Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - Apropos of Something

Episode Date: May 27, 2023

Chris Hill loves coffee, curiosity, and people. To celebrate his run as the host of Motley Fool Money, Mary Long rounded up a few Fools to talk about what they’ve learned from Chris as an investor, colleague, and friend. They discuss: Why it pays dividends to ask good questions Why timing matters in the studio, but not so much in the market The importance of investing in people Companies mentioned: SBUX, V, MA, PYPL, SQ Host: Mary Long Guests: Ron Gross, Steve Broido, Alison Southwick, Bill Mann, Mac Greer, Bill Barker, Jason Moser, Matt Argersinger, Chris Harris, Dan Boyd Producer: Ricky Mulvey Engineer: Rick Engdahl Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Don't you wish you could just hit skip on the worst parts of your life? You know, the same way you can skip an ad? I get it. I'm Siaya and I live in Ice Cove. I've made some questionable decisions that didn't end up the way I planned. And today I'm still figuring it out. Somehow things usually get worse before they get better. Apparently, that's how I roll.

So bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride. Stream a new episode of North of North Tuesdays on CBC Gem. Regardless of whether he's talking to a professional, a CEO, a really green analyst here at The Motley Fool, he does such a good job at making them feel comfortable and at basically being a frame for them to shine. It's a skill, and it's a skill that not everybody can even develop because it requires you to be interested in people and to have that level of presence. I'm Mary Long and that's Bill Mann. This Tuesday is Chris Hill's final show as the host of Motley Fool Money. We are really, really going to miss him. To celebrate his incredible career,

we rounded up some fools to hear what they've learned from Chris. first up motley fool senior analyst ron gross i've learned a lot of great investing and life lessons from chris over the years and i think they boil down to four main themes one stay calm the market may be correcting or a stock might be crashing but if you stay calm you'll be able to analyze the information, you need to make proper decisions. If you've ever listened to Chris on the show, you know he's always cool and calm. Number two, learning to thoroughly process lots of information quickly takes repetition. I see Chris prepping for the show every week, and I realize how many times he's had to process an earnings report or other company news in a short amount

of time, and repetition is the key. Three, you've got to ask the tough questions in order to do thorough research. Just listen to Chris questioning the investors on the show or executing a wonderful interview with an author or a CEO. You've got to ask the tough questions. Finally, do your homework, but remember to have fun. Chris loves to inject some fun into most shows. Just listen to the last segment of each show for a fun news story or a wacky company name change. Chris is looking for anything that can make us and our listeners smile. If you've been a listener on the show, you already know Chris pretty well. This is Matt Greer in programming, who's worked with Chris for more than two decades. The one thing I would say about Chris is the guy you hear, that's Chris

Hill. The guy on air is the same guy off air. And I say that as someone who has known Chris since 1997. Before I started The Motley Fool, I produced a television show and we would book Tom and David Gardner on that show. And I would deal with Chris as part of that. So I've known Chris pre my Motley Fool tenure. I started The Motley Fool in 1998 and Chris was already at The Fool. So I have worked with Chris since 1998. But the one thing I would say is the guy you hear, that's the guy it's the same chris hill on and off air chris has always understood that by listening to the show you are making an investment here's allison southwick chris hill and the work he did on market foolery and motley fool money really represents like the motley fool at its

very best kind clever investing advice and what listeners hopefully pick up on but i certainly got to experience every day that i worked with chris is how high a bar he sets and he sets it so high because he truly cares about his listeners. So not only do I owe Chris a lot for teaching me about investing, but also about the importance of taking the time to craft excellent content for those who are choosing to spend time with you. Respect your audience, their time, and their intelligence. Chris really understands time. Here's Steve Broido, the original engineer on Motley Fool Money. It's something that the audience probably never never is tuned into, but working on the show for so long, on Motley Fool Money with Chris for so

long, we started the show, I believe in 2009. It's a high wire act. We tape on Fridays and there's not much time between the time that taping completes and the show goes out over the air and to the audience in podcast land. So it is an absolute high wire act, and you cannot believe how cool and collected this man looks while he's doing it. It's just like, is this scripted? Where is this coming from? It's just years and years of experience and mastery. I mean, really, it's the definition of mastery. Here's one small example of that impressive timing from Chris Harris, who works on our legal team. I come down to the studio to see him to get some lunch. I came in, he was in the studio, had just finished recording. I was outside the wall

and Matt Greer, the producer said, Hey Chris, that was really good, but we need about 21 more seconds to finish out this episode. And Chris says to me, he's like, all right, I'll be with you in 21 seconds. And then he proceeds to, now I can see he doesn't have a clock. He doesn't have a laptop. He's just at the mic and he does an end of episode summary wrap up that is exactly 21 seconds long. And he finishes it, says to Mac, we good? Mac says, yeah. And he'll takes off his headset and walks out of the studio. We get lunch. In classic Chris fashion, when we told him we were doing the show, he insisted that we provide listeners with investing takeaways. So to make good on our promise? Here's Motley Fool Senior Analyst Jason Moser.

