Rule Breaker Investing: Gratitude 2025

This week's podcast is an expression of thankfulness for what inspires us, what drives us, and what reminds us why we invest.

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A full transcript is below.

This podcast was recorded on Nov.19, 2025.

David Gardner: What do you have to be grateful for? Pull up a chair and stay awhile. Let's be grateful together this week. Let us reflect on our world at the end of another year. Let us rejoice in the good things that we have. Only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.

Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. A delight to have you join me during what is for me anyway, I bet for you, too, one of the busier months of the year. Thank you for sparing some time to suffer fools gladly. Speaking of thanks, well, that's the theme of this week's podcast. Near the end of another year, I want to think together from a position of gratefulness, gratitude and the power of that. I started this five years ago after having a talk with my son, Gabe. He had just read the book, Thanks, How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier by Robert Emmons. He said the thesis of the book centers on research that determined how just a bit of gratitude every day can increase our baseline level of happiness. Now, maybe you, dear listener, have a practice of gratitude. Maybe you say a prayer each morning or have a meditation. Well, gratitude can take many different forms. For my own part, I often start my day in the shower enumerating 10 things I'm grateful for in that coming day, the people I'll meet, the places I'll go, the things I'm looking forward to. It's a very fine way to start every day with a smile. The great 20th century humanitarian physician, theologian and Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer called gratitude, "the secret to life". In one particular sermon, he summarized his position by stating, and I quote, "The greatest thing is to give thanks for everything. He who has learned this knows what it means to live. He has penetrated the whole mystery of life giving thanks for everything." Well, everything sounds like too long a podcast this week, but I do have eight things queued up to give thanks for. Before I start with the first one, let's just think briefly about the opposite of gratitude and that would be, of course, ingratitude.

For me, it sounds a lot like complaining about everything. I hope you don't have anybody like this in your life. If I ever did, I don't have now, I'm happy to say, but people whose first instinct is to complain. Whenever I have in mind those feverish, selfish, little clods of ailments and grievances, I have to go back, speaking of quotes to another of my favorite quotes previously covered on a great quotes, Rule Breaker Investing podcast, and that would be the George Bernard Shaw quote from Man and Superman on living a great life. Let's do it one more time here, and I quote. "This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, the being a force of nature. Instead of a feverish, selfish, little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community. As long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake, life is no brief candle to me. It is a splendid torch, which I've got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations." Well, thank you, George Bernard Shaw, for that beautiful contrast between feverish clods of ailments and grievances, complaining the world won't devote itself to making you happy and the exact opposite. That is gratefulness, in Schweitzer's words for everything. Gratitude number 1 for my first gratitude. Well, darn it, I do this every year. I want to thank you. Yes, you, whoever you are, wherever you are and you are many places, and you are all different. But I'm speaking to you right now.

You, a Rule Breaker, brother or sister in arms, fellow fools all, a community to which I can say with Bernard Shaw, my life belongs. Thank you for being there. And not just, of course, to my Rule Breaker Investing podcast listeners, although most of all, to you, but I want to thank all Motley Fool members and prospective Motley Fool members everywhere, especially I think of people who are not yet members today, but who are awakened to the beauties of questioning conventional wisdom, which is at the heart of foolishness. Those whom we will be reaching through your help with our Motley Fool Foundation in 2026. For all fools everywhere, for that spirit of challenge, for doing it in a fun way, which has to be the case, by the way, if you're a Motley Fool, it's one thing to be a fool, challenging conventional wisdom, as a fool. But if you're a Motley Fool, you're bringing some humor to it, just like Shakespeare's jesters. To every foolish spirit everywhere, I say, thank you. Especially thank you to my Mailbag correspondence this year. Thank you. If you're somebody who's shared your story, if you've shared your question, if you've written in this year or really any other year, thank you.

