesome, Joe. You know, I, I, why am I full cap? Yeah,
Joe: let’s do it. Yeah. For people that don’t know, I put my full cap on that I wore a couple times when I was keynoting and you got the full nice job.
Let’s go. We’re
OG: ready.
Joe: Well, I gotta ask you initially about your career, and I could do this for about three minutes that I’m taking the hat off, but my understanding is you work for Lewis Rukeyser early in your career, and I think a lot about Lewis Rukeyser. I mean, you know, in high school I’d see him on TV and I thought that guy was so boring.
And then as I got introduced more into stocks and into investing, I still found him boring. But I found him incredibly fascinating and hugely intelligent. Why would a guy who worked for Louis Rukeyser who seemed very straightforward decide to wear the fool cap and decide that [00:07:00] investing could be fun in the early and mid nineties?
David: Well, I could ask the same of you, Joe, since you are donning the Foolish Chapo as well. And so I think both of you and I share a background that was more about creative writing in our first 25 years than it was about finance. I’m a big humanities person, so I really believe that. Part of the beauty of being a humanities person, history, literature, et cetera, is that we can kind of make connections, uh, across broad expanses where much of the world is specializing.
And of course, the engineers get all the best salaries coming outta school. But, you know, there is an opportunity for people who are humanities types to start to strut their stuff by making connections broadly. And I think that Ruey did that in his work. He was, I mean, he was very eloquent. He was a fun writer.
He would write his monologues that would open up Wall Street Week on PBS, the longest running show on PBS for yeah, a few decades. And he always did an opening monologue, which he personally had written. And it was fun. He, he brought wit to it. I realize most people. In the world at large, don’t really think [00:08:00] investing or stocks are fun.
And most people think stocks are intimidating and want someone else to do their investing, but I think you and I, since we have viewers and listeners of the things that we’re doing that are about money and are about investing, I think we probably over indexed toward intellectually curious people who are trying to do it better because they recognize the importance of money in their lives.
I would say it doesn’t matter what your major is in order to have that realization, and in my case, I had the great fortune of being raised by a dad who taught us the stock market, and when dad, when I turned 18, he said, here you go. This is a portfolio that I’ve invested for you from birth. This is all you’re ever getting from me.
Don’t screw up.
Joe: Wow. At, at 18. So there was no estate plan stuff you got at 18 and it’s yours.
David: That’s right. And you know, he’d done a great job compounding returns from zero to 18. I wasn’t financially independent, but I was off to an incredibly great start. And I’m always encouraging all of my fellow fools and yeah.
All of my stack and Benjamin friends to get started with your kids as early as possible. ’cause getting on that compounding train is so valuable. [00:09:00]
Joe: And I feel like as I read through rule breaker, that the goal here too is finding the story behind a company. ’cause you know, and you mentioned, we’ll get into this a little bit later, that, you know, the phrase long-term investor is an oxymoron.
It’s, it’s you, you don’t need the words long term. And as an English guy, I’m like, yes, you don’t. But we’ll get into that later. But still, this is about finding the story behind the company, not just the technical analysis.
David: Yeah. I think that that is something we can all relate to, first of all. So no matter whether you have an MBA or not, whether you started accounting in, in, took any courses in college or not, I think you can understand Chipotle.
I mean, you’ve probably been there at least once and you can see how they brought fast casual. They, they really brought a new standard to what we think of as fast food. Fast forward, we’ve made about 40 times our money on that investment just by buying early and holding all the way through. In a world where so many people don’t buy early, they wait or they hear Chipotle’s overvalued or they don’t wanna buy stocks directly, they just buy funds.
And then eventually if they do have [00:10:00] it, someone tells them to sell or they get worried about the market. And so they don’t really invest, which is a truly beautiful word. And you are, you’re rocking a little bit. My enjoyment of language, I won’t use that phrase that you did. ’cause it is a tology, which means it is a restatement.
It is redundant to say the term that you are investing over if it is long, because that’s what investing is. There’s no such thing as short term investing that’s just trading, which is the antithesis of investing.
Joe: Which is much closer. You write to to guessing as well.
David: Yeah.
Joe: I wanna dive into, you start off with six habits in your book and I really want to go through these six habits ’cause I think they’re habits and we opened up.
While you are upstairs talking to mom David, we talked about, you know, whether you’re somebody that’s just gonna invest in mutual funds your entire life indexes, or you’re gonna dive into individual stocks. I believe these habits and actually knowing the stories behind individual companies and what’s going on, still hugely important no matter what you decide to do with it.
But as a way to get there, I would. I would love for [00:11:00] you to tell a story to our stackers. Speaking of stories and finding the story, so you and your brother, your co-founder, you guys get invited to go on a big show, the View, which is pretty damn amazing. I could just imagine that call. You’re like, all right, things are going pretty well.
We get to go on The View. Can you tell a story? What did they want you to talk about on the View?
David: Yeah. The date was July 2nd, 1998. Seared in my memory for reasons that will become shortly evident, and we were invited to come on to pick a stock. They had a new host at the time, Lisa Ling, who was back then in her twenties as pretty much.
Well, I was in my early thirties, but we were around her age and they’re like, let’s have these young guys on and you know, let’s have ’em pick a stock for Lisa. And then through the show, more viewers will start to learn more about the stock market and investing. And so we did, we met with Lisa, did the pre-call.
We’re like, Lisa, we think this would be a good one, but we wanna make sure you like the company, you like the product. You’re on board with this. And she’s like, yeah, I like that. Let’s go with that. So we came on the show July 2nd, 1998, about a five minute appearance, really positive studio [00:12:00] audience, of course, bubbly and all the rest.
We picked the stock for Lisa and uh. It all went well. Can you wait til
Joe: for a second? ’cause I just can’t imagine though, David going out on that stage. Like, seriously, I would think the, the things about my stomach would be doing, and I’ve been doing this podcast for a long time. I’ve, I’ve done, you know, TV in Detroit I did for nine years as the Money man there.
Nice. I still can’t imagine sitting. Right. Was was Barbara still on the show? Yeah,
David: Barbara was on the show and Meredith Fiera and uh, oh my God. See, and Lisa Ling was the new kid on the block. Yeah. And you know, I’ll say Tom and I at an early age, ’cause we started the Motley Fool quite by mistake. Well, we, we intentionally started to set print newsletter.
We just didn’t expect the internet to show up. And then all of a sudden we became a.com company, briefly, a dot bomb company as everybody else came down in 2001. It’s a totally separate story. Mm-hmm. But I’m so happy we’re now in our fourth decade of trying to make the world smarter, happier, and richer.
So there we were with Lisa Ling and we picked the stock. And Joe, I know you’ve read it so you know the story. And I’m not gonna fully spoil it, but [00:13:00] I’m gonna mostly spoil it here because over the next six weeks. That stock went down 33% in value. It literally lost one third of its value. And we were slated to come back on and do the, uh, Ling’s money thing, was the name of the branded segment.
And so we’re back six weeks later, reintroduced. Everyone’s really positive, you know, we’re smiling. Lisa knew what was coming though. We’re like, but Lisa’s stock is down. And a friend of ours who watches the View says, I think you guys may be the only ones ever booed on the view. And, you know, it was good natured, but truly this company had lost a third of its value since we picked it six weeks earlier, and we’ve never been invited back on the view since.
And the punchline in the spoiler, the story, what stock was it? Uh, Joe, you know, what stock it was? What stock was it? It
Joe: was a little company called Starbucks. It
David: was Starbucks. Starbucks lost a third of its value in six weeks when CEO Howard Schultz basically said, while I love the results we’ve just reported in the year ahead, I think we’re coming in the [00:14:00] lower end of analysts expectations.
And that immediately set the stock down maybe 15%, and then it just kept feeding on itself and lost a third of its value. But here’s the punchline, and I know, you know it’s coming, uh, the stocks up 34 times in value since our first appearance on the View. If you’d bought it a third down, you’d be up even more.
And the the, the sad thing, I mean, it’s a fun story because it’s kind of a story of timeframes. It’s all about trading or thinking short term versus investing like you would plant seeds in a garden and let that acorn grow, maybe even to become an oak tree one day, which is exactly what Starbucks has done.
And we’ve been invested all the way through. So you end up with 34 times your money and we’ve never been invited back to the View in order to close the loop. And I think it would be great if they wanna invite us back now. Pretty sure the show’s still on the, uh, tv, which I definitely know. Yeah. But I’m pretty sure the, the producers have changed over, so I doubt today’s 2025 producers have any idea of Ling’s money thing or the Motley Fool appearance.[00:15:00]
But that was such a fun story to open up the introduction of my book, rule Breaker Investing because it, it just sends every message we’re trying to, as, as people playing the long game.
Joe: Let’s walk through your six habits then, brother. ’cause uh, these are, I think, really important for people to learn. The first habit is let your winners run.
And when I think of winners, by the way, I think of, initially I thought stocks that are up, but that’s not what you’re talking about. What’s your definition of a winner?
David: Well, I mean, it, it’s a combination. It certainly includes the stock being up. Sure. Because that’s, those are the ones you wanna let win.