Most listeners probably aren't even really aware of this, but most listeners do know of what we've called the war on cash basket. It is Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and Square. We've talked about this war on cash for a long time, but really this basket of stocks, this collection of stocks that I put together back in 2017, really the inspiration for the War on Cash basket came from just ongoing conversations that Chris and I actually had through the years when we would do market foolery in Motley Fool Money. It essentially revolved around earnings season. Every earnings season, we would go in, we would tape a show, we would talk about MasterCard or Visa or PayPal or Square, for that matter, and how the businesses were performing.

Typically, the businesses were always performing very well. Every show, we would conclude, we would stop taping, the show was done. We'd look at each other and be like, yeah, these businesses are really on fire. Do you own any of MasterCard or Visa or PayPal? We would look at each other and be like, no, I don't own any of it. We started looking at each and we're like, why do we not own these stocks? They are just proven performers that do so well. We sit here and we talk about them all the time, and yet we don't own them. At some point during one of the shows, I said, okay, that's enough. I was like, dude, we need to put these four companies together. This war on cash term had been thrown around in a few earnings calls before,

So, we just decided after one show, sort of spur of the moment, this is the war on cash basket, and it's MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, and Square. And while I've had a lot of fun following along with those companies and keeping people updated on them and whatnot, you know, Chris was really part of the equation there in building that basket from the very get-go. So, going all the way back to July 24th of 2017, which was the inception, that's the date of inception of that basket. I mean, we've been talking about those companies nonstop leading up to that point and since that point. And anytime I see that basket or hear those stocks, I immediately go back to the uncountable number of conversations we had around the table in the studio regarding all

those companies. Here's Mac Greer again with some more investing takeaways he's gained from working with Chris. So, when I think of the genius of Chris Hill, and especially, Mary, when I think about Chris's investing prowess, I think about three areas. I think stocks, for as long as I can remember, Chris has owned Starbucks. In fact, when I first started at The Motley Fool back in the late 90s, people were asking, can Starbucks really get any bigger? What's going to be the next Starbucks? Well, it turned out, the next Starbucks was Starbucks. And Chris knew that. And Starbucks, it's the perfect Chris stock, because Chris like Starbucks, very steady, steady as they go. So, investment number one, stocks. Investment

number two, colleagues. If you work at The Motley Fool, there is a 99.9% chance that Chris knows you. Chris took the time to get to know colleagues. Whether it was a side of desk flyby or grabbing coffee, Chris invested himself in his coworkers. And investment number three. And for the sake of Motley Fool money, Mary, this to me is Chris's greatest investment. The biggest investment our listeners make in us is the investment of their time. And Chris honored that investment. Motley Fool co-founder Tom Gardner, a few years ago, told me this, and it's always kind of stuck to my ribs. And he said, as a host, we need to be more impatient than our listeners. Chris personified this. He never took listeners' time for granted. It's the ultimate act of love and respect for

listeners in honoring that time. Chris keeps a long-term lens, even when deep in the weeds of daily financial news. Here's Bill Mann. I hope that they take from Chris that he has embodied the Motley Fool in that we on Motley Fool Money tend to talk about the things that are happening right now, but it's like he's never really pushed us to come up with an instant deep analysis of the things that had happened four hours before. He has kept current events and things going on at the moment in the context of us being long-term investors and in terms of us being patient. He's never, to my knowledge, asked any guest, okay, what should I do right now? What should I do? How should I be thinking

about this when the reality is that the way he has come and framed questions and framed the conversations is we should be thinking about this and how do we put it into context and so he's he has kept in mind what the core purpose of the motley fool has been and the core purpose of having a podcast like motley fool money and there's a reason that it is excellent and it's because of that cadence and that philosophy that Chris has embodied so well. Chris Hill is a rare breed in financial media, especially when it comes to putting guests in a position to talk about things that they fully understand. Here's senior analyst Bill Barker. One of the things that gives Chris an advantage is he does his own homework

when he's researching before doing an interview. And aside from being a good listener and a participant in a conversation rather than having a set of questions that he has to get to. The research that he does himself allows a conversation about what you actually know rather than what is already set on the agenda. I can think of times that I've been on TV and I've done pre-interviews with somebody who is not doing the actual interview, but is an assistant of some sort, or a producer, and have been asked, can I answer a specific kind of question? And I've said on occasion in the pre-interviews, I don't know anything about that. I can make something up if you want, but I don't really know anything about

