In this Rule Breaker Investing podcast, Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner explores the four types of capital, speaks to the importance of embracing good ol' "R"eality, brings back an honest-to-goodness pet peeve, and unravels a spool of cool words that rhyme with "Fool." Grab your lemonade, find a comfy spot in the shade, and join us under the summer sun!

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A full transcript is below.

This podcast was recorded on July 16, 2025.

David Gardner: Summer days have a way of making us slow down, reflect, and muse over the little things in life. I'm in the mood for heading out where my Whimsy takes me this week, as the novelist Dorothy Sayers might put it. It's a sampler, not of five stocks like the ones reviewed last week. In my review of Palooza 2025 episode, not of five stocks, but of five thoughts. Grab your lemonade, find a comfy spot in the shade, and join me as we explore five idle thoughts of a summer's day Volume 2, only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.

Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. Happy Summer. I realize that only applies to, I don't know, about half the world, those of us in the northern hemisphere. It is the depth of winter in various places for our southern foolish friends. But indulge me, if you will, wherever you are, with some idle thoughts of a summer's day. This is Volume 2, which means I did this once before. Last year, this same week. I think I was in the same whimsical mood, and so here I find myself again with you. Thanks for joining me this week for five idle thoughts. Before we get started, I want to mention next week, I'm excited to welcome back a past guest on this show, Sem Verbeek. October 12, 2022, join me for an episode we called To Fools, professional tennis player Sem Verbeek. Well, Sem did something quite remarkable earlier this month. With his mixed Doubles partner, he won Wimbledon. Sem, a fellow fool, a supporter of Or Motley Fool Foundation, an investor all the way through. You can hear his story three years ago in October as an investor and a professional tennis player. But that same man has now become a Wimbledon champion. He'll be joining you and me next week to share some of his experiences around that Wimbledon championship, some updates on his investing, and probably a little bit of life overall, too.

If you are a tennis fan or if you have tennis players or fans in your life, I think you're going to love next week's podcast, and before I lead off with thought Number 1, as I shared at the start of this year, my 2025 book, Rule Breaker Investing is available for pre order now. After 30 years of stock picking, this is my magnum opus. It's a lifetime of lessons distilled into one definitive guide and each week until the book launches, in just Oh, my gosh, two months from today, the day this podcast comes out. In just two months, I'm sharing a random excerpt. We break open the book to a random page, and I read a few sentences. Let's do it, and I quote. "At the end of his landmark work, Candid, Voltaire offers a timeless reminder. In five words, he tells us that while we can't control what happens in the world at large, we can shape our own circumstances. " And I'll leave you to guess what those five words are probably the best known line from Candid for Voltaire fans. Well, that's this week's Page Breaker preview to pre order my final word on stock picking, shaped by three decades of market crushing success. Just type Rule Breaker investing into amazon.com, Barnes and noble.com, or wherever you shop for fine books, and I'm really pleased and honored. I want to mention this. This is for the first time I'm sharing this that I got a wonderful endorsement for my book from none other than Morgan Housel, the celebrated author of well, a number of books at this point, but Psychology of Money his best known Morgan a longtime Motley Fool collaborator, as well, and Morgan has said about my book Rule Breaker Investing. Few people have helped individual investors understand investing by owning good companies for the long run as much as David Gardner. This book shows how he built a name for himself over the last 30 years, a delight to read, easy to understand and packed with wisdom, and sure enough, a great Morgan Housel quote like that will be on the book Jacket, as well. Thank you for that endorsement, Morgan, fool on friend, and congratulations to you on your coming book, The Art of Spending Money, which also comes out this fall. Five idle Thoughts of a summer's day. Thought Number 1, I'm just going to call it NVIDIA. NVIDIA did something remarkable last week. If you follow me on Twitter X, I'm @DavidGFool. You might have seen me celebrating something, but if not, let me explain a little bit about what happened last week with NVIDIA. First of all, let me mention that Chapter 1 of my book starts with this line, and I'm somebody who cares about opening lines. Call me Ishmael, which is, of course, how Herman Melville started Moby Dick.

