Jack Bogle, every mention
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Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Jack Bogle comes up
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- ▶ 1:23:05 Ben Gilbert I think it was maybe Walt's Folly, but either way, it's the exact same thing that people said about Trip Hawkins when he was working on Madden, about Jack Bogle with Bogle's Folly, with creating the Vanguard index funds.
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- ▶ 2:01 David Rosenthal Millions and millions and millions of people have sent their kids to college, bought homes, retired comfortably because of Vanguard and Jack Bogle.
- ▶ 2:57 Ben Gilbert And a pedantic stick in the mud who was as disagreeable as he was right, Jack Bogle.
- ▶ 3:06 Ben Gilbert And his story is wild since he didn't start Vanguard until he was 46 years old, and you might think it was started idealistically given this structure we're talking about.
- ▶ 3:22 Ben Gilbert But what is clear, we all owe Jack a giant thank you.
- ▶ 3:49 Ben Gilbert So Jack Bogle and Vanguard are responsible for a trillion dollars of wealth transfer out of the pockets of Wall Street and the finance industry and into the pockets of individual investors in the form of fees that they didn't have to pay.
- ▶ 4:08 Ben Gilbert And his comment to me was, I view Bogle as an undercover philanthropist, and, uh, at a trillion or even half a trillion dollars, that would make him the greatest philanthropist of all time.
- ▶ 4:21 David Rosenthal I mean, a large portion of that trillion dollars could easily have flowed into Jack's own wealth, and he made the choice that it didn't.
- ▶ 10:39 David Rosenthal And Jack especially just like flourishes at Blair.
- ▶ 10:57 David Rosenthal Now, there's just one problem, though, as Jack and David are approaching graduation.
- ▶ 11:30 David Rosenthal And because Jack has been so successful at Blair and is such a good student, he gets chosen as the one of the brothers that's gonna get to go to college.
- ▶ 11:39 David Rosenthal And Jack would say that, like, the weight of that decision just rested on him for the whole rest of his life.
- ▶ 11:58 Ben Gilbert And it's funny, listeners, David, you're referencing the things that Jack would say.
- ▶ 12:02 Ben Gilbert It is incredibly easy to find Jack's words everywhere.
- ▶ 12:07 Ben Gilbert There is no shortage of commentary that Jack would give on his own life, on his philosophies.
- ▶ 12:25 Ben Gilbert So there is no gaps in the historical record of, uh, Jack's life.
- ▶ 12:30 David Rosenthal Of Jack's memory, yeah.
- ▶ 12:32 David Rosenthal Jack loved nothing more than to give a speech.
- ▶ 12:34 David Rosenthal So after graduation from Blair, Jack goes on to college at Princeton.
- ▶ 13:15 David Rosenthal So the next year during Jack's junior year at Princeton, he's
- ▶ 13:37 David Rosenthal And specifically, I also went through the rite of passage that Jack has to go through, which is, he needs to write a
- ▶ 14:15 David Rosenthal David Rosenthal, Jack Bogle, you know, the connections abound.
- ▶ 27:21 David Rosenthal Now, as graduation approaches, Jack has a goal.
- ▶ 27:51 David Rosenthal Walter Morgan hires Jack as his assistant, right out of school, really takes a shine to him.
- ▶ 27:57 David Rosenthal Jack becomes sort of like a surrogate son to him.
- ▶ 27:59 David Rosenthal You know, Jack didn't really have a dad and Walter didn't have kids.
- ▶ 28:41 David Rosenthal And the Wellington Fund, by this point here, when Jack joins out of school, has attracted a hundred and fifty million dollars in assets.
- ▶ 29:11 David Rosenthal Like, I think Morgan and everybody at Wellington and Jack absolutely did have their customers and the fund holders in mind and wanted to do a great job for them.
- ▶ 29:39 David Rosenthal So Jack takes to Wellington and to Mr.
- ▶ 30:02 David Rosenthal Morgan was 30 years older than Jack.
- ▶ 30:04 David Rosenthal And then, ultimately, in 1965, Morgan retires, steps back, and names Jack president of the firm at
- ▶ 30:18 David Rosenthal He's, Jack, he's come up in the world.