Anytime you look at a stock price, like a graph of Amazon over the years, or Chipotle or Starbucks or Netflix or the list, Tesla, the list goes on. What you’re seeing is stocks constantly make new highs. But obviously the only reason those stocks are doing that is ’cause the companies themselves are winners and they’re usually winners in lots of ways.
Usually there are companies, people enjoy working for. Like if you have a friend at Chipotle, they’re probably having a better [00:16:00] time than if they were working at, I won’t take a shot at any other fast food restaurant, but you know, generally these are great places to work in their industries. They’re also beloved by customers.
They would be deeply missed to, kinda like Chick-fil-A if it ever disappeared off the face of the earth would be, oh man, badly missed. Right? People would be
Joe: shaking. Exactly. So
David: that’s another sign of winning. And of course the business results are winning. Um, winning for your partners and suppliers is winning, winning for the environment, if that’s relevant to your business.
For some businesses or industries it is. Others not so important. So that’s really what winning is about. And then once you’ve found a winner, Joe, as sports, as the sports fans will say, what do winners do? And the right answer is they win. They don’t win every time. They don’t win all the time. But generally winners win.
So that’s why habit number one of the rule breaker investor is to let your winners run high.
Joe: This might foreshadow David some of the other habits. But when you’ve got a company, well let’s take our Starbucks example. Let’s not get off that train. Starbucks goes down a third. Howard Schultz says we need to be [00:17:00] more conservative.
Which I think, by the way, as a CEO is a winning move to do that. I think it’s fantastic that he’s being conservative but isn’t an investor. How do you know that that’s winning when it appears that Schultz is saying you gotta put on the brakes ’cause we’re not gonna grow as fast.
David: Yeah, I think a lot of it is.
First of all, Ty goes to holding and always should too many of us, if we are investing in stocks directly, and by the way, very few people in our society actually do much direct stock investing. I’m here to say we should be doing it more. But anyway, I, I think that for a lot of people, they have an emotional reaction when something goes down and they usually start thinking, I wanna get out.
And while I totally understand, ’cause I also am human and I feel emotions as well, if the business. Is one you believe in. And just because for one year or one quarter, the CEO who as you just pointed out, Joe was actually under promising and then he went on to over deliver, in fact, Starbucks stock. We weren’t back on the view a year later, but it had already fully recovered that and was [00:18:00] up 40% one year later.
So I think that tie always goes to holding. I think you have to have to have a really good reason to jump off the ship. And this comes from somebody who’s watched any number of my favorite best stocks sometimes get cut in half, multiple times, Netflix over the course of time that I’ve held it. If anybody remembers the Quickster debacle where they split their DVD rental business from their, I forgot about that streaming business, that stock lost two thirds of its value inside of one year.
I had owned it 10 years before that, and I still own it more than 10 years after that. So for me. I believe in the businesses, it’s kind of like, you know, the, the, the meaning of the word invest, going back to Latin, relates to the word investi in Latin means to wear the clothes, to put on the clothes of, so the mental model I want All Stack and Benjamin fans to, to have is that it’s like the sports home jersey that people wear to the stadium every Sunday.
And if their team wins or loses that day, they’re gonna [00:19:00] keep the jersey on. If their team has a bad season, they’re gonna keep the jersey on. And for many people, it’s like a whole life thing. And if more people literally invested their money the exact same way. We would have even more prosperity for sure in our society.
So how many people do I encounter are like, yeah, I had Apple for a year or two, I should have held. I’m like, yeah, you should have held and you also should have held Nvidia, Amazon, Tesla. Uh, the list goes on of the great, the winners that you and I are talking about here.
Joe: I feel like you’re staring right at me, David, because back in the late nineties when I was a financial planner, long time ago, I remember telling a client of mine, apple had just done something.
Oh, I had just done it. It was actually later than that because they just released the iPhone so what? 2007? 2007. They just released the iPhone. Stock goes through the roof. I looked her in the eye ’cause she had maybe 60 or 70% of her portfolio in Apple. And I said, what can they do ever that beats this?
Like, how does it get better than [00:20:00] this? We need to sell. What a dumb ass, David. Well, I’m
David: sorry to hear that, Joe. I do wanna say for anybody who’s been an investor for any meaningful period of time, we all have a story like that. I sure do. E every, sure. Yeah. And actually, one really as important aspect of my book is that I openly talk about my losers.
And that’s something we’ve always done at the Motley Fool because it’s human. It’s true. Too often Wall Street’s full of people who are just talking about the winners, or they wanna put somebody who made a single great market call like Beat one bear market. We’re all making mistakes, stumbling and bubbling all over the place.
Too many people think that investing is more like Olympic figure skating, where if you fall once you’re done, you’re not gonna get the gold medal. But actually it’s all about falling all over the ice. It’s more like hockey and, uh, and not even caring that you got checked into the boards or you lost that game.
So I’ve been checked into the boards any number of times, a RM Holdings, which is a phenomenal British company that provides the intellectual property behind a lot of the semiconductor industry. Uh, the Brits come up with the ideas, design them, and then they get manufactured by semiconductor companies. I sold that [00:21:00] after holding it for five years with members following me with their money, and then it went up nine times in value and got bought out about six years later.
So, I mean, this is gonna happen, but we highly reduce the chances of it happening if we don’t actively trade, if we ignore phrases like buy low, sell high. Now, I realize for a lot of people, that’s what, wait. That, isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? And my answer is not so much because if the third word, the first new thought in your mind after buy low is sell, then you’re doing it wrong.
And I strongly believe that we should be buying high. And trying not to sell at all. And by buying high, this gets back into more of the habits that we’re looking for. Yeah. In investors.
Joe: Well, that’s a fantastic segue because your second habit is add up. Don’t double down. What does add up even mean and how’s that different than doubling down?
David: Yeah, so I think a lot of people, if they’ve new money, they’re like, okay, I’m gonna add to the one that’s down. ’cause I just wanna get back to even, there are a lot of people, if they buy, [00:22:00] whether it’s a fund or a stock, they’re often like, I’m gonna put money in the one that’s down because I just wanna get back to, by the way, when it gets back to even, I’ll have made some money ’cause I bought down here and then I’m out ’cause I wanna get out of this thing ’cause I’m down.
Right? There are so many people who have that mentality and so a lot of rule breaking, a lot of rule breaker investing is me. Maybe helping people think differently or see with new eyes. And so for me, I have been hugely reward my whole lifelong, if I have new money, I only add it to stocks that have gone up for me, which again, sounds like the opposite of what everybody else is supposed to do or doing.
And yet, if you really think about those lower left to upper right graphs of many of the companies whose names we’ve already mentioned, Amazon, Nvidia, lesser known companies like Intuitive Surgical, which is leading the surgical revolution toward robot, minimally invasive away from humans cutting us up, intuitive surgical Chipotle, the list goes on.
These stocks go from lower left to upper right, which means Joe and everybody [00:23:00] listening, they’re constantly making new highs. That’s what winning looks like. So you actually wanna add to those. Because they’re gonna keep going up over time, not immediately. And one year in three the market drops. And you have to know that, ’cause I’m invested my whole life long.
So I’ve eaten every bad bear market. Every great financial recession, I was being cut in half along with the rest of the market or anybody else. And we just keep swimming dory and, uh, and yeah. ’cause I have to have my Pixar references, which by the way was a great stock pick for me until Disney bought my Pixar away from us.
But anyway, um, yeah. Um, but that’s a
Joe: happy ending. It is. It’s still a happy ending.
David: It is. And so just keep swimming is actually a great mental model for, for many people. That means I’m, when I have new money, I’m gonna throw it after. Good. Don’t throw good money. After bad. And again, a lot of people, that’s what they’re doing.
And if a stock’s really nose diving, like let’s say Peloton has been for a few years since COVID sure ended, uh, they keep adding and watching it go lower and [00:24:00] then lower after that. Truly Joe, the only way to go poor investing in the stock market, which by the way goes up 9% annualized. So imagine how hard it is to actually go poor investing in the stock market.
The only people that do it are just buying one or two stocks that are keep going down and they can ruin themselves. And I’ve seen it happen and it’s sad and it’s not how we should behave. So yeah, habit number two, add up. Don’t double down.
Joe: It sounds like you’re teaching fundamentally people to be momentum investors then.
David: It could sound like that. And that’s a really important point and one I get into in the book. ’cause I’m not, but I hear how it sounds. I might be, especially when we look at some of the other traits and things that I’m doing because when I say things like, winners win and let’s add to the ones going up, it may sound like, yeah, oh, it doesn’t matter what’s going up, just buy anything.
That’s really not the case because this book is called Rule Breaker Investing. I’m teaching you rule breaker habits to follow the best stocks of our time, which I call rule breakers. By definition, the best stocks of our [00:25:00] time are not every stock. You don’t hear me talking about the also rans in companies that, that are meme stocks, crypto, junk, other stuff out there.
