In this podcast, Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner checks in with Motley Fool analyst Bill Barker and personal finance expert Robert Brokamp. Sports, family, and finance keep popping back up in their life stories expressed in 10 sentences, in the stock graphs of their lives, and in the three key moments that have made these admirable men the Foolish investors that they are.
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This video was recorded on April 10, 2024.
David Gardner: Who lives, who dies? Who tells your story? Runs that poignant lyric from the American hit musical Hamilton. Well, storytelling has been at the heart of this podcast for many of the 450 weeks and counting, we've shared together. But it didn't occur to me until a few years ago to start a new episodic series that features some of your favorite Motley Fool personalities telling their story. Because regardless of who lives, who dies and the truth is we all do. The unanswered question is, who tells your story? I thought, why not have them do so? Why not have you do so this week, Bill Barker, Robert Brokamp? Where do you come from? If you had to tell your story in just 10 sentences, how would you tell it? What does the stock graph of your life look like? What were the three key moments that made you into the investor you are today? Telling their stories. Volume 6 kicks off right here, right now, only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.
Welcome back. If you missed that espresso shot of optimism that Bill Barker uncooked on this podcast last week, go back and listen to it or share it with a glass-half-empty friend, at least recognizing the serious and real health benefits to being more optimistic, etc. As I said last week, that episode is timeless. It's going to be a great one to bookmark and go back to, any time you or someone you know needs a pep talk. Thank you again to the optimism institutes, Bill Barker for suffering Fools gladly last week and now without further ado this week, the 6th in our episodic series, Telling Their Stories. Let me remind you how this works. Telling their stories features the life stories of some of our favorite investors, longtime Motley Fool personalities. The storytelling has three building blocks. The story of your life in 10 sentences. Have you ever done that, dear listener? It's available to all, try it sometime. Well, two people who have definitely done it are this episode's guests Bill Barker and Robert Brokamp. They will tell their life stories in 10 sentences. That's building block number 1, building block number 2. Hey, we're all investors my dear listeners, you are too. All of us understand the concept of a stock graph. But what if instead of graphing a stock, you're graphing your life? What are the highs and lows? Bill and Robert have done that too. They'll speak to whatever they'd like to in the stock grafts of their lives, and then the third and final building block is the three key moments that have shaped these fools into the investors they are today. They'll share all this and we'll talk about it. Thereby hangs a tail or two. Let's get started. Bill Barker, welcome.
Bill Barker: Thanks, David.
David Gardner: Bill, what are you doing today at The Motley Fool?
Bill Barker: Primarily working on Firecrackers, the small microcap service with Bill Mann, and little work on Hidden Gems and the Motley Fool One portfolios and little podcasting here and there and sometimes Motley Fool Live.
David Gardner: How many years have you been at the Motley Fool?
Bill Barker: Well, will get into that.
David Gardner: Spoiler alert. We're going to go there. Bill, do you have 10 sentences setup?
Bill Barker: I do.
David Gardner: You're ready?
Bill Barker: I'm ready.
David Gardner: Excellent. William Stephens Barker. Tell your story.
Bill Barker: Thank you, David. I was born and raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia, not far from where you and Tom spend a little bit of time. In fact, we may have gone to the same preschool for a period of time, even if we didn't necessarily overlap, will get into that. Grew up a big sports fan, though not a Philadelphia sports fan. That's a product of neither of my parents being from Philadelphia, which is an unusual thing for those in Philadelphia. Tab, neither parent from there was taught how to play tennis at an early age by my father was a much better tennis player than I ever was. But that led me into a number of other racket sports which have been a big part of the exercise, at least in my life and a lot of my time. I did some public school through about 7th grade and then went to private school and then to Yale for college, where I was an African studies major through junior year and then switched to political philosophy for my senior year and graduated with that degree, then to University of Virginia for law school. I met my wife during one of my summers there, the summer softball game on the fields of D senior or the Washington Monument. Spent a few years at a big law firm here in DC, then I was back in Philadelphia, my home for a couple of years in the commercial litigation section of the City of Philadelphia, City Solicitors Office. Most of the time that I was in law, both at the law firm and with City of Philadelphia, I knew I wanted to do something other than law and litigation and didn't know what it was until I found the Motley Fool, and it blend completely unique of education and investing and humor. I found myself here shortly thereafter, a couple of years of posting on the boards but about three-and-a-half years during my first stint here, then I and a couple of others left around 2001. I came back in 2005 in the interim. I worked in the treasury department working on terrorist finance, freezing, and tracking, and thwarting. Then I was back and 2008, I helped start Motley Fool Asset Management, small team. Things are still going and money management, but I came back to the publishing last year and somewhere at all that I had a growing family, three kids. One is out of college, two are in college, one about to graduate, and two dogs and two cats. That's more or less an outline of my life story.
David Gardner: That was about 10 sentences.
Bill Barker: It was about 10. Some of the sentences were runoff. [laughs] I detoured a couple of times from what I had written here.
David Gardner: African American studies. Why were you intending to major in that when you started at Yale?
Bill Barker: I certainly was not intending to start on it. When I got to Yale, I was at the time something that is more uncommon today than it was back then. I was just there for a liberal arts education. I was there to take courses that interested me and figure out what interested me more than other things, and even the concept of having a major was an imposition on the freedom that I would have preferred to just take the most interesting four or five courses every time, but I had to organize it into a major. I guess when I was in that period, I had been to Africa, just a tourist but had enjoyed the trip I'd made there and I took a great course, my very first term at Yale, which was a survey course, which had all of the teachers who did a week or two, they would just do their best lectures there. The music teacher would do a week on African music and then they'll be a week on African religion, and philosophy, and history, and politics. I got to see the best, most high-level version of everything and thought it was all interesting and I didn't commit until the end of sophomore year to the major, as you didn't have to where I was at that time until the end of sophomore year. Then by the end of junior year, I had learned enough about myself to know that I wasn't going to go off to Africa and spend my life.
David Gardner: We're going to go off to Pawleys Island.
Bill Barker: Well, I had to look at what I had and I had a lot of the African studies courses I took. It was about the political science there. I had taken a lot of political science, a lot of philosophy and was able to cobble together this political philosophy major, which was under the political science department but had a lot of the philosophy was applicable.
David Gardner: Racket sports and sports obviously coming up multiple times in your store. I'm sure we'll talk a little bit more about that. Let's do a little bit more of that now Bill, hand-eye coordination, you've got it.
Bill Barker: Well, as I said, my dad was quite a good tennis player and probably genetics have a lot to do with what happens to you on the courts.
David Gardner: Growing up as a fan, I know you're a baseball fan, I'm sure you're a fan of other sports too including tennis, of course. But were you that guy cheering on the Yankees in your Philadelphia classrooms?
Bill Barker: That guy, well, I guess I probably hate it a little bit. The reason why people ask, why are you a Yankees fan? It was that I was already interested in baseball, baseball cards, of course.
David Gardner: Of course.
