August 2026 Mailbag: The Scores We Keep

**David Gardner** (0:00)
For the past three weeks, authors in August has handed the microphone to three remarkable thinkers and their books. This week, we hand it back to you. Because what good is a provocative idea if nobody provokes it back? So what happens when a middle school teacher takes T Nguyen's warning about scorekeeping straight into his classroom?
And can you add up to an index fund?
What songs belong on the Rule Breaker Soundtrack? And then near episode end, The Fool Who Originated Our Pet Perk Series returns by audio with a favorite pet perk of his, one I suspect will raise a smile, have more than a few of you nodding along. Authors in August may be ending, but the conversation certainly isn't. Your reactions, your questions, your stories, your mailbag, only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:57)
It's the Rule Breaker Investing podcast with Motley Fool co-founder, David Gardner.

**David Gardner** (1:06)
Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. The month that was, well, it was our ninth annual authors in August. We had three authors, three special podcasts. Let's briefly review where we've been this month. On August 5th, it was T Nguyen and his book, The Score. So our games philosopher, one of my favorite returning guests, T Nguyen joined me to explore what happens when the scores and metrics meant to help us navigate life, start quietly determining what we value. The score, August 5th. Then on August 12th, I welcomed in a 40-year AI pioneer who helped us think about how to live and work alongside increasingly intelligent machines, when to trust them, when to question them, and how to make sure AI exercises our brains rather than making them lazy. It was Vasant Dar and his wonderful book, Thinking with Machines. And then finally last week, August 19th, Dave Ulrich, The Why of Work, one of the world's leading thinkers on organizations and human capability. Join me for a wide-ranging conversation about what makes work worth doing, and what decades spent studying people and workplaces have taught Dave about meaning, about leadership, and bringing out the best in others. You know, looking back now, what strikes me about this ninth authors in August is how much these books ultimately ask of you and me, of us, the reader, because none of them is simply dispensing knowledge to be absorbed. Each, in its own way, challenges us to exercise judgment, to recognize what we truly value, week number one, to decide when technology deserves our trust, week number two, and then last week, think about why we spend our days doing what we do. These are books that hand responsibility back to you and me to the reader, and maybe that's what made this such a rule-breakery authors in August. The future keeps arriving. There are more metrics, more machines, more systems designed to make decisions easier for us, and yet becoming smarter, happier, and richer has never meant outsourcing your judgment. It means developing it, knowing what you value, thinking for yourself, putting your time and talents toward things worth doing. So that's not a bad three-part takeaway from three very different books. My thanks again to those talented authors for spending their time with you and me this August. We have five mailbag items this month before we get started. Just a quick minute about The Fool Community Foundation. This is such a passion project for me and for many other fools. I'm chair of The Fool Community Foundation, and I want to mention something new that I want to put in front of you while classrooms are still getting settled in these few days and weeks. We're building something called the Fredometer. It's a free investing simulator for high schoolers and it does one thing really well. It shows a 16-year-old what their life looks like if they start investing at 18 instead of 28
Most people don't skip investing on purpose, they just never picture themselves as the kind of person who invests. So we're not building the Fredometer alone at the Fool Community Foundation. Teachers around the country are testing it in their classrooms, telling us what doesn't work and helping us fix it. We're taking applications now for the next group of founding teachers. So if you teach, or if you know a teacher who'd be great at this, send them to foolfoundation.org/teachers.
That's foolfoundation.org/teachers.
Thanks.
All right, on to Rule Breaker Mailbag item number one. Hi David, my name is Matt and I'm a middle school English teacher and board game lover living outside of Raleigh, North Carolina. And Matt has to insert, this hurts me just a little bit as a graduate of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, he has to insert, go pack. But anyway, it's Matt's note. I have to honor it. My dad, he goes on, introduced me to The Fool as a pre-teen. The brokerage account he started for me would eventually fund my graduate school education. So I am grateful to you and The Fool for the wise investing values and recommendations. And that's very kind of you to say, Matt. And I know we're both grateful to your dad since he's the one who really made it happen. And that's awesome. Matt goes on, I'm writing because I thoroughly enjoyed your conversation with Tien Nguyen which solidified my own musings on value capture in education. As I started teaching last summer, I quickly discovered the extent to which organizations gravitate toward what is quantifiable and what is observable from afar. I entered the discipline, excited to boost kids, sorely needed grammar, their spelling, their vocabulary skills which seems to be atrophying. Matt writes at an accelerated rate in the age of spell check and AI searches. Yet he goes on, these areas are entirely neglected in our curriculum because our end of your test is multiple choice. Since the school and its teachers are evaluated exclusively on these scores, our administrators have understandably optimized for them. This results in a completely different educational experience than I or previous generations received for better or for worse.