- ▶ 42:33 David Rosenthal So, this is the stew that's happening as Jack is taking over, and-
- ▶ 43:25 David Rosenthal So he casts a bout, and eventually Jack finds a small new firm in Boston that
- ▶ 44:30 David Rosenthal Wellington and Jack feel like they're in such dire straits and need this merger, need to bring this go-go blood into the firm so much that he ends up offering 40% of the equity in the management company to the four partners coming in from…
- ▶ 45:16 David Rosenthal Mr.
- ▶ 45:48 David Rosenthal With Jack as a four-armed quarterback.
- ▶ 49:32 David Rosenthal So then in the midst of all this, to complicate things even further, Jack starts to develop a crisis of conscience.
- ▶ 50:43 David Rosenthal Well, so Jack's Jerry Maguire moment here is he gives a speech to the whole firm where he throws out this idea that, hey, maybe we should actually mutualize
- ▶ 51:22 Ben Gilbert A mutually owned group of mutual funds or, uh, mutual mutual, as Jack loved to say.
- ▶ 51:30 David Rosenthal Why would they have to do that if Jack and potentially his partners out of the goodness of their hearts were, were going to give it to the fund holders?
- ▶ 51:49 David Rosenthal They're in the management company, in Wellington Management Company, along with Jack and along with the four iVest partners.
- ▶ 52:27 David Rosenthal And just to really highlight this again, it's kind of easy in retrospect to look at this and be like, oh, Jack, he was like so morally upstanding and he stood up against Wall Street and like all of the crooks and fees out there.
- ▶ 53:12 David Rosenthal To the extent there is a moral conflict, it exists solely in Jack's kind of head and in his heart.
- ▶ 53:40 David Rosenthal The four iVest partners band together, rally enough votes from the public shareholders, and they fire Jack as CEO of Wellington Management Company.
- ▶ 54:09 Ben Gilbert You know, they, they ask Jack to quit.
- ▶ 54:25 Ben Gilbert And from Jack's perspective, he partnered with these guys.
- ▶ 54:38 David Rosenthal So January, 23rd, 1974, Jack is fired as CEO of Wellington Management Company.
- ▶ 55:02 David Rosenthal So Jack was CEO of Wellington Management Company.
- ▶ 55:14 David Rosenthal There was one board of directors that represented all the funds, and Jack is chairman of that board of directors.
- ▶ 55:42 David Rosenthal Or Jack was about to test it, shall we say.
- ▶ 55:52 David Rosenthal You don't know Jack Bogle.
- ▶ 56:43 David Rosenthal The next day, after Jack is fired as CEO of the management company, he calls a special meeting of the board of directors of the funds, which is his prerogative as chairman, and he proposes that they, as the board of the funds, vote to,…
- ▶ 58:32 David Rosenthal Okay, Jack.
- ▶ 58:56 David Rosenthal Jack does have a very good point, especially to the directors of the fund whose fiduciary duty is to do what's in the best interest of the fund holders.
- ▶ 59:33 David Rosenthal Let's take a month, and Jack, we will direct you, since you want to do this, to go prepare a study, a feasibility study, of like, what are the available options to us as the fund and the board of the funds?
- ▶ 1:00:06 David Rosenthal So Jack goes away, prepares a 250 page report.
- ▶ 1:01:05 David Rosenthal And obviously Jack's answer to the question is yes.
- ▶ 1:01:46 David Rosenthal Jack is idealistic.
- ▶ 1:01:53 David Rosenthal Ultimately, the fund board comes back and does vote with Jack.
- ▶ 1:03:01 Ben Gilbert Which is Jack's least favorite thing to do.
- ▶ 1:03:39 Ben Gilbert And Jack logs the win.
- ▶ 1:05:19 David Rosenthal Jack tells an anecdote at the beginning of, of the book's Stay the Course, which is his memoirs, that around this time, he travels out to Los Angeles, when, while he's there, he gets an urgent message from the head of capital group out…
- ▶ 1:05:38 David Rosenthal John Lovelace Jr., the head of Capital Group, says he needs to meet with Jack privately.
- ▶ 1:05:42 David Rosenthal Jack's like, well, my schedule's pretty booked.
- ▶ 1:05:56 David Rosenthal Jack shows up.
- ▶ 1:06:05 David Rosenthal Jack says, yes, John, that's right.
- ▶ 1:07:19 David Rosenthal So, Jack's starting down the path.