that topic. Feeling that that gave them the information without saying, no, I won't talk about it, it was obvious that I shouldn't be talking about it. But that gets lost in translation, and I've been asked on TV specifically questions I told the station, I don't know anything about that. I can make something up if that's what you want, but obviously you don't want that. Not knowing them well enough that they understood that. With Chris, I would do an interview with him, and maybe we've done a little chatting over some coffee beforehand. But if I get to the point of saying, ah, it's not a company I know that well, then you'll say, ah, we'll just move on. We'll do a different thing. So I think that one of the things that people can take away and

that I take away from that is that when you're watching TV in particular, there's a tendency to portray everybody on the TV as an expert on what they're talking about. And that they're there, in particular, because of the degree of certainty that they give opinions, the confidence, rather than what they actually know. And my experience is, I'm more likely to learn from somebody who acknowledges that he or she doesn't really know as much as they're being asked to to answer about chris checks his ego at the door and is the epitome of class here's producer ricky mulvey there's a thing in financial media especially for people who've been at it for a long time where you can get very crystallized in your knowledge and you can um like ego becomes

can completely absorb people and that was never that's never the case for chris he's always trying to make others look good. And it's incredibly rare to meet someone who's had this long of a career in financial media where the sense of class and humility is still completely a part of what they do. I think like there's going to be investing takeaways from this, but the thing I learned most from working with Chris for a little over a year and a half now is just honestly like how to be a gentleman at work because of the way he carried himself, not necessarily what he said. One of Chris's strengths is making people comfortable in the studio and at work. Here's Matt Argersinger.

Doing Motley Fool Money for so many years with Chris, it started to feel less like a production over time. It felt more like a fun conversation with a very smart investor and business thinker, which Chris is. I learned so much, I think if not more, in my conversations with Chris. I think he learned by asking me questions because he always had such a good sense of what listeners wanted to hear and what they cared about. He truly made everyone who listened to the show smarter, happier, and richer. That's not just me spouting off the Motley Fool's purpose or brand message. That is genuinely how I feel. Because I know how much his talent and wisdom impacted listeners, because I've read so many of the

heartfelt messages that listeners have sent in over the years. And those messages have only gotten more heartfelt as time has gone on. And because I think Chris and the shows that he's done have had a greater impact over time on people who have listened to the show for years. And here's Bill Mann again. Chris is the consummate professional. And a lot of people who have never done an interview in a formal setting don't realize that how different it can be from a conversation. You know, there's a very famous moment here at The Motley Fool in which I interviewed

Elon Musk. And a lot of people laugh about it. to me, it was a little bit horrifying because I was a very new interviewer, and I didn't do it right. I tried to set it up almost like it was a movie script, like, I'm going to say this, and then Elon Musk is going to say that, and then we're going to say, ha, ha, ha, and I'll move on to the next question. It turns out someone who has a galaxy brain doesn't stay on the script. he answered literally all nine of my contrived questions in the first answer and I panicked and afterwards I really just spent some time with Chris because I didn't want that to happen again

right like it wasn't it wasn't fair to the guest it wasn't fair to the audience and it wasn't comfortable for me and Chris said no what you need to do is keep the topics in your mind that you want to hit, the islands of safety, and then the rest of the time, you just have to be present for the conversation. And when you think of it that way, and it is what Chris does so well, and regardless of whether he's talking to a professional, a CEO, a really green analyst here at The Motley Fool, he does such a good job at making them feel comfortable and at basically being a frame for them to shine. It's a skill. And it's a skill that not everybody can even develop because it requires you to be interested in people and to have that level of presence

that the conversation, I mean, even if it's not something that you're personally interested in, which I don't know, maybe you've met Chris. He's not interested in a whole lot of things. deep deep dark secret chris has like three things he's interested in no quite seriously he makes people feel comfortable and he brings out the best in them and it comes from decades of experience and having had conversations with with people from so many different walks of life behind the scenes chris sometimes gave more than just investing advice back to bill man the Motley Fool is a very unique place in that, for most of our history, there have not been real boundaries in between what your job is and what other people's jobs are. There's a very

collegiate environment in which things have to get done. We tend to think of Chris now as being the head interviewer or being the head of our podcast. But when we first came in, his job was basically to get media opportunities for other people. It was his capacity to book guests and to interact with people. So he moved to this role, I don't want to say later, but I do want to say that it was definitely not what he came here to do. Maybe he was made for it. Maybe it was his dream, but he went through and was patient and then found the position for which he was built. That's when you really got to see Chris Hill shine. He's been a consummate professional. He's been a great friend. When I first got to the company, my wife was seven

