Five Idle Thoughts of a Summer’s Day, Vol. 3

In this episode of Motley Fool Rule Breaker Investing, Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner sets aside the markets for a week to let summer take over. He discusses:

• How to get the most out of AI.
• A few tweaks that could improve the world’s biggest sporting event
• A prediction about who may become the world’s most valuable people.
• A dramatic reading of one of David’s favorite short stories.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. When you're ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy.

A full transcript is below.

This podcast was recorded on July 22, 2026.

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 this week for heading out where my whimsy takes me, as the novelist Dorothy Sayers might have put it. It's a sampler, not of five stocks this time, but of five thoughts. To 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 3, only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.

Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. Happy summer to my fellow North Americans, many others around the world. Of course, it is the depth of winter in various other places for our southern hemisphere Foolish friends. But I'm not there. I'm here. In this case, in my house in Washington, DC, where, as I speak, the high today is 89 degrees Fahrenheit. I think the humidity is about 89%, as well. These things all say to me, summer, so indulge me, if you will, wherever you are, with some idle thoughts of a summer's day. This is Volume 3, which means this is now a go-to at the height of summer Rule Breaker Investing podcast tradition. I did this same podcast Volume 2, I think the same week of last year, generally a shorter podcast for us because it is hot. Thanks for joining me this week.

Before we get started, I want to mention we have our first two authors in August, and I want to mention them to you. I've already lightly sprinkled their names and books in, but now I'm making an official author in August. No. 1 is Thi Nguyen, author of the wonderful book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game. I'll be delighted to be joined by what I consider to be the world's foremost philosopher on the subject of games. Operating out of the University of Utah, Thi Nguyen, who is a past multiple-time guest on this podcast, has written a spectacular book. I completely recommend The Score to all humans, and I hope you'll get a chance to read it, maybe even in advance of my interview with him in a couple of weeks.

Our second author in August is Vasant Dhar. An AI pioneer, professor at New York University, somebody who has worked in the field on AI, programming AI, for example, to try to make money inside of seconds for Wall Street hedge funds, but he's done a lot of academic work, as well. He's been there all the way through. Vasant Dhar wrote a wonderful recent book called Thinking with Machines. So, yes, our topic will be AI, and he is an author in August No. 2. There will be a third week where I have an author in August. I have yet to name that person. I'm excited about multiple possibilities, but for anyone new to this podcast, August every year has been dedicated to authors of books that I admire, that I think you'll really enjoy wide range of different topics, sometimes fiction, this time, pretty much all nonfiction for this August. I want to make sure I queue you up, Thi Nguyen, The Score on Aug. 5, and then Vasant Dhar, Thinking with Machines, Aug. 12.

Speaking of the near future, even nearer is next week's mailbag. That's right. It'll be your July 2026 Rule Breaker Investing Mailbag. This time, I think, let's go back to something we did 10 years ago. Let's go back into the future with the possibility for those interested, if you're hearing me right now, I would love possibly to take some mailbag items this month or next as voicemails. That's right, like your human voice. Anybody who's listened to this podcast for any amount of time knows that typically I've just been reading these as letters coming in, but I went back and listened to one of my early mailbags 10 years ago, where I was taking audio files. I think that'd be really fun to do next week or if you like next month. A reminder, our email address at Rule Breaker Investing is rbi@fool.com. You can certainly still submit your questions, thoughts, poems, challenges, whimsical thoughts of your own to this podcast by typing out a text, just like people have always done, rbi@fool.com.

But starting right now, you could also drop us a sound file. Just record off your phone, and attach it to an email, and send it to rbi@fool.com. Definitely include your name and, of course, where you live, where you're calling in from, and maybe we'll do some voicemails on our July 2026 mailbag next week.

Idle thought of a summer’s day No. 1. Let's talk about AI. Have you heard about it? Do you know what it stands for? Artificial intelligence? Are you invested in some companies that might be using AI? Is your own company using AI? If your own organization isn't, are you all of a sudden feeling fomo or behind the curve because you're not using AI? Of course, this topic, ever since a few years ago, ChatGPT surprised us all by giving us legit instant answers to almost any question we could ask, and even when it hallucinated, it was kind of cute doing so, although sometimes you could get in trouble. If you're an academic, you definitely didn't want to cite your AI as a source because you can't fully trust it. I would even say today that's the case, but ever since that halcyon day, a few years ago, AI has been an ongoing topic of discussion, and I thought from my idle thought of a summer's day, I would just share some of the ways that I've used AI in just the last 48 hours. I realize some of you listening to me don't really use AI. You either might not have access or you might not have interest. But I'm somebody who very regularly for multiple years now has been using AI, and I just want to share this might be a TMI moment for me on this podcast, but I'm just going to share with you some of the ways that I've used AI just very recently. It's just to show the range of how you can use AI, and maybe I spark a thought for you.