I am ignoring all of that and I’m focused on the leaders in each industry who in important emerging industries, and so this is the group of stocks. When I say things like add up. Don’t double down Joe, as you, you well know based on your career and your history as an investor. There are stocks, like cyclical stocks that do kind of go like a parabola up and down.
Sure. And I guess for some people, they can try to buy low in the cycle and then sell high in the cycle. Feels exhausting to me when I could just buy and hold a great rule breaker, but that’s why I wanna make it clear. Momentum would just be, it doesn’t even matter what the company does. Most people who are momentum investors are looking at stock charts they don’t even notice.
They know the ticker symbol and the shape of the chart pattern. That’s momentum investing. What we’re doing is rule breaker investing where we’re breaking the rules. Of how we approach the market.
Joe: And to do that, you’re looking at the company’s financials, their fundamentals quite a bit.
David: Yeah. [00:26:00] And that for me, as an English major, that I’m self-taught.
And I believe thanks to the internet and AI and all kinds of aids, a lot of this is free these days. You can learn anything you want to learn. So my first thing I did after college, again, I’d gotten this stock portfolio from my dad when I was 18. I was an English major, so somewhere around the age of 22, I was like, I admit it, I skipped all accounting classes in college.
You know what? I’m gonna read a great book, a simple book, how to read a financial statement. I did have the benefit of a dad who’d already taught me some stuff, and I do like numbers. Not everybody does. But um. We gotta educate ourselves around how to understand a company’s financial statements.
Joe: It is just a language, David, I feel like once you know what you’re looking for, you know, free cash flow, how much debt does a company have?
I feel like now I can go and kind of shorthand, but at first I’m sure three quarters of our stackers are like, you lost me at financial statement. It’s just a language and it’s like riding a bike.
David: Yeah. And I do wanna say that like riding a bike, it becomes intuitive and you don’t even have to think about how you’re doing it as you’re doing it.
And once you’ve got it, [00:27:00] like it becomes habitual. The whole point of the first part of my book that you’re diving deep into, Joe, is things become habitual, what you’re doing. And habit number three, I have to underline because it’s invest for at least three years, and that again goes against, that breaks the rules of how the vast majority of players on the market every day are behaving.
Joe: Do you know what? I love that this gets rid of David. The number of times that I’ve had people tell me. Well, they’re coming out with a new drug or they have this new thing, or they just changed CEOs. I think the question of is this a good enough change that it’s gonna last three years? Because when you talk three years, you have to look at the whole business, not just the new drug.
David: You’re absolutely right. And like a sports fan, you’re probably keeping that jersey on for several years at least. Yeah, if not three decades, which is really what I shoot for. And my best stock picks I’ve held for decades, like Amazon, so, and Netflix. These are the phenomenal winners of our time. Obviously, if a company, I know, if, if something became something, if one of my butterflies turned back into a [00:28:00] caterpillar or seem deeply threatened, I wouldn’t hold every stock for that long.
But the reality is, Joe, the best way toward prosperity, uh, early retirement is to find a great company or three and hold them for at least. Three years, if not three decades. And so I really appreciate your point about, I mean a lot of people are looking for catalysts and I mean good on them, right?
They’re kind of following it enough to say there is a new drug. So I would, I would certainly pat ’em on the back and say, let’s watch that together. But if they’ve already formed before picking any stocks, habit number three, then they should be coming to you going. And Joe, I need to think about the three plus year implications of this.
’cause it’s not just about this falls, fashions, or what the next Big Mac is gonna be. A lot of it is about, is this a company I wanna be a part owner of? ’cause that’s what you’re doing when you’re buying stock. You’re literally becoming a part owner. By the way. That’s a miracle. There are a lot of societies.
Today in historical cultures, it was completely impossible to own a piece of something that you weren’t tilling [00:29:00] yourself or grinding on yourself. We can do that now. And what, how fortunate are we that we live in a society where we can become a part owner of a company like Nvidia? Even though I know very little about semiconductors myself, it has been an absolutely phenomenal company.
And one thing I’ve gotten good at is looking and seeing what wins. And so the, the pattern recognition that we develop as rule breakers is not industry specific, but where we talk about which stocks to pick.
after show: Yeah.
David: That comes after the habits. But the key is it’s not like a single technology. We’re doing pattern recognition that identifies the winner in all different industries.
Joe: The, uh, fourth habit that you have is, there are four tenants you look at when it comes to a company that is their conscious capitalism. You call it, what are the four tenants?
David: These are basically looking at the company itself and then thinking about that for your own behavior, either as a business professional yourself.
We have a lot of entrepreneurs watching us right now, small business people. This will make you better as a professional. It’ll also help you. Find better companies. So the four tenets of [00:30:00] conscious capitalism, and you can Google them, I’ll just go real fast through these. The first one is purpose over profit.
We look for companies that state a higher purpose. Tesla’s purpose statement is not to make as much money as possible selling electric cars. They might be doing that, but their purpose statement is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy. That’s what Elon Musk set in place more than a decade ago, and that’s how they think about what they’re doing.
And you know, you might agree that they’re doing it or you might disagree, but the point is that’s what they’re putting forward as a purpose-driven statement, I, I’m a purpose-driven person. I like purpose-driven entities. Higher purpose. The best companies are usually marching to the beat of a different drummer.
And the we’ll say even the dirty little secret here is. Ironically, and perhaps surprisingly, the profits in most industries are going to the companies that aren’t purposing profit above all. Wow. It’s going to companies that are purpose driven. Chick-fil-A, we mentioned earlier, it’s like a leadership academy that happens to be a chicken restaurant.
I mean, it’s, it’s [00:31:00] remarkable. So looking for these companies, that’s number one. Number two is they’re winning for everybody. 20th century capitalism was largely about just maximizing shareholder value. That’s what business people were taught. That’s what CEOs said in the paper. Annual reports that were printed throughout Lucas Lewis, Ru Keiser’s life.
We’ve moved on to electronic now and digital, but that was how everybody thought about business 50 years ago. Milton Friedman, the fantastic economist. I think the, maybe the only thing he got wrong was to say, the purpose of a corporation is to maximize shareholder value and conscious capitalism disagrees.
We think you should be trying to win for all of your stakeholders, not just taking one group and saying, we’re maxing it out for them.
Joe: Well, we can go back to Starbucks, David. I mean, with that, look at all the things that Howard Schultz did and does to try to make his employees happier, to make customers happier to, to hit for everybody.
David: Absolutely, Joe. So they’re, they’re putting baristas through college. You’re giving opportunities that you just would never expect from your local coffee [00:32:00] spot. So you’re winning for everybody, or you’re at least trying. Uh, third and fourth tenets. I can go very quickly over ’cause it’s just basically conscious leadership, which I liken to servant leadership, not a sense of entitlement.
Not the best office or the best parking spot every day for the leader, but rather a leader who is driven to serve the greater purpose of his or her organization for profit. These are the best leaders and I find most of the best leaders not in politics. I find most of the best leaders my whole lifelong in business, and they’re out there in, in force and I’m looking for ’em.
And then the fourth and final one is just conscious culture. So you know, what are the great companies to work for? Where do people love to go to work? Where do you hear friends say, I love my job? And then think of all the companies where people don’t say that or don’t feel engaged. So those are the four tenets of conscious capitalism and I want that to become habitual thinking for anybody who wants to break the rules with me.
Joe: I was thinking as you were talking over. Like the last 30 years in thinking of what are some companies that maybe used to be for everybody and kind [00:33:00] of morphed away from that no longer were rule breakers and I’m thinking about. When do you get off the train? So, you know, and I don’t know if this is a company you’d agree with or not, but I look back at the heyday of General Electric as an example.
General Electric used to be like the company and Jack Welch talking about leadership. I remember reading his statements as CEO. It was all about if we take care of our employees, of course he fired a bunch of his employees. But the ones that stayed around, he’s like, if we compensate them well and we take care of them and we make sure they have the tools, they’re gonna take care of our customers.
And look at what happened to General Electric during that time, for better or worse. But then the leadership changed, the company changed. Like at what point do you get off that coaster? Is it when these tenants are no longer what the company believes in anymore?
David: I think they give you a, a clue. I sure do.
I think that they’re, you know, I’m not trying to present each as a litmus test, but anybody could treat it that way. And you’re right, there are different leaders, different points like. Microsoft under Bill Gates was [00:34:00] a phenomenal startup into a mega awesome company. Not everybody liked Star. Uh, sorry, not everybody liked Microsoft.
And there was the whole, I’m a pc, I’m a Mac who’s really cool out there. When Steve Balmer showed up, the company went sideways for his leadership over 10 years. So that would another big well-known example. And then he steps aside and there’s a transition. So we end up finding, again, another purpose-driven leader who’s been absolutely phenomenal.
And I’m sorry to say, I’ve never recommended Microsoft, not in the Gates era, not in the bomber era. Not in the Nadella era. We don’t have to have ’em all. Joe. It’s good enough to have Apple, which I have had since ironically, the year that you, you sold, because literally in 2008 I recommended to Molly Pool members for the first time buy Apple.