Bill Barker: Of course, baseball. Just planning baseball. It was a bigger sport back then and it's something you would do in the neighborhood and I loved it. When I was very young, my dad, in order to encourage me to read more, would buy books that were very easy to read and were geared toward the history of baseball and it was all Yankees. If you were being given a book in the late 60s, early 70s, that was about baseball's best sluggers, baseball's greatest World Series, greatest pennant races. Half the book would [laughs] be about the Yankees. That was just the Yankees took up such a large chunk. I was in a way, just a front-runner, although the Yankees were terrible in the late 60s and early 70s.
David Gardner: I remember that.
Bill Barker: But the history that I was being indoctrinated with by these random house books were, what led me to root for the Yankees. As I say, I wasn't raised as a Philadelphia sports fan, like in this household. We root for the Phillies and the Eagles and the Sixers. My dad was from Utah and my mom was from Illinois, and I was left to choose my own teams.
David Gardner: How'd your parents meet?
Bill Barker: College.
David Gardner: Good way to do it. You met your wife though, your bride-to-be sounds like on a softball field in Washington DC, summertime.
Bill Barker: That is true. Yes.
David Gardner: Sports really runs deeply through your life. Was there a chance that you and Diana would not have met on that field that night? Could it all not have happened in the alternative universe?
Bill Barker: Very much so. Well, we had both been at Yale, but she'll point out when she has the opportunity. Much younger than I am, two years, and so we didn't really know each other, although we traveled in circles that overlapped just enough that when I saw her on this field, I recognized her face, although I didn't know where I was recognizing it from. We were not really acquainted, although we had met, and it's been a few years, and I don't have a very good memory. Ultimately, I stared at her long enough in a way that was no doubt upsetting, but she was wearing Yale shorts. I bet it's that. That's where I recognized her from. Introduce myself, she had no idea who I was, of course. But yeah, as she would tell the story. Her office was loath to play our office because we were this lobbying firm. I didn't do any lobbying, I was doing litigation, but they fancied themselves. She worked at a congressional offices, not ones who should associate with lobbyists. Unless we were picking up the check for the meal and drinks after the game, which we were. Her office might well not have ever played our office and we would not have met or remet.
David Gardner: Bill, I see you're starting to brandish the stock graph of your life. We're going to go to that in a sec. But before we do, I'm sure you're going to get into this a little bit more, but the law and then all of a sudden, the stock market. What in your mind, is the single greatest advantage you have as a lawyer? A recovering lawyer, a present lawyer. I don't know how you think of yourself with the law as an investor.
Bill Barker: I think that the training in the law and legal rating where you have to have support for every fact, you have to have a citation for every argument. Either you're citing a previous case or you're citing something that's in the record, and you have to have that to move forward to the next thing, which is not the way much of argument works in the rest of society. You don't ever have to show your facts or have any facts. As is more and more the case in both social media and political world. You can just make up your own facts a lot of the time, but you can't really make them up for very long in the stock where you can make up a story.
David Gardner: Story stock?
Bill Barker: It might hold for a couple of days a week, but it's not going to hold up to an investment horizon.
David Gardner: Really appreciate that point. I'm glad you're on our team. Bill the stock graph of your life. They can see the graph. In fact, I can't even see the graph. It's on your laptop. Make sure that as you talk us through it here, just over the course of next couple of minutes, you make it visual for us.
Bill Barker: All right, there are ups and downs like other stock graphs you've seen. I think there is, well, go ahead and then I'll discuss why the shape is what it is. It could be whatever shape you want.
David Gardner: It sure can and really, the way we've done this on this episodic series on Rule Breaker Investing is to just invite the presenter to touch on a light upon a few different highs and or lows. It's whatever you'd like to share about your life. But of course, because this is an investing podcast, we see lives through graphs, which usually goes somewhere in the lower left and usually a little bit higher in the upper right somewhere. But thereby hangs a tail, as I said. Well, Bill, we can both picture your x-axis. That is, of course, time, it goes from left to right, it is unstoppable. But your y-axis, the y-axis seems to me, for a lot of people, I think it's happiness.
Bill Barker: I do think that to feel that it should keep going up and to the right, I think works against the actual experience of life. Not just ups and downs, but, like, I don't know what. It wouldn't be that certain. When is it better than when you're seven? You don't have to do anything.
David Gardner: Can you even speak at seven? Is that what I'm hearing?
Bill Barker: In terms of happiness, it's probably some study on when happiness peaks and it's not at the end of your life. It moves to the right, and the way I graphed it, it does move up and to the right, but it doesn't relentlessly move up.
David Gardner: What's the first thing you want to share?
Bill Barker: The first thing that I want to share. One of the peaks here, as we've discussed. In 1990, when I met my wife to be, things were on a nice ascending trajectory. I started at a point value of 100 the day I was born randomly. She'd hope that seems like a nice round number.
David Gardner: That's often the way things start, we index a certain number, we make it 100.
Bill Barker: Up through college and all that, it was certainly feels those things are getting better and better. I met her and then I had to become a lawyer. This was during the summer when I was still in law school, and I would have summer associate job at a law firm. They wine and dine you and they don't make you do much work and they introduce you to your fiance and all that stuff. That's how they rope you in. Find a boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever for you, and then you feel you got to go work for them.
David Gardner: You're making it sound as if this is all controlled by a puppeteer, a marionette man or something. I didn't realize that's how it actually works. Keep going.
Bill Barker: That's how law firms, well, they give you a lot of carrots first and as many jobs too when they're getting people to work for them. Then you learn along the way how many carrots and how many sticks there are.
David Gardner: So 1990 a high, keep going.
Bill Barker: Then I would say that actually working in a legal office, working as a lawyer, certainly introductory, big law firm life is not for everybody. After a few years, I had gone to Philadelphia and did more litigation. By the way, litigation is just arguing with people all the time, which is also don't recommend as something you must try. To get yourself into a position where what you do on a daily basis is get into arguments.
David Gardner: I hear you. Can you give an example? Maybe I'm sure the names can be changed to protect the innocent. But what would be a typical argument you'd find yourself in?
Bill Barker: I'll go with the good argument. There was one client, this was one of my favorite pieces of work to have done, was representing the library for the blind of Philadelphia. They were about to be kicked out of their space as a library. In terms of a client.
David Gardner: Right away they've won the sympathy lottery here. You can't argue against these people. This is wrong.
Bill Barker: It's a library for the blind. They were going to be kicked out. I found a letter that was in a file that was in the court that was sort of nobody had found and sent it to the entity that was trying to kick them out and I said, look, under the terms of the bequest, you don't get to kick them out. In fact, I think what we might be looking at is whether they can kick you out. If you'd like to continue your litigation by all means and that resolved the case.
David Gardner: Congratulations.
Bill Barker: That was fun. They don't all wrap themselves up that titling.
David Gardner: Take us along further on your graph. What else can we see here?
Bill Barker: Things move up. When I found the Motley Fool. To be perfectly honest, it was an unexpected thing. I was on AOL back in the day, and they would relentlessly push the Motley Fool icon, on there little tiny homepage.
David Gardner: I remember it. That was big by the way. That was a lot of eyeballs. Early days, AOL, huge fish, small pond, and so anybody who was thinking to use the Internet was probably using AOL for a couple of years there and to be up on the main screen with our Elvis logo. That's what we've always called our gesture internally, that was huge.
