Jack Bogle, every mention

Vanguard: The communist capitalist who saved investors a trillion dollars (Audio) · Acquired May 18, 2026 · 90 mentions

• ▶ 1:54:22 David Rosenthal Playing squash and intimidating his opponents, like, gosh, if you thought it was scary to play against Jack when he might have a heart attack, how about playing against Jack with a new heart?
• ▶ 1:54:41 David Rosenthal Jack didn't think he was coming back from the heart transplant.
• ▶ 1:57:03 David Rosenthal Jack is still on the board, but he's no longer CEO.
• ▶ 1:57:13 David Rosenthal Jack, I think, gets super frustrated.
• ▶ 1:57:51 David Rosenthal In Jack's mind, this is starting to be a perversion of the mission.
• ▶ 1:58:35 Ben Gilbert 99% of Vanguard's AUM came after Jack stepped down.
• ▶ 2:00:03 David Rosenthal And they end up at loggerheads with Jack on the board.
• ▶ 2:00:34 David Rosenthal So, Jack...
• ▶ 2:00:47 David Rosenthal A man named Nathan most had come to see Jack at Vanguard.
• ▶ 2:01:34 Ben Gilbert And you might think Bogle's going to love this.
• ▶ 2:02:49 David Rosenthal Jack hates this idea.
• ▶ 2:04:27 David Rosenthal So Jack hates that.
• ▶ 2:05:07 David Rosenthal So Jack turns it down and not just turns it down, but like he hates the concept of ETFs.
• ▶ 2:05:46 David Rosenthal Like a year or two ago was the largest ETF in the world until it was surpassed by Vanguard and BlackRock after Jack's time.
• ▶ 2:05:55 David Rosenthal Well, after Jack's time.
• ▶ 2:05:58 David Rosenthal this was a really bad decision by Jack to pass on ETFs.
• ▶ 2:07:59 David Rosenthal Jack is staunchly against it.
• ▶ 2:08:15 David Rosenthal Jack has turned 70 that year, and that Mr.
• ▶ 2:08:46 David Rosenthal So, unlike the last time Jack got fired, where his former partners were probably hoping he would go quietly into the night, that's not an option here, because
• ▶ 2:09:02 David Rosenthal By this time, Jack has become like a saint to the investing public.
• ▶ 2:09:06 David Rosenthal People had actually started calling him Saint Jack, and when he stepped down as CEO in 1996, you know, ahead of the heart transplant, the company had commissioned a statue of him to be erected.
• ▶ 2:09:19 David Rosenthal There is no option to just, uh, part ways with Jack Bogle.
• ▶ 2:10:41 David Rosenthal So, as I said, the compromise that they reach is Jack will still be the founder of Vanguard.
• ▶ 2:10:48 David Rosenthal Jack will still be
• ▶ 2:11:03 David Rosenthal They set up the Bogle Financial Markets Research Center on campus, which Jack leads, uh, with a staff helping him for the next 20 years, uh, researching, speaking, writing books, papers, uh, and
• ▶ 2:11:34 David Rosenthal For all of the conflict and strife around this second firing, it really works out about as good as it possibly could for the company and for Jack.
• ▶ 2:11:45 David Rosenthal His legacy is preserved.
• ▶ 2:11:47 David Rosenthal His value to the company is preserved.
• ▶ 2:11:56 Ben Gilbert Which he did soften on over time.
• ▶ 2:11:59 David Rosenthal And he does eventually repair his relationships with management of the company, especially after Brennan steps down in 2008 and the next CEO, Bill McNabb, succeeds him.
• ▶ 2:12:27 Ben Gilbert The first one to know is indexing was not actually that interesting when Bogle started it.
• ▶ 2:18:37 David Rosenthal Warren Buffett implicitly endorsed Jack and Vanguard in the 1996 Berkshire annual shareholder letter where he wrote, the best way to own common stocks is through an index fund that charges minimal fees.
• ▶ 2:22:13 Ben Gilbert There's been, like, four other CEOs since, since Jack.
• ▶ 2:22:34 Ben Gilbert Well, listeners, one of the big takeaways from this whole story that we have been telling is that Jack Bogle had the data.
• ▶ 2:22:43 Ben Gilbert He showed over and over again that active fund managers on average don't beat the market after fees.
• ▶ 2:24:00 Ben Gilbert Bogle bet on data over intuition and built one of the largest financial institutions in history doing it, and if you want to apply that same rigor to how you build a great product, go to statsig.com slash acquired.
• ▶ 2:27:55 David Rosenthal Wall Street and active management in not just a major way, but arguably a permanent way, and who is there as the hero of Main Street, the little guys, but Malvern, Pennsylvania-based Jack Bogle and Vanguard, which makes no profits, has no…
• ▶ 2:34:33 David Rosenthal For American investors, the hands down choice should be Jack Bogle.
• ▶ 2:34:38 David Rosenthal For decades, Jack has urged investors to invest in ultra low cost index funds.
• ▶ 2:34:44 David Rosenthal In his crusade, Jack was frequently mocked by the investment management industry.
• ▶ 2:34:49 David Rosenthal Today, however, he has the satisfaction of knowing that he helped millions of investors realize far better returns on their savings than they otherwise would have earned.
• ▶ 2:35:00 David Rosenthal He is a hero to them.
• ▶ 2:38:51 David Rosenthal So, in January, 2019, Jack passes away at age 89 after
• ▶ 2:39:07 Ben Gilbert He enabled more Americans to participate in the fruits of capitalism in a way that sort of dips only into the best parts of capitalism and leaves all the unsavory parts behind.
• ▶ 2:39:35 David Rosenthal I mean, this from a firm that started as like a cockamamie revenge plot against his former partners.