This podcast is powered a quarter of the time by you, about one week in every four it's Mailbag, and it's your awesome stories, poems, and questions which power this podcast, and this special thanks to you. By the way, it's Mailbag next week. Our email address is rbi@fool.com. You can tweet us on Twitter X. We are @rbi podcast, the email address again, rbi@fool.com. I would love to hear some reactions to this week's podcast or this month's podcast or whatever is happening in your own financial life that you might want to celebrate or question here near the end of 2025. Let's move on. Gratitude number 2. Gratitude number 2 this year traces along the same lines as the first one I just shared. But it is unique to 2025 because it was just this year of 2025, just a couple of months ago that my final stock market book was published, and I hope you've read it. 2025 was the year that Rule Breaker Investing broke out, rather than just being a set of themed ideas or just being a weekly podcast that I've brought you from one week to the next ever changing. Now Rule Breaker Investing is also this year a book. Chiseled out of stone, unchanging. Readable from page 1 in logical order to page 230. I spent 15 years taking notes for it. I spent 41 years picking stocks for it. I spent six months writing it, and I loved every moment and I hope you'll love it, too. My aim with Rule Breaker Investing the book is to make you smarter, happier, and richer. If you have already read it, thank you. If you've already listened to it, as I read you the whole thing as an audible audio book, thank you. Especially if you've taken the time to leave a review on Amazon, that's the best help you can actually give authors these days. If you haven't yet and are inspired by these words to do so, I would really appreciate you making a point of signing into Amazon, finding my book page, and sharing a few sentences with your reactions. Yes, gratitude number 2 is that I'm thrilled the book is finally out there in the world this fall.

Gratitude to you, my readers, and my real hope, my deepest one, is that it becomes more than just a 2025 book. I hope it becomes a generational companion, read and reread over the years, handed to a daughter, a nephew, a friend starting out, a colleague curious about the market. I want to help people discover, in some cases, rediscover the beauty of true investing, the kind that builds freedom and optimism across decades. I hope my magnum opus keeps doing so for a long time. To my readers, thank you. Gratitude number 3. This one goes out to someone who occasionally listens to my podcast, and I always appreciate it when he does. My dad, he's never been much of a podcast guy, which is perfectly fine because he's always been supportive in all the ways that mattered most. He could not have been more encouraging as Tom and I built the Motley Fool. But long before the Fool, before adulthood, before memory, he began shaping my financial life in ways I couldn't possibly have understood. When I was born, he quietly opened an investment account for me. He funded it over the years. He invested it thoughtfully. When I turned 18, he placed it in my hands. "Here you are", he said, in so many words. "This is for you. You know why it works and how it works." He never said, don't screw up, but that was gently implied. He added quite straightforwardly, that this was pretty much all I'd get from him. Whatever remains at his death would go to his grandkids. Eighty eight years in, happily, I'm here to say that hasn't come to pass yet. Starting that portfolio for me and more importantly, teaching me to invest, that remains one of the greatest gifts I've ever received. He taught me not just what to do, but how to think. He did another thing that great parents do. He let me make my own mistakes. At 18, I chased a penny stock or two, no doubt against his instincts, but he let me learn. That freedom mattered. As I found my own footing leaning into a creative, fun, subversive new way to invest the Rule Breaker approach, which was not his style, but has certainly been his enjoyment, he trusted my instincts, and that trust has stayed with me. Yes, gratitude to my dad, Paul Gardner Junior. I would be remiss not to close gratitude number 3 without gratitude to our mother. She died in 2008 and I don't speak of her as often because, well, she isn't here, and she wasn't a stock picker. She was an artist, a homemaker, a society woman.

