Motley Fool Money - Big Tech Breakups?

Episode Date: June 7, 2019

Wall Street reacts to reports that U.S. regulators are preparing to investigate Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google over potential antitrust concerns. How worried should investors be? Analysts Andy Cross, Ron Gross, and Jason Moser tackle that topic and debate the age-old investing question, value play or value trap? Plus, we revisit Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner’s conversation with best-selling author Dan Pink about the science of perfect timing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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From Fool Global Headquarters, this is Motley Fool Money. It's the Motley Fool Money Radio Show. I'm Chris Hill joining me in studio this week, senior analyst Jason Moser, Andy Cross, and Ron Gross. Good to see you, as always, gentlemen. Hey, Chris. We're going to dip into the Fool mail bag. We've got a great conversation with best-selling author Dan Pink, And as always, we'll give an inside look at the stocks on our radar. At the end of this week, we are all going to be involved in Fool Fest, the annual two-day investing conference put on by the Motley Fool.

So we are recording this week's show earlier than usual. But we do have news that affects some of the biggest and most influential companies in America. On Monday, the House Judiciary Committee launched an antitrust investigation into some of the largest tech companies, including Facebook and Alphabet. This coincides with reports that the U.S. Department of... Justice and the Federal Trade Commission are expanding their oversight of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Alphabet. So Andy Cross, I will start with you.

We've got the Trump administration and House Democrats who normally don't agree on that much. If anything. Both focusing on big tech. Of these four, is there one that you look at and think is more vulnerable than the others? Or one that's maybe in better shape than the others? Well, I think the one that's in better shape, Chris. is Apple. And I think the one that's in a little bit more of a precarious position is Alphabet and Google just because of the search dominance they have and the advertising dominance they

have. And the fact that, I mean, just look at the newspaper industry, Chris. I mean, half its subscribers have vanished over the last five, ten years. And when you think about how we go about finding everything these days, it's all done through search, almost all done through search. Now, I know we're using Amazon more for search when it comes to specific products, but really, we use Google, and that is just so tied to the way that we integrate with so much of what we find information about and for, and that drives their advertising business, and they also have their tie-in with the Android system and the dominance on the phones on the software side. So I just think they're going to be in a little bit of a tricky situation.

Yeah, I definitely agree with the Apple sentiment. I mean, to me, that is the one that kind of stands out here is I'm not exactly sure why they're even included with the other three. I feel like maybe Facebook might be the company. It feels like to me they're going to be the ones they're going to have a lot of explaining to do in the coming years. And I think part of that is just because of the misinformation that just is rampant on their platforms. I mean, when it comes to social, really, the biggest networks win. And I mean, that's why we're a lot of the why Facebook has done so terrifically over the past several years. I mean, I think that between Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and breaking out Messenger, I mean, they've got a lot of ways to win, and they've got a lot of ways to really sow some chaos, particularly during election seasons. And I think that I always kind of, I feel like search is forever. You know, social can be fleeting. Google provides a lot of really valuable services. I'm I'm not sure the same can really be said for Facebook. Ron?

At the risk of agreeing with my colleagues, I do think Alphabet feels like the biggest monopoly of the four. I don't feel, when I think of Apple, I don't feel or think monopoly. Amazon obviously is the category killer. They're the most dominant competitor. But just think of all the other e-commerce sites out there, thousands and hundreds of thousands. Whereas think of all the search providers out there. You got Google for the most part.

Well, I'll say Alphabet also has been the one that's been in the crosshairs around the globe, especially over in Europe the most. Facebook's the smallest of the bunch, from a market cap perspective, the smallest of the bunch, the other ones are north of 700 billion Amazon, bigger than 800 billion now. So that's a small fish of the four, you know, but I think they're 100 percent advertising-driven. The other ones are much more diversified. Yeah, I'll make one political statement at the risk of getting emails. So I think the antitrust laws are there to protect the consumer, obviously.