Maybe via Mailbag next week, you can spark a thought for me. I'd love that. Hyperlocally, wherever you are, especially while traveling, asking your favorite AI tool what might be interesting to you nearby, all of a sudden gives you a tour guide a direction you never had before. I literally did this. I realize this may sound sad or embarrassing. I took a picture of my shirt and trousers and asked what jacket and tie I should wear. Of course, how to pronounce almost any name is another great use of AI, especially for this podcast. I love trying to honor our listeners from around the world by saying your name correctly when you write me from India or Indonesia, and I'm not sure how to pronounce your name. Now I am, I can't say sure, but I can say more confident, and often AI shares with us where the names come from and what the names mean. Now, anytime you're about to meet someone professionally, especially in any kind of important capacity, a quick backgrounder on someone via AI is a great use of it. I make regular use of that. Of course, you could have gone to LinkedIn, looked them up, connected with them as a friend, and tried to piece together who they are. But I found a much quicker study. I use ChatGPT in this case, but I'm sure Claude does just as well, and a lot of the other options out there, but quick backgrounders on people before we meet them really honors them to know something about them. I needed to brainstorm a name for a new project, and ChatGPT came up with a really cute, useful name for a new project I just started.

Am I making a list here? If so, this would be number 6. But one of my favorite ChatGPT channels is simply, well, I call it Tech. It's my tech help tech resources channel. It's become my personal help desk for absolutely everything technology related. In the last few weeks alone, I've diagnosed a Sonos Bug that even a reinstall didn't fix. I've solved a mysterious Amtrak Wi-Fi failure by tracing it to custom DNS settings. I figured out why my Ring Doorbell insisted on playing Jingle Bells in July. I've tracked down control for lighting quirks. I've rescued Safari from reader view. I've converted files, untangled Apple calendar, debated USB cable width, and even talk through fire tables, saunas, ovens, and Wikipedia editing. It's less like asking a search engine a question these days, more like having an endlessly patient engineer sitting beside me. We are living in a world of increasing technology complexity. The Internet of Things has put a chip in everything from our cars to our refrigerator. And whenever anything goes on the blink, or you find an interface has changed, and especially as we age, and you're now trying to keep up with dozens of things, and you have a family, you're trying to keep up with their things, too.

Then there's this new thing that just came in the mail from Amazon, and you're trying to run any kind of tech support or tech understanding. Just taking a picture of it in some circumstances can get you started. But, wow, what an incredible help for me, AI has been for all of the technology in my life. A few more uses come to mind, corporate strategy. Yeah, we do that here at The Motley Fool. We don't just generate ideas. I love to have my own assumptions about what we might do as a corporate team or an overall company. I love to have them challenged, stress-tested by AI. One of the best uses of AI is not to tell you you're great at what you're already doing, which by the way, in my experience, it too often almost painfully does.

AI is often just too willing to praise almost anything I'm thinking or any mistake I'm making, and I'm constantly trying to coach it not to do that, but simply by asking AI to challenge or disagree with your latest greatest idea or intention can be extremely valuable. Just two more quick examples, both in the last 48 hours. As a lifelong video gamer, I have a really bad habit of going halfway through great games. Like, I'll go halfway through the Indiana Jones video game that came out last year or any one of the last eight or 10 Assassin's Creed video games. Then a new one will come out, and I'll lose interest halfway through in that old one, and all of a sudden, shiny, sparkly squirrel, I'll jump to the new one. What that leaves me is a long train behind me of half-finished video games that I start feeling guilty about and wonder, why did I buy the new Assassin's Creed? It's black flag. It's resync. I think I already bought the previous version 10 years ago, and yet I've now bought this new one when I could go back and finish unfinished excellent games of the past. AI is like having a friend who's already finished the game, helping you through, but specifically, if you ask it, avoiding spoilers. It's been incredibly helpful for me to start finishing video games of the past by helping remind me where I was and guiding me without spoilers through forward so I can actually become somebody who finishes games as opposed to just starting new ones constantly.