As I wrote in my book, she was the family Rule Breaker. If you ever want a glimpse of her spirit, just Google Comforts of the Carlisle. You'll find a lovely story, one that surprised us all that appeared on the front page of the New York Times in October 2008. Gratitude number 3, thanks, dad and thanks, mom. Gratitude number 4 is for great companies because without great companies, there are no great stocks. Every winning investment comes down to the men and women who imagine, build, ship, and serve year after year, decade after decade. Today, as we approach Thanksgiving, 2025, here in the United States, I want to highlight one remarkable example, among many, but here it is, Apple. The Apple that keeps ripening. Apple first IPOed on December 12, 1980. Probably a cold day, I imagine December 12th, 1980. The stock pre-split was at $22 a share. The company offered 4.6 million shares. It raised just about $100 million. That was the largest raise by a technology oriented company since Ford in 1956. Apple ended that day a $1.8 billion business, which sounded big then. It sounds quaint now. One of the lessons of Apple is that it has been with us for our entire lives, most of us. I'm 59. You may be older, you may be far younger, but Apple has been part of your lifetime. Here's a key investing lesson, as well. With truly great companies, you haven't missed it. Not in 1980, not in 1990, not in 2008 and I would say not today either. Apple is just a wonderful reminder that excellence compounds and that we should never assume a great company has run its course. Let me take you briefly through the decades. Through the 1990s from January 1st of 1990 to December 31, 1999, Apple tripled. But all of that gain came in the final nine months of 1999. If you'd owned Apple for 9.5 years, you'd gone sideways and then tripled in one dramatic sprint at the end. The stock market in the 1990s throughout, was roaring, but Apple made you wait. Then came the 2000s, starting in the year 2000 at the modern day equivalent now post split of about $1 a share. Apple finished 2009 around $7.50. A 7.5 bagger in the decade, when the market itself was often pretty miserable.

That's when I finally made Apple an official Motley Fool recommendation. It was another cold day January 18th, 2008. To my surprise, no one at the Motley Fool had picked Apple before then. Thousands of members on our discussion boards were begging us to do it. The iPhone had launched the year before. The stock was at $4.89 when I recommended it. As I said, I felt like we'd missed it. But in hindsight, well, it's actually become a 54 bagger for us and counting. From 2010 through 2019, Apple went from 7.5-$75 this year, so almost exactly a 10 bagger in one decade. Now, this decade, well, Apple began 2020 at 75. It sits around 265 today. That's more than a triple in five years. That's what great companies do. They keep ripening. Here are a few lessons from Apple as we close gratitude number 4. The first one, and I've already said it is, you haven't missed it. Not Apple, not Amazon, not NVIDIA, not Tesla, not any truly great Rule Breaker. The past is the past. All that matters is the future, and the teams inside these companies these days, they don't show up to work every day thinking, my gosh, we're just too big now. There's no more value left to create. They don't think that, and neither should you. Lesson number 2, great founders can be succeeded beautifully. Tim Cook became CEO of this company in 2011. Apple's market cap was around $300 billion. Today, it's four trillion, meaning that Tim Cook has added quite a bit of value to Steve Jobs' start-ups and both were exceptional leaders for different eras. Lesson number 3, even the greatest investors can't see at all, and that's OK because, and I quoted this in my Rule Breaker Investing book. I'm looking at a 2011 Bloomberg headline which read Buffett to extend aversion toward Apple. The article was about how Buffett said he couldn't make predictions about electronics companies the way he could simpler companies like Coca-Cola, so he wasn't buying Apple. Now, check it. Since that article was published 14 years ago, Coke has about doubled. Apple is up more than 20 times. Now, of course, history will show that Buffett eventually reversed his course. At one point, he made Apple Berkshire Hathaway's largest public holding. Now, these days, if you're following headlines, Berkshire's buying up Alphabet stock. You and I are never going to have anything remotely close to the size of those holdings, but there is one thing that we do have as Rule Breakers, Apple, Alphabet and their ilk. We have way lower cost basis. That's gratitude number 4, gratitude for great companies, for the entrepreneurs and engineers and designers and operators who create products we love. They solve problems we didn't know we had. They reward those of us who have the optimism to partner with them as shareholders. Great companies make great stocks possible, and Apple, as just one Rule Breaker example, remains among the greats.