Bill Barker: Did they even have data to put some people and not others? Did they have an algorithm?
David Gardner: That was the age of hits. It would be like, how many hits does your website get? I'm sure they were counting hits.
Bill Barker: But would you know, would my use of AOL have been incorporated into their targeting me?
David Gardner: I would say probably not initially, but certainly in time and most of all, and this was really helpful for the Motley Fool. Enough about me. We're going back to you in a sec, but I do want to say that back then, older hands will remember you were paying per hour or per minute connect fees to be using Internet. As Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric once said, what does the Internet? Famous thing of today's show. You can watch it again on YouTube. It's classic when they first broached the topic of Internet. But yeah, people were paying per minute. We knew very specifically who was in what area because we were making money from that. That was a fantastic way for the Motley Fool to start. We didn't have to have venture capital. We had a cash-flow-positive business model thanks to AOL. Bringing in lots of people, mailing out disks that served as cocktail coasters. There were so many of them out there 1990s, but yeah, enough of you found your way to us, and Bill, some of you are so bright we hired you.
Bill Barker: I had posted quite a bit on the message boards, or at least I posted enough to get a number of message of the day or post of the day.
David Gardner: Definitely, you made me and Tom, and a lot of others laugh, and it was smart.
Bill Barker: Well, it was fun to do. That was the early days of social media, and I don't know what your experience is today compared to then. Certainly during those years where the stocks were generally going up a lot.
David Gardner: The market went up 20 percentage points or more for years in a row SMP.
Bill Barker: People were very nice to each other, largely online, at least in the Motley Fool message board world. That everybody was generally helpful, and maybe some people were jealous of some people's making money when they were making money, but not as much as people taking victory laps for things they were doing. But there was far less hostility.
David Gardner: There is a lot of esprit de corps and I think in part, I still think this exists in Fooldom today or you go to our gatherings and you see. I agree, a lot of social media doesn't seem to work this way and a lot of people seem to use it as a foghorn to call out things or people they don't like. That's what seems to get a lot of the clicks today. But I think it was discovering that we could work together by having our computers dial in through phone lines to each other's computers and share information especially as individual investors. There were doctors who are prescribing or using solutions that were manufactured by companies we are looking at. We didn't have any access before AOL or Internet. We had no access to that knowledge or conversation and so I really think that was a big part of that early.
Bill Barker: Yeah, 95, I didn't post right away. I think I lurked for better than a year, maybe two, but started posting in 97, possibly 96. Was hired in 98 and did a year remote. Then I moved here, which was something my wife was very happy to do because she's from here.
David Gardner: Bill pointed out one or two more spots along the graph of your life. I realize we're oversimplifying, but that's what we do on this episodic series.
Bill Barker: Well, we talked about this briefly earlier, I did. I was here for a few years and then 2001, I and a number of other people were not able to stick around.
David Gardner: We had mass layoffs and it was extremely painful, 2001. I remember that we had three layoffs and they were about 85 -100 people each time. I remember Tom and I as we talked with our team at the time, that first layoff, we were like, that's the only one. We're not going to need any more after this. People are not investing anymore. A lot of the online brokers are shuttering, everything's shutting down. We have too many people and then we had to do it again, and then we had to do it again, at which point we're laying off people who aren't just some of our most talented Fools, some of our family members. It was gut-wrenching.
Bill Barker: It was and I was involved in laying off people as in a management position and actually much much more painful to lay people off than to be laid off or it wasn't in my experience. Of course, by the time of this third round of layoffs, which is where I got laid off in 2001, that was after 911. There were a lot of problems out there and being laid off was relatively easy to digest and felt like I was going to be able to go off and do something, and the people who were left might be the ones that really you needed to empathy for, because the task left was tough.
David Gardner: It was hard for everybody and not just for our small company, but for our society, our world, as you pointed out. The events of that year, I think that was the worst year of my life. I'm not looking at your graph right now, Bill, but at least mine goes down that year. Did yours?
Bill Barker: It does go down from 2000. I didn't have a child born in that year and I found a job pretty quickly working in terrorist financing. It was a hiring time in terrorist financing.
David Gardner: Makes sense to me, right here in Washington DC.
Bill Barker: Tracking and freezing and thwarting and was the thing that I could.
David Gardner: Get behind.
Bill Barker: It was a wonderful job in at least one respect and that has everything that I was working with was classified. When I left my job, I was done for the day. There was no bringing work home, there was no working on something. When I went home, I was free and that's never been the case before or since. You've always got something, you leave, I should work on this a little more and it's hanging above you all the time that you could be, and maybe you are working a little bit while you're watching the baseball game, while you're talking to your kids. It's a distraction, that is unfortunate opportunity in most jobs now that you are never fully not working.
David Gardner: I feel you. I think a lot of us do, although I love my work, so I'm happy to answer emails or even sometimes send them on Sunday nights, not expecting my fellow Fools even open them until the next morning. But thank you for that. Bill Barker, we're about to go to the three key moments that have made you the investor you are today. Before we do that, I want you to share one more point on your graph, and if you're not including a racket sports championship, that you have won because you're being too modest, could you please mention that and then a life moment, and then we're going to your Investor development story.
Bill Barker: A racket sports. I won the US Amateur doubles in the game of core tennis, which nobody's ever heard of, but is played by about 1,000 -1,500 people or so in this country and maybe another three or four times at around the world. My son has also won the US Amateur in doubles.
David Gardner: That is amazing.
David Gardner: We haven't won it together. But that's something I'm happy to talk about his win because he's got more in front of it. I've wrapped up mine, I'm heading off to England in a couple of weeks to play the world 50 and over championship.
David Gardner: That's wonderful. Good for you. Share one more graph moment.
Bill Barker: One more graph moment. I guess I would talk about just coming back from asset management, back to publishing, which has been good. It's a little bit on a down as I look at where I plotted things, I only tracked through 2023. I haven't looked into 2024, but I think there's definitely a little bit of a downward trend through that time because of the office life has not come back to what it was. I think that that's probably been something a lot of people in the company appreciate. The ability to work from home. There is the ability to come into the office but frankly, the office life was much more vibrant, pre-pandemic than I think it could ever be again. That shows up in my graph. Today there are a few more people in the office, tomorrow is going to be a good day of people coming into the office and those are good days for the company.
David Gardner: We have that. We call them sink days where everybody comes in, no one's forced. We've never really been compulsory about that at the Motley Fool, I think that's our strength, but sometimes in your strength is your weakness too. I appreciate that point, Bill, I recognize that we once had four floors in the office building in which you and I are broadcasting today, and we're down to just one. We actually have more employees than we did before pandemic, but we also started to go more and more remote. We have employees in states where we wouldn't even have an office and we were a lot more spread out. I also share with you our love and appreciation of the times that we have spent in and around Fool HQ. The only constant is change, so who knows where things are headed next, but thank you for that, Bill Barker. Well, let's close it then with the three key moments that have made Bill Barker, the investor that he is today. What's number one?