And one final use as a sports fan, I do want to say, where AI really leaves the old Internet behind because back in the day, Google, it's funny to think of the old days as being the Google days, and obviously, Google is a major player in AI. But back in the day, when we were Googling 15 years ago, we could only really ask things like who won the 1979 World Series of baseball? Having just checked it, in fact, I'm embarrassed to say, that was the year the Pittsburgh Pirates We Our Family Team defeated the Baltimore Orioles four to three. But anyway, that's kind of how things work before AI. But now AI can answer not just questions, but curiosity. Here are some examples you can now ask and get legit, useful, creative and fun answers. Which World Series champion since 1980 was the least dominant during the regular season yet played the best baseball in October? That's a really fun question. You got a pretty good answer these days. Or, Hey, NBA ball, the New York Knicks just finally won another championship, what championship team most resembled the 2026 Knicks emotionally? That's a fun AI question. Or hypotheticals. If baseball had adopted the pitch clock in 1975, instead of 2026 at the major league level, whose Hall of Fame career would have changed the most? I haven't actually plugged that one in, but that's just being hypothetical. For me, I hope that was helpful. I hope it opened some eyes or gave you some new thoughts how one particular fool is regularly using AI across all dimensions of his life. Again, I'd love to hear how I could make better use of it myself.

Our mailbag address is rbi@fool.com. Let's go on to Idle Thought No. 2. Now, the World Cup just finished. It was a delightful experience for Americans. By all accounts, I think a lot of people who visited America, some for the first time, it was a delightful experience for them. I realize this will be an unpopular statement with some as I make it. But for me, I was able to enjoy the World Cup despite it being soccer. I apologize again for the many people I likely just offended, but there's something relating to my own degree of intellectual curiosity or attention that doesn't love watching one game after another. You watch roughly 88 minutes. It’s still tied zero, zero, and then someone scores in stoppage time, and one team wins one to nothing after two hours of observing people largely pass the ball back and forth. I don't want to criticize soccer per se. It is the world's sport, and part of what makes the World Cup great is it brings all the world together to watch the world's sport. But as a Rule Breaker and a Fool, I feel as if, and I don't think I'm the only one out there. I feel as if we can make some suggestions that would improve the World Cup for all of us, or would improve the game of soccer.

The two ideas I'm about to share were simply voiced by others on Twitter, whom I follow, and I appreciate how they put these out. I batted these ideas around even on this podcast in the past and certainly with friends. But Scott Phillips, who oversees Motley Fool Australia, not just a friend of mine, but also somebody I follow on Twitter @TMFScottP, put it quite well just a couple of days ago when he wrote this on Twitter, and I quote, "I'm not a soccer fan, Scott writes, but if the sport wanted to attract more fans, penalizing both diving and descent would go a long way." In answer to Scott's tweet, there was one response from @GordonsGecko, which I'll read as well, very brief. @GordonsGecko simply wrote back, penalizing all the cheap shots would be a start as well.

In the past on this podcast, occasionally, we talk sports and occasionally I put out that I don't think penalty kicks are an adequate way to decide a championship after you've watched a sport for a couple of hours and it's tied and you're going to do this artificial mini game that's totally disconnected from the rest of the game, I don't think it's a great answer. In fact, I think one day it will be fixed, and people of the future will look back at our era and go, wow. That's how they finish soccer games. I truly believe the future of soccer will be better than the present. But I do want to speak to what, for me, almost offends my sensibilities. Again, maybe I'm by myself on this, or maybe you're with me. But watching people that we lionize as heroes, calling them out as great citizens of their nations and great athletes, constantly fall over, fake being injured, complain profusely to the ref, structuring games so that the refs have so much say over what goes on that you're constantly having people whining and hoping they don't get a yellow card for doing so. These are the people that we're calling out to our kids and their behavior as admirable and heroic. I realize they're going through the motions for what the sport has always rewarded and what it has expected. By no means am I sitting in judgment of people who are incredible athletes playing the world sport. I'm not calling their own personal character out when I say this, but Scott Phillips, you're darn right, I agree that if the sport wants to attract more fans, penalizing both taking dives and constantly complaining about what's going on, or with GordonsGecko, penalizing the obvious cheap shots that people are taking.

