Cyberpunks, Dead Heads, Fools… not all of the best investing ideas come from business books. Today David shares some of the most inspiring quotes he’s collected over the years, often from the most unexpected of sources.
Rule Breaker Investing
Great Quotes, Vol. 1
It's the Rule Breaker Investing Podcast with Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner. And welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. You know about five or six or maybe seven podcasts ago, I opened up the opportunity for you to vote and say, "What we should do the next podcast." And I gave you two options and this week's podcast is the option you didn't vote for. But I knew I'd get to it eventually anyway and I think you'll enjoy it. It's going to be the first of our great quotations, we'll call it Volume 1, my great quotes series. I definitely, perhaps you do to collect quotations from time to time. I tend to enter them into Evernote where I keep a lot of my stuff. And then as a writer, I have occasion to go back and use them in something that I'm writing or in this case podcasting. So yes, I've built up at the age of 49. I've built up a fair number of quotations over the years. That's why this is great quotes Volume 1 because there's a lot of great lines and thoughts to talk about on this podcast. And for each of these, maybe I'll have occasion to mention a few stocks, a few companies that fit with them, the ones that fit with stocks anyway. And let's kick it off. So great quotes, Volume 1, the first one up, is William Gibson, the cyberpunk writer. He's now 67 years old by the way. He's the one who coined the word cyberspace. And in fact, I think that was in his first novel, Neuromancer, written in 1984, a novel that I have not read. But I suspect there are some pretty big William Gibson fans listening to me right now. Probably going to say, Dave, you got to read Neuromancer. Come on now. And you're probably right. But here's the quote that came from, not Neuromancer, but from Gibson himself. He said, the future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed. The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed. That's a great thought. I first came across it because Andy McAfee of MIT Media Lab fame and author of an excellent book called The Second Machine Age, written in the last couple of years. And Andy McAfee came and spoke at the Motley Fool, and that's where I heard him talk about William Gibson's quote first. So McAfee loves this quote because he says it describes our world today. The future is already here in Google's labs in whatever Tesla is cooking up right now. Cancer, some form of cancer was probably just cured today. It's just that you and I don't know it yet. And maybe the scientist, him or herself, doesn't even quite realize it yet. But it's already happening. The things that are happening, some crazy thing is being 3D printed today that is going to change the future. And someone is already aware of that. And somebody might even be the beneficiary already of it. In a very live, innovative, dynamic environment like the year 2015, it's amazing how the future will keep popping up going forward. This is just as true. And the only question is who knows about it and who's for whom is it relevant? Who's who's been reached? There are still lots of people in the world today who haven't used the internet yet. Talk about the future is already here. The internet has been around for 20 years and still a fair number of people worldwide haven't signed on to the internet yet. So they haven't felt the internet yet, but that's an easy example. If we want to talk about people who are behind the curve for whatever reason because of their socioeconomic status, the really repressive government they live under, it's unfortunate to think that people haven't all enjoyed the internet yet. But moving from there and just thinking about all of the amazing innovations that are probably happening as I talk right now, you and I don't know about them yet. But one of the things I like to do, and I mentioned a few companies right there, I like to invest in the companies that are making the future happen right now because they're already aware of it at Google, at Tesla. And so these kinds of companies get threaded through the Rule Breaker Investing Podcast and certainly our Rule Breaker Service and the Supernova Universe where all my stocks reside. And so thanks William Gibson, I like the thought a lot. Number two, and now for something completely different because it's from Jerry Garcia, the now deceased long time grateful dead band leader and Jerry Garcia, these days is sometimes taught in business schools because of how innovative and forward thinking the band was. For example, the band, and I'm not really a fan, I'm embarrassed to admit, I don't know a single lyric from a grateful dead song. And that's an embarrassing thing to admit as a 49 year old. So it's not so much that I'm a dead head, but it is that I have a lot of admiration for what they did because back in the day, 30, 40 years ago, they said, come on, go ahead, bootleg this concert, tape everything we don't care at a time when, of course, it was illegal for every other band anyway, for you to go and tape the concert. So you had your own copy of a live concert, but the Grateful Dead basically had open source figured out, so lots of people bootleg the concerts and shared it around and was part of the reason for the great popularity of, of the band itself. So, so I admire a lot of what they did. And here's the Jerry Garcia quote, you do not merely want