Bill Barker: Number one, we're talking about moment. We've already talked about it. Just finding the Motley Fool really was a key moment, foundational moment on AOL. I had been doing a little investing.
David Gardner: Were you raised to think about the stock market? Did your parents care?
Bill Barker: No. I think it was more my experience where that came more from the gambling world that that part of it appealed to that part of my brain. Knowing how to invest or knowing how to do my own research was not generally something that anybody was talking about. You would get ideas from your broker or the Wall Street Journal. It was great fun to find that.
David Gardner: That really was how the world worked back then. It's still not that different today. A lot of people still have brokers and still read the Wall Street Journal. But it was a smaller world with fewer resources and possibilities for investors. Definitely more of a Yale than let's go with in Ohio State University when we think about just the walled gardens, a fewer people, by the way, did you watch Yale beat Auburn in March Madness this year, the men's?
Bill Barker: Sort of, I was at a dinner with my wife and a friend of hers and we're in a place where I could keep an eye on the game and I was frequently. But two of the people beside myself were Yale's, so I was able to defend it. The fact that when it got down to about two or three minutes, I had been paying more attention to the table than to the TV. All of a sudden I looked up at and Yale, was up by five with two, three minutes left, so I pause the conversation and everybody agreed to watch the last couple of minutes of the game.
David Gardner: There went my final four entrant, Auburn, name one.
Bill Barker: Well, I got to live a little bit less than 48 hours of hope for Yale. laughs] They were finished off about the first five minutes of their next game.
David Gardner: Well, I guess I could've predicted maybe what investing moment number 1 is, especially because that wasn't a big part of your background, but you had, while you're smart guy who are also intellectually curious. There's a little bit of the gambler, the sports, the lover of chance and risk and it sounds like that's maybe what appealed to you when you found a little jester icon on your AOL login screen, Bill, what was investor moment number 2.
Bill Barker: I'm going to take this out of order chronologically.
David Gardner: That works.
Bill Barker: Second one was signing up to take the CFA. It's certainly not a moment taking the CFA. It's a three-year process or back then it was or more for most people.
David Gardner: It's rigorous.
Bill Barker: It's a rigorous thing. It's much harder than taking the bar and the moment I was a couple of months into my job at treasury when i signed up for it, knowing that I wanted someday to get back into the world of finance and this was one element that might help with that. It was a long process but for those that are interested in studying finance, I recommend it.
David Gardner: Now we glibly throw around acronyms sometimes especially around full HQ. I think a lot of listeners will know that the CFA does stand for chartered financial analyst, I think. But then there's like certified financial advisor. There's there's a lot of possibilities, but do I have that right? Is it chartered financial analysts? You're one, I'm not.
Bill Barker: You're not actually supposed to throw around the acronym CFA as as it now or something like that. [laughs] I'm violating some term. But that is it and it's the way that it worked back then and it's been tweaked a little bit. You take a test. Whatever, four or five hours test, Level 1, about half fewer than half the people pass it. A year later you're allowed to take Level 2 if you're one of the 40% or so that have passed Level 1 and then same thing happens even though Level 2 is only people who have gotten that far.
David Gardner: Minority pass.
Bill Barker: A minority passed Level 2, and then a year later you're allowed to take Level 3 and if you don't pass, you just take it over. You wait a year to take the test again.
David Gardner: I really admire that. I think it seems too broad excellence to all the CFAs I know around the Fool and we have a number of them. These are people I esteem.
Bill Barker: It's a real thing. It's much more work than you probably anticipate it being.
David Gardner: What do you feel like you took away from it? The biggest takeaway, the number 1 reason you're grateful for it. We have people listening right now who are probably considering. I know some are actually in the midst of it, but for those younger Fools that thinking, should I do that? Why?
Bill Barker: Well, I had been raised on the Motley Fool analysis school and it's a less valuation oriented or certainly was back in the late 90s.
David Gardner: Still is for me.
Bill Barker: When a lot of valuation went out the window, I think that learning what the traditional valuation that means are radically different method of looking through financial statements. There's a lot of discipline, not in how you conduct it, but just how you have to manage your time in order. If you are working in a job that has nothing to do with the material and also with young kids. There was not a lot of time to waste in my schedule. You study for months and if you don't pass it, you've got to look your spouse and the faces that like I didn't pass it and I'm going to do it again next. I am no further along than I was and I spent all this time. It's a brutal thing that a lot of people go through.
David Gardner: The majority of people who walk away from that have to tell their friends, spouse, or partner. I'd I know I spent a lot of time, I didn't pass.
Bill Barker: Didn't pass it's tough. In my case, I did pass all three times. I don't say that to take.
David Gardner: That's a little bit of a humble brag. How can it not be? Anybody who has a CFA is humble bragging.
Bill Barker: It's hard to talk about without making it seem that way, [laughs] but plenty of people pass all three. But not certainly not all and it just a matter of doing the work. You can't just be smart and know how to do the Black-Scholes for it.
David Gardner: It's not math. There's a lot of math, but some people just are great at math and so they could just pass anything but this is applied math.
Bill Barker: I had never taken statistics in any of my math courses in high school and I didn't take math. I was good with numbers, but I didn't actually pursue it in college. I pursued apparently African studies for a while. But I love statistics.
David Gardner: I've often heard it said.
Bill Barker: Should take statistics.
David Gardner: Yes, there's a whole school of thought out there. I see this, maybe Kevin Kelly once said it, but there are people who say we should be teaching statistics in high school rather than calculus.
Bill Barker: Yes.
David Gardner: It's much more relevant for more of us throughout our whole lives, estimating probabilities of things rather than the shape of a curve or the speed of something.
Bill Barker: I would 100% agree that statistics should replace calculus as for most people in terms of it can be very rigorous. Statistics can be less rigorous, but there's plenty that you will learn and I struggle to think of when I've used calculus in my life.
David Gardner: Let's move on to the third moment that has helped formed you to be the investor you are today. Bill, it sounds like these are out of order, which is completely fine.
Bill Barker: 1999, there's a little bit before I started, which would have been the spring of 2002 is when I signed up for Level 1 of the CFA. But 1999 November, stock market's doing very well. Warren Buffett comes out with an article in Fortune magazine, which was not an article that he wrote, but it was taken from some speeches and it was done by Carol Loomis, I think who sometime biographer. He talks about, I think at the time there was a poll of what investors anticipated making in the market and was, I think, 17% or something annually. Buffett laid out this argument that this could not be done. Here are the reasons why cannot be done and his best estimate was that investors over the next 15-20 years would make 5% in real terms, that's subtracting inflation. I was looking at up to that. It always has been an article every reread many times. I've written about it a number of times on our site. In the 25 years since the articles published, the market in real terms has produced 4.85% of returns. There are reasons why math can be applied to the market and in the short term not as much so, but over the long term, whether things have looked bleak or look great. The math is a heavy hand in dictating what can happen over the long term.