And I felt like I was so late, like we’d all grown up with Apple. Yeah, jobs was at Apple. The iPhone had already come out the year before. I finally was like, I just, we didn’t have anybody else following Apple at the Moll pool. I was like, I’m gonna recommend this stock now. ’cause I think they’re well positioned.
I know they’re big [00:35:00] and I’m not meaning to brag here and make anybody feel bad, but it is up 35 times in value since 2008, which is absolutely phenomenal. But again, shows you that one of the big misnomers and mistakes people make is they think they missed blank, they missed Amazon, they missed Apple, they missed any of the other great companies we’ve talked about in our conversation.
You haven’t. Winners keep winning. And it is to your own detriment. You’re gonna pay a big opportunity cost if you think you missed blank. Now obviously if we’re talking about junk companies or a meme stock like GameStop, which I would absolutely never invest in, yeah, you may well have missed it if it’s skyrocketed 10 times in one day ’cause it got hyped online and it’s not worth that.
Sure. But we’re not talking about those companies. We’re talking about the rule breakers and you rarely miss great companies like Netflix, which is so well positioned today for the next 10 years, et cetera. So anyway, that’s my way of saying you’re right Joe. I love your example of ge and I think using these as a litmus [00:36:00] test or a a lens that you can evaluate companies does help you evaluate and think it through.
Joe: I’m gonna brag back at you. While you were ignoring Microsoft when they hired Satya and I started hearing some of the four tenants. I picked up Microsoft. It’s now my biggest holding.
David: I love that. I really do love that. That’s not magic. That’s actually very logical because what we’re doing, if we have found excellence and then we buy excellence, and we talked about this adding to excellence over time is we’re setting ourselves up for inevitably, I think logically prosperity.
If on the other hand, we chase stuff, we guess we gamble, all these other things that aren’t about finding and holding excellence, we’re not gonna have as much prosperity. And the middle ground is that some people find good companies. Sadly, they don’t actually hold them. So the only way you’ll ever get a hundred bagger, and I’ve recommended seven of them to Motley Fool members over the years.
The only way you’re ever gonna get a 100 bagger, a stock that goes up a hundred or more times in value [00:37:00] for you is if you hold it to let it do that for you. And many will not
Joe: feel like a good wine. Let it breathe. Let it breathe. Great comparison. We’ve got two more here and this is where we’re gonna get slightly technical for our stackers Max opening position.
5% of your portfolio.
David: Yeah, I mean, this is math. Um, 5%, but really what that means is when you start a new position, don’t invest more than 5%, $1 in 20 of your overall net worth into any. One position, that’s
Joe: which means you’re holding then at least 20 stocks.
David: That’s exactly right. And I think here, here’s something really great, and when you and I first started investing, this was not the case.
Back in the day, you had to pay commissions to buy stocks. Gigantic. And they were usually gigantic, 50 or a hundred dollars. They could be more than that. But at, for a kid it was very hard to start a portfolio with 20 stocks. ’cause you’re basically paying almost a thousand dollars just in trading costs for a broker to get you shares.
There’s a [00:38:00] second thing that’s amazing today since commissions, by the way, for many people are now down to zero, which is so great. The other wonderful development is that back in the day, you used to have to buy round lots of stocks. So if you wanted to buy Microsoft, you had to buy a hundred shares. You couldn’t buy seven shares.
You couldn’t even sometimes buy. 101 shares that need to be round, big round numbers. So here you are paying 50 to a hundred dollars just to buy a stock and then you have to buy a bunch of shares to have a position. And that has now gone away. As we enter the age of fractional share purchases, you can buy 0.7 of a share, right?
Seven tenths of one share. It’s more just about the money you’re putting into it. It’s no longer about having to have a certain number of shares and paying trading costs. So there is a way of saying that starting with 20 investments, 20 stocks, I love investing in stocks directly. Not everybody will. I do.
You can act, you can very easily diversify from the very get go. And [00:39:00] yes, Joe and everybody listening, I think you should start with 20 plus and later on as it goes up and the numbers go up. Check. What about 5% of your portfolio is if you start with let’s say $25,000 and now your portfolio is at $50,000, then you know 10% of that would be $5,000, which means 5% is 2,500, which to me would be the maximum that you put into a new position in that $50,000 portfolio.
So max 5% allocation,
Joe: we are evaluating our companies, we’re putting money in the winners, which also means there are some losers, and you and I have already talked about some of ours, but I love your six habit, which is aim for 60% accuracy, which means I feel like almost when we talked to Annie Duke about poker, David, that you can do all the homework, it can all be right and you still somehow the market doesn’t agree with you.
David: Yeah, I’m always aiming high. It’s okay if we don’t hit that because we aimed high. So aim for the stars. And even [00:40:00] if you come up short, you might still have a moonshot. And so let’s aim high. Let’s aim high in life. Let’s look for businesses that aim high. Let’s raise it up. So I’m all about, for me, when I pick a new stock, I’m hoping it beats the market.
I could have just bought an index fund. We could have done no work at all and simply enjoyed the market’s returns. And obviously that’s what a lot of people do. But my lived experience is I don’t wanna buy an index fund because you have to buy all the bad companies and all the mediocre and average ones.
I would rather just buy the best companies and outperform the averages, which a lot of academics say is not possible. And a lot of the world somehow believes the conventional wisdom, which is that it would just be luck to beat the market. So ours, Joe, mine is the only profession where to be great would just be lucky.
Nobody else thinks that about NBA players, doctors or lawyers. But man, stock pickers that that would have to just be luck, obviously. I completely disagree with that. Yeah.
Joe: How do we, how do we get that wrong? Because I also think we get that wrong. You, you probably know Jack [00:41:00] sch. He’s been a great guest here with, uh, market Wizards.
And when you see these market wizards, I realize, David, that I don’t want to be one of them. Like, I, like I, I’m fascinated by the research. I love the books. I’ve devoured all of his stuff. Good for you. But still the work some of these people go through. I think the more difficult thing is when you’re betting on other people, finding the person that’s going to beat the index next year is difficult.
And I think we also get confused about how your average mutual fund manager gets paid because their incentive truly is. Trailing the index slightly so I don’t get fired, is my understanding.
David: Well, first of all, uh, Jack Schwager, I’m very happy to say, well, I don’t know him personally. He was one of the beta test readers for the first 50 pages of my book.
Oh, was he really? And in some nice comments. By the way, anybody who’s, I know you’ve brought through the book, Joe, one of my tricks is send out the first 50 pages to a group of 15 to 20 people that you know and respect that have a motley array of different viewpoints. Jack was one of them. I’m actually not as familiar with Jack’s [00:42:00] work, and if it’s really hard work.
That would kind of explain why I’m not, because I personally don’t want to have to work that hard. I love winning without doing much. I’ll tell you
Joe: still though, David, I’ll still tell you it’s pornography. You’ll get into it and the way that you love stocks, even though you’re not a trader and a lot of these people in his books are traders.
Yeah. It is amazing though how some people just continually beat the market and I read it and I’m like, this is you. Just the little time you and I spent together. You would love it.
David: Well, thank you and I appreciate it. And you’re right. I love people and approaches that beat the market. The reason that a lot of the world has become convinced that that would just be luck.
And I’m not blaming any single person here. We can see how the logic would play out, but Burton Malkiel with his book, a Random Walk Down Wall Street, sort of set in motion and notion that it would just, it’s random like to beat the market and. Ultimately Jack Bogle started Vanguard and really was powered up by that message.
If it’s like, if it would be locked to beat the market, might as well just put it in. Index funds, low cost, great [00:43:00] Vanguard Index funds, and there’s your largest asset gather of our lifetime. And the studies that usually are proving in quotes that you can’t beat the market. Dependably are looking at it in a short term timeframe, usually year by year.
And that’s not what I do or how I think anybody should invest. I’m not trying to beat the market every year. I know, first of all, one year and three, the market goes down. That is proven by history. So one year and three, it’s gonna be bad anyway. But the other two years, it does go up. And I think for a lot of us just realizing that we’re not actually investing, we’re living through that three year period over and over and over.
For our whole lives, and therefore, you know, we don’t have to beat it every year. And if we did it, it doesn’t mean you can’t beat the market. And so what’s usually missing from studies or the academic view that it would just be luck is the long term and measuring long-term [00:44:00] performance where clearly you can beat the averages.
And I believe it’s not luck. In fact, I’ve demonstrated it for the 30 plus year career I’ve had at the Motley Fool, and I’m putting all the goods in this book to show exactly how I think about it and how I found Amazon at 16 cents and Nvidia, thanks to stock splits, coincidentally at 16 cents. So I think for a lot of us, it’s just realizing we’re not trying to beat the market every year.
We’re trying to beat the market over 10 plus years. How about our whole lifetime?
Joe: I wanna ask you a man in the arena question, if you know what I’m talking about, man in the arena. Because people like I Roosevelt, people like you and Tom, heck, we get it. You’ve been criticized by some big time people, which it’s kinda like a badge no less than Jason Swe and the Wall Street Journal has talked about how amazing it is, what you do, how you fire people up.