First lines of books matter. When I wrote this at the start of Chapter 1, I did so with real intention, and here it is. NVIDIA tells you all you need to know if you will, but listen, And as I penned that line and then wrote a lot of Chapter 1 about our initial recommendation of NVIDIA stock in April of 2005 and how we'd added to it over the years and how some years it went sideways and other times it lost 2/3 of its value, it's a phenomenal story of long term success, and really some of the greatest success you could find in the public markets of the last few generations, that stock alone. For it to be a Motley fool stock advisor recommendation that I made on Tax Day of 2005 is always going to raise a smile. But as we got closer to getting depressed with Rule Breaker Investing I started realizing that I didn't want to make this mistake, And I shared this with my editor at Harriman House publishing, Craig.

I said to Craig, I don't want to pin Chapter 1 and the whole opening of the book on any one stock because Rule Breaker Investing is about having many stocks, and there have been many great stock picks, and also a lot of bad stock picks, too. That's also part of Rule Breaker Investing, losing to win. But I started to say to Craig, and this was earlier this year as we started to fix on the final draft, I started saying, I don't want us to make the mistake of pinning the tail on the NVIDIA Donkey and making the game all how NVIDIA does, And so he and I agreed that we should footnote the very first line of Chapter 1. If you're reading Chapter 1 in a couple of months, you already know the first line. But here's the footnote that comes right after it, and I quote. "NVIDIA has been a generationally great performer, one of the defining stock picks of my career. But it's important that you understand I'm not telling this story to showcase NVIDIA itself. Volatile stock that it is, who knows where it will be in another six months, let alone six years. Time will tell what I'm here to tell is that the habit of letting winners like NVIDIA run high is the only way you'll ever make rule breaking investments in great stocks.

That's the footnote, and all of that is just preface, prelude for what happened last week because for those who may own the stock or follow me on Twitter, you may know that when it tripped over $160 a share last week, that made it a 1,000 bagger For Motley Fool Stock Advisor members. For longtime fans, for people who have watched NVIDIA or watched our services, watch my stock picking over the years, my cost basis in the stock is $0.16 at present prices. Therefore, when NVIDIA trips over 160, it becomes my second 1,000 bagger in full history, the first being Amazon and a really fun coincidence is that my cost basis for both of those stocks is the same number $0.16. Fun to note that as well. I guess my idle thought of a summers day Number 1 is just to celebrate NVIDIA video what it represents for us as investors. If you own the stock, you don't have to have had it since 2005. If you've had it for the last five years or the last couple of years, I think you're a pretty happy F fool, as well, but it's just a beautiful thing to imagine that we as public market shareholders, people who are not insiders, people who are armchair investors, individual investors, you and I I have no special advantage over Wall Street. In fact, probably you and I have some disadvantages, but we should also benefit from our advantages, and one of them is that if you don't NVIDIA in a mutual fund, I assure you that it has been cut down as a holding repeatedly by that mutual fund over the years, because when stocks explode in a good way, they go up, mutual funds have to sell them down in part to keep them at the same relative level to keep them balanced and diversified as funds.

But if you're a fellow fool who likes to buy individual stocks directly, which is what I've done my entire life, there's nobody who's selling off your winners for you as they win. It is almost unimaginable to have a stock go up 100 times in value, let alone 1,000 times in value. But I'm here to tell you it's not unimaginable. It is not just imaginable. It is real, and with NVIDIA having gone up over 170 today, as I record, well, the winners keep winning. But idle thought for a summer's day is that NVIDIA tells you all you need to know. If you will, but listen and thanks for listening to point Number 1. You know, when we first recommended it in April 2005, it was around 19.5, and part of the fun of telling the invidious story in my book is, I never split the stock. Of course, the stock has split a number of times. In fact, if you've owned the stock since April 2005, you now have for every share you had back, you now have 120 shares.