David Gardner: Well, there you have it. William, Stephens, Barker, Bill. Thank you so much for sharing so much about yourself and what you've learned and inspiring a lot of us to backup our claims. Well, you don't have to be a lawyer to appreciate the importance of understanding where someone's financial advice comes from and any of their analysis and asking them to site in the world of fake news, asking them to site, why they think something that rigor, you make us better as a Fool in that way and many other ways besides. I don't think we made people laugh as much as you normally do, but we weren't trying for that this time. It was still fun.
Bill Barker: Well, we could redo this. laughs] Bro is coming. I think you're going to laugh. You're going to have some laughs with Bro.
David Gardner: You're right. Bill Barker, thank you so much, Fool on.
Bill Barker: Thanks, David.
David Gardner: He's here. He's in the house. Robert Brokamp.
Robert Brokamp: David, hello.
David Gardner: I'm delighted to welcome you. In some ways, I think when I started the series a few years ago it was just waiting for this moment. Robert, how long have you been at the Fool?
Robert Brokamp: Since 1999. I will celebrate 25 years this August.
David Gardner: That is phenomenal, and we're going to talk about some of those years. But we're going to go a little bit deeper or we're going to go as deep as you want to take us. The one thing I know for sure is that you're going to tell us the story of your life in 10 sentences. Are you ready for that?
Robert Brokamp: I am ready for that, David.
David Gardner: Excellent. Robert Francis Brokamp, tell your story.
Robert Brokamp: Well, I was born in Chicago. By age five my family moved to Tampa after my dad bought a ship supply company that he saw advertised in the Wall Street Journal. I thought I might want to be a priest, so my first year of college was at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Seminary in Winona, Minnesota. But a year later, I transferred to the Catholic University of America, which brought me here to the DC area, and I became an English pre-Med major. But before going to med school I wanted to do some service work. I joined the Archdiocese of Washington's teacher service score which placed me in Holy Trinity School in Georgetown, two blocks from the famous Exorcist Steps. I taught sixth and seventh grade English and religion for five years and also developed a massive crush on the school counselor which worked out fine because we eventually got married and we'll celebrate our 25th anniversary this September. Meanwhile, my desire to be a doctor waned but I realized that a teacher's salary in the capital of this country will not go far so I decided that I need to be much smarter about money. I read as many books as possible and used a newish thing called the Internet which led me to discover a newest company called The Motley Fool. I became so interested in personal finances that I thought maybe that should be my profession and worked for two years as a financial advisor with Prudential Securities under the mentorship of my high school English teacher's husband but I kept an eye on the Motley Fool and when I saw a job opening for an editor, I lapped at the opportunity and have been here as I said previously since August of 1999. Finally, I now live in Northern Virginia, have four kids, two dogs, and a lot less hair.
David Gardner: Fantastic. Just like Bill's story I feel like I knew that story but I'm always being reminded of things that I've forgotten and learning new things. It's my fault. Bill left a smoking gun when he mentioned we may have gone to the same pre-school. I didn't even remember what school I went to when I was four, it was just one year. We were in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania about to move to Washington DC because my dad is a lawyer, like Bill's a lawyer, moving to Washington DC and so it was Bryn Mawr Presbyterian though. Bill reminded me. As you mentioned, Holy Trinity School. I was raised Catholic at Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown the very same place that you were a teacher, Robert. I did not intend what I invited you both into this episode to have these school connections, but wow.
Robert Brokamp: Yes. If you've seen The Exorcist, you've seen Holy Trinity in the background there. It was the church where JFK attended his last Catholic mass, and it's where my wife and I got married.
David Gardner: That is excellent. Robert, where were you growing up? I heard Winona, Minnesota at one point. Were you bouncing around? Obviously, you have to tell a little bit more about your father's story. Reading an ad in the Wall Street Journal and ended up buying the company.
Robert Brokamp: Yes. It was a ship supply company which means when ships are coming into the Port of Tampa, they would send a telex, before the days of fax, '70s and '80s. They would say we need some food, we need some tools. Whatever they needed he would buy it and then bring it to the port. Really I grew up in clear water outside of Tampa. I might be the DC area's Number 1 Tampa Bay Buccaneers fan by the way. That's pretty much what we did. I grew up running around, riding my bike, swimming in the summers I spent at my grandmother's farm outside of Cincinnati, which was great. I was thinking earlier my family never took a vacation. I've never been on a plane with my entire family. But those summers on the farm in Ohio were just magical.
David Gardner: Why?
Robert Brokamp: Well, you got to run around a lot. The animals were there. It really was a time where, Bill Mann said this when he was doing this previously, like the Gen X kids was like get out of the house, come back at dinner time. We're allowed to go to really just about anywhere where we wanted to go. We could ride the tractors, we could ride the horses, go by the creek, we'd a lot of fun.
David Gardner: You actually listened to Bill tell his story and you just alluded to it. Robert, thank you. Quick question. Compare and contrast yourself with Bill Mann. One point of comparison similarity and one contrast that you have with Bill.
Robert Brokamp: Similarity, we started on the exact same day.
David Gardner: No way.
Robert Brokamp: August of 1999.
David Gardner: That's awesome.
Robert Brokamp: The difference was, when you first meet me, I'm an introvert. Bill Mann is not. We've sat very close to each other and I sat very quietly awestruck, really starstruck by all the people around me. Bill Mann, not that way. Hey, world, I'm Bill Mann [laughs]
David Gardner: We love him.
Robert Brokamp: We sure do.
David Gardner: Indeed, thank you for reminding me that Bill appeared on the previous episode in this series telling their stories Volume 5. Of course, a Cavalcanti of Fantastic Fools. This is our sixth episode of telling their stories. I can't believe it took me this long to get to this wonderful friend and Fool. Robert, do you still teach it all?
Robert Brokamp: Yes, because one of my roles here at The Motley Fool was an internal rule. I'm going to 401(k) committee and I'm on something what we call the wallet team, which is a group of Fools that try to help our colleagues optimize their finances.
David Gardner: Shortly all of our employees would know all the things about money.
Robert Brokamp: Unfortunately, that's not true. Fortunately, they know a lot more about tech and sales and marketing and running an office.
David Gardner: Indeed.
Robert Brokamp: But not all of them are investing experts, personal finance expert. We're on the wallet team, advocate for good financial benefits and then educate about those benefits. Either I teach the classes, other people teach classes. Next month, we're bringing in Virginia's 529 plan to teach about college savings. We just do those types of things.
David Gardner: Being raised with a father who is a businessman, what feelings and thoughts did you have, as let's say, an 18-year-old, about capitalism?
Robert Brokamp: I'll touch on this a little later as well.
David Gardner: Spoiler alert.
Robert Brokamp: Spoiler alert. The good thing was that my dad taught me a lot about business. He took the opportunity teach me about things, really about all kinds of things. Like I mowed the lawn at our house, and he taught me how the lawn mower worked. He would bring me to work and teach me things about business. One thing he taught me was you always do more than they expect. If they expect X you, you gave them XYZ.
David Gardner: Wonderful.
Robert Brokamp: But as I'll mention later, his business failed. That was a very hard time for my family, which has made me have two sides of my approach to personal finance. Love the stock market, love risk, think long term. But there is a part of me that I call the awfulizer, and then I'm always prepared for the worst-case scenario because my dad's business went under and it was devastating for our family. I saw the good and the bad part of being a business owner and capitalism.