In American football, lots of use of slow-motion instant replays made where you can clearly see who is cheap shot who, these things would really improve soccer. I would love to see referees much more often identify clear violations often by defenders, tearing down guys with the ball. I will say there was some good refereeing going on. I saw some excellent calls where someone's being kicked clearly in the foot, not the ball in front of them. It's not like the sport is not being well referee generally, but it's the sport itself that I think could be improved. The use of penalizing around these forms of behavior I'm calling at is what I'd love to see. Maybe it's not just for all soccer. From my humble approach here in Washington, DC, not regularly watching the sport, I realize I don't speak with a lot of authority. I'm not maybe trying to change all of soccer with these rules, suggestions, but maybe just for the World Cup. Maybe when the world comes together every four years, and we want to make it a big deal, maybe people are on better behavior because the World Cup has a higher standard of expected comportment of on the field behavior in front of the world in the World Cup than you would merely get in the Premier League or the many other leagues that are well lower than that. Maybe we can leave all of the dissent and diving and complaining and cheap shots. Maybe that can be regular soccer, but maybe future World Cups could be a cut above?

Onto Idle Thought of a summer's day number 3. This one actually first hit me in spring. In fact, I was checking. It was April 10, 2026, when I popped open two different stories, both of which come to me every morning. I use the news daily service, the clipping service 1440 daily. If you've never come across 1440, 1440 Daily, and you're looking for a neutral, fact-based news source that shows up in your inbox for free, every single day except Sundays, generally, and keeps you connected to the world. I don't spend a lot of time. I watch no cable news. I try to spend as little time with the news as possible, and I really appreciate 1440 for what it does for me every day.

On April 10th of this year, this story popped into my 1440 daily. It's entitled America's Baby Bust, and I will quote. "The U.S. fertility rate hit another record low in 2025, falling from 53.8-53.1 births per 1,000 women ages 15-44, according to the CDC. The decline extends in nearly two decades slide and reflects a broader shift toward later childbearing and smaller families. Provisional data shows 3,606,400 total births last year, 3.6 million." Down 1% from 2024, teen fertility dropped 7%-11.7 births per 1,000 females. To many of us, I can imagine that doesn't sound that bad. While the rate for women ages 30-34 actually rose 3%, but since 2007, the overall birth rate has fallen 23%. The news follows a global trend of declining fertility, with most nations now falling short of the roughly 2.1 children per woman needed for stable populations. Final CDC data is due later in 2026. That was the first story I read that morning. It's not news to me. It's probably not news to you in what is often called the developed world, we've discovered, starting with long-standing cultures like the Japanese culture. Japan has not been replacing its own population for years now. It's also been true, and this is something that I think is a good thing overall, of course, not a bad thing. The more educated the more women get on average, the fewer children they have. Again, I think that's for very logical reasons, but all of these are playing into a global trend that has humanity likely peaking in terms of our overall worldwide population peaking in the next couple of decades. According to futurists that I respect, like Kevin Kelly, for example, past guest in this podcast, we may never get back there again. It may slowly decline over the course of time. That's what I read on April 10th.

But then one other thing came into my inbox, and that is my morning Readwise newsletter. Now I want to briefly promote Readwise. This is an unpaid promotion. This comes from a fan. I think I mentioned them once or twice a year. I absolutely love this app. If you're an eBook reader, which is what I am, the minority of the world is, by the way, most of us, as it turns out, really do prefer physical hardback, paperback books. But I'm an eBook reader, and if you are, one of the benefits is you can have all of your highlights. If you highlight your books, you can have them all sent up into the Cloud and gathered for you by Readwise, which will fire you back a newsletter every morning, sending you five past highlighted quotes pulled from your reading. There you are going, oh, I totally forgot. I read that seven years ago. That's such a good quote. As a writer and thinker myself, I love having ideas come back to me that I had previously admired and completely forgotten about. Also with my really poor memory, which isn't just because I'm an older guy these days, I didn't have a good memory in my 20s. With my really poor memory, it's awfully helpful to have tools like Readwise bring me back many of the things that I've admired and can reuse from one day to the next.

