You're listening to TIP.

You're listening to TIP.

Welcome to the Investors Podcast. I'm your host, Trey Lockerby.

And we have a real special treat for you guys today. We have on the show with us, David Gardner. Welcome to the show, David.

Thank you, Trey. It's great to be with you. I don't know why it's a real special treat, but let's try to make it special together.

Well, it's a special treat because I wouldn't say I'm intimidated, but it's not often I find someone who is not only a great investor, but a great businessman, and also a great podcaster. So I've really got my work cut up for me today.

Yeah, right. You're actually a professional. I'm just an amateur just trying to make it work for one week to the next with my podcast, which I love doing.

But you know that word amateur, which as you may know, I remember this still for my undergraduate that's the only degree I ever got just an undergrad English degree, but it comes from the Latin for love.

And it's, you know, what do we love doing? And so I really am an amateur when it comes to investing and business and podcasting to.

So I think it's really important to have that amateur mentality and keep it in play your whole life. I have to agree. I think as soon as you slap the expert label on something you're done growing, I think, right?

I love it. Well, you have an approached investing from I would say the traditional path, but you found this niche for yourself, this own style, your own authentic style.

That's worked really well for you and worked for a lot of followers of the Motley fool. I would say the core tenant of it is around this idea of rule breaking companies.

And you seem to be going against consensus as a means of finding potential competitive advantages. So before we get into rule breaking businesses, I'm curious where your contrarian nature comes from.

And if you think contrarianism is a learned skill.

I'm generally somebody who tries to think that almost anything can be a learned skill. So I'm not going to say it's not, but I do think it's more of a viewpoint and angle.

And that's not necessarily a learned thing. It's more something that you either start with or kind of roll into.

You can choose it intentionally, choose to call yourself a fool, for example. But I do think some people are just naturally funny or they're comedians than others. I'm not sure how much comedy is a learned skill.

So this one's probably closer to comedy than not in the sense that I guess I just grew up when everybody took one side, I just could not help but take the other.

And in particular, I think of like what are examples from my youth? Well, I was a huge baseball fan and I was a big Bill James fan and back from the day and I'm talking about the 1980s now.

These days, Bill James and his ideas have been mass adopted. Baseball can be done smarter, better using numbers more effectively.

That was written in a book called Moneyball by Michael Lewis turned into a great movie with Brad Pitt playing the lead.

But you know, it's the heart of it. Bill James came from outside the industry and he challenged the conventional wisdom that baseball people that's with capital B capital P had been operating off of for decades.

...