Companies split their stocks. We've talked about that many times before in this podcast, and they keep reducing the price to make it affordable to smaller shareholders, And every time they do, if they cut their price in half, you get twice the number of shares. Well, you now have 120 shares for every one you started with, but I tell the story by ignoring splits overall and comparing that initial cost basis of 19.5 to today where the stock is now over $20,000 a share. Sometimes stock splits hide from people the real benefits of watching numbers pump up over time. People see $0.16 and would assume I was recommending a penny stock, which I never would. I don't favor penny stocks, NVIDIA never was a penny stock. But when you split your stock that many times and it does that well over the years, it starts looking like you were a penny stock investor. That's why it was fun for me to tell the story without splits, And to note today, of course, when the book was printed, the stock was only around $16,000 a share. Last week or two, it's now up over $20,000 a share. Let's move on to idle thought Number 2. Idle thought Number 2 starts with a reminder of a wonderful conversation I had with J Jacob. His last name is spelled J-A-K-U-B and his book, Completing Capitalism, written by J Jacob and his writing partner and business partner Bruno Roche, and in completing capitalism, which if, by the way, you're a conscious capitalism fan, then you're going to really appreciate this book. I highly recommend it to you. The authors posit that we limit capitalism when we tend to think of it only in monetary terms. The authors go on to point out in completing capitalism, there are really four types of capital. But most people, most financial reporting, most of us just think of one of them, the money kind, the financial capital, money, and we tend to reduce things down to money.

In fact, there are some triple bottom line companies that like to score how they do with the environment or other things. But in the end, as the authors point out, often, they're just reducing that back to money as well, and completing capitalism and idle thought Number 2 is reminding you of the four types of capital and then offering a pointer or two around your own life goals. Four types of capital. The first, we've already covered it. It's financial capital, it's money, it's currency. It's what enables us to trade. It's a store of value, etc, financial capital. The second form of capital is human capital. It's an unattractive phrase. It sounds dehumanizing to describe you and me, our fellow employees, humanity writ large as human capital. But really, when you get under the hood, it's how we treat each other. How do we treat people at work? How do we treat our customers, our fellow employees? How well is human capital managed by a capitalistic enterprise Really important to not just how well that enterprise does, but human capital, to me, is all about human flourishing, which is, I think, what I'm dedicating my life to. Human capital is a second form of capital.

The third form of capital the authors highlight is social capital, and they define that as non financial relationships that are about community that affect a community's well being and prosperity, but in ways that can bring sustainable quality of life increases. Not monetary here, sustainable quality of life increases, which in turn, by the way, positively does impact performance. For example, companies that do social capital really well usually do better with their stock and with their financial capital. The authors measure social capital by surveying three primary drivers that exist in any business situation or really any geographic location. Those three are trust, and community cohesion and the capacity for collective action. Like if you tried to get everybody in your neighborhood in your ZIP code to volunteer to pick up trash, with you leading it this coming Saturday morning, how successful would you be in mobilizing your community toward that collective action. How much social capital do you have in that example? That's the third form of capital, and then the fourth form of capital after financial, human and social is natural capital.

That would be the environment. That would be the natural world at large, the resources that we never want to take for granted that are themselves powerful and important capital. Completing Capitalism, again, a book I completely recommend to you if you've not come across it before, and if you want to cheat, you can just listen to my interview an Author in August interview with J Jacob a few years back, Completing Capitalism. But I think I have two personal insights about that. Before I hit them, I just want to give you really good news because the authors say this based on their studies of these four forms of capital, they say, let's say you're a business owner, if you grow any one of those four forms of capital, if you measure it and do better with that. Good news, it pulls up the other three. All four forms of capital here, any one of which help the other three. If you can increase any of them in your personal life, in your business life or in your neighborhood, it helps all the others. You can see logically why that would be the case. The better you treat people, the better they treat your customers, the better your customers are treated, the more they're willing to spend for you. The more you take in, the more social capital you can start building, making yourself more of a community asset in your community and let's hope you're also treating the environment well, as well, and you have the resources to do so. These things all uphold each other, and that is my favorite and most powerful insight from their book. But I had two idle thoughts for you before we move on to Number 3.

Thought A is this, not a bad goal in life for you and for me is to think about all four forms of capital we just covered and to try to create value, to try to provide value to others yourself in all four of them. I think a lot of people tend to just measure their net worth. It's understandable, listening to investing podcasts like this one, where we talk about NVIDIA, that we're thinking about how much money it might make you, what percentage return you could earn, when you might be able to retire, etc., based on a lot of math around a lot of financial capital. But sure enough, once you get there and some of my listeners are already there, I think you start to discover with financial independence that it's not really about that anymore. It's much more about how you treat your family, what you do for your community.

