motley fool money — money that knows what it is

motley fool money is a phrase that, to my ear, knows what it is. money belonging to a fool, declared. supermarket failure earlier today, the same money in the same wallet. coffee shop hum. a brand, named honestly, is rare enough to write a post about.

parked at the workstation. carla is upstairs in the all-hands on the third floor. nobody is monitoring the screen. forty minutes, give or take, before the corridor gets foot traffic again.

so. motley fool money. the brand has a podcast by the name. the podcast, on a wednesday, runs about forty minutes, give or take, depending on the host’s mood and how many disclaimers the legal team buried in the ad reads. the show is, on inspection, the audio version of the a noble tradition of paid truth-tellers in jester hats ethos — except the jester is now wearing a microphone and the king is a retail investor with an open browser and a slow morning.

motley fool money is the official podcast of the paid stock-advice service. each episode runs roughly forty minutes, mixes market news with interviews and listener questions, and treats financial decisions as conversation rather than text. the show extends the brand’s noble-fool posture into audio: stocks discussed honestly, opinions offered, doubt left in.

A PODCAST. NAMED. AFTER ITSELF. HONESTLY.

that, on its own, is the part that interests me. most financial media is named after a metaphor — a horn, a bull, a street, an arrow pointing somewhere upward. motley fool money is named after the thing it actually is. it is money. it is fool money. it is, on tape, one fool talking to another fool about which fools to send the money to next. the brand is, in the cleanest sense of the word, declarative.

motley fool money, the brand, the show

the show is a podcast. that is the first fact, and the most relevant one. it is not a newsletter. it is not a chart. it is a microphone in a room with somebody who has read the news and somebody else who has opinions about the news, and the two of them, for forty minutes, talk. that is the format. it has been the format, with mild variations, for over a decade.

i listened to the show for the first time on tuesday, in this same coffee shop, in the corner near the window. the barista knows my order. the barista does not know what i listen to. that is, in my opinion, the cleanest version of customer service available — knowing the latte, not knowing the playlist. i am, for the record, reading and writing in the coffee shop only on tuesdays at lunch, when the workstation upstairs gets too quiet to think in. the writing happens at the desk. the listening happens here. those are different rooms.

the show, on first listen, is calmer than i expected. i had assumed financial podcasts were full of men shouting about the federal reserve. this one is two voices, evenly matched, taking turns. one voice says “the company reported earnings.” the other voice says “and what did you make of it.” the first voice answers honestly, including the parts where the answer is “i’m not sure”. that admission, on a financial podcast, is rare. the threads on a paid stock-pick newsletter that mails its calls weekly would call it a feature, not a bug. i agree.

why money called fool is money self-aware

let me put this in flat english. money called fool money is money that knows what it is. the rest of money, in the rest of the world, pretends to be smart. it is in funds with serious names. it is in accounts called “growth” and “retirement” and “high-yield”. those names are doing publicity. the money, underneath, is the same money — anxious, mostly idle, and occasionally lost.

the format helps. an audio show, by virtue of being audio, leaves room for hedge. the host can pause. the host can say “well…” and let the silence do half the work. text doesn’t do that. text either commits or doesn’t. an article on the same topic would have to print “i think” or “probably” or “in my view” — and once printed, those words look weak. spoken, they are appropriate. the medium changes the math.

the receipt for two coffees, declared accurately

i have, in front of me on the table, the receipt for the two coffees i bought today. one was for me. the second was a defensive purchase, for a person who was about to take the corner table i wanted, who was charmed enough by the gesture that they took the coffee and the other corner. the receipt is in the receipt wallet. i carry a receipt wallet. it is brown leather, folded twice, and contains every receipt from the last fourteen weeks.

the receipt for the coffees says, in small print, $8.40. that money, on inspection, is fool money. it is not investment money. it is not savings money. it is not retirement money. it is the kind of money that buys two coffees on a tuesday for a stranger as a tactical move to secure a window seat. the receipt does not lie about this. the receipt is, in its own quiet way, an audit.

i am keeping the receipt because of a rule i have, which is that any money i spend on a tuesday is, in my view, taxable as a domestic operation. i don’t know what that means in real tax law. i know what it means in my receipt wallet. mike has a system for taxes. has not filed since 2019. mike’s system is, effectively, my system, except mike admits it and i pretend to. the receipt wallet is the difference. mike has no wallet. mike has a glass.

the gym sauna membership, technically fool money

i have, for reasons i cannot reconstruct, a gym sauna membership. i do not exercise at the gym. i go to the sauna. that is the entire usage pattern. it has been the pattern for two years. the membership is, on its face, fool money — i am paying for access to a building i use, on average, once a week, for the one room in the building i could, theoretically, replicate by sitting in my own bathroom with the shower running on hot.