In my Readwise, on April 10th, I came across this quote from the book, SQ21 by Cindy Wigglesworth. This is the quote I read that morning. "My husband, Bill and I often discuss how far the United States has come in our lifetime as far as diversity issues are concerned. We both joined Exxon in 1979, when affirmative action was relatively young, and women's liberation conversations were in full swing. Prior to that time, a minority like my husband, Bill, or a woman like me would most likely not have been seen as management potential. Women who worked outside the home after having children were still a bit of a scandal in some circles. Sexist and racist jokes were prevalent. In just our lifetime, we have seen so much change for the better."

As I put those two things together, the declining birth rate and what I think is a very accurate, fair and encouraging quote from Cindy Wigglesworth about her own experience as a woman in the workplace, now dating back several decades ago, I started to realize and appreciate one particular group of people on this Earth that historically have not received much appreciation, whether we're talking about approval, Hall of Fame awards, whether we're talking about their compensation, the list goes on. Yet, as a Rule Breaker, you know that I don't try to live in the past. I try to live in the future. I try to live backwards from the future and think about where we are today. I'm going to make a prediction here. Because putting together my 1440 daily and Cindy Wigglesworth’s quote, I started to sense that the group of people that are maybe the most valuable people on Earth today, and I think will be more greatly valued in the next five decades, are very specifically women running families with three or more kids. By the way, adding a lot back to society.

Think about these women 50 years ago or 500 years ago in so many ways, previously demeaned or discriminated against in my own life. It was considered by adults when I was a kid unusual that a woman would be in the professional workplace in many different workplaces. Of course, that's not true of other whole industries, but often at the white collar level, at the corporate level, many of the stocks that we pick today, these kinds of companies, a generation or two ago, it was highly unusual to see a woman in a senior position. Economically, of course, therefore, they were not being rewarded. But I think what I realized for me on the morning of April 10, 2026, this spring is that working women with three or more kids may well be the most valuable people on the planet Earth today. I do predict there will be more and more economic support for them. There will be more privilege accorded to them.

There will be more honorifics and appreciation rightly given to these special people. I happen to be married to one. I know many others. Some of you are this type of person I'm talking to right now, we're all connected to them. But when you think about where we are right now in history and where we are going forward and what we really need, and you think about the incredible complexity of running families, growing families in increasingly complex technological world with lots of different challenges and possibilities my admiration goes out to working women running families with three or more kids.

By the way, I love a lot of other women and men, too, for many other reasons. But this idle thought of a summer's day number 3 wants to make sure I double underline and celebrate that person. If you're nodding your head along with me, I hope you will, too.

ADVERTISEMENT: Did you know three out of four U.S. homes have toxic chemicals in their tap water, even though contaminated water looks clear, it could put you at risk for devastating health concerns, including fatigue, hormone disruption, cognitive decline, even cancer? Surprisingly, standard fridge and pitcher filters do little to remove most contaminants, and bottled water contains microplastics. What's the solution? Introducing Aqua True, the countertop water purifier that's tested and certified to remove 84 contaminants, including chlorine, lead, forever chemicals, and microplastics. It's patented. Four stage reverse osmosis system goes way beyond ordinary filters for pure healthy water you can trust, no plumbing, no installation. Aqua True has been featured in Business Insider, Popular Science, and named the best countertop water filter by Good Housekeeping. Join 98% of customers who say their drinking water is cleaner, safer and healthier. Go to aquatru.com now for 20% off your purifier. Using this promo code, RBI. AquaTru even comes with a 30 day best tasting water guarantee. That's aquatru.com, AquaTru, spelled without the e on the end, so that's A-Q-U-A-T-R-U.com, and remember to use the promo code RBI aquatru.com.

David Gardner: Idle thought for a Summer's Day number 4. I already talked about authors in August and how much I've gained from reading so many brilliant books by so many smart thinkers in investing in business and in life. One of them is Dave Ulrich who with his wife, Wendy, wrote one of my favorite books about business, it's called The Why of Work, why as in W-H-Y. It really speaks to purpose in the workplace and how the best companies know their purpose, align their employees around that purpose, and clearly demonstrate their purpose. As a conscious catalyst, I would say the greatest companies have a purpose higher than their profits. The irony to this is companies that truly have a higher calling, and we can all think of them. I'm not going to put any names in your head right now, but ask yourself, do I know either a big company, maybe a stock I'm invested in, or do I know a local business? Maybe a local business person. Do I know somebody who truly has a higher calling to their work?