Are you doing well by the environment? One of the things I care about are our oceans. I live part time, one of my houses on the ocean. I stare at it, and I think about microplastics and how we could do a much better job cleaning up our oceans in the next 50 years than we did in the last 50 plasticing them up. An opportunity once you hit a goal in life, a financial capital goal to really start measuring and scoring your life based on those three other forms that are put forth in the book Completing Capitalism. Now you know the four types of capital and how they interrelate. My personal thought B for this one, is the advice I give to my kids, and you might want to give to yours someday, especially if you're an entrepreneur or somebody who's succeeded in the world, you've made money, you've made maybe generational wealth. You're able to pass it on to family members, a great goal, I think, not necessarily for everybody, but it has been for I think sometimes if you're in the second generation or third generation, you might feel some pressure or necessity to try to also be a successful entrepreneur or a great athlete, somebody who matches or exceeds their parent in whatever form of capital their parent did a great job with, in this case, financial capital. But I really think nobody in a second or third generation should feel that need.

At least for my kids, I want them to grow up to become their best version of themselves. I'm never going to expect them to try to replicate what I've done. I'd rather they go on to their own pursuits and one of the ways you can express that, especially if you're the forbear, if you're their ancestor is to start pointing out the other three forms of capital that they could really make their own name in and not feel as if they're just trying to replicate grandfather's success with whatever grandfather or grandmother's business was. I think that focus back on the human capital, or social capital or natural capital can be a great calling card for family members of future generations when somebody's done well with financial capital, which, by the way, if you bought some NVIDIA or some of our other rule breakers you might be or getting near that position today. Idle thought Number 2, Completing Capitalism. That book can be about a lot more than just what you may have thought that book was about.

On to idle thought Number 3. This one's about reality. I bet you've heard about VR. You might have heard about AR. Maybe you've heard about MR? XR, we're going to talk about DR before we're done here. But these are all various forms of reality. Idle thought of a summer's day Number 3 is about reality. Now, virtual reality is a fully computer generated environment that replaces the real world. It's typically experienced through a headset. You might have one yourself, blocks out your surroundings. That's VR. Let's go through the other Rs now. AR, augmented reality, digital images or data overlaid on top of what you're actually seeing. You can think about phone filters or of course, smart glasses that augment, in a sense, real life rather than block it out or replace it. That's AR. Next comes MR. I don't hear this one as often. Maybe you haven't either, but to define our terms, mixed reality is a step beyond augmented reality.

Digital objects not only appear in your view, but they also anchor to or hide behind or bounce off real world surfaces. Virtual and physical elements interact believably. That is MR, mixed reality. Then I heard this one the other day, and I had to look it up to understand what we were talking about XR. If you are dear listener or technologist, somebody steeped in this, you already know what XR is, but for the rest of us, I didn't. But XR is just an umbrella label for any immersive tech. So VR, AR, MR, just simply used when you don't want to pick one of those. You're just blithely in an idle thought of a summer's day kind of a way, referring to all the Rs by saying XR. I did some additional research, just wondering, are there any Rs that I'm missing? I came across DR. I don't think this one is au courant yet. This is more the stuff of academic papers, but DR is diminished reality. Instead of adding visuals, it removes or masks real world elements. Imagine just erasing a distracting sign that's in your augmented reality views. DR is diminished reality. I want to say each of these VR, AR, MR, XR and DR, I'm cheering them on. I'm interested in each of these. But I'm here to say idle thought of a summer's day Number 3. In fact, I'm the biggest fan of all of R. I want you to be a big fan of R, too. The other XRs are of interest, but I personally believe the happiest and most valuable lives will be spent over the next ten or 100 years by the people who master R. Of course, by R, I simply mean reality.

I have a friend who says, you know what? You should be a big fan of Dave, and I'm saying that to you now, dear listener, dear fellow Fool. You know what we should be really big fans of? R, reality because most of the bad things that happen in this world, most of the delusions and mistakes that are made are when we don't actually acknowledge or see reality. I'm not a worrier. In fact, I'm quite the opposite. I spend almost no time worrying about anything, possibly to my detriment. But if I were to worry, I'd have a little bit of worry that so many forms of reality are potentially being overlaid on you, me, our kids, and their kids, too, whether we're talking about virtual augmented, mixed, extended, diminished, the list probably will go on. I think it would be really great to be a master of R. That's my challenge to you this week. That's my idle thought. Be really great. Be increasingly good, at least. Be trying to always get better at R. R always connects us to the truth. Reality is the truth.

