5 Hard Truths About Investing From 26 Years at Motley Fool | Chris Hill

Chris Hill (0:00)

Investing is as simple or as complicated as you would like to make it. There are plenty of very successful investors who just put money away every two weeks into broad market index funds, but there are people who are interested in finding great companies and looking for market beating returns. It really just comes down to what is your risk tolerance, what is your appetite for this? How much time do you want to spend on this?

Tyler Gardner (0:32)

Hello, friends. This is Tyler Gardner, welcoming you to another episode of Your Money Guide on the Side, where it is my job to simplify what seems complex, add nuance to what seems simple, and learn from and alongside some of the brightest minds in money, finance, and investing. So let's get started and get you one step closer to where you need to be.

Before we get into today's episode, quick personal announcement. I wrote a book. Three years of your questions, finally in one place. It's called Real Wealth, published by Norton, out December 1st. And if you pre-order this month, you're automatically invited to a free live event on May 6th, where I'll answer your most asked investing questions exclusively for pre-order buyers. So go to tylergardner.com, pre-order, click the button that says you did, two minutes, you're in. Now, let's get into today's episode. Today's guest is someone who I've been looking forward to connecting with for a long time. Because before I ever had a podcast, before I ever had a newsletter, before I ever created one video on Instagram or TikTok about personal finance, before any of this, I was listening to this guy in my car every single day. Chris Hill spent nearly 26 years at the Motley Fool, where he created and hosted Motley Fool Money from its very first episode back in 2009, building it into one of the most listened to financial podcasts in the country, airing on over 75 radio stations nationwide and hosting over 3,500 episodes along the way. He co-created five shows about money and investing, interviewed everyone from Malcolm Gladwell to Mark Cuban, and became the narrator of Morgan Housel's The Psychology of Money, as you all know, one of my all-time favorites, which hit number one on Audible's non-fiction list. He is now the creator and host of his own show, Money Unplugged, and he is without question one of the most important voices in financial media over the last two decades. So I'm thrilled to offer you one of my favorite conversations to date with Chris Hill. First of all, thanks so much for spending the time today because I have mentioned this to you before, but I grew up listening to Motley Fool, and I actually say, you know, grew up in a relatively literal way, and you joined Motley Fool in 1997 with no background in finance that I could find, communications degree, theater work in college, and then when the company was genuinely struggling during the 2008 financial crisis, you pitched starting a podcast as a type of lifeline. So did you believe in that moment that this would work, or were you just throwing ideas at the wall during a scary time for the company?

Chris Hill (3:32)

I'm glad you mentioned that it was a scary time because I think it's easy as the great financial crisis gets further and further in the rear view mirror.

It's easy to forget how genuinely scary it was for the US economy, and in particular for financial companies, and the Motley Fool is a financial company. And when you're in the business of providing investment research for people, and not just a bear market hits, but a genuine crisis like this, you start to lose customers. People get scared. We had produced a radio show between 1998 and 2006 And so at the end of 2008, as the market continues its slide and our business continues to suffer, it really was a time of just throwing ideas against the wall. And so my boss at the time said, should we be doing a radio show again? And I said, give me a day to think about it. And I wrote up what ended up being a five-page memo, longer than I meant it to be. But I figured, I'm going to write this and he's going to share it with the other executives at the company. And it basically boiled down to, we should try a podcast before we try a radio show again. We had experience in radio. Podcasting was a relatively new medium. It really was a sense of, we're going to try this for a month and just see. We'll do a weekly podcast for a month. And we launched it in February of 2009 And after about a month, we were encouraged enough to say, all right, let's give it one more month. And after two months, the numbers were going up. And so at that point we thought, all right, this is something that we feel like we're doing a good job of. And we're differentiating ourselves because there were other financial podcasts at the time. The Wall Street Journal was doing some. They were just talking about investing in a different way than we would talk about it around the office at the Motley Fool. And this is one of those things that comes under the umbrella of desperate times call for desperate measures.