Great Quotes, Volume 7: What Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, and the Gardner Brothers All Agree On

This week, David Gardner cleanses his podcasting palate from last week's Rule Breaker Investing show about his worst losers by bringing us some of his favorite quotes.

In this segment, he quotes Steve Jobs, who was quoting Steward Brand and the final issue of his Whole Earth Catalog. That countercultural touchstone, unsurprisingly, has a bit in common spiritually with the rule-breaking spirit of The Fool.

A full transcript follows the video.

This video was recorded on Jan. 17, 2018.

David Gardner: Great Quote No. 5: Best for last. This is my second favorite Motley Fool quote of all time, and in a way, I hope it ties a nice bow around this edition of Great Quotes, and in our case "Great Quotes, Vol. VII."

Now, our favorite Motley Fool quote has to be the line from Shakespeare, Act II, Scene VII of As You Like It, where we took our name. "A fool, a fool! I met a fool i' the forest, a motley fool." It's a great scene that celebrates foolishness. That celebrates the court jesters of this world. People who can tell the king or queen the truth and have license to do so by using humor, by being a little bit more laid back, and by fighting the conventional wisdom of their time.

I think our No. 1 favorite Motley Fool quote always needs to be from Act II, Scene VII of As You Like It. But at least for me personally, this is my second favorite all-time Fool quote. And if I've done a good job throughout this podcast, I've set this one up with a few forerunners that you might recognize as I read this paragraph from the closing of Steve Jobs' 2005 commencement speech given to Stanford University graduating seniors. You may have heard this one before, but if not, it's my pleasure to share it with you, and listen for a few of the things we've already talked about here in this podcast.

He closed, "When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form 35 years before Google came along: It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

"Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: 'Stay Hungry! Stay Foolish!' It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry! Stay Foolish! And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

"'Stay Hungry! Stay Foolish!'"

And Steve, I never got to discuss that with you, or thank you for that, but it wasn't long after you said those words, now viewable till kingdom come, and with 9 million YouTube views the last I looked, it wasn't long after you said those words that members of our online community who'd heard it and seen it signed on and said, "Hey, did you guys just see that? Did you hear that?"

I don't know how the official transcript reads, but I like to think, I'm pretty sure, that Steve was spelling "foolish" with a capital F.