David Gardner: Well, to be able to integrate those is in some ways a privileged. That's very hard lesson and I did not experience something like that growing up myself. Yet many do. To actually try to see the best and integrate those things into the investor that you are today and the fantastic Fool Robert, is something that you've succeeded at. Thank you for sharing that we're about to get to your stock graph of your life where we might talk some more about these things. Now not going to take this personally, Robert, I realized that Elizabeth, that was probably more important. But the moment that you and I met, at least for me, the music slowed down and we went into slo-mo high-def video as we shook hands at a book signing.
Robert Brokamp: I think you said you complete me [laughs] . I think that's what you're actually that's not what you said. You were very kind though, I met you at a book signing. I was still a teacher. It was at the Books-A-Million maybe in Old Town Alexandria, you and Tom, where there signing books. I still have my copy, the Motley Fool Investment Guide with your autograph.
David Gardner: Love it. You mentioned that from time to time in these podcasts. We have some new listeners who probably don't know that. But thank you. I just love that we met that way. Let's move now to the stock graph of your life. Robert, thank you for putting in a little bit of time to think it through. This an investing podcasts. So of course we see things in investing terms. When I think about graphical investing terms, I see graphs. That's always how it's been. A lot of people even before they first understand what a stock is, I don't know, they see Amazon plotted on a graph. For them, the stock market is a series of graphs. It still is for me, decades later. I was joking with Bill that everybody agrees that the x-axis of this graph is time, which goes from left to right. But it's not actually clear what the y-axis stands for. It might be happiness, contentment, it might be something else. Do you want to label your y-axis?
Robert Brokamp: I think given my approach toward finances and some of my history, I would say it is peace of mind.
David Gardner: Love it.
Robert Brokamp: Financial security, that balance between earning enough to pay your bills, to save a little bit and still be happy, I would probably call that my y.
David Gardner: I'm going to say that you just helped me innovate with this particular episode because we've never really talked about labeling the y-axis before, but I think that's a fun creative choice. You just did it take us through.
Robert Brokamp: Stock in bro, as I'm known around these parts, had a fantastic IPO coming public on July 11th, 1969, just two weeks before the moon landing, the Manson murders, and Woodstock [laughs]. It was an eventful summer. My IPO is fantastic because I was born in the United States of America. What a way to start out your life. Plus, I was born to very loving parents. My mom was demonstrably loving, my dad was little more old school like wouldn't change diapers, maybe a little stern but taught me a lot as I said.
David Gardner: Do you ever see your dad cry as a kid?
Robert Brokamp: I did. But just when his business went under, that was the only time i saw him cry. I really had a very happy childhood. I would say if there's a stock price that's going up, fine. It really started flourishing, really in high school. Student council, youth group, very active in sports, ran track, specialized in pole vaulting, did a couple of decathlons.
David Gardner: Wow.
Robert Brokamp: Played football, still have my high school's record for most interceptions in a game at three.
David Gardner: You had three picks?
Robert Brokamp: Three picks in one game.
David Gardner: Incredible. You were also decathlete?
Robert Brokamp: I was.
David Gardner: What was your strongest event? What was your weakest event?
Robert Brokamp: Strongest was pole vault, hurdles, high jump. Weak was anything with strength like shot put, discus.
David Gardner: I forgot that was part of the decathlon. Of course, it is.
Robert Brokamp: In Florida, we didn't do the javelin because unfortunately someone got killed one year. I never had to throw the javelin.
David Gardner: It does remind us that lawn darts were actually a toy that some of us grew up with back in the day. Not anymore.
Robert Brokamp: Absolutely. True story. I had a friend and we would shoot arrows at each other and try to catch them [laughs].
David Gardner: Did you both live to tell the tale? I know you did.
Robert Brokamp: I did and he did as well.
David Gardner: Okay. Good.
Robert Brokamp: We are now Facebook friends. Anyways. So my stock's going up but then really it was junior year when my dad's business failed, and just a lot of things happened. Car got repossessed, our utilities got shut off, I had to go to the principal and tell her we can't afford to pay the bills, and it was devastating for all of us. We had a very loving family. I would never say that my parents had a great marriage, but that was the end of it. So it'd began the start of their separation and divorce, so it really affected my financial personality in a way, and I remember saying at that time, ''I'm never going to put my kids through what my sisters and I went through''. So that's that awful part of me, but then I'd just add here at this point. It was also very difficult for my parents financially. But now, they're fine. They found people that are good for them and they're in their mid-80s and they're genuinely friends now. They call each other and check on each other. So it all worked out, but that time period was very difficult.
David Gardner: Thank you for sharing.
Robert Brokamp: So go to college and BRO stock was pretty volatile, it was truly like the best of times, as well as among the worst of times, but very formative. The year at the seminary was very interesting and then coming to Catholic U here in DC to come from Clearwater, Florida to the big city, was just so cool. Then I did the teaching, as I said, and if you were to value my stock at as a price to sales or price to earnings, it's not very high because teachers aren't making a lot of money. But I was very fortunate to be at a great school with a great community, great principal, great teachers of course, met my wife there and then I did that transition to becoming a financial advisor, which is a bit of a change. I think it was like a business changing its whole business model.
David Gardner: Yeah. Were friends and family expecting this were people shocked?
Robert Brokamp: They were shocked and really I think the seeds of it were that I was dating my now wife at the time.
David Gardner: This is a guy who is in seminary a couple of years before that and all of a sudden you're dating and you're about to go into the business.
Robert Brokamp: Yes, exactly, and I remember my dad specifically saying, ''I'm not sure this is the right business for you.'' It makes me think of one of the first stocks ever bought was Nokia. I bought it in like 2000, 2001 did not turn out so well. Cell phone company in tech still around. It began in 1865 and Finland as a lumber company, and so that's also like me, like I'm changing my business model. I'm not sure how this is going to work out. In the end, I am grateful for my two years as a financial advisor, learned a lot about the nuts and bolts of the financial services industry behind the scenes. But it wasn't for me. I wore a suit every day, do some cold calling and salesman stuff, but it was a great experience, and I'm sure it gave me a leg up to getting my job here at the Fool and then the stock took off at that point. I mean, I truly feel like getting a job at the Fool in 1999. I won the lottery, partially because it was the dot-com days, and feeling very fortunate to be part of that. But even now, I feel like I won the lottery, even though, as you know, some times were a little difficult along the way.
David Gardner: Yeah. Bill and I talked a little bit about that. We laid Bill off in 2001. The final of our three layoffs, our company went from 435 employees to 85 employees in nine months.
Robert Brokamp: Yes and if you were to do the stock graph of BRO stock, that's where it definitely took a dive, and my wife was among one of the people got laid off. All of us who are still here, we're brushing up our resumes because we don't know how long is this going to last, but the truth of the matter is that would've been a good time to buy BRO stock because and I'm also feel bad to say this the last were good for my career because up to that point, I was like the fifth string editor and I did very little writing, even though really what I wanted to do is be a writer. After the layoffs, those of us who are still here had to do a lot more work, so I became like that third string editor and I gradually did more writing to where I eventually lead and launched our early retirement service in 2004.