Here's a great Mark Twain line to cement that. Do you know this one? Twain said, If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything, which I really appreciate with my increasingly diminishing memory here at the age of 59. Before I move on to Idle thought of a summer's day number four, I'm reminded of a pet peeve of mine. I was doing a little history checking. In fact, it was nine years ago this week that on this podcast I first shared this pet peeve, which now I get to rock because we're talking about truth and reality. I get to bring it back here nine years to the week later. This one comes out in various phrases, this pet peeve. It's always going to make me chuckle a little bit, though. Let's go with the phrase. When someone says to you, I'll be honest with you. Now, there are other variations of this like honestly or frankly. Those aren't quite as good. We could just go with the phrase, I'll be honest with you.

Or now here in 2025, the most common version of this I'm hearing these days, have you heard this? Are you doing this yourself? Someone will say to me, if I'm being honest or if I'm being totally honest with you. Well, my pet peeve, the humor going on here, is, of course, whether it begs the question, are you not always being honest with me? Anytime I hear somebody saying, if I'm being honest, it by definition, to me, calls into question everything else they're ever saying to me. I'm wondering why are you just telling me now that you're being honest with me in this moment? Some of you, my fellow Fools have reported back to me over the nine years that this is one of those pet peeves that stayed with you, too, that you might agree with. Whenever somebody says, if I'm being totally honest, it immediately in a small but funny way. This is mainly for laughs, but there is some truth to it, too. It calls into question their own integrity and everything else that they've been saying. Do they know when they say frankly, or let me be honest, that this need to highlight it for us, that they're being honest with you or me may make you, it makes me anyway quietly ask.

Are they not always being honest with me? In conclusion, frankly, honestly, let me be honest with you. Those are my thoughts. If I'm being honest. On the idle thought of a summer's day Number 4. Now, part of being a summer's day is, these are lighter thoughts. I hope my point about being honest or about being a big fan of R are fairly light, not too intense. I'm going to try to keep this one light, as well. This is a politicized point. I am not making a political point. I don't enjoy talking about politics. I spend very little time thinking about the public sector. I'm a private sector oriented person. That's the person I hope I've become for you over now 11 years into our 11th year of doing this podcast. But I do want to share because this is a topic that's in the headlines every day, we're going tariffs here, I just wanted to talk briefly about trade. Specifically how wonderful and beautiful trade is. When I used earlier the phrase human flourishing, we talk about human capital.

We talk about capitalism. From the dawn of humanity, somebody traded an item or a thought with somebody else who benefited from that thought or item. As Thomas Jefferson once said, likening it to lighting candles, which he would call tapers back in 18th century English, he says, "When his candle is lit, when his taper is lit, it is diminished not by you or I walking with our candle, our taper and touching it to his wick and catching our candle on fire, as well." That's the nature of the human sharing of ideas that you listen to this podcast this week and enable me to share some of my ideas. I am not diminished. In fact, I'm actually raised up that you took the time to listen and or share this podcast this week. Every mailbag, I'm re lifted up by your questions, and I, of course, try to share back your questions and thoughts through mailbags to raise everybody up further. There is an incredibly beautiful Jeffersonian sharing of ideas going, and that's one form of trade. But obviously a much more tangible form is constantly in the headlines these days, where we're hearing about how the United States may not want to trade with you unless you're willing to pay quite a bit more in taxes in order to trade with us. In some ways, I understand the instinct there. I understand that a totally out of balance trade deficit can be challenging for countries that bear that trade deficit. They're not able to sell their goods as ably and volubly as they are buying goods from other countries. I understand with my Econ minor at the undergraduate level some of the aspects of economics, but at a more human level, we all benefit when we get to trade with each other, and raising prices around that diminishes, not helps humanity.

I do regret that as an American, when I travel around, I'm going to be traveling abroad in a little while that we're not viewed as favorably right now. Because of the increasing supposed costs borne by trading and I do think that's very regrettable. I want to mention here with idle thought of a Summers Day Number 4, that I actually presented this basically same thought in this same podcast a year ago. When I shared Five Idle thoughts of a Summers Day in 2024, I was talking about the beauty of trade. I did not know what would happen to it over the succeeding year, which is why I feel a little bit of desire to go back and speak to it briefly because last year I was pointing out that the value of global merchandise exports in 1970 was 0.6 trillion. In recent years, it's been over 20 trillion, which means if we're talking about stocks that rise multiple times in value, we're talking about a 30 plus bagger here over the last half century, the incredible benefit of the interconnectedness of world economies because we're all trading with each other, and we're all getting better goods and better services often when we have the full world to buy from as opposed to just our own little country producing whatever it is. I'm very persuaded that we have all benefited so many ways, materially and psychologically, emotionally, and certainly generationally from brisk trade that has occurred over the last 50 years, and I think we should be doing our best to make that trade as cheap and manageable as possible.