So if any of these practices are anti-consumer, then I'm cool with breaking them up. It's an election season, and I think there's a lot of talk that sounds anti-capitalist to me, and I am not on board when it comes to that. I think this is a competitive market, a free market, and there are always going to be winners and losers, and I don't think we want to regulate that. We're all old enough to remember 20 years ago when Microsoft was facing off against the federal government. And just from the standpoint of Microsoft, the stock, 2000 through about 2010 or so, was a pretty

lean decade when you look at, and maybe it's just Facebook and Alphabet, but when you look at these companies and what they are facing from the federal government, should we as investors ratchet back our expectations in terms of the returns we should expect over the next five years or so? I would think from a monopoly perspective, from an economic perspective, from an economic perspective, if you control a market, your returns should always theoretically be higher. If you are broken up by act of the government, then you are therefore less competitive, and perhaps your returns would be impacted by that, and you should assume less returns going

forward. I think when you look at companies like Alphabet and the services that they provide, I mean, it'd be one thing if the stuff that they did sucked, but it doesn't. I mean, Google Maps is great. Search is terrific. YouTube is terrific. I mean, they had in ways. All of these things that they do, they do really well. So, I mean, I think that even if you said, okay, we're going to try to stoke more competition, I think most people are going to start migrating towards the better performers, which is, in many cases, Google. So I don't know that really, this does seem like it's more politics than anything else. I mean, at the end of the day, these are companies that

provide services that consumers are using, and they use them because they're good. I think you have to reset your expectations just because they're so large. I mean, they're close to $9 trillion. Each of them is, like I said, before, those big ones, not Facebook as much, but the other ones are so large. And those three are really diversified. I think for the services side, Apple pushing more into services, Amazon is starting to get tied into the advertising business. Now they're the third largest advertiser, digital advertiser out there behind Google and Facebook now. that opens up more competition for them, more concern from the regulatory perspective.

And by the way, from the antitrust perspective, so much of historical concerns about monopolistic practices have been around pricing for consumers. Ron mentioned the consumers and JMO just mentioned about how this helps consumers. These services help consumers. We just see continuing lower and lower costs for consumers, if not free for these solutions. This is really a political concern around them having too much power when it comes to the data and the way they're using that data and how it's all linked in. Apple just announced a revamped MAP service this week at their conference. That's going to compete more and more with Google Map and Ways. So it's how Google uses that data, not so much the pricing of that data.

Just one final word on returns. If any of these companies get split up, your returns will be impacted by whether or not you buy each piece. When AT&T was split up into the baby Bells, you all of a sudden could pick and choose which of these companies you thought had the best opportunities going forward and your returns were impacted based on those decisions. If Instagram gets removed from Facebook, you probably will have the opportunity to own Instagram as a standalone company if you choose. These companies are big enough that they can be proactive if they want to. If Alphabet wants to stave off a serious investigation, if they wanted to, they could spin

off YouTube. They could spin off any number of divisions. Is there any of these four that you look at and the CEO calls you on the phone says, what do you think I should do? Are you advising any of them to spin off any parts of their business? Because Jeff Bezos strikes me as someone who wants to have as little interference as possible and as great as Amazon Web Services has been for that business, it wouldn't shock me at all in the next five years if he just preemptively spun that off.

But I don't think that helps with the antitrust argument because I don't think the antitrust argument surrounds web services and Amazon, the retailer, being embedded together, as much as some of the other reasons. But at least part of it has to do with how big the company is. Yes, for sure. So my advice to all of the CEOs was keep your nose clean. The more scandal like you have with Facebook, the more the political wind is going to be blowing against you.