David Gardner: I was going to ask what year? It feels like it's been around forever celebrating 20 this year.
Robert Brokamp: 20 years in June.
David Gardner: Rule your retirement, so many Fools have benefited over the years. Thank you.
Robert Brokamp: Since then, really all I can say is the stock has gone up, not in like an NVIDIA sort of way. I view myself more as like a blue chip dividend payer, steady as she goes, but I've been very fortunate.
David Gardner: You did reference BRO stock a few times, do you know that the ticker symbol is unfortunately taken? Are you aware of that?
Robert Brokamp: I was not aware of that, what is it?
David Gardner: You don't know who has BRO?
Robert Brokamp: No.
David Gardner: Nor did I, but I just looked it up and it's Brown and Brown, Inc, they're insurance brokers. I mean, I'm embarrassed. I'd like to think that I know what's going on in American business and the stock market. This is a company with a 24 billion dollar market cap, it has your name as its ticker symbol, neither of us know anything about it.
Robert Brokamp: Well, if anything happens to my job here at the Fool, I can always get a job with an insurance guy.
David Gardner: I just loved that it's Brown and Brown, I mean, this sounds like it's from another century, which it probably is, maybe it started also as a Lumber company in 1860 something. Robert, do you remember how Rule Your Retirement started?
Robert Brokamp: Yes. I think at that point, we had Stock Advisor Rule Breakers and Income Investor, and we decided that we needed something that wasn't just focused on stock picking. So Buck Hartzell, who still here at the Fool [inaudible], who is not here at the Fool, and I were tasked to create a service. So we created it, proposed it, but then I had to apply for the job to lead it. And I know I was up against at least two or three external people. In one period, I'm with these people planning and creating the service, and then maybe a month later, I'm in that same room with a with a suit on, just to be funny, applying for the job to lead this service and sure enough, I got it.
David Gardner: So 20 years in Robert, Rule Your Retirement has served so many and I know we're changing up our services some here at the Fool, so exactly what form it takes is unclear maybe as we enter summer, but one thing is for sure looking backward from the future, we will continue at different levels of our business model for different members to provide the kind of advice that you have for two decades now. Can you just briefly summarize a couple of your cardinal points that I, as maybe a knowledgeable person about finance, could share with friends around me to get them inspired and moving forward?
Robert Brokamp: I would say number 1, we've talked a lot about investing, but the number 1 reason most of us who are investing is retirement, financial independence, and there are some things we control and some of the things we can't. What I focus on in early retirement is sort of marshaling all of your resources to maximize your ability to be financially independent. It's obviously your portfolio, but decisions about your portfolio, right? Should it be a traditional or Roth account when it comes to retirement? Still, the foundation in this country for most people is social security, when do you claim it? How much should you plan to get given that it has financial issues? How do your taxes change in retirement? And there's a strategy around that. If you enter retirement with a traditional account, a Roth account, and a taxable brokerage account, which should you tap first? So there's all these little tweaks that are within your control that sort of optimize your ability to be financially independent for the rest of your life.
David Gardner: All right, Robert, as we wrap up our look at the stock graph of your life, remind me how you entitled the Y-axis again.
Robert Brokamp: I considered it financial peace of mind, your ability to pay your bills, save for your future, but still enjoy yourself, value the way you spend your day every day.
David Gardner: Good news your life is not over at least as far as I know. I think you're going to walk out of this podcast studio just fine, Robert, so it's going to keep going from here. Where do you find yourself at this present perch 2024?
Robert Brokamp: Very high really because I talked previously about how when I was a kid, its like I don't want to put my kids through what my sisters and I went through, and I think I've succeeded in that. I am, as of this year an empty nester, one kid who is married and is a digital nomad in Europe, three kids in college, all their colleges is pretty much saved up in 529. They've had good lives, and for me, that was such an accomplishment. I feel good about that.
David Gardner: Congratulations. I love it.
Robert Brokamp: Otherwise, my wife and I get to spend more time together, and I love my job at the Motley Fool, so I'm very happy.
David Gardner: Traveling any?
Robert Brokamp: Not quite yet. My wife I'm so proud of her as a mental health counselor has had her own practice for many years, but then got her PhD at age 52 and is now a professor. But she's got a job that is a little too much because she's department chair. This is her last year as department chair.
David Gardner: This is the danger of being so capable.
Robert Brokamp: I know that's the problem.
David Gardner: Plus you were just getting ready to be empty nesters and all of a sudden you can't do anything.
Robert Brokamp: I know. Well, she's already told the dean that this is her last year, so once she's done, then we will have more opportunity to travel.
David Gardner: All right, let's close it out with the three key moments that have made Robert Brokamp the investor that he is, and there might have even been some of these spoiled ahead of time. I'm not sure we've had a wide ranging conversation. Robert, what's number 1?
Robert Brokamp: Number 1, when I was again a very low-income teacher, I was listening to radio and I heard the Rick Edelman show. Rick Edelman is a well-known financial advisor, author and he was talking to someone who called in and so they couldn't find enough money to invest, and he was talking to her and she said, ''Well I do spend a lot of money on Diet Coke'', and he said, "Don't spend so much money on Diet Coke, buy Coke stock, spend your money on things that appreciate in value, not that depreciate in value'', and the light turned on for me.
David Gardner: Switched on moment.
Robert Brokamp: Exactly, because we're always spending money, but we can choose to spend our money on things that we appreciate 5, 10, 20 years from now, or things that we appreciate for about five minutes and then we get rid of them when we go to the bathroom.
David Gardner: Not just that we appreciate, but that will themselves appreciate or not.
Robert Brokamp: Yes, exactly. So that was really a big key moment and it really did lead me to sort of learning more about finances. Again, I did discover the Motley Fool very early, Rick's books were very helpful as many as other books and I'll get onto those here in a little bit as well, but that was like the light bulb moment to turn me into an investor.
David Gardner: We like reading suggestions on the show, let's move to key moment number 2.
Robert Brokamp: So I'm still the poor teacher at night, I'm teaching SAT and GRE classes at Kaplan to make extra money. The Kaplan office was in a mall that had a Barnes and Noble's. So before and after I would go to the Barnes & Noble and read the books there because I was too poor to buy books and I just read any book I could.
David Gardner: You'd just pull a book off the shelf, sit there on maybe a stool and just hide out and read?
Robert Brokamp: Exactly which is why now when I go to a Barnes & Noble, I do make sure that I buy books on a regular.
David Gardner: You don't need to feel guilty about that, Robert.
Robert Brokamp: I honestly believe a bookstore is a community service, I am happy to support them.
David Gardner: Love it. There you were hanging out in the corner of the Barnes & Noble. Kaplan by the way that that company was, maybe still is owned by the Washington Post company For a while, it was like the profit center. Everyone thinks about the Washington Post back in the newspaper days when it was quite profitable, but Kaplan was a real shining star for a while there.
Robert Brokamp: Yes, and it was frankly, a great way to make some extra side money.
David Gardner: Yeah. They pay well.