To push it just one further before my final closing idle thought this week, one of the greatest things we can do for world peace is to invest our time, our money, our attention, and indeed our love in other people and other countries, other people from other countries. My life is richer the more people that I get to meet, the more different experiences, foods, places that I get to visit and learn from and benefit from, and I think that's true of you, too. It was Montesquieu, who was the 18th century French judge, man of letters, historian, and political philosopher, that Montesquieu, I don't really remember studying him much in school.

In fact, his full name was actually Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, but most of us just know him as Montesquieu, but I had forgotten some of what he did for freedom and for our nation. I'm going to provide my Montesquieu line about trade in a sec, which is why I'm bringing this in. But let me first mention that, and this is going to the Wikipedia page for Montesquieu. He is the principal source of the theory of separation of powers, which is implemented in many constitutions throughout the world. Montesquieu is the principal source of the theory of separation of powers. He's also known for doing more than any other author to secure the place of the word despotism in the political lexicon. His anonymously published book, The Spirit of Law, 17 48, which was received well in both Great Britain and the American colonies influenced the founding fathers of the United States in drafting the US Constitution, so yeah, that Montesquieu. Here's Montesquieu's line about trade, and I want you to keep this in mind as you see the headlines about trade or the difficulty of trade in the world that we're living in today. Montesquieu wrote two nations that trade with each other become reciprocally dependent. The natural effect of commerce is to lead to peace an extra idle thought of a summer's day.

The last one, this is truly an idle and whimsical thought of a summer's day. It's just about the word fool. I am so glad that we ended up naming our company the Motley Fool for many reasons, but the only one I'm going to highlight here with my final thought this week is that the word fool rhymes with a bunch of other great words and we've used this to our benefit over the years. While we as a company don't have the same physical presence we once had, we once had hundreds of employees in several stories of a building. These days, we've gone more remote, and so we don't see each other as much anymore. Therefore, I don't get to give what we used to call huddle talks.

A huddle would be like our monthly gathering of all our employees, and my brother Tom or I or another Fool would give a talk and so in lieu of being able to give a huddle talk that effectively anymore, I thought, Let me just park it short form here with idle thought number five. It's just the words that fool rhymes with and what we can learn. In some ways, this is to any of our Motley Fool employees who are listening because this is what I would be saying to you about how we should do our company right, what we should do right at the Motley Fool. But I'm speaking mostly to people who are either customers of the Motley Fool or just listeners who aren't employees at all. In some ways, I'm asking you to think about your inner fool here and what can make you awesome when you remind yourself, your inner fool of what words fool rhymes with. The first is cool.

To me, cool is what we need to be. If you're going to go around calling yourself fools and go into business trying to turn a profit by giving people financial advice, you better be likable, approachable. You better have a little bit of fun to you, especially if you're going to put a jester cap on, you better be trying without trying too hard to be cool and let's celebrate the cool rhymes with fool. The second word that rhymes a fool that I love is rule. In a world that lacks financial literacy, that really has given the Motley fool a reason to be. Of course, I love the word rule, because on the one hand, it's what the world needs. The world needs more rules around how to invest. What are the proper approaches to saving and investing money over time? What are the dos and don'ts? Give me the rules. We start with rules when we learn any new game. But the other thing I think about when I think about rule, which rhymes with fool, so I think about breaking the rules. That's, of course, the heart of what this podcast stands for, what my coming book is about. It's about the benefit of looking at the rules the world has used and sometimes has gotten too comfortable with or sometimes those rules are just being practiced years later, and the conditions that made them necessary are now gone. Some people are going through the motions, and so some rules, dear listener, need to be broken. Indeed, the act of breaking rules is what's created most great start ups it certainly led to most of my best stock picks, and I, of course, celebrate the breaking of rules. But as a gamer, I also maybe contradictorily, I also love rules, rules are what make games happen. I love that fool rhymes with rule.