Just operate fairly, compete fairly, and make sure your lawyer bills are paid up. Yeah, you got to be out in front of all this, too. And don't forget, with the Microsoft issue, Chris, you mentioned, that took 10, 12, 13 years to resolve itself and ultimately ended up with them not having to separate the company into the baby bills. So, I mean, ultimately, I think for these companies, they have to continually to be much more transparent than they have been before and work with the regulators who clearly have their crosshairs now eyed on these companies. So I'm going to venture to say that in the next five years, I don't think any of these

companies are going to be broken up, but I don't think they're going to spin anything off. I did look at this for a second. I thought, okay, if I see that, if I see that, spoke with every CEO, what advice would I give each individual? Because I think they have their own little different things they need to focus on. With Jeff Bezos, just because you run the everything store doesn't mean you literally have to do everything in the world. So, maybe don't make yourself such an easy target. Tim Cook, really, just keep doing what you're doing. I think that your stance on privacy is going to be your legacy, and that's going to be a good one. Zuckerberg, make me trust you. I'm not sure you can do it, but I'm keeping an open mind. And Paige, I mean, you've

got the best search product out there, you know it. Just don't be evil. How do you determine if a beaten down stock is a value play or a value trap? The answer is coming up. So stay right here. You're listening to Motley Full Money. Welcome back to Motley Full Money. Chris Hill here in studio with Jason Moser, Andy Cross, and Ron Gross. Our email address is Radio at Fool.com. Question from Tom in San Francisco, who writes, recently I've gotten interested in Miller Industries, a company that makes towing and recovery equipment. It's been on a bit of a roller coaster so far this year, but it looks like it might be a good value. They do not have any Wall Street analyst coverage. And other than the recent tariffs that have increased

the cost of steel and aluminum, I can't find any reason for the pullback. What are your thoughts on Miller Industries? Good value or value trap? What do you think, Ron? All right, Tom. So lack of analyst coverage and information in general can often lead to a company being undervalued. That's why folks like me and back in a different world, back in my head fund days, would focus on microcap companies. That's why value in investors often fish in the microcap waters. I think the opportunity has lessened over time, because everyone's kind of cut on to the fact that you can do that. And so that arbitrage between price and value has come down a bit. But specific to Miller, it's a nice little

company. $350 million market cap only trades 40,000 shares a day. So it's pretty illiquid, which is another reason it could be undervalued. All the profitability ratios, for the most part, are trending in the right direction. This is not a troubled company, which is sometimes you'll find a trouble company leading to a value trap. This is a nice little company. The one thing I notice is that gross margins have contracted because raw material prices have increased. They've been able to pass along a price increase, but I think investors are probably concerned cause the stock to get hit a bit. All the valuation ratios are pretty good. You're less than six times EBITDA, you're only 1.4 times tangible book value. Again, indications that this may be cheap. So what's going on? Why would that be the case?

So, I looked at other companies that are a resource raw material intensive. Look at Caterpillar, look at Deere, superimpose the stock charts against Millers, and you see the same thing happening. So it looks to me like this is a macro problem based on raw material prices. If you look at a small microcap company like commercial vehicle group, it's almost the identical chart to Miller. So I think we have a macro problem here. You've got to make a macro call to decide whether it's a value investment or a value

trap, but I actually think he may have uncovered a good opportunity. Tom in San Francisco, getting some serious help there from RONG. Jason, Tom points to something that I think we forget from time to time, which is that in the wake of the Great Recession 2008, 2009, there are far fewer analysts on Wall Street, which means there is far less coverage of individual stocks. How should people look to beyond using the Maudley Fool? Of course. As a resource.

How should people think about researching stocks? I mean, I think that's the beauty of today's day and age, the way that we can access information. I mean, everything is at our fingertips. I mean, no longer do you have to pull the old Warren Buffett move of going to the library of the S&P and, you know, sitting down there for hours on end. I mean, you can find pretty much anything you need on any company's investor relations site, for one. So, I mean, if you just name the company and Google, you know, the name of the company in investor relations, that'll take you right to that site.

You can find presentations, links to filings. Of course, you can use Edgar, which is the way to pull up those SEC filings. And you can look at 10Ks and 10 Q's. Eight K's are the press releases typically when companies make announcements. So really, the information is out there. It's all a matter of understanding how to use it. And hopefully that's something we're helping people to do. If there are any questions out there on how to use that information, lob them or away.