In my experience now, I'm speaking as David Gardner the investor. In my experience, ironically, the most profits often go to the people who aren't going for profit, they're going for purpose. That's one of the secrets of conscious capitalism. In their book, The Why of Work, Dave and Wendy talk about hiring people. An idle thought for a Summer's Day number 4 is about talent identification and purpose management. It's a relatively short thought. Most people, when they're hiring, think you need to find people with the right strengths for the job. We're often looking for very practical things, like if they're out there on the assembly line, we need them to be alert, and by the way, if they're strong, that's helpful, too, because they're helping us manufacture things.

Or, of course, if they're going into the law, it would be awfully good if they could read and write really well if they speak well on their feet, especially if they need to stand in front of jury by the way, integrity would count for a lot in that job, too. I would say all jobs, but that job in particular. We're looking for very functional strengths often when we ask, who should we hire if we put a new job out there? But the Ulrichs say in their book, The Why of Work, the right strengths when you really think about it, and I want you to really think about it, if this point is relevant to you, the right strengths should be customer defined. The Ulrichs ask, and I love this. We'll just keep it rhetorical here. Are you hiring employees, your customers would want you to hire? A number of companies that these consultants and authors I'm referring to, Dave and Wendy, who have consulted with many companies over the course of long distinguished careers, a number of companies they worked with took their own value statements. If they say, what's the mission statement of this company? What's our purpose statement for this company? They actually went out to their customers and shared their mission directly.

One of the key questions they would ask is, dear customer, basically, are these the values that you would like us to have? I would say next level thinking when it comes to talent and purpose is when you start to allow your customers to help you figure out what types of people you should hire, and also what types of value you are espousing to those people that you have hired. One of the great businesses of our time, something that I've come to take for granted virtually every day as yet another package or three of their drops at my front door, talking about Amazon, of course. One of the great businesses of our time was started by somebody who, in his first letter to shareholders in the year 1997, wrote, “Our goal at Amazon is to be Earth's most customer-centric company.” I can imagine some people were even laughing at that because this is a tiny enterprise compared to what it is today. It was Earth's biggest bookseller. I still have the mousepad to prove it from back in those days. That's really how Amazon started, and yet you had the ambition of somebody who said, our goal is to be Earth's most customer-centric company. Now some of us might agree Amazon is that. Some of us might disagree or point to failings or things we don't like about Amazon or Jeff Bezos.

I'm not here to sway you either direction. I'm just here to underline the power of being truly customer-centric. The businesses that I want to invest in as a stock picker, I want to be the most customer-centric in their industry. I often say the most innovative, as well, when you combine innovation and customer centrism, and by the way, that sounds a little bit Amazon, to me, when you combine innovation and customer centrism, you almost can't lose in this world, no matter what industry you're in. But this concept of allowing your customers to help you figure out what types of employees you should hire or what your values should be is to me, next level and a worthy idle thought for a Summer's Day number 4.

On to Idle thought of a Summer's Day number 5. This is going to continue a very small tradition on this podcast where I get to make a dramatic reading. Over the years, I've occasionally spent 10 minutes or so just sharing a funny chapter from a book I love. For example, I definitely I've always loved the comic book Three Men in a Boat by the turn-of-the-last-century author Jerome K. Jerome. His parents, whose surname was Jerome, named their son Jerome. But Three Men In a Boat is an absolute classic. I know I've read a couple of passages from that book. Definitely go back to The Pickwick Papers from Charles Dickens. I've read the chapter about the Blues and the Buffs a political satire makes you think of these so called blues and reds in America today. By the way, you won't ever catch me saying blue state or red state, other than I just said them because that's not how I think about my country, and I have in part, Charles Dickens to thank for my view of that from his wonderful comic novel The Pickwick Papers. I've definitely read the poem Too Many Daves for understandable reasons, that would be Dr. Seuss.