And yet sometimes David’s claims are a little big, right? I mean, we’re wearing, we’re wearing the fool hats. How do you [00:45:00] process some of the criticism by people like Jason?
David: Well, first of all, I haven’t seen that criticism for a while, but I admit I’m also not keeping up. For example, I don’t watch CNBC, so I’m, I’m kind of disconnected from the financial media.
But what I do remember back in the day is as young guys, we were saying. We think you could beat the market on its own. That is challenging the received wisdom that is going against convention. And then we were doing it in our books and on TV and in magazines and on our website and all along we were saying, and watch us because we’re picking every stock one a month transparently.
Everybody can follow what we’re doing. And yet we were in our twenties and early thirties and we were wearing jester caps on top of all of that. And we were choosing to do that because we believe. Going against the conventional wisdom is what life’s about. If you’re trying to win in lots of different contexts.
I think the difference between the Motley Fool then and now is we now have 30 years plus of data. So anybody can [00:46:00] see every good and bad stock that I’ve picked or my brothers picked. And I’m really happy to say that I have crushed the market for our members. And so while I guess as a 30-year-old, all you can really do is say, this is what I believe, this is what I’m gonna do.
But now that I’m almost 60, I can say, here are all the numbers. I was down there on the baseball field in the bat’s box every single month for decades. Check it. And by the way, obviously we think there are other great examples of people who’ve beaten the market. Warren Buffet comes to mind, Peter Lynch.
These are all our exemplars. I, I can’t speak for what any financial journalist believes or not, but I’m all about results and the fun of writing Rule Breaker investing now, which is my final stock market book. I’m not a book, it’s it, I’m not a new book every year guy. This is it. I basically am leaving it all out there on the field.
Wait. Or you could
Joe: be like the Rolling Stones. You say that every other year and then you’re back on the Stacky Benjamin Show when you’re 82.
David: First of all, have me back anytime. I’ve had so much fun with you, Joe. [00:47:00] It’s great to meet your mom and be down in the basement and I will write probably at least one more book and it will be an investing book.
But now that you, you and I know and everybody listening knows where that word comes from, you realize it’s about life as much as it is about the stock market or business. And those are the three things. I have my own podcast, which is Rule Breaker Investing, and I say I spend a third of my time in investing a third of my time on business as an entrepreneur and lots of professionals listen and a third of our time on life.
So I do think that I will write one more book speaking to that, and that’s about breaking the rules across all three of those. But this truly is. My final stock market book. I’ve written several, although each time was with my brother. I wrote half the book with Simon Schuster bestsellers over seven years, but I haven’t written anything in 15 years, and this is the first time I’ve written it all myself.
And this is my final stock market book because I’ve retired from stock picking. I remain very active at the Motley Fool, but I’m not picking stocks. I put it all in there. What I do and how I think it wins and will win in every era, [00:48:00] not just the last 30 years, but maybe the difference between me then and me now is I could only say what I thought would work back then.
Joe: Last shot here, David, which is, let’s say that you could add a seventh, you know, and I finished my book, I’m sure you did this too. You get done, you’re like, oh, I should have included this. What would your seventh habit be? If you could add just one more.
David: Yeah. So I truly don’t have one, but I always love the question ’cause anytime someone says, you know, Myers-Briggs or gives any framework, I’m like, well, what’s the other letter that they didn’t include?
So I totally, in a pesky, fun way, love to always say if there’s seven things, what’s the eighth? So first of all, receive the question. Totally appreciate it. I don’t, I’m gonna make something up to honor the question. I’m gonna give an answer, but I don’t actually have a seventh. And one of the fun things about this final book for me is that I write the six traits of the stocks.
I’m looking for rule breaker stocks that’s in the middle of the book. We didn’t focus on that today. Yeah. But it’s the same list of [00:49:00] six that I published in 1999 in our bestseller Rule Breakers, rule Makers. That should be comforting. I, I’m not merely repeating myself, there are now numbers, stories, and additional insights, but I literally haven’t changed that list 27 years later.
And it led me to Nvidia, Tesla, Netflix companies that didn’t even exist back in the late 1990s. And we found them and owned them, and we’ve made a lot of money with them. So I’m here to say that I like sticking with your knitting and not having a seventh. And here’s my seventh for you. I think a great habit we should all be in is to care about what’s happening in the world and show intellectual curiosity.
To read and keep up with the things that we think matter most. So if I had to add a seventh habit, it w um, again, these are for investors, but of course to me, an investor is everyone. In fact, the first four books, first four words of my book is everyone is an Investor. And that is truly my belief. If you ask people to raise their hand in a [00:50:00] room, you know, you, you as a financial professional, you’re like, raise your hand.
Everybody who’s an investor, I believe every hand should be up because we’re constantly making investments, mostly of our time, occasionally of our savings. We’re constantly investing. So when I say what are the six habits of the rule breaker investor, and I had to add a seventh, that’s not in the book.
I’d go with intellectual curiosity. Your whole lifelong growth mindset. Always be learning. A BL.
Joe: David’s new book, rule Breaker Investing, how to Pick the Best Docs of the Future and Build Lasting Wealth. And the methodology is the same as it was 20 years ago when he and his brother Tom wrote this, uh, wrote this out for the first time.
And as you mentioned, it now has, uh, all the anecdotes from using it for the past 20 some years. David, I can’t believe we’re, we’re this old getting close to 60. What the hell happened? Man, thank, thank you so much for mentoring our stackers brother and for putting the hat on for me. I appreciate it.
David: Oh, it is my pleasure.
You’re the one who put the hat on. You inspired me, Joe, and this was a really fun conversation and [00:51:00] stackers are lucky to have you. So thanks for your work.
Doug: Hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor Duggan, the focus of today’s mission, mission Impossible. The television show debuted on today’s date way back in 1966, with the hook being a mission tape that would always self-destruct the series. Did anything but self-destruct though it blossomed into a huge film series featuring none other than my doppelganger Tom Cruise.
Talk about star power. Talk about me, not Tom Cruise. Here’s a mission impossible question for you. Back in Mission Impossible four. Tom Cruise really climbed outside in a building, repelling down the side from the hundred and 23rd floor. What is the name of the building? I’ll be back right after I go climb the stairs because my mission, which I totally choose to accept, is to sneak a few of those cookies from Joe’s Mom’s Cookie Jar.[00:52:00]
Hey there, stackers. I’m cookie lover and guy now serving two to three weeks of window washing duty for getting caught. Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, back in Mission Impossible four. Tom Cruise, who famously does his own stunts for the film. Actually climbed outside the tallest building in the world, beginning repelling from the hundred and 23rd floor to accomplish the stunt.
The team used multiple harness points with special permissions to drill into the building to hold crews in place. Yeah, if he was fit like me, they wouldn’t have needed all that support for him During shooting. The team actually broke 35 windows even after the stunt, which involved multiple helicopters shooting at Tom Cruise.
The film had to be flown back to Los Angeles before it could be evaluated whether the stunt had actually been captured. So what famous building did [00:53:00] Cruise Repel down in Mission Impossible? Four. That would be the tallest building in the world located in Dubai, the Burge Khalifa. And now your mission, and you’re gonna wanna accept it stacker, is to hop on over to Joe and OG and today’s headline,
Joe: oh, we’ll do our headline just a second.
But og, you saw Mission Possible four, did you not? Where Cruz is climbing the Burge Khalifa.
OG: Yeah. I mean, I’ve done that myself.
Joe: That would’ve been one of my favorite Mission Impossible scenes. I like the one where he is running around, uh, Vienna and the Opera House. I thought that was kind of a classic cruise scene.
Of course. Him jumping with the motorcycle, right? The big motorcycle stunt or, uh, the
OG: thing I liked most about that particular scene, the motorcycle piece, was the backstory behind it. Did you ever see any of like the making of No, but the making of all of these is phenomenal. The Dead Reckoning, is that Dead Reckoning one?
Is that the name of it? But anyways, the long and the short of it is, is that he has been trying to work that stunt into any [00:54:00] mission, like the motorcycle jump off into a parachute, you know? Yeah. Landing, like he’s been trying to fit that into any mission impossible. And it’s, you know, and he could never, there’s never a place to logically do it.
And so then in this scene, as they’re chasing the train and he’s trying to catch up to the train, it’s like, oh, you know, they’re like, wait, this is perfect. I get to do the thing. And so they built the ramp and everything and he made it digital so you couldn’t see the ramp in, in real life, but, uh, or on the camera.
But they launched a bunch of motorcycles off this thing to make sure that it cleared. You know, like how fast does he have to go? You know, what the angle of the ramp has to be to like get far enough out. So when he fall, you know, when the motorcycle falls and he falls, he is far enough away from the rocks to pull the chute and everything.
It was kind of a fun, a fun little behind the scenes on that particular scene.
Joe: I wonder how many times he jumped shorter distances just to,
OG: you know, get used to it. I think they, they launched the motorcycle a bunch and then they strapped him on and off they went. Yeah. I don’t think he did like a, [00:55:00] Hey, let’s jump off this rock real fast and see if I can make it.