I'm sure we'd love to answer them. I love, Chris, I love using the website. I just went to Miller Industries. They have a NASCAR, a picture of a NASCAR car getting towed on their website. I'm wearing their trucks, right? So, like, I definitely want to read the annual report. And if you can get a hold of the shareholder letter from the CEO, from the chairman, that gives you a good feel.

Hopefully it's not too advertising for the company. them or too promotional, but it's actually an honest letter. As you read more and more of those, you get a good feel for the company. But you know what? If it is too promotional and too advertising, that's also a signal as well. That's right. Absolutely. You learn as much what not to look for as what to look for. Real quick, before we get to the stocks on our radar, I mentioned at the top we've got our annual investing event, Fool Fest. Jason Moser, I know you've got at least one breakout session you're leading. A quick preview and maybe a stock out of that breakout session you're doing?

Sure. Yeah, well, the entertainment economy, it's obviously a very big one. And I'm trying to, with this breakout session, whittle it down to something a little bit more understandable because there are a lot of different ways to invest in entertainment. So break it down into ultimately four pillars with video and gaming and advertising. And then the last one being music podcast and events and ultimately come up with 12 stocks. I'll go ahead and give you a hint there. One of them is the trade debt. I think, a pretty amazing opportunity in the advertising world. And let's face it, advertising is a big part of the entertainment economy.

All right. Let's get to the stock's on our radar. Our man behind the glass, Steve Brodo is going to hit you with a question. Ron, Gross, you're up first. What are you looking at this week? I've got RPM International, ticker RPM. They're holding company. They manufacture chemical product lines like paints and protective coatings.

A very stable business. Really great record of growth, both organically and through acquisition. Big international opportunity, I think. Their asbestos litigation is behind them, which is always nice. Increase their dividend for 45 consecutive years. That dividend now stands at 2.6%. Steve, question about RPM International. What tips you off to a company like this?

Well, I started with the dividend yield. Looking for companies that pay dividends at least 2%. 2.5% is even better. And then we go from there. Jason Moser, what do you look at? Sure. Keep an eye on Ameris Bank Corps. Ticker is ABCB.

and I'm sure listeners remember I've spoken about this one before, but remember there is a big acquisition pending of Fidelity Southern that is slated to close during the current quarter. So I'd like to see that go ahead and happen. I think what it will result in is a bigger bank with a bigger asset base and a bigger deposit base. And the nice thing about that deposit base with the acquisition, the Fidelity acquisition gave them access to a cheaper base of deposit. So in this environment where it seems like interest rates are going to start going a little bit first. further back down. It may be a little bit longer until banks can make a little bit more on the profit side with a higher interest rate environment. But low-cost deposit basis help that cause, and that will be something Ameris has.

Steve, question about Ameris Bank Corp? You bet. Jason, do you use your debit card or do you use a credit card? I've always wondered with the banks. I always wonder. That's a really good question. Actually, I try to minimize the use of my debit card so that if there's ever any fraudulent activity with a credit card, you really haven't paid for it. it yet. So the debit card is few and far between. Andy Cross, what are you looking at? Chris, I'm going to be talking about IPOs at the upcoming Fool Fest this week.

So I was going back through some past OIPOs and Duluth Holdings. It's had a tough little run here. The maker of seller, the retailer of casual wear, workwear accessories out of Wisconsin, operates more than 50 stores. It sells most of those fun products via their online direct sales mechanisms. The stocks had a really bad run this year because their earnings and their sales growth has really slowed. So I want to hear what management has to say about what they're doing to reverse the trend. They report earnings next week. DL.L.H. is the symbol? Steve? I think they, I get mail from them. Is the direct mailer business a big one for them? Well, the direct sales to their e-commerce and their traditional, old-fashioned mailer is the biggest part of their business. Yeah. You got a stock you want to add to your watch list, Steve? I think I might go with Duluth. All right, Andy Cross, Jason Moser, Brian Gross. Guys, thanks for being here.