to be considered just the best of the best. You want to be considered the only ones who do what you do, I'm going to say that again, you do not merely want to be considered just the best, the best, you want to be considered the only ones who do what you do. What you just heard is an excellent business strategy. And this is one of the things that I look for when I'm picking stocks. I love to find companies as I've sometimes said, if they're a coke, if they're Coca-Cola, I can't figure out who Pepsi is. These are some of my favorite stocks, long-term winners. You're like, okay, Amazon.com, who is, who is the Pepsi to Amazon's coke? And it's really hard to pin down on a single company today and say, I mean, some people might say Walmart. But then Walmart really isn't anything like a cloud computing innovator, and it's really not an online e-commerce business for the most part. Back in the day where there were things that looked a lot like Amazon, like maybe buy.com, looked like, hey, anybody can set up an e-commerce site, buy.com was a fairly successful scaled site. I don't think it ended up working out so well. A lot of people who have competed with Jeff Bezos haven't done so well, but that's a great example. So again, it's when companies aren't just doing the business of their business, it's when they're morphing and enhancing and going directions where literally no one else is doing what they're doing. Jerry Garcia. What are a couple more quick examples? How about TripAdvisor? I mean, TripAdvisor in a lot of ways is like, I guess, other travel sites and there's things like Kayak and then there's Priceline and Expedia. But really what TripAdvisor has nailed, I think, better than anyone are just reviews, I mean, the sheer amount of community generated content on TripAdvisor is unrivaled and it took a really different approach than a lot of the big traditional players like Orbitz and Expedia that were all about the transaction and getting you to book tickets. Really, TripAdvisor started with a community that was reviewing and rating all of these hotels and sites and certainly has made a ton on ad money from the players who do the booking. Kayak, TripAdvisor is looking to participate in some of that as well. Anyway, that's a good example, I hope. Here's one more. IMAX. Who's the Pepsi to IMAX's Coke? I don't know of it, I don't see it. IMAX is very relevant this particular month because the stock, which is a recent recommendation in our Rule Breaker service, the business is going to have a really good month. I don't know about the stock, I hope it does, but the business is going to have a really good month thanks to J.J. Abrams and Disney and ultimately George Lucas because Star Wars, J.J. Abrams himself said, "You have to see my movie at an IMAX theater." It was made for that immersive IMAX experience. I know a lot of us are going to be watching that movie this month, so IMAX is another example. There's the Garcia quote. Quote number three, speaking of Jeff Bezos, let's go with the Jeff Bezos quote. I've got several of them, we'll only share one here for the great quotes volume one podcast. Here it is, quote, "Another thing that we believe is pretty fundamental is that the world is getting increasingly transparent, that information perfection is on the rise. If you believe that, it becomes strategically smart to align yourself with the customer. You think about marketing differently," end quote. I won't reread that one, it was a little bit longer, but the central tenant that I'm pulling out from that is just the world is getting increasingly transparent. This isn't a Jeff Bezos quote from this year, this is a Jeff Bezos quote from about five or six years ago. I'm pretty sure if you go back to Amazon annual reports where he writes his CEO letter, he's done so for a couple of decades, now I'm sure he was saying it well before that. People who get out front and think about where the world's headed and then set themselves up so that they'll succeed, or as is sometimes said, the cliche line skate to where the puck's going to be, not where it is right now. Those are some of our best CEOs, and forget about business. Those are some of our best people worldwide in whatever field we're talking about. Bezos specifically on transparency, recognizing that with a worldwide medium, the internet, that makes it really in some ways harder to have privacy than ever before, but also adds a lot of value back, replacing lost privacy with a lot more convenience, a lot more transparency and truth telling in many contexts, and I think that Amazon is clearly benefited. So he didn't just say more transparency, he said it becomes strategically smart to align yourself with the customer, that's a profound business insight. Before I go to number four, I guess I should mention that affects how I pick stocks as well, because I also, and I've thought for quite a while that the world is, and it's going to be even more and more transparent, just put a high definition camera on a lot of drones and you'll have even more transparency than that, and that's happening too. So I think we have to pick stocks with that in mind, because I think it's observably true and likely to continue indefinitely more and more transparency. So what are some examples of companies? Well, I mean, search engines are really creating and really benefiting from that. I mean, they're creating a lot more awareness, it's easier to find facts, and it's easier to look up and get info. And so I think naturally of Alphabet, which is Google, what Google's called, the