Yeah, I, I think it was full go. I mean, it’s widely known that Tom does a lot of his, uh, a lot of his own stuff. Enjoys that part of the filmmaking.
Doug: You guys ready for something really shocking about Mission Impossible?
OG: Sure.
Doug: I’ve never seen a single one of them.
trailer: Oh,
Doug: I did not want to. It’s such
OG: a great popcorn flick.
Like the whole series is, you know, and the last one, I haven’t seen the last one yet because it was, was in the theaters and I had tickets and then, then my kids all took their friends and I didn’t, I wasn’t one of the six people invited. You got sacrificed? Yeah, I was like, Hey, I got six tickets. You know, if you guys wanna bring some friends.
They’re like, dad, we can bring five friends. And I’m like, wait, but then hold, uh, hold on. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. How You’re bringing five people total? No, no, five plus me. See then I’m the ratio of cake to people, you know? That was my moment, you know? So I still haven’t seen that [00:56:00] one yet, but apparently it was awesome.
My red stapler.
Joe: Yeah, I did not wanna see any of them. Doug, I kinda had eye roll and then I watched one and I went back and watched ’em all because they are so, so fun. Yeah. If you watch ’em all in
OG: order, that’s a very interesting story. And, and then later they bring back like, some of the stuff from like, you know, they’re some of the people and some of the characters and, and you’re like, wait, that guy was in like episode two, all these callbacks.
Like, he was the ba like he’s the mastermind of all this. Oh my gosh. He’s the bad, bad guy. I thought they, I don’t
Doug: have any reason not to watch him. I’m not avoiding them. I just, when I’m looking for stuff to watch, that just never crosses my mind. So, well, I just have to put a sticky note on the, on the tv.
Joe: Not a 10, but a, almost like the movie we talked about on Monday. Solid eight and a half, the whole series. Wow. Big thanks to David Gardner, by the way, for stopping by. Oh gee. What I love about knowing about individual stocks is I feel like as you dive into individual stocks and you learn what’s important to individual.
Stock shareholders, [00:57:00] you start to look at your own situation, like you are a publicly traded company. So free cash flow as an example. Super important for a company if you’re gonna invest in it, very important in your own life, the more free cash flow that you have, and this difference between what comes in the front door and what you’re spending, man, that gives you the spells, opportunities, uh, debt levels, right?
Getting into huge debt can be super problematic. Not having any growth prospects or what are your growth prospects, you know, and David talks about the rule breakers. These companies that quote broke the rules to design new things, like what are you doing that’s fun and exciting and purposeful in your life?
I feel like there’s so many analogies around individual stock investing and just good financial planning. It can really travel. Even if you’re not gonna buy, like most of our stockers are not gonna buy individual stocks still can apply.
OG: Oh, the parallels between that and, uh, economy as a whole and understanding how just generically [00:58:00] speaking, you know, what you should expect from, from equity, like returns or equity esque returns.
And when you put all those things together and whether you put ’em together in an individual stock portfolio or you put ’em together is a single line item on A ETF portfolio or collection of mutual funds or whatever, or all those things all laid out, it still, I think, gives a good indication or a good lesson in how it makes sense as you look at the economy through the lens of companies making money.
Why they continue to grow and why owning stocks as in particular as compared to owning fixed income or having your money sit in cash is far superior despite the volatility to any other sort of inflation busting or inflation protected, or whatever you want to call it. Ideas, because the economy still continues to grow on the backs of all of the, these companies using those factors that he was talking about, you know, whether it was cashflow or debt or whatever.
You know, it’s like, [00:59:00] it’s like when you see it at a microscopic level, you can extrapolate, okay, this is how this works at the fund level, this is how it works at the country or sector level, like this is the economy and why would I wanna be invested in anything except the growth of the economy as a whole.
Joe: I remember reading Michael Lewis’s first book where he’s talking about being a bond trader. And about how learning as he’s trading about the dominoes in order, like he was looking at the first domino and not making any money, and then he started thinking, okay, if this domino goes down and this domino goes down, and then he starts looking at second and third dominoes, and all of a sudden his trading gets better.
It just kind of as a reminder of what Alex Harm talked about at the beginning of the year, like you’ve got these two companies. You’ve got company A makes a really innovative, delicious hotdog, but they’re out in the middle of a park in the middle of nowhere. They’re a Grady Wallace Park in Texarkana, right?
Where there’s never anybody in this park except when there’s softball and baseball games going on. [01:00:00] Nobody ever there, and they’re trying to sell this fantastic hotdog that the world needs versus somebody with a pretty mediocre hotdog OG sitting right in front of Yankee Stadium. Like who’s, who’s gonna sell more hotdog?
Sometimes it’s about the innovation. Mm-hmm. And other times it’s about the economy, the time, the timing, all the stuff going around it. That makes sense. And so learning to think about the big picture, not just with stocks, but with your whole life. Good stuff. Lots of analogies today, even for our non stock investors.
Hey, let’s do a headline.
headlines: Hello doling. And now it’s time for your favorite part of the show, our Stacking Benjamins headlines.
Joe: Our headline today comes to us from the Investment news, uh, and this is actually an opinion piece from Investment News written by CFP Todd Bryant. Todd writes about how financial advice has to evolve.
You know, I thought this paired really well today with [01:01:00] David’s appearance because back in the early nineties, people weren’t talking about trading stocks and having fun together. And over time as things have morphed, I mean back then you were either trading individual stocks next to nobody or buying funds that were through advisors.
Buying funds that were actively managed by some woman or man buying and selling stuff, and you’re evaluating their performance and 90% of them recommended through an advisor channel. And look at how all of that changed. Now, a lot of people out there investing without advisors and a lot of people that are going to advisors that really, they’re not going there because they wanna find the quote perfect fun, right?
There’s a whole, whole different reason. So he’s talking about in this piece how financial advice has to evolve as it has always needed to evolve. He writes, when I look back at how financial advice evolved [01:02:00] over the last 20 years is striking, how much has changed in terms of client expectations, the services we deliver, and ultimately the value that people believe an advisor brings.
When I started the industry, the job was primarily about investments, and before that, it was even simpler. Clients went to a broker just to buy stocks. Over time, stockbroker turned into financial advisor, which later evolved into investment manager. But today, the only thing you lead with is investment management.
You’re not going to stand out. And what he talks about then is how the investing piece has largely become commoditized and people go to advisors for completely different reasons. This piece, OG, is written for financial advisors and it says that if, if you are not the most trustworthy person in your client’s life and you’re not working with them on a behavioral level, if you’re somebody who just, they come in and you’re recommending insurances and you’re recommending funds, or whatever the case may be.
You’re a dinosaur and especially AI is making that even, [01:03:00] you’re even more of a dinosaur. You have to be a person not doing things the AI is never gonna do. And being someone who is seen as much more than the guy who’s bringing products to the table.
OG: Well, I’m not worried at all about ai. If you put, at least not yet.
If you put into chat GPT, you know, give me a portfolio that’s great for a 30-year-old, it’s gonna just pick a bunch of tech stocks and whatever is top of mind in the socials right now. It’s not at all well thought of in that regard. Solving the problems, I think it will do like in terms of math problems and that sort of thing.
But if you’re an advisor, and I don’t know who we wanna talk to about this, but if you’re an advisor and you are. Like the article says here, leading with, you know, we’ve got the greatest mutual fund in the universe, or we’ve got the greatest asset allocation tool in the universe, or something like that. I suspect that there’s not a lot of takers for that [01:04:00] because there are tools, to your point, Joe, about like there’s a lot of tech that’s available to the public now.
Even that wasn’t available 10 years ago. I think largely advisors are more counselors and guides than they are, you know, the keeper of the knowledge. And that’s what it used to be. It used to be a, you had to, right? If you wanted to buy stock, you had to use a broker, and then online brokers came out and then it was like, well, if you wanted any sort of investment advice, you had to use an investment.
Broker and now you can get investment advice without using that. Right. You can find tools online or you can, yeah, you can even use AI to have some conversation there.
Joe: Yeah. Much less gatekeeper now.
OG: Yeah, a a lot less. And you see that with the products too, right? It used to be, well, if you wanted American Funds, you had to go to the American Funds place, or the American Funds guy or gal.
If you wanted to use whatever company, you had to go to that specific place. And now if you want American Funds, you can put ’em in your Schwab account. If you want Vanguard, you can have it in your Schwab account. If you want iShares, you can have it in your Schwab account. There’s no product [01:05:00] differentiation in terms of where that stuff can sit anymore.
So there’s much less interaction, you know, needed to be able to, to buy the stuff you used to have to go to a life insurance sales guy. If you wanted life insurance and now one 800 select quote, you just go online and do it. You know, or, or ladder or whatever, you know, you don’t even have to talk to anybody now.
You can just type it in. They’ll. Digitally do your health screening based on the answers to your questions, you know, and pull your medical records electronically and approve you right then. And that’s a really great thing, by the way. I think that’s really awesome ’cause it lowers the friction and makes it so people can implement stuff.