Thanks, Chris. Up next, a conversation with one of our favorites, Dan Pink. Stay right here. This is Motley Fool Money. Put the money down. Welcome back to Motley Full Money. I'm Chris Hill. At this year's Fool Fest Investing Conference, our guests include best-selling author David Epstein.

And in the coming weeks, you will hear those interviews on this show. At last year's Fool Fest, Motley Fool co-founder, David Gardner, interviewed one of our all-time favorites, best-selling author, Dan Pink. Now, if you're not familiar with Dan, He's written extensively about work, motivation, management, and behavioral science. He's the author of six books, including bestsellers like Drive and To Sell as Human, and his TED Talk on Motivation is one of the most watched TED Talks of all time. They covered a lot of ground in this conversation. Dan and David talked about the changing nature of work, artificial intelligence,

and the value of right-brained thinking. They also talk about when we should take breaks, and, of course, invest. David Gardner kicked things off by asking Dan Pink about his latest book, When, The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. So let's begin right away with your new book, Dan, When. I've seen you speak about it a couple of times. It's already influenced me. I want you know I had an age-appropriate medical procedure that you're supposed to have after the age of 50 recently.

It starts with a C. I bet some of you have had this. And I intentionally schedule it for the morning because that, that, became a big deal to me thanks to your book. Could you just start right there and let's talk about, well, the idea that when we do things matters as much or more than how we do things. And when you look at a typical day, Dan Pink, what should we be doing when? So the last book I wrote came out a few months ago. It's called When. It's about the science of timing. And the main point is that it is just that. That we tend to think of the timing, the decisions we make about

when to do things. We make those decisions based on intuition and guesswork. That's the wrong way to make them. We should be making them based on what turns out to be this very rich body of science across multiple disciplines that give us clues, evidence, data to make these decisions about when to do things in a smarter, more strategic way. And one of the things that you see, especially in health care, is, I mean, as your friend, I'm glad that you got your colonoscopy in the morning because doctors find half as many polyps and afternoon exams as they do in morning exams for the same population. Anesthesia errors, four times more likely at 3 p.m. than at 9 a.m.

Hand washing in hospitals, which is not that high to begin with, goes down considerably in the afternoon. And one of the things that the science of timing tells us, at a broad level, is that our cognitive abilities don't stay the same throughout the day. Our cognitive abilities change over the course of a day. The difference between the daily high point and the daily low point can be significant, and when we should do things depends on what it is that we're doing. And the evidence is pretty remarkable, especially on health care,

but you also see the same effect on education. You see it in corporate performance. You see it in the markets. When we take breaks during the day, what kinds of breaks should we be taking when? The science of breaks is where the science of sleep was 15 years ago. 15 years ago, it was a badge of honor in some cases to come in and say, I pulled an all-nighter last night. I'm massively sleep-deprived.

I'm so committed to this organization that I'm only getting by on three hours of sleep. And back in the old days when I was working in organizations, I actually used to admire that. I used to feel bad about myself because it was really hard for me to do that. And now, 15 years later, once we understand the science of sleep, we say to that guy, and it's always a guy who got three hours of sleep

or pulled two consecutive all-nighters, you're not a hero, you're an idiot. Go home and get some sleep. You're hurting your performance. You're probably hurting everybody else's performance. And the science of breaks is where the science of sleep was. What we know about breaks is the following. We should be taking more breaks, and we should be taking certain kinds of breaks.

