The key insight I have for listeners this weekend on April Fool's Eve is that the joy of gain and investing is actually infinite times the pain of loss. The worst you can ever do is lose 100% on a stock market

investment. Is the best you can ever do plus 100% higher? Plus 300%? Three times the joy of loss? Higher. Plus 300% three times the joy of loss higher.

I'm Mary Long and that's Motley Fool co-founder and Chief Rule Breaker, David Gardner.

Tomorrow April 1st marks the second anniversary of the Motley Fool Foundation, which is committed

to finding, funding, and building equitable pathways to financial freedom.

To celebrate Dylan Lewis caught up with David for a wide-ranging conversation about a new way

to measure Americans financial health, advice for investors in the midst of an AI hype cycle, and money in college sports.

We're rolling into April Fool's Day. It has historically been a day that we celebrate here at the Motley Fool because we are fools. We pride ourselves on being fools and having some fun.

And I think I wanted to kick off with your take on the virtue of foolishness and why it is so important.

Well, I from our earliest days when we started the fool, Tom and me and our pal Eric, and we signed on to

AOL as paying customers and all of a sudden AOL said, hey you guys have a following.

You want to open up a site on AOL? We're like, great! From our earliest days,

we recognize that the financial world wasn't really

that well set up are friendly to individual investors and so we started looking at

the conventional wisdom of the time things like like load funds, if you remember those.

They probably still exist somewhere,

but the idea that you'd have to pay a sales commission,

let's say a 3.5% up front

to that talented broker who's sold you on buying their overpriced fund, that was the

standard fair of the time. Commissions, $50, $100 a trade, schedules that weren't even published by the Merrill Lynch's of the world because they kind of kept it close to the vest and charged you a different commission because you were an old widow, which you're not, actually I'm increasingly an old widow or type myself.

So it was set up so that they won and we lost.

And as we looked at the financial world at the time,

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