But I still think that as it relates to counsel and the human nature of advice, whether it’s advice around financial planning or advice around taxes or advice around your health, any of those professionals, their value isn’t writing the prescription because you can get those anywhere. The value is having the conversation about why you might need the prescription and recognizing that everybody is a little different and there’s no one size [01:06:00] fits all type of thing.
And how you evaluate life and how you’re working through your personal situation, I think makes, makes all the difference. I think all of the stuff individually can largely be accomplished, but the collection of it and having the conversation is. What the value is.
Joe: Yeah. I think even if AI gets smarter and is able to finally put together a much more efficient and better asset allocation for people, I think just the way that advice is measured has changed so much that that’s almost irrelevant.
It’s almost like, you know, we thought. Seven, eight years ago that Roboadvisors, we kept doing all these pieces about Roboadvisors and all these claims that Roboadvisors were going to replace advisors. And look it, that didn’t happen. There’s more people going to advisors today than there was then.
after show: Yeah.
Joe: And so why is that? It’s, it’s because it’s not about picking the stuff and the RoboAdvisor proved your point, OG that picking the stuff is not at all what we’re looking to do now. Chat, [01:07:00] GPT hasn’t figured out how to pick the stuff yet. That’s just a function of how it’s built, it’s predictive in nature.
Looking at that, what’s, what’s the zeitgeist talking about? And so it’s going to cobble together what most people are talking about, which is why you’ll get a healthy dose of Bitcoin in Nvidia, in your, in your asset allocation. I do believe that will change, but I also think that facilitating these conversations and being a filter, much more of a filter of, you know, somebody walks into an advisor’s office and they’re talking about.
A bunch of stuff and the advisor being able to go, okay, I hear you, but is any of that truly important? Is this actually what we need to talk about? I don’t know when we’re going to get to the point that AI is gonna be able to be that person who can say to me, yeah, you know what, great, but irrelevant. You don’t even need to be, even need to be almost like it’s a filter.
You know what I mean? Like somebody comes in, they have all these hopes [01:08:00] and fears and you’re filtering out all the stuff that doesn’t matter, and just keeping the stuff that truly matters in the discussion.
OG: Yeah, I mean, I’m not an AI expert in terms of where it’s headed. It seems like there’s a ton of opportunity there, but in my own personal experience, it seems like it’s very much of an echo chamber.
Like it’s very happy and continuing a conversation with you about the stuff that it thinks that you wanna hear. Yeah, I don’t, I don’t know that it’s got the challenge component to it yet. You know what I mean? Not at all. It’s like not at all. Like, oh, that’s a really great idea. Yeah, let’s explore that.
And you’re like, no, I don’t wanna explore that. And I don’t think, my idea is very great.
Joe: I asked you
OG: for me, you’re right. That’s a not great idea. What would you like to talk about next? You know, it’s like very, it’s like, it’s very much of a yes man.
Doug: Yeah. And you know, you have to spend so much time developing a relationship with your chat agent for it to learn how you want it to talk to you.
Why not invest that time with a real human that is going to be able to incorporate so much more [01:09:00] into the relationship than just telling you what you wanna hear. I was working with it to try to create some images recently, and it just kept. Screwing it up so many times I started to get snarky with it. I know that’s a shock coming from me and I’m like, man, you really fell on your face on that one.
And its reply was, you’re right. I did. I’m sorry. Instead of saying, no, I did exactly what you asked me to. You know, it just, it was just rolling over because it could tell I wanted it to roll over. Yeah. Where as if I had said that to a human financial advisor and I said, man, that thing you recommended that one stock didn’t do so well, they would be able to say, nah, here’s why.
It was still the right choice. They wouldn’t just roll over.
Joe: And I think that’s why we have to evaluate our quote board of directors. Who are these people that I’m getting advice from, and am I using them as a trusted resource to guide conversations and maybe to get in my face a little bit. You know, it’s funny, not just with financial advisors og, but with insurance people.
I’ve done this [01:10:00] recently. I had a company I was using and when I truly needed them there was, they were always happy to collect the premium. They were happy to quote, run a quote If I called them, they were happy to run a quote. One of my neighbors is an Allstate agent. Allstate not my favorite. Company and a company that I think is hit and miss depending on the value of the agent.
But this guy’s amazing. This guy, not only twice a year, calls me and just wants to ask me if anything’s changed and to give me just his feeling on the insurance industry and what’s going on. He also, in a claim that we had recently during the construction we have going on at our house, he’s actually working with my builder to fill out all of this stuff because the claims department wants all this technical language and my builder even wrote about him and said, Scott’s amazing.
Scott’s just been so helpful getting this done. That’s what I need my insurance person for. Otherwise this’s just a one 800 number. I think there’s value for, for [01:11:00] this person in life, I think it’s not just even financial advisor or insurance. I think if you’re that person that could be a good filter for other people.
There’s always gonna be room for you. There’s always gonna be room. It’s an interesting discussion. Love this opinion piece, and I will link to it in our show notes at stack you Benjamins dot com. Well guys, we did it again before we say goodbye on this episode, we always love having community time with a segment we call the back porch.
Doug, let’s hang out on the back porch a little bit. What’s going on, brother?
Doug: Well, I’ve got one review I wanted to talk about. This is actually also from a couple of weeks ago, but uh, the headline of the review caught my eye. It says, great show religious listener. I thought I’m, I don’t know where religion comes into this.
I’m not, I mean, I don’t care what you, what faith you practice, but it says, I can’t give this show any less than five stars. And then it, I got it. Like I figured it out. They listen to us religiously. Now I’m on board, right? Says, listen to them regularly for so [01:12:00] long. OG is great advice. Joe is very experienced and really cares about doing good for the community and others.
So obviously this person’s a little delusional because they have these great thoughts of, of, of you guys. So, I mean, big asterisk over this whole, this whole review, but, you know, nice positive things to say and I thought you needed to hear that today, Joe. So they also, I mean, it’s, it’s a longer review. Uh, they say they wanna know more about me and my backstory.
Maybe it’s time to tell people that, uh, we can’t really, for. Government. I mean, I was a CIA agent. Okay. I mean, I’m just not allowed to talk about my backstory. Uh, I worked for a few different governments over my years. I’m just, you know, contractually obligated not to talk about it, but positive review from a religious listener.
Joe: They do say something funny and, and it is a long review, but they do say something funny about, wondering about Joe and o Gee’s background. They sound like they’re, what, what does he say? Rich or wealthy? Or he or she say rich or wealthy.
Doug: It actually says, so they never dive into what Doug’s story is and they often slip out things [01:13:00] that make it seem like they are pretty rich.
So they, they think we’re all three of us. Pretty rich.
Joe: I
Doug: think the
Joe: question is not, not wrong. Well, I don’t know if that’s a, if they’re presenting that as a good thing or a bad thing, but who do you want teaching you about money? I don’t know at all what I’m doing. Can’t practice it at all. I have no idea how any of this works.
OG: It’s like when I had my colonoscopy, if the doctor would’ve been like, now which end is this? Go in. And then you pass out. He’s got YouTube up on his phone. Exactly. Look, we don’t even need, they don’t even
Joe: need anesthesia. You’re out cold. Just think about what’s about to happen.
OG: The doctor takes a hit of the thing before he is like, and then gives it to you.
You know, I think we’re both gonna need some of this. It’s like looking at the camera, is this thing
Joe: on. We also got a nice note from Bearer BUER in Norway, over on Spotify and Bearer asked the question, do you know how many listeners you have in Norway? I think og it’s all the listeners. Don’t we have all the listeners in Norway?[01:14:00]
Uh, we
OG: do
Joe: know. Would we come to Norway for a live show? Please come to Oslo. Oh
Doug: God.
Joe: And it says, I would do that in a heartbeat. Please bring Paula pant as well. I I am coming to Oslo. I am. Whoa. However, I have a milestone birthday, which will be in, uh, 2028 and I will be coming to Oslo in 2028. So mark your calendar now.
I have no idea what day. Just circle 2028. Just the whole year. Yeah. Yeah. And if we can get three Oslo based listeners together, that would be fantastic. But
OG: I think that’s our goal, OG, isn’t it? To be number one. Joe will try to send, submit it for a business expense. You’d be like, we had a work trip. It’s $11,000 again.
Like, wait, what? I was there. I
Doug: had to do a tourer,
OG: right?
Doug: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a work. I would go, God, I mean, you’ve heard us talk about skiing. I wouldn’t go,
OG: you wouldn’t
Doug: go, you wouldn’t. I
OG: invited you down [01:15:00] here to come to a football game and you said it was too expensive. It was like $240 to fly down here. And you were like, ah, yeah, it’s too much money that it was, but you’re gonna fly halfway around the world.
Yeah. I wanna go be,
Doug: I wanna go meet all the World Cup ski racers that are in Norway. I think I could probably bump into Christofferson and am Mote and, and, uh, Spinall say you wanna meet there walking around, you wanna, could be fine too. Only if he could introduce me to those people, but yeah, I, I would do that.
Joe: Number one in Norway, stacky Benjamin Show.
OG: I believe it.