At a broad level, this is something that I got wrong. I always believed, I have not a good break. I have not been a good break taker. I always believed that professionals, that amateurs took breaks, and professionals didn't. And that's 100% wrong. That's as wrong as a statement can be. It's the exact opposite. it. Professionals take breaks, amateurs don't take breaks, and when I can finally steer

this 18-wheeler to actually answer David's question directly, what we know is about breaks is the following. There's some very good research that give us design principles about what kinds of breaks to take. Here's what we know about the right kinds of breaks to take. One, something is better than nothing. And so even micro breaks can improve your performance. Micro breaks as short as something like something that I do sometimes, which is called 2020-20-20, which is every 20 minutes, look at something, if you're working at a computer, every 20 minutes, look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds. Even that can actually improve alertness and mental acuity.

We know that, so something is better than nothing. We know that moving is better than stationary, big time. So I think that's become pretty well known. that social is better than solo, that breaks with other people are more restorative than breaks on our own. And in the remedy in the study by Katie Milkman at Penn and Brad Stats at UNC, where they showed that deterioration in hand washing in hospitals, the remedy for that that got hand washing back up was to give nurses more breaks and to encourage them to take social breaks, breaks with other nurses. That ended up getting hand washing back up. We know

that outside is better than inside, and we know that a fully detached is better than semi-detached. So leave your phone behind, don't talk about work. And I really, I think the science is clear enough that if the U.S. workforce, I truly believe that there would be an uptick in productivity writ large if white-collar workers every afternoon took a 10-minute break, walking around outside with someone they liked, talking, leaving their phone behind and talking about something other than work. I think that that regular habit would actually be a massive productivity enhancer for no cost. Whenever you did first come up with this idea, let's go back to that Dan Pink, now looking at the 2018 Dan Pink, who's already written the book and knows it. How does this

Dan Pink surprise or look different to that Dan Pink? How does, I'm sorry? How does this book changed your own habits in life? Oh my God, this book probably more than any book I've written changed how I do things. So truly, I'm not joking around about this medical stuff. My younger daughter is having a 19-year-old is having her wisdom teeth taken out. And it's like there's no question in our family what time of day she's getting her wisdom teeth taken out because she's going to go under general anesthesia. It's like she will absolutely, like I will stand in front of the door if preventing her from leaving our house if there was an appointment scheduled in the afternoon with general anesthesia for one of my kids, period, full stop.

We changed, my mother-in-law had a heart perceiving. six weeks ago and my wife who was navigating things for her negotiated with the hospital to do something out of the ordinary and do the procedure in the morning rather than in the afternoon. I mean so this is like for real on that one. So I also changed the way that I conduct my own schedule because one of the things that we know about the pattern of the day is that we go through the day in three broad cycles. There's a peak, a trough, and a recovery. And we do different things better at different points on that cycle. So during the peak, which for most of us is the morning, for night

owls, it's much later in the day, we're better at doing analytic work, work that requires heads down, focus, attention, and energy. And so I changed my own schedule so that I do all my writing in the morning because that's my best time of day. And I will, on writing days, I will not bring my phone into the office. I will not check my email. I will not take any phone calls not do anything until I hit that number. And so for this book, I was really, really rigid in how I wrote it based when I got a wind of this research. So I would come to the office every morning, shut everything down,

give myself a word count, and not do a thing before I hit that word count in the morning. So I would probably wrote this book 90% of the words in this book before noon. And actually, no joke, this is the first book I've delivered on time. So broadening it a little bit, Dan, obviously so much of your writing and your work has been about the changing nature of work, of motive. But let's go to work for a sec, changing nature of work. So, automation. Oh, yeah.