- ▶ 1:07:27 David Rosenthal So right as this is happening, Jack gets a visit to
- ▶ 1:07:48 David Rosenthal Jack is looking through the prints and one of them is of a ship.
- ▶ 1:08:26 David Rosenthal But knowing all the history now, like, obviously Jack chose the name because it represented total victory.
- ▶ 1:09:44 David Rosenthal And it turned out that Jack would need to lead another second and totally separate revolution as well before anyone would pay attention to what he was doing.
- ▶ 1:17:59 David Rosenthal Couple years after this, along come Jack and Vanguard in this unique moment where they, they need something to make their model work, and computing and software is, like, just now starting to be capable of handling this.
- ▶ 1:18:15 Ben Gilbert And Jack is reading the docs very carefully.
- ▶ 1:19:00 David Rosenthal As Jack puts it in his memoir, you know, kind of like, uh, you know, uh, rendering a guilty verdict in a legal trial, he and early Vanguard there had both the opportunity to commit the crime, or in this case, you know, uh, create the first…
- ▶ 1:19:22 Ben Gilbert And the thing that Jack was starting to realize, which is the culmination of his senior thesis and the Paul Samuelson article, is that this could actually be very successful.
- ▶ 1:19:33 Ben Gilbert He runs the numbers, because he's Jack, the S&P index, without the fees, beat half the active managers, and over the full decade, it would beat 78% of them.
- ▶ 1:19:44 Ben Gilbert So Jack realized, wait a minute, it's impossible to run an index at zero cost, but at scale, actually, you could approach zero cost.
- ▶ 1:21:45 Ben Gilbert Bogle was sort of this zealot for indexing, and he hated active management, but that's not true.
- ▶ 1:22:25 Ben Gilbert That's the thing that is really Bogle's legacy and what he was obsessed with.
- ▶ 1:22:30 David Rosenthal Later in life, Jack would come to, uh, call this the cost matters hypothesis.
- ▶ 1:37:13 David Rosenthal Finally, in 1981 into 1982, Jack and Vanguard do win the right to take over distribution of the index funds.
- ▶ 1:37:30 David Rosenthal Jack argues, oh, we're not taking over distribution.
- ▶ 1:39:48 David Rosenthal That Jack's first revolution of the low cost, low fee proposition of Vanguard, it works pretty well in equities.
- ▶ 1:40:58 David Rosenthal Vanguard builds a juggernaut in the fixed income business during this era, and that's what keeps the firm afloat while they are waiting and waiting and waiting for Jack's indexing revolution, his second revolution, to come online.
- ▶ 1:46:39 David Rosenthal Jack manages to get himself fired again.
- ▶ 1:49:00 Ben Gilbert Alright, so David, there is something that you have not been telling us about Jack's life over the years.
- ▶ 1:49:08 David Rosenthal Jack, unfortunately, has a bad heart.
- ▶ 1:49:20 David Rosenthal And that means that Jack suffers his first heart attack in 1960 at age 31.
- ▶ 1:49:43 Ben Gilbert And what Jack decided to do with this was work.
- ▶ 1:50:18 David Rosenthal This is totally Jack's unique personality.
- ▶ 1:51:20 David Rosenthal As Vanguard's really taking off and indexing is taking off, Jack's heart is just getting weaker and weaker and more and more worn down from all this.
- ▶ 1:51:28 David Rosenthal In 1994, his twin brother David dies, also from heart complications, and by 1995, over half of Jack's heart has stopped working.
- ▶ 1:52:03 David Rosenthal Jack and the family are brought around.
- ▶ 1:52:14 David Rosenthal Where Jack announces that he's stepping down as CEO to prepare for his heart transplant, and the company announces that John Brennan, Jack's former assistant, who had joined the company in 1982, will be taking over as the next CEO.
- ▶ 1:52:31 David Rosenthal Brennan had been Vanguard's CFO for many years leading up to this, and in late 1995, Jack Bogle
- ▶ 1:53:10 David Rosenthal On January, 3119 96, Jack officially steps down as CEO, and Brennan takes over after more than three months of operating as CEO out of his hospital room.
- ▶ 1:53:23 David Rosenthal Really, Jack is one of a kind here.
- ▶ 1:53:24 David Rosenthal And then, in February, finally, they get the call, there's a heart available for Jack, and he has the heart transplant at the end of February.
- ▶ 1:54:04 David Rosenthal And Jack
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