On to Gratitude Number 5. This is one I shared years ago, and I'm going to run it back up the flagpole because it's an old favorite. I'm going to express gratitude right now for the power of a candle, the power of candles. Thomas Jefferson's great line about the power of ideas is really what I'm talking about here, and I quote, "He who receives an idea from me receives instruction himself without lessening mine, as he who lights his taper at mine receives light without darkening me." Taper, of course, being Jefferson's word for a candle. When you light someone else's candle, you are brightening theirs without dimming your own. I've always loved that line because it is so true. Gratitude Number 5 is thanking you for your great idea and your welcome for any good idea I've given you. We're talking here about the power of ideas. On this podcast every week, as the months and years go by, we're lighting each other's candles, and no one is diminished as I share a great idea with you or you share a great idea with me. There's incredible power in sharing. One of my favorite aphorisms. I'm reminded of this every few years. I never keep it top of mind, but isn't this a great line? Here it is. A burden shared is halved, a joy shared is doubled. At the heart of this podcast every week, every month, every year now for 11 years and counting is that I light you and you light me back. In a lot of ways, it's actually the story of the Motley Fools business. We come up with what we hope will be a good stock market recommendation. We light your candle. You light ours back by paying us for it. Then as that stock does well, good news, enough of them do do pretty well. Some spectacularly well enough. We all win together. But how many times did somebody bring me a great stock that I got to share with others? I've got new ideas about stocks, and trends, and technologies from my podcast listeners, from fellow Fools at events, and of course, our Motley Fool Rule Breakers service, in particular, I've always had great teammates. I'm not on the team anymore, but I think about a stock like Shopify, which came picked by Karl Thiel, or Chipotle, which came picked by Rick Munarriz, or Salesforce, which came picked by Tim Beyers. These are my teammates and these were some of the stocks they brought me, and all of these stocks are up dozens of times in value for our members as we all light each other's candles. He who receives an idea from me receives instruction himself without lessening mine, as he who lights his taper at mine receives light without darkening me.

Thomas Jefferson, Gratitude Number 5, gratitude to all those who share. Gratitude Number 6 goes out to the Fool Community Foundation and to all of you who support its work. Every gift, every note of encouragement, and every hour volunteered helps fuel a mission that I believe in deeply, helping others take their next step toward financial freedom. We talk a lot about investing on this podcast, but the foundation reminds me every day that investing isn't just what we do with our money. It's what we do with our lives and whom we choose to lift along the way. I want to call out the leadership of our Executive Director, George Khalaf, whose steady, generous vision has shaped our organization from the inside out. George has built a team that is talented, thoughtful, fully aligned with our mission, whether they're advancing our ImpactFool Fund or evolving the Freedometer, you can go to foolfoundation.org to see what I mean by these terms and our programs. These things are all there to better serve families across the country. I'm grateful for our team's creativity, for their persistence, and the way they turn hope into action every day. Speaking of George, he and I have a Rule Breaker investing Weekend Extra that's coming your way this Saturday morning. We've got an extra podcast this week for those interested. George and I are going to be joined by Gooding. Now, Gooding is the Nashville musician who uses rock 'n roll as a trojan horse to teach financial literacy. Gooding tours schools across America, guitar in hand, teaching kids about money, debt, credit, and the power of starting early. It's going to be an inspiring conversation. It's a joyful one, a reminder of why this work matters. I hope you'll give it a listen. Gratitude Number 6, the Fool Community Foundation, and those of you, thank you, who support us, foolfoundation.org. Well, if that was Number 6, that means we have two left. Let's move on to Gratitude Number 7. This one goes out to the people who unite.