AI. How do you think AI will change work? It's a great question. I think we don't know. I think we can use certain ways of reasoning through this issue. So as it turns out, I wrote a book about 11 years ago called A Whole New Mind. And the argument behind that book was that certain kinds of abilities that propelled you to the middle class, what we can think of.

as SAT spreadsheet abilities, logical, linear, sequential abilities, abilities that were metaphorically left brain. My argument was that those abilities were becoming commoditized. They were easy to outsource. They were easy to automate. And that was putting a premium in these kinds of abilities, abilities more characteristic of the right hemisphere of the brain, artistry, empathy, inventiveness,

big picture thinking. And what I did in, and I have a chapter on automation in that book about how things are, you know, how a lot of kinds of left brain functions are being automated. So you have, I grew up in the American Midwest when the rust belt was rusting, and that was a change in the structure of work there, and even in the kind of advice that parents, middle class parents gave their kids, that you couldn't, like, routine factory jobs, factory jobs that were basically about doing repetitive tasks over and over again were no longer the path to the middle class. So parents told their kids to become accountants or engineers or lawyers, and the argument was is that a lot of the actual tasks, tasks in those professions were actually at risk of being automated and outsource because they were routine.

And so an example would be something like basic tax preparation and turbo tax. And we often get this wrong. So you have every year, every April, CNN does a story about chartered accountants in Manila processing American tax returns for $400 a month. some sad sack, a personal accountant in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, who is losing business as a consequence of that. And they never mentioned anything like TurboTax. I mean, any of you do your taxes on turbotax? Anybody? Yeah, look at that. So you're the people with accountant blood on your hands. Like, that's what's killing, that's what's killing accounting jobs. So you have the automation

of these kinds of white collar tasks and the outsourcing these white collar tasks. The point of this is that the rise of AI was far steeper than I would have expected. it. And so I did an, so for instance, I wrote about how, like, empathy, the our ability to read facial expressions is something that is very, very difficult to automate. And it turns out it's actually less difficult than we thought. And so that that kind of capacity, which I thought would be impervious to that, whoa, actually, you might be able to automate that. So I think that the world of AI to make a long story short, which I've never done in my adult life, is, it's a, it's, it, is this, that I think it's going to have an effect.

I think it's going to be neither utopian nor dystopian. In 1999, I ordered on eBay a bunch of books by futurists from the middle of the 20th century who were projecting out to 2000. I was going to do a piece on this. What did people think was going to happen in the year 2000? And basically, the distribution of these texts, these pundits, these thinkers, was this. you had about, you know, 45% of people predicting massive dystopia, charred lands, maybe 40%, charred landscape, you know,

widespread unemployment because of these things called computers. Then you had about 55% of people saying, you know, utopia. We're going to only be able to have to work five hours a week. The rest of it's going to be leisure. Everyone is going to be having sex without consequence. It's going to be, you know, this incredible utopian vision. And then you had about 5% of people saying, I think it'll be a little better.

And it turned out that the 5% were the ones who were right. And so I sort of, like, using that as a heuristic for figuring, analyzing this thing, I was like, you know what, it's probably going to make things a little bit better. There's going to absolutely be some disruption. There already is. We're not in this country taking, we're doing a terrible job of just being willing to leave people behind. But I think that AI is going to replace some jury tasks. And I think that what we're going to do for a living are things that augment machine intelligence rather than compete with machine intelligence.

But I don't see a utopia, nor do I see a dystopia. I see things basically a little bit better with some social consequences that it's a political decision whether we address. Coming up, Dan Pink talks about the big one that got away. Stay right here. You're listening to Motley Fool Money. This episode of Motley Full Money brought to you by TD Ameritrade. When it comes to investing, each of us does it our own unique way. Some of us want to go it alone. Others might prefer some guidance. Regardless of your style,

TD Ameritrade is always creating new solutions to help you. From their award-winning technology to personalize guidance, they have everything you need to invest on your terms. Visit TDmeritrade.com slash YTDA. To learn more and get started today, member SIPC. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. I'm Chris Hill. Let's get back to Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner's conversation in front of a live audience with bestselling author, Dan Pink. Dan, on my podcast, Rule Breaker Investing this coming week, we're going to tell stock stories. A lot of people talk about story stocks. I need to reverse it and tell stock stories.