ticker symbol, still a G-O-O-G though, they weren't willing to go to the new, I don't know what the ticker would have been, A to Z, Alpha, something like that. But anyway, Google, here's another search engine people don't talk about nearly as much, and that's Yandex, which is a search engine for the Russian language, and for Russia, even though the company is itself located in Scandinavia, because it doesn't want to be domiciled in Russia, which is not the best place to run a capitalistic enterprise. And one more, Taser. Of course, a lot of people know Taser for the stun guns, the non-lethal weaponry that is deployed in lots of police departments worldwide these days, but I'm thinking about police cameras, body cameras, and I'm thinking about the very high likelihood that those continue to become more and more relevant in a world where, sadly, there's been a lot of skepticism, in some cases, rightly so, about our law enforcement. But overall, I'm always the person who thinks that while it's sad that the bad people make the headlines, there are far more good people in law enforcement every day, and really, those body cameras are going to show that off far more than any bad stuff. But so those are companies that are both creating and benefiting from transparency. Quote number four. Quote number four comes from someone who's not famous. In fact, I don't even know this person's real name. I do know, however, I know it's a he. I remember that. I know his screen name, because this is coming from a Motley Fool community board posting that I noted more than 10 years ago. And if you're using the Motley Fool site, it's a free discussion board, so anybody can sign up register. You'll find this on our economy and markets discussion board. It was post 5,894, and you can check the date. I'm too lazy to have done so myself, I admit. It's a busy time these holidays, but it was around 2004 or so. And here it is. It's about, and we'll just title this. It's a one paragraph read here. We're going to call this market as crazy man. The market as crazy man. Here we go. Mark Coos was the name of our community member, and he wrote this, the stock is going to trade whether you look at it or not. And the market is a crazy man. If you haven't already noticed, always has been, always will be knowing that why on earth would you listen to a crazy person five days a week? Your mood is going to swing right along with the market. Your stocks are up. You're going to be happy for the rest of the day. Your stocks are down. In a bad mood the rest of the day, possibly even scared or worried that something's wrong when there's no reason at all. Honestly, life has enough ups and downs of its own already. You actually want more? Besides, he concluded, listening to this crazy person day after day is probably going to tempt you to do crazy things. And I'll let that one speak for itself. Well played, sir. Find our closing quote, and it's an inspirational quote. And that's the way I like to close things. And in fact, for any future great quotes, volume X of our series, I'll try to close with something inspirational each time. This is probably one of my 10 favorite quotes of all time. It comes from Antoine, Saint-Exupery, the author of The Little Prince, the French aristocrat who lost his life as a pilot at war. And as an aristocrat, a war he didn't even need to be fighting in. And while The Little Prince is not one of my favorite books, it's a very whimsical thing. And anybody who has a foolish heart has to admire a whimsy. But this was a great quote from Saint-Exupery. And it goes like this. I think I have it memorized. So I'm just going to take a shot here. If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood. Divide the work, and give orders. Teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. And that quote is inspirational to me because that's, I think, what we're trying to do at the Motley Fool. And I think that's what I'm trying to do with this podcast because I can't make you invest and I can't teach you hands on how to invest. I can't sit by your side as you click your mouse button and buy or sell a stock. But what I can do is I can inspire you. I can give you some instruction. I can do what the Motley Fool has tried to do for 23 years now to educate, to amuse, and to enrich, but ultimately to inspire you to make good decisions, to get invested, to get the money saved in the first place, and to invest. And I think that kind of quote and that leadership is what this world desperately needs. And some of my favorite corporate leaders, people like Howard Schultz at Starbucks, have that ability to tell stories, move the human heart and move the actions of sometimes tens of thousands of people for good. And it's all for me baked up in that great San Diego Prairie line. Thank you for listening to this edition of the Rule Breaker Investing Podcast. I'll be back next week, and next week, I'm going to go with a little bit more inspirational material. After all, it's that end of the year, time of year, holidays, it'll be a shorter podcast, but yes, we're still going to do it. We're not going to be like those other people who take the holidays off and don't give you a new podcast. We're going to have something that I'm looking forward to sharing with you in 10 minutes or so next week. In the meantime, Fool on. As always, people on this program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and the Molly Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. Learn more about Rule Breaker Investing at rbi.fool.com. [music] [BLANK_AUDIO]