Joe: That’s gonna do it for today. How do you beat that? Where do you go from being number one in Norway? Uh, you don’t. Thanks everybody for hanging out with us on Friday. Our phenomenal round table episode is front and center, so we’ll see you back here in a couple days.
If you ever wanna watch those recordings live, join us Monday afternoons where we are live on YouTube making the show, which is a lot of fun with, uh, increasingly more and more stackers Hang out [01:16:00] with us during those recordings. If you get the 2 0 1 newsletter, stack your Benjamins dot com slash 2 0 1 on many of the days that we’re recording live.
We’ll also send you a quick note saying, Hey, if you’re available. You can come join us. Alright, that’s gonna do it for today, except for this. Doug always tells us what are the big three things that should be on our to-do list after today’s show.
Doug: Here they are. Joe. First, take some advice from David Gardner When thinking about the financial markets, focus on what a company accomplishes, not just the technicals.
Second, don’t trust your advisor. Time to realize that trust is your biggest friend, and lack of trust can sink your financial plan. The big lesson, okay. This mission impossible theme has now officially gone too far. My mission, if I choose to accept it, is to run to the store for more gin for Joe’s. Ma, no, ma, I do not accept this mission.
Wait, what? What? Okay, fine, fine. I accept. I accept. God, [01:17:00] that lady’s terrifying. Thanks to David Gardner for joining us today. You’ll find the new edition of Rule Breakers wherever you buy books. We’ll also include links in our show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com. This show is the Property of SB Podcasts llc, copyright 2025, and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy.
Joe gets help from a few of our neighborhood friends. You’ll find out about our awesome team at Stacking Benjamins dot com, along with the show notes and how you can find us on YouTube and all the usual social media spots. Come say hello. Oh yeah. And before I go, not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know.
This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor. I’m Joe’s Mom’s neighbor, Duggan. We’ll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamin Show.[01:18:00]
after show: Oh gee. You saw a movie or is it a TV
OG: show? Not a movie. It’s a, uh, long awaited, uh, season two. Of a program [01:19:00] that, uh, love is Blind uk actually, it’s actually coming out as a prequel. So season two is a prequel to season one that’s already been out. So let’s see if you guys figure this one out. Here you go
after show: and cut.
trailer: When we step on that battlefield, we fight for each other.
Doug: You’re
trailer: moving on a restricted target. This is why it’s so hard to give up that brotherhood. Oh, you had to shoot him to end the fight. An example needs to be made along with this. Signia comes the trust that we put in you to wear it. You’ve broken that trust.
I am not gonna apologize for what I did.
Thank you for your service. Is it that obvious?
I need two shooters for a time sensitive album. I’m offering you a chance to finish what you started [01:20:00] to keep your brothers from danger. If we do this
headlines: eyes and ears in position,
trailer: I need to know that you can find breaks.
Have my word.
You do not have to carry this weight alone.
after show: The only way
Doug: out is right through it. I think I just watched the movie. Wasn’t that the entire movie? Wait a minute. Hold on. Her show season. Know what it is.
Joe: The only way out is right through. It starts off with a discussion of Battlefield Brotherhood Insignia. I’m not gonna apologize your service. I have a time sensitive op.
I mean, this is all OG pornography right here. All those words. So is this the great, great
Doug: British Baking Show? Like they totally play right into OG [01:21:00] Psyche can. I guess. I’m so surprised you asked me to guess. Is it Terminal List?
OG: Yep.
Doug: Ah, yeah. Terminal
OG: List season two, but it’s a prequel. It’s got Chris Pratt in it, but just a little bit.
So he’s not really the main character terminal list in the original season, Chris Press the main character. This is filling in the backstory of one of the other characters that’s in season one. I guess the best review that I saw on this said it’s like watching Call of Duty.
Doug: Which they’re actually working on now is the line. Of course they are Call of Duty. Yeah, of course. They’re, yeah,
OG: which is basically like any movie. But, um, no, it’s good. I mean, again, popcorn stuff, it’s like lioness, it’s spy espionage. It’s got a little James Bond, it’s got a little bit of Call of Duty, wide open RPGs and kind of fun stuff like that.
There’s a lot of name brand actors in this. Again, people, you guys are talking on Monday about people that you go, [01:22:00] oh, I’ve seen that guy before. Or he’s, he seems to be in these movies and, and so you’ll recognize a lot of these actors, and I’m not good with names, but she’ll say, oh yeah, that guy’s always typecast as the the military boss.
And this guy’s always typecast as the Iraqi soldier. That always helps the Americans and you know what I mean? Like, it’s basically you go, I’ve seen this guy in this role before. And, uh, very specific. Well, it’s, yeah, but even
Joe: those lines from the trailer Doug
Doug: are just so, yeah.
OG: Yeah, same. I’ve never
Doug: heard any of those lines before.
OG: I don’t know. I said nobody ever, I watched the first three episodes. It comes out on Wednesdays, so they launched first three and then you can watch it on Wednesdays on Prime, by the way, one of the many subscription services that we have. ’cause we are rich and we can afford them all.
Doug: Oh geez. Oh boy.
OG: That’s the next comment. These guys sound so rich. They can afford all the subscription services, all the streaming services. Yeah. [01:23:00]
Joe: I, I still love the fact, you know, my cousin’s idea of there’s only, you only have one set of ice, so I have one at a time. Yeah. Your, your
OG: idea is actually really, really sound actually are your cousins, you know, just flip ’em on one at a time as like as you need ’em.
I’m just not disciplined enough to do that. Me neither. Me too.
Joe: Yeah, I’ve made it to three and I stopped. I can’t get less than three. I’m like, no, no. Don’t take it away.
OG: There’s only a place to like aggregate all these subscriptions into one. Just pay one flat fee for everything.
Joe: If only. Wouldn’t that be wild?
And now ESPN made it even better. Yeah. And by better I mean worse, right?
after show: Mm-hmm.
Doug: Doug, you had a series too. Oh yeah. It’s called The a hundred Foot Wave. Have you heard about this? No. Og you have. It
OG: involves water. I can tell, but go on. Huh? They got
Doug: recommended me by somebody who. Would not like surfing at all.
Surfing is the [01:24:00] only sport I can think of that I really wished I had tried back when I was more physically capable. Yeah, IE younger, but I, I totally get why that, why people would get hooked on that. You know, everybody knows I love skiing and being able to just trench as we say, meaning when you’re really laid up on edge and carving a turn, that feeling is unbelievable.
It’s, it’s, it’s the second best feeling in the world. And I imagine surfing is like that as well, but I’ve never tried it myself. And this person recommended this show to me. It’s got three seasons. It’s Emmy nominated, and it’s about a guy who sort of discovered NRE Portugal and the waves off the coast of nre, Portugal are the biggest in the world.
It’s an extreme form of surfing. And the goal that so far, at least I’m in season two and a half out of three. Hasn’t been reached is they’re trying to be the first person to surf a 100 [01:25:00] foot wave. They’re up to like an, I think somebody got an 80 footer once that, I mean, it’s just an astound. When you see the little tiny person up against this wave, it’s, it’s just jaw dropping to think that they’re out there and they’re not dying.
Uh, I, because when it crashes on you, and they all do eventually, right? That’s eight stories of water that’s falling on these people. It’s unbelievable. And you really get, they, they produce it so well from a storytelling standpoint. You get to really care about all of the surfers and some of the main people.
They focus on you. It’s very well is Wait, this, this
Joe: is documentary.
Doug: It is. Yeah. This is not scripted. This is a hundred percent documentary. Um, the photography is unbelievable in it. They follow, I mean, I don’t know, we gotta be up to like 10 or 12 different. There’s one main guy who sort of discovered his name is Garrett.
He kind of discovered this thing, or was the first, I break it open as a surfing destination and he and his wife just made it their mission to, and other surfers are [01:26:00] like, oh, that looks pretty cool. And now it’s this mecca of just terror.
Joe: This documentary series that speaking documentaries that, you know, started off with Formula One drive to survive and then went into what, uh, tennis, two different football and ones golf, all these.
I could not get Cheryl to watch them. One day she was watching quarterback with me and she watched the rest of the episode. Yeah, she’s like, that was really good. That was really good. But she, she wouldn’t come back for another episode. But I finally got her with Sprinter where they have the top sprinters from around the world.
And being a former track athlete that got her following, uh, Chikara Richardson. And um, uh, some of the others has been really a fun series to watch together. I’m hoping it’ll translate where she’ll watch the rest of them with me. ’cause they’re all so fun to watch. Like they’re all, it’s all the same. Yeah.
Stuff. Just different sports. So much Cool. Behind the scenes and getting in your head, stuff like that. Right. One [01:27:00] more that I had, by the way, I finished Fisk, Doug, uh, Fisk was a series that Doug recommended to me a long time ago. That is great.
Doug: We did two, we finished that except my partner decided to go watch like three episodes without me.
So I saw the first couple of episodes of this most recent season and then the last two. So I’ve gotta go back and fill in the gap in the middle. But yeah, just great light watch. Highly recommended
Joe: 30 minutes of comedians doing great work.
Doug: Super dry Australian comedy. Very good.
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