• ▶ 2:39:42 Ben Gilbert Using a system that he believed in prior to wanting revenge.
• ▶ 2:39:46 Ben Gilbert He had pitched this before.
• ▶ 2:40:16 David Rosenthal And it is widely reported in the press in Jack's obituaries at the time of his death that his estate is worth roughly 80
• ▶ 2:40:58 David Rosenthal I mean, Vanguard's bigger than Fidelity at this point, so maybe hundred billion dollar delta that Jack leaves on the table just goes right back to the American investing public.
• ▶ 2:41:07 Ben Gilbert Did he leave it on the table?
• ▶ 2:41:21 Ben Gilbert Totally could have been ways for it to start being profit generating or have enterprise value, and he just wasn't interested in any of it.
• ▶ 2:41:41 David Rosenthal In the years kind of leading up to Jack's death, and then especially really in the seven plus years since his death,
• ▶ 2:44:30 David Rosenthal And I think Jack kind of foresaw this is why I didn't like the, the, the business opened up the Vanguard funds to being on all the other platforms.
• ▶ 2:56:25 Ben Gilbert The other thing is you really do need a crazy person like Jack Bogle that is interested enough in capitalism to spend their life in the world of investing, but not capitalist enough to want to benefit from it in any way, which is like this…
• ▶ 2:56:42 Ben Gilbert And Jack didn't exist in this world at all.
• ▶ 2:56:46 Ben Gilbert I mean, he only was in the world of mutual funds and basically had no contact with the sort of venture and private equity world.
• ▶ 2:56:53 David Rosenthal Yeah, there hasn't been a Jack Bogle in the private asset world of BC and private equity, and there hasn't been another Jack Bogle in the public asset world either.
• ▶ 2:57:02 David Rosenthal He is one of one.
• ▶ 2:57:04 Ben Gilbert There hasn't been another Jack Bogle in any industry.
• ▶ 3:01:01 David Rosenthal As set up by Jack, or as it should be today, is to bring the service to as many people as possible.
• ▶ 3:02:13 Ben Gilbert So just to underscore that Jack Bogle was not a index passive zealot.
• ▶ 3:02:20 Ben Gilbert He was a zealot for low fees.
• ▶ 3:05:13 Ben Gilbert It's the anti-Bogle.
• ▶ 3:05:42 David Rosenthal So after Jack left, the original four Ives partners took over the firm and slowly rebuilt it into something new.
• ▶ 3:07:48 David Rosenthal It's this incredible story, and Jack and the iVest partners eventually reconciled in the early nineties.
• ▶ 3:07:55 David Rosenthal Jack goes up to Boston.
• ▶ 3:15:54 Ben Gilbert If you want something to happen, and Jack really wanted low-cost investing to happen since the math showed that it was superior in the majority of cases, it
• ▶ 3:16:33 David Rosenthal Jack's quote on this that he would say often is strategy follows structure.
• ▶ 3:16:50 Ben Gilbert Bogle really understood the power of compounding costs.
• ▶ 3:16:53 Ben Gilbert His quote on this, where returns are concerned, time is your friend, but where costs are concerned, time is your enemy.
• ▶ 3:17:00 Ben Gilbert And Vanguard strategy was just that, to give you the power of compounding returns without, uh, what Jack calls the tyranny of compounding costs.
• ▶ 3:17:11 David Rosenthal So Jack, yes.
• ▶ 3:21:01 David Rosenthal Which I think Jack would readily acknowledge is, hey, we're free riders here.
• ▶ 3:27:53 Ben Gilbert Bogle did something that was essentially non-economic.
• ▶ 3:30:00 David Rosenthal Really hard to replicate Warren Buffett saying that a statue should be erected to Jack Bogle and that he's a hero to the American public and to him.
• ▶ 3:31:09 Ben Gilbert Jack had the insight that running a successful mutual fund is actually not a differentiated product.
• ▶ 3:32:12 Ben Gilbert And he realized that actually the public equities investment business is that.
• ▶ 3:32:28 David Rosenthal I would suggest that Jack bifurcated the public equities market into commodity and non-commodity before Jack and before Vanguard.
• ▶ 3:32:43 Ben Gilbert He invented a commodity sleeve of this market.
• ▶ 3:32:52 David Rosenthal Jack took a huge chunk of that, broke it off, and said, nope, this is a commodity market.
• ▶ 3:33:07 David Rosenthal But yeah, Jack broke off a huge chunk of it and created a new market.
• ▶ 3:33:11 Ben Gilbert Yeah, I love the quote that he has.
• ▶ 3:34:11 David Rosenthal The world and America should erect a statue to Jack Bogle.
• ▶ 3:34:20 David Rosenthal More than almost any other episode I can think of, the Vanguard story and Jack's story is proof that one single human being really can change the world.
• ▶ 3:35:01 David Rosenthal Were it not for Jack Bogle and Vanguard?
• ▶ 3:35:39 David Rosenthal Millions and millions and millions of people have had their financial lives changed because of him, and would not have happened without him.
• ▶ 3:36:15 Ben Gilbert Bogle and crew amidst that crazy board fight all the way across the country in Pennsylvania.
• ▶ 3:38:53 David Rosenthal So Jack, as we talked about, was a prolific author.
• ▶ 3:39:06 David Rosenthal All the proceeds from the book sales all go directly to the Bogle Family Foundation, where they get distributed to a whole variety of charities, including prominently the American Indian College Fund, which I think Jack was on the board of…
• ▶ 3:46:18 David Rosenthal Author of the intelligent investor column in the journal, and one of the most prolific authors on the entire fund space, and of course, Vanguard and Jack Bogle throughout his life.