Robert Brokamp: As I'm reading, of course, are learning everything right now only about stocks but mutual funds like the basics. But of course, I learned about index funds. I learned about a guy named John Bogle, my very first IRA that I opened when I was 25 or 26, Vanguard. I just came to first of all, admire John Bogle so much, but also learn the value of index investing. So I have many individual stocks, like most of the people listening here, I get my ideas from The Motley Fool. Thank you David for my 10 baggers and Tesla and Starbucks and my 20 bagger in Intuitive Surgical.
David Gardner: I love it. You're welcome.
Robert Brokamp: But a good part, if not most of my portfolio is actually in index funds because I know it is hard to beat the market. So I understand I want to hedge that. But index funds are also very useful to add other components to your portfolio. When we think of index funds, we think that S&P 500, but I also invest in international index funds. Most of my individual stocks are US they tend to be very large cap growth oriented. So I use index funds to add little value and a little small cap and little real estate to my portfolio to round it out. I'm very diversified, which is in some ways limited my returns. But in 2022 when the market was down 20%, the Nasdaq's down 33%. My portfolio is only down 5%, which suits me just fine.
David Gardner: You ever get to meet Bogle?
Robert Brokamp: I did. I've met him twice. He came here to the Motley Fool as you know and I sent him a letter once, and he sent me a handwritten note back and he was famous for doing things like that.
David Gardner: That was the character of the man. I'm so glad that you got to meet him, that I got to meet him, that we got to be friends with Jack Bogle because Bogle had an amazing ability to translate complex concepts down to the common man, someone like me, the common Fool, you and me. Robert, it wasn't just that he explained things really well through his books. It's that he gave us instruments like financial instruments that would make sense in a very confusing world where a lot of people can't really figure out what a fund even is. Index funds beat mutual funds, as we once wrote in our Motley Fool investment guy, we turn that into a song that used to be sung by an operatic singer who is a fellow Fool. Index funds beat mutual funds. We sang that many a time on our Motley Fool radio show. But to have Jack Bogle on this podcast, I want to do an episode, google it, love letter to Jack Bogle and then had him on the week after a favorite memory of mine. We have many of them here at The Motley Fool with Jack Bogle. But it's especially, and I know you appreciate this about him as I do to Robert, his character.
Robert Brokamp: Such an ethical guy really. He could have been a billionaire if he structured Vanguard differently, he did fine. I'm sure he died a deck a millionaire. But I don't know if you remember one of the things he said when he was here in 2008.
David Gardner: Remind me.
Robert Brokamp: That he was going to come in a basically a raggedy shirt and his wife was like, you can afford to buy a new shirt [laughs] . Just the type of guy he was.
David Gardner: Well, thank you for that memory. Let's move to your final key moment, the making of Robert Brokamp, the investor.
Robert Brokamp: This isn't one key moment, but really a series of moments. It did start with my dad's business going under and then the tough time we had at the Fool, and of course, the Fool is still survive, but a lot of other so-called dot com's didn't survive. Then soon after that came like the Enron's and WorldCom, the world and all those people losing their jobs and you may remember that your very first installment of this series was with Emily Flippen and she talked about how important it was to her as a moment in her life when her mother lost her job as an attorney for JCPenney's for more than 20 years. So you not only lost her job, but she had company stock, so it was a double whammy. What then all taught me was like the best investment I can make is my human capital, my ability to earn a growing and safe income. Because that's the foundation of everything. You can't invest unless you're earning enough money to pay the bills and have money left over to invest, to save for college, to buy health insurance, to buy life insurance. It has to be strong enough so that if your company goes through layoffs, that you're hopefully one of the people who survive. Or if you're not, you can get a job very quickly. Unemployment is very low right now, but we still heard over the last few years, people at Microsoft and [Meta's] Facebook and Google and Twitter probably thought they just also won the lottery, had great jobs and now they got laid off. Elon Musk buys your company and then half the company is gone. So you have to have a Plan B and part of that, it depends on your situation. But for me, it was education when I was a teacher, I got a masters in teaching. When I became a Fool, I got my certified financial planner designation. I just finished getting my masters and personal financial planning. Hopefully, I will be at the Fool for the rest of my life. But if at some point you all figured out that we could just use AI to rate the robot, you fire me [laughs] . I can get a job somewhere else pretty quickly because I've worked to make sure that my resume is compelling.
David Gardner: Let's hope that day never comes. But if it does, you are well-prepared and you've just taught a great lesson to many listening and I can only imagine yet. You just named some of the world-beating companies, many of which I've invested in. I'm very grateful for, but there was a huge round of layoffs in last six months.
Robert Brokamp: There were fantastically profitable companies, but they still decided to lay people off.
David Gardner: I think some people would really object to that and say, how can you do that when you have so much money sitting in the bank? But then the other side of me thinks, as a business, you need to make sure things work. While it may look like you have a lot today if you don't keep changing and dynamically reacting, AI, etc, to what's happening in the world. That might be a big mistake. I respect them for who they are, those kinds of businesses in some cases I'm a shareholder, but I also know it's very hard. In the end, we're adults engaging in life long learning. There is simply no substitute. You can't fake it till you make it with a resume.
Robert Brokamp: No, you can't.
David Gardner: Maybe George Santos, I don't know.
Robert Brokamp: One of my little rules and I don't always follow it is to try to update my resume once a year. If I haven't added something interesting to it or compelling to it, then I know the last year has not been as productive as I would've liked it to be. The other rule of thumb I tried to have and this is an aspiration because I don't always hit it. But that is, if I'm doing a job, I want to be in the top 10% of people doing that job, and if I don't know what that looks like, you ask everyone around you like, tell me about the people who did this job beforehand, who is the best and what made them the best. If you can do that, then you're definitely developing your human capital. Robert Brokamp has influenced literally millions of people to be better and it's not just financial advisor retirement advice. We just heard some good life advice as well, Robert, in investing in business and in life. Thank you for the foolishness that you continue to bring. So many of us may include it.
Robert Brokamp: It's such an honor to be here, David. Thank you.
David Gardner: Fool on. Well, there you have it. Telling their stories, Volume 6. I think I want to reiterate one thing at close here because if you're an investor and the truth is, we actually are all investors, whether we yet know ourselves by that name or not, so I should say that if you've switched on to that, you recognize that you are an investor. Maybe you were a lawyer clicking some Fool icon on the welcome screen of your AOL service one day. Or maybe you started in seminary and then thought, I want to have a family.
In fact, maybe as you raised your family, you wanted to ensure that whatever bad things may once have happened to you, you will not let that happen to the family you're going to lead. Well, you'll realize that your story will inevitably be shaped by the investing that you do. Stock stories and our stories, they become intertwined. They weave their way through our lives as Robert mentioned, Intuitive Surgical for example. Here's one more key insight. If it isn't also true that the more investing that you do, and the more care you take with it and the better, you do. That story of your own making has a better and better chance of being a story with more and more possibilities all the places you'll go and one I hope, with a very happy ending. Thank you again this week, special guests, Bill Barker and Robert Brokamp. When you're gone, who remembers your name? Who keeps your flame? Who tells your story?