At this moment in our country, it can sometimes feel, especially if you spend time watching the news or scrolling social media, as if we're being split into two camps. There's the good guys on your side, and then the bad guys on the other side. That story line gets clicks, it gets ratings, and it gets attention, but it doesn't come close to describing the country that I know. Because the truth is most of us are somewhere near the middle. Most of us are centrists, thoughtful, curious, generous people who don't live at the extremes. While the extremes can be loud, they're not actually that large. The great, quiet majority of Americans are not shouting, they're not posturing, and they aren't trying to provoke or divide. They're simply living their lives, helping their families, supporting their communities, treating the people around them with decency. I'm going to call them the unifiers. Gratitude Number 7 is to the unifiers because they rarely get the spotlight. I want to shine one right here. I'm grateful for the people who instinctively look for common ground, the ones who lower the temperature instead of raising it. The ones who listen first, the ones who assume goodwill. These are the bridge builders and every healthy society depends on them. In a season where it's easy to get swept into cynicism, they remind us that unity isn't naive. It's actually necessary, and it's still happening everywhere you look if you just look in the right places. That leads to a favorite quote of mine. I had to look up who it came from. It's Joseph Fort Newton. But here's the line. "People are lonely because they build walls instead of bridges."

Again, today, I want to thank the people who build bridges not walls. I'd love to offer five quick, intentional ways that you, my fellow Foolish listener, can build a bridge this week. Try any one of them. Yes, you earn yourself a gold jester cap if you can accomplish all five. Here we go. Number 1, send a spontaneous message. Text someone that you haven't spoken to in a while just to check in. No agenda, just, hey, thinking of you. Number 2, turn a transaction into a conversation. You're at the coffee shop, you're at the grocery store, go beyond thanks, offer a genuine compliment and ask a question. Learn something about the person serving you. Number 3, extend an unexpected invite. Let's say maybe it's a lunch or a coffee or maybe a short walk with someone you wouldn't normally think to spend time with. Number 4, give a small, unsolicited gift. Might be a handwritten note or a book recommendation. An article that made you think of them. Small gestures go a long way, which leads us to the fifth and final suggestion for your week ahead, and that would be reconnect in person. If you work remotely, maybe pop into the office one day. If you always text, maybe make a phone call. If you rely on email, hey, try Zoom. Small bridges, each of these, but built intentionally, these are what changed the world more in my experience than any headline ever will. Gratitude Number 7 to the unifiers, Fool, onto you. Finally, Gratitude Number 8. Now, I don't do this every year, but I certainly will when the S&P 500 is up again this year. Even in a year where so many market pundits at the start of 2025 were saying, it would be a down year this year. Well, as of now, it hasn't been.

In fact, as we record, just past market close on Tuesday, November 18th this week, the S&P 500 for 2025 is up exactly 12.00% for the year. That's ahead of historical averages, so, yeah, I want to thank the stock market. I hope you do too. That we even can invest is worthy of our gratitude. For many of us, hearing me right now, we were born into a society that we are in danger of taking sometimes too much for granted. It's hard to appreciate all the things that have privileged us that we've inherited, in some cases or just naturally been surrounded by or fallen into through serendipity. One of those things is that we have currency that lets us store up value. My good friend Wikipedia reminds us that originally currency was a form of receipt. Representing grain stored in temple, granaries, in Sumer, in ancient Mesopotamia, and in ancient Egypt. They eventually realized that coinage would be easier than grain. Anyway, so thank you currency and thank you banks which enable us, most of us, though not everyone in the world today, most of us, to protect our savings, guard it. Know that it will be there for us from one day to the next. Thank you, banks. Then actually through the stock market, we can translate those savings into part ownership of companies whose products and services and work in this world we admire, companies you can take pride in, that you can actually become a part owner of through the small miracle of the stock market that we so often, too often take for granted. That's pretty great. Even better because it gets even better if you've invested it well and you give time. You let time happen. Those good stocks grow in value over time, which is great news for you and me, and we're doing very little. When you think about it, I've done very little to power the stocks that have powered my life and the lives of many who followed the Motley Fool over the last three decades, ad we're just still getting started at Fool HQ, so I hope it's true over the next three decades too. I've done very little to actually help great companies like Apple, or Intuitive Surgical, or Mercado Libre, 50 plus baggers, all of them, for me and our members, they have done so very much to empower many others toward financial freedom. Gratitude Number 8, thank you, market.