But this short reading of a two-page short story is how I wanted to close our idle thoughts of a Summer's Day. Martin Gardner was born in 1914. He died in 2010. By the way, no relation at all. I wish I were related to him, but nope, he was one of the 20th century's great popularizers of ideas. He was a prolific author. He wrote more than 100 books. They spanned mathematics, science, philosophy, puzzles, literary criticism. He's probably best known for writing for many years, scientific Americans mathematical games column. That was for 25 years, but he inspired generations of mathematicians, scientists, I would even probably say computer programmers, certainly curious readers, by making deep ideas accessible and playful. He always championed curiosity, clear thinking, a lifelong sense of wonder. I'm quite sure many of you know who Martin Gardner is. You might have read his annotated Alice, which I think is his most popular work. Yet, I'm giving that background for those who may never have heard who Martin Gardner is.

Here's how I first came to know Martin Gardner, he wrote the two-page short story Thang, which I'm about to share. With you, I want to mention before I read it. I was first published in 1936. I needed to go back and check this. He was actually a senior at the University of Chicago when this story appeared in their literary magazine. He said later it was his first published work of fiction. He'd originally written the story for a short story writing class taught by Thornton Wilder, who I guess was teaching at U Chicago then, the future Pulitzer winning author of Our Town was maybe the first authority to put his eyes on the story I'm about to share with you now Thang. That's T-H-A-N-G by Martin Gardner.

The Earth had completed another turn about the sun, whirling slowly and silently, as it always whirled. The East had experienced a record-breaking crop of rice and children. Larger stockpiles of weapons were accumulating in certain strategic centers, and the sages of the University of Chicago were uttering words of profound wisdom when Thang reached down and picked up the Earth between his thumb and finger. Thang had been sleeping. When he finally awoke and blinked his six opulent eyes at the blinding light for the light of our stars when viewed in their totality is nothing of dimness. He had become uncomfortably aware of an empty feeling near the pit of his stomach, how long he had been sleeping, even he did not know exactly. But in the mind of Thang, time is a term of no significance. Although the ways of Thang are beyond the ways of men, and the thoughts of Thang are scarcely conceivable by our thoughts, still, stating the matter roughly, and in the language we know, the ways of Thang are this. When Thang is not asleep, Thang hungers.

After blinking his opulent eyes in a specific consecutive order which had long been his habit and stretching forth a long arm to sweep aside the closer sun's, Thang squinted into the deep. The riper planets were near the center and usually could be recognized by surface texture, but frequently Thang had to thump them with his middle finger. It was some time until he found a piece that suited him. He picked it up with his right hand and shook off most of the adhering salty moisture. Other fingers scaled away thin flakes of bluish ice that had caked on opposite sides. Finally, he dried the ball completely by rubbing it on his chest. He bit into it. It was soft and juicy, neither unpleasantly hot nor freezing to the tongue. Thang, who always ate the entire planet, core and all, lay back contentedly chewing slowly and permitting his thoughts to dwell idly on trivial matters when suddenly he felt himself picked up by the back of the neck. He was jerked upward and backward by an arm of tremendous bulk, an arm covered with grayish hair and exuding a foul smell. Then he was lowered. Even more rapidly, he looked down in time to see an enormous mouth, red and gaping and watering around the edges. Then the blackness closed over him with a slurp like a clap of thunder. For there are other gods, then Thang.

Other gods, indeed. Martin Gardner had a wonderful way of reminding us something that I think is very Rule Breakery. He reminds us that our perspective is always smaller than reality. George Saunders, who himself wrote one of my favorite books, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders reminds us, and I'm paraphrasing here, but he said, "Our ego naturally takes a vast unitary wholeness that would be the universe, and for each of us, we select one tiny segment of it. That would be you and me. We tend to see the whole story from that point of view. You and I are clearly located at the exact center of the universe, and everything is happening in our own particular movies", George Saunders would say. Again, Martin Gardner has that wonderful way of reminding us that our perspective is always smaller than reality. One of the reasons I love Rule Breaker Investing, by the way, life, too, is that every so often, we stumble across an idea a company, maybe a person. Or, yes, hear a whimsical two-page short story that suddenly makes the universe feel much bigger than it did just five minutes earlier.

May you find a few of those moments yourself this summer. I hope you will have some idle time to have your own thoughts of a Summer's Day. I hope you'll keep wondering what's just beyond the edge of your imagination. I'd be remiss if I didn't close with stay hungry and stay Foolish. Fool on.

David Gardner has positions in Alphabet, Amazon, and Apple. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, and Apple. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.