Another word that rhymes with fool that I love is school. We just talked about how the world needs more financial literacy, more education. That's something the Motley Fool Foundation is trying to do. I was touched when the Fool Foundation was mentioned by a few of our listeners, a few of our donors, if you ever want to help us out at the Motley Fool Foundation, we're there for you foolfoundation.org. We were focused on our fellow Americans living paycheck to paycheck, helping them get to that first full dollar save their first invest and all of the complexity sometimes about unraveling debt or sometimes just getting through our own mental blocks to truly become sustainable, financially a goal for all of us. To educate, to amuse, and to enrich was the phrase we had on the first day of our AOL page, August 4, 1994. Yeah, back when AOL was a thing to educate has always been so important. That's why I really love that fool rhymes with school. Just a few more to close. I love that fool rhymes with jewel because I want what you and I are doing to be highly valuable. We're not just going through the motions or having fun putting our gester caps on to make other people laugh. We're trying to create something highly valuable. We're trying to make the fool our inner fool into a jewel to those around us. My fifth of sixth words, the rhymes a fool that I also love is pool. When I think about pool, I think about the community, the community pool, the community of fools. I think about well, it is that time of year in the northern hemisphere.

It's really hot out there, so having a community pool is awfully helpful as swimming pool, but I'm talking about that pooled sense of community where you benefit from my presence, I benefit from your presence, our neighborhood benefits that we're both trying something together. Lots of investment clubs or small communities. I think the Motley Fool and our membership base functions at different points as a community with, going back to an earlier idle thought social capital, cohesion to accomplish things together. I'm always inspired when the Molly Fool and its members have helped each other, have gotten together in small ways, like maybe you just posted a good stock idea to our message boards, and one of our analysts picks up on it, researches it, decides it's great, and it becomes a recommendation some months hence, and everybody benefits from what you shared in our community or something we've done on a grander level like Regulation FD, which was adopted by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and its chairman at the time, Arthur Levitt, right around the year 2000, based on hundreds of write in notes from people who identified themselves as fools. Members of the Motley Fool community brought Regulation FD into existence. That's the one that requires companies not to share information financial information, their results, their perspectives going forward. They cannot just share that with Wall Street with a specialized group of a few people in a room.

Fair full disclosure, companies from that day forward were required to release transparently anything to the entire community, not just to a small group of Wall Street analysts. That was achieved by the fool pool, by a community of you and me acting together and writing in. Fool pool. My last word, my last rhyming with fool word that I love is tool. Because in the end, this podcast needs to be useful. If you're still listening to me 45 minutes or so in, I need to be worthy of that. I'd be the first to say, stop listening if I'm not being useful for you and I would say the exact same thing about all of our podcasts, and forget about our podcasts. How about all of our services, our paid services, our free articles? If we and I'm saying this to every entrepreneur, if you are not being truly useful to your customer base, if you're not being a tool, then get there as quickly as you can. Change up what needs to be done, remove things or add things to your product or your service, fellow entrepreneur, to make sure it's as useful as possible. One of my favorite game designers is Sid Meyer, the great genius behind the Civilization series and some other great games. Computer games pretty much all like Xcom, which I just found myself staying up until 2:00 AM playing the other night, Sid Meyer knows the importance of being useful. One of the articles I once read about Sid Meyer's design philosophy is he constantly asks people Beta testing and play testing his games. Are you still playing? It's deeply important to him that you still be playing. If you're not, he wants you to be honest and explain to him why you're not still playing because he's trying to create something in game terms, useful. He's trying to make a tool that you love that you want to use. I'm so delighted as well that our corporate name, our brand, Fool rhymes as well with tool.

To summarize those six for you as we close, I love the word fool rhymes with cool, rule, school, jewel, pool, and tool. I went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We have a great basketball tradition there, many great coaches. The present one, Hubert Davis has a line about what he's really trying to do in the world for the undergraduate young men that he's coaching, even if they're now somewhat professionalized, I assume this would still be what Hubert says. Hubert says, You know what I'm really here to do is to teach life through basketball to teach life through basketball. I want to close by saying, in some ways, paraphrasing what Hubert's saying, I hope you see that with this podcast with my coming book with what we did this week, in a lot of ways, we at the fool are trying to teach life through investing. Fool on.