That you were even there. But this Gratitude Number 8 is not just for the stock market, which I've just spoken to, it's also for why we invest. That's another thing I'm extremely grateful for not just the market itself, but why we invest. In closing, I want to share with you a brief essay, which I've turned into an audio essay that recurs only once a year on this podcast this week, as well as a poem that was inspired by it to close this way, once again, my annual gratitude podcast. This is an essay I first wrote in Motley Fool Stock Advisor in 2010. Shortly after it came out on our discussion boards at fool.com, one of our members who went under the screen name Captain Haiku, which I later understood to be two young women who shared that account as sisters composed a brief poem in response. I'm first going to share my audio essay and then their poem to close. Here we go. Gratitude Number 8, closing it out with my annual audio essay, Why We Invest. My favorite episode of my favorite miniseries, Band of Brothers is entitled Why We Fight. Without wishing to spoil the story for those who haven't yet seen it, I won't give away the answer to the question, but the episode is a beautiful, sad, and gripping piece of Hollywood poetry. The phrase Why We Fight has since stuck with me, and it's morphed into my own phrase, Why We Invest. Let's peel every layer of the onion away at the start. At the root of the fruit is this simple reality. We work hard in this world to build up savings. That savings we call capital. Our capital represents the sum total of our lives efforts expressed monetarily above and beyond what we've spent. When we invest, we're doing something very wonderful and very difficult. We're forfeiting the enjoyment of the use of this capital in the near term. All our instincts and temptations, many of our peers, perhaps even a spouse, urge us sometimes directly or subtly by association against this. Spend it now, reads or sings or shouts any one of thousands of messages confronting the typical adult every day. But investors take at least some of their capital and do the exact opposite. We forego the instant gratification.

That on its own is admirable, but we go one further. We crazy investors, forfeit the enjoyable, immediate use of our capital for no certain reward. As stock market investors, in particular, we invest willingly knowing that our unspent and unenjoyed capital may actually at least partly disappear. Now, if there's a better reason for calling ourselves Fools, I don't know that the world will ever find it. In particular, practicing my own unique rule breaking style of investing, seeking to maximize our returns, we flat out know that we will lose money on many occasions. When you throw in academic studies that say investing in individual stocks isn't worthwhile because you can't reliably beat the indices, well, now you can see why do it yourself investing is a niche. It's a niche we've been helping to grow, but it's a niche. Here's why we invest, for our children and grandchildren, because our parents and grandparents did and made our lives so much better, because every dollar we invest helps support the companies and businesses we admire and buy from, because we love and celebrate ownership and believe this world will be far stronger for more owners, not more renters, because the academics are wrong. Because with Arthur O'Shaughnessy and his Ode, we are the music makers, and we're the dreamer of dreams, and investing is our instrument and making dreams come true is even more than Disney. I would say it's a very real Motley Fool end and 100 other reasons besides, these are all in part or in whole why we invest, so keep at it, dear Fool. Now, before I close out with Captain Haiku's response, I do want to remind you once again, next week is your Rule Breaker Investing Mailbag, so give me a gift. Will you drop me a thought, a story, a question, a poem of your own? All are welcome. We'll record next week's Mailbag on Monday, so please get me a note now or over the weekend. Our email address is rbi@fool.com.

Now to close, Captain Haiku's response, scribed by two Foolish sisters in a short sequence of Haikus that speak so well to why we invest. And I quote, "Sorry, can't truncate. Each word has import and heart. Not selfish, we build. Many years gone by, hard work, hard times, good times too. Haiku needs little. Why do we invest? So that our hard work endures beyond our short years, so that our children start their journeys on a hill and see the mountain. We build battlements that endure, shelter others from the worst of storms. We launch sturdy ships. We will not see the far shore, but have no regrets. We are a small part of all we set in motion, and thus, we invest."

David Gardner has positions in Apple, Intuitive Surgical, and Tesla. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Apple, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Intuitive Surgical, Nvidia, Salesforce, Shopify, Tesla, and Zoom Communications. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: short December 2025 $45 calls on Chipotle Mexican Grill. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.