months pregnant and he and his wife had just had their first child. And he just out of nowhere gave me advice. He's like, look, nobody's ever going to tell you this, but the first two weeks after you have a child is miserable and then it gets better. And you're going to feel weird because everyone's going to say, hey, this is a completely joyous time and you're exhausted and it's okay. And I bring that story up quite a bit because it, to me, it was just a guy who recognized that a friend of his could use a little bit of advice. And I did take it, and he was pretty much right. It was about two and a half weeks, so maybe he understated it by a little bit. But, yeah, so he's always just been a fantastically decent human being.

He's one of my best friends at the company. I will miss him very, very much. But in terms of what he's brought to the company, I think it is somewhat close to unmeasurable in how big it has been, at least in part because so much of it happened behind the scenes. Chris works with others as a partner, except in one instance. This is Ricky Mulvey again. I'm going to miss him as a boss he was a great boss um and i'm lucky that i get to call him a mentor and i think one of the reasons that he was a great uh he's a great boss is he didn't he doesn't micromanage he's he's genuinely supportive and he makes he makes you better he he wants you to improve um the only time i saw him say i'm ricky's supervisor was when i was in alexandria virginia and uh i was

getting lunch with some of the fools there when i when i traveled out there and i started talking about to bill man about getting ethiopian food and we were getting more and more excited about getting ethiopian food which i think was like a 20 minute drive away and they had meetings in the afternoon and that was the only time i'd seen chris put his foot down and say i am ricky supervisor we are getting barbecue and that is that but other than that he he never had that sense where it's like, I'm the boss and you're the employee. Working with him is a partnership in the best sense of the word. You know Chris as the host. He's also pretty funny. Here's Chris Harris. We were at an all company event and Chris was talking to the woman in charge of the event

beforehand. And she was saying how she had to come early because there were bags you had to drop in rooms and water bottles and all this sort of like prep stuff like you would for a wedding. Like you had to prep the hotel rooms before all the company got there. And Chris heard this and he goes, wait, did you just say you have a way to go into hotel rooms before people check in? And she said, yeah. And he says, excellent. I will be here early. And so the day before Fulapalooza, like, I don't know, 2008 or whatever, Chris Hill shows up with a life-size cutout of John Cena and a feather boa. And he puts it in our friend Roger Friedman's hotel room in the bathroom and never says a word about it. And, of course, Roger shows up late.

We all go immediately to the whole day of activities. We're drinking afterwards. Roger goes back that night and presumably enters his hotel room to find a life-size cutout of John Cena with a feather boa. up the next day as everybody's leaving chris finds the life-size cutout of john cena sitting outside in the hallway with all the bank of the hotel rooms and puts it in his car and takes it back to the office and proceeds to put it in different conference rooms throughout the office for the better part of the next five years and never once says it's him and never once tells roger what happened and just has this john cena that would randomly pop up and we would all just

pretend it was totally normal and here's one from the man behind the glass dan boyd we saw uh john ham the actor at south by southwest once we were going one of the years they gave us like the platinum pass which meant we could go anywhere and which we availed ourselves of that let me tell you and we were in one of the like i want to say like lounge areas for presenters or something uh and we were we were going around to interview oh what was her name she was a reporter from cnbc um i don't i don't remember but it doesn't matter we saw john ham and and uh chris made a funny joke because John Hamm was in front of us like on the escalator or something

and he remarked how the like this we could smell barbecue and he remarked how it smelled good and Chris said oh that's just my aftershave and got a got a look and a laugh from John Hamm which I think may have been the highlight of his entire life I it would be if it were if I had made that joke so that's that's only what I can surmise

For some final thoughts, we turn to Matt Greer. One more thought before I get too weepy here, Mary. I recently went and saw Bruce Springsteen. I'm a big Bruce Springsteen fan. I've seen him a ton. Big fan. Bruce is 73 years old now, but he's still Bruce. And a friend after the show asked me, so what was it like?

And my response is also really how I feel about all my years working with Chris. Here's what I said about St. Bruce, and here's how I feel about working with Chris. It's a privilege to grow old with people you love, watching them do something they love for people they love. That's how I feel about Chris. Chris, we will miss you very, very dearly. Thanks for all that you've taught this Motley band of fools over the years. We hope you come back to the show, sometimes. As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations

for or against, so don't buy stocks based solely on what you hear. I'm Mary Long. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. Bye.