You have an awesome stock story, and I'm just going to spot you up with it. And this is going to appear on my podcast. So, you know, start with once upon a time, once I spot you up. But this is the one about a guy you got to know through social media who had an eye. So once upon a time in the middle of the first decade of this century, I wrote a book called A Whole New Mind. It had an orange cover. And one of the ideas in the book, which I'm not sure is totally right anymore, but is that I had this argument that the MFA, the Masters of Fine Art, the MFA is the new MBA. The MFA is the new MBA because a lot of MBA skills can be outsourced and automated.

The skills of an MFA, the masters of fine art, are harder to outsource and harder to automate. Therefore, it would be more valuable. The MFA is the new MBA. That idea got me invited to a lot of art and design schools. Because everybody loves confirming their own biases. And in the course of going to this, I went to the Rhode Island School of Design, one of the premier art and design colleges in America, just an incredible institution. And there I met a young man.

I'm not going to even tell you his name. I'm just going to tell you. I met a young man who came up to me after the speech and talked to me a little bit and then sent me an email. And afterwards and asked me some questions, and I responded to the email. And he seemed like a good dude. I like this guy. I thought it was super creative. And maybe a year later, two years later, he emailed me.

And he said, I thought he was just a super creative guy. And he said, oh, you know, I got this crazy idea for a business. and he told me about the business, and I thought it was the most absurd. It's just an absurd idea. But as a way to raise money for it, because he was a pretty skilled designer and a very creative guy,

he decided, this is now 2008, he decided to do a set of limited edition cereal boxes. This is going to sound weird. Limited edition cereal boxes, where he and some of his design colleagues created these two boxes of cereal. Literally, it had cereal in it, and the box, one brand was called ObamaOs, all right?

Hope in every box. And the other one was called Capon, C-A-P-A-P-N, Capon McCain's, all right? So one was for McCain, and they said, we're going to do these things, to raise a little bit of money, we're going to do these limited edition cereal boxes. And so there are actually works of art in the limited edition,

and each cereal box had stamped on it, you know, number four of 500, number six of 500 or whatever. And I thought, that's pretty good. And these things, and I'm actually, I mean, I actually really enjoy fine art, particularly conceptual art. Like, I like going to the Hirshorn, and I like this sort of more, utre, forgive my French, kinds of art,

and these kind of wacky things. And they were selling it, and I like this guy, And I said, this guy could be a famous artist one day and it'd be really cool if this guy were like the next Andy Warhol or Jeff Coons or something like that. And I had one of his early pieces. And so for a tiny little amount, literally, I think there was like $75 a piece,

I bought these things. And I said to this young man, this is totally cool. I mean, you know, it's cool that you're raising money for this business. But, you know, I'm buying these things because I think you could probably be a well-known artist and this is my investment,

but like I would never put a cent into your company. And so I have in my office, and I think David might have seen these, I have in my office these cereal boxes, because they look really nice. They're super cool looking. And so it's Obama owes Captain McCain. And on the top of it, it says, you know, a product of air bed and breakfast. Thank you. So, you know that old, like, you know that old line? It's like, you know, the country song.

It's like, you know, you got the coal mine. and I got the shaft. So I didn't want to say his name to tip it, but is Joe, a fellow named Joe Gebbya, who is now like, I don't know, the 41st richest person on the world. And so Joe got the billion-dollar company that's going to go public next year,

but I've got my cereal, man. The book is When, the scientific secrets of perfect timing. In the 10 years of hosting this show, I've interviewed a lot of authors and a lot of books have come across my desk. And I can honestly say, this latest one from Dan Pink changed my life for the better. Check it out when you get the chance. And if you're looking to pick up a little bit of fool swag to show off the fact that you

actually are one of the dozens of listeners, you can go to shop.fool.com. That's shop.fool.com. Get a hoodie. Get a ball cap. Get a coffee mug. is the most amazing beverage in the world. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about. The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against. So, no, buy, ourselves stocks based solely on what you're here. That's going to do it for this

week's edition of Motley Fool Money. Our engineer is Steve Broido. Our producer is Mac Greer. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.