(i have considered the home-bathroom workaround. it does not work. the bathroom is not big enough. the steam doesn’t sustain. the gym sauna is, on the merits, a better product. the membership is foolish, but the foolishness is, in my view, justified by the steam.)

the podcast, if i applied the podcast’s logic to the membership, would say the following: “this is fool money. you are aware it is fool money. that awareness is, on a long enough timeline, worth more than the savings you’d get by canceling.” i agree. the membership stays. the receipt for the most recent month’s renewal is, also, in the wallet. it is an investigation that closed itself.

the sauna, for the record, is the only place i have ever heard a man explain the federal reserve while wearing a towel. he had opinions. he had data. he had, on his lap, a folded copy of the financial section. the steam was thick enough that i could not read which section. he did not stop talking when i sat down. he did not stop when i left. he was, in his way, a one-man motley fool money episode without the editing. the show is, on listen, his more polite cousin.

the supermarket transaction that confirmed the theory

this morning, before this coffee shop, i went to the supermarket. the supermarket was the test case. i had a list. the list said: oats, milk, soap, one onion. the list was four items. four items is, by my own count, the maximum a man can carry in one hand without a basket. i had, however, no list with me. the list was on a sticky note on the kitchen counter. the kitchen counter is in my apartment. my apartment is, currently, two miles from the supermarket. the list and i were not in the same room.

i did not, in the moment, recognize this as a problem. i started shopping from memory. memory, on a tuesday morning before coffee, is not a reliable financial advisor. memory said: oats, you also need crackers. milk, you also need a second milk for the freezer for emergencies. soap, you actually need three soaps because the bulk place isn’t open until thursday. one onion, but also two limes because limes seemed important when you saw them.

i left the supermarket with eleven items. the receipt — now, also, in the wallet — was $47.20. the list, had i actually consulted it, would have produced a receipt of approximately $11. the difference, $36.20, is, in the cleanest definition of the term, fool money. it was deployed in the absence of information. it was deployed by a man who had the information at home and did not bring it. the supermarket did not lie to me. the supermarket sold me what i picked up. the fool was the picker.

this is the part of the post where i’d like to insert a fact i learned from the show: the average household, according to one of the hosts on a recent episode i half-listened to in the sauna with the man who had opinions, spends a measurable percentage of its grocery budget on items not on its list. the percentage was double-digit. i couldn’t hear it clearly through the steam. but the direction was clear. the supermarket is, statistically, a fool money laundering operation. the dignity of the operation is that it doesn’t pretend otherwise. you walk in. you make decisions. the decisions are documented. the documentation goes in the wallet.

i am not, on this point, a moron. a person who is loudly wrong with conviction at every dinner party would have left the supermarket convinced the eleven items were the right eleven items. i am, in the technical sense, dumb about the list — i forgot it — but not dumb about the consequences. the receipt is in the wallet. the receipt will be reviewed on sunday. that is the difference between dumb and a fool. the fool reviews. the dumb one does not.

verdict, all money is fool money, only some declares

so here is the verdict, while the espresso machine behind me does whatever it does between drinks.

all money is fool money. some of it is in accounts that pretend otherwise. some of it is in funds with names that pretend otherwise. some of it is in homes, cars, gym memberships, receipts in wallets, vending machines on third floors. all of it, at the moment of deployment, is being moved by a person who is, on the inside, guessing. the difference between a podcast called motley fool money and a podcast called, hypothetically, strategic capital insights is that one of them admits the guess. the other charges more for hiding it.

i am going to keep listening to the show. i listened to the first episode on tuesday morning and, against my expectations, found it calmer than the equivalent text would have been. the audio format gives the host room to be honest. the text format pressures the writer into looking competent. on a financial topic, that pressure is the enemy of good information. the podcast, by being audio, removes the pressure. that is, on inspection, why the show works. it sounds like a long-running sitcom about a psychiatrist’s brother and a bar regular — except the bar is the studio, the regular is the listener, and the topic is, instead of love and family, which stocks the host bought and which ones he wishes he hadn’t.

i’d recommend it, conditionally. listen to one episode. listen to it in a sauna, or a coffee shop, or — if you must — at a desk on a tuesday morning when the building is empty. do not listen to it while opening the unopened mail pile. those two activities cancel each other out. one is, by design, a guided tour through fool money. the other is the receipt for it.

the espresso machine just paused between drinks. the barista is restocking cups. carla, by my watch, has another fifteen minutes upstairs. the wallet is heavier than it was. the receipt for these two coffees will join the others. it will be reviewed on sunday, with the rest, in the kitchen, at the counter, with the list i forgot this morning, finally honored, posthumously.

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