Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
42 published records
01 / belief
“I was telling my wife, you know, I think I'll be able to do bedtime tonight, maybe, maybe even dinner.”
02 / belief
“I think like if you're Vanguard, you're delighted to get the business, to have people buying Vanguard funds on Fidelity.”
03 / evaluation
“Listeners, for anyone who isn't tuned into our Visa episode, it took a similarly—I'm not sure if "selfless" is the right word—but a person who was not motivated by getting to own the fruits of their labor, where Dee just decided this is the best structure if all these banks link arms and collectively create this thing that if memory serves, it might have even been a nonprofit or some sort of strange structure.”
04 / belief
“Fidelity is very happy to have their 401(k) and brokerage account holders do what you do of just hold the Vanguard funds through ETFs. And I think Jack kind of foresaw this.”
05 / belief
“Man, The Wall Street Journal party continues to Justin Baer there, who has a book coming out soon called House of Fidelity, which I think is actually due out this week.”
06 / belief
“Some people know that Vanguard is owned by its fund investors, but I think few people realize that is why it is low cost.”
07 / uncertainty
“Most of the time it's suggestions of how we should vote the shares, but I get where you're going that the fund manager of, let's say, one of these Vanguard or BlackRock grows to be, I don't know, 60% ownership of every company in America.”
08 / belief
“Like I'm not concerned in any way about this. I think even if you had 95% passive, the prices are set by the marginal trader.”
09 / belief
“I mean, it's his quote from his memoir that I have right here: I realized that a mutual company would never provide me with the personal fortune that so many denizens of Wall Street would earn, but it offered, I believe, my last best chance to resume my career.”
10 / belief
“All that said, I totally agree. I think you need to be operating in a space such that you can access capital.”
11 / belief
“Yep. So in January 2019, Jack passes away at age 89 after just one of the most incredible lives, I think, of the 20th century into the 21st century.”
12 / commitment
“I don't exactly know the answer, but what I will tell you to bring us to today here is that 24 months, in May of 2024, Vanguard made another big CEO announcement that they were bringing on the first outside CEO in the firm's entire 50-year history, Salim Ramji, from BlackRock, where he was until that point in time, head of the iShares division.”
13 / observation
“Did he leave it on the table? I mean, the only way that Vanguard would exist is by not taking profits.”
14 / belief
“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 and was a huge supporter of during his life.”
15 / belief
“I think Costco thus far has been the most correct analogy that this is Costco on steroids, but it's also something else that was also an Acquired episode.”
16 / belief
“I think structurally, they sort of need to raise them when there are contractions in the market.”
17 / commitment
“Could be $1 million, could be $100 million, could be $5 trillion, as we will see approaching towards the end of the episode.”
18 / belief
“I don't think I realized that it was also happening in the kind of 1965 to 1971 era.”
19 / belief
“I think the most interesting reason is that it was the thing where it was clear that the founder really should hand over the reins.”
20 / commitment
“Morgan rep and tell them that Ben and David sent you. And if you want to join us for some live interviews, we will be on the main stage with J.”
21 / evaluation
“" Then he went and talked to a second doctor, and that doctor said, "Why don't you get a place out in Cape Cod and stop working and enjoy the last few years you have left? Don't work anymore.”
22 / commitment
“There will still be costs. We will operate at cost, but we will forgo all profits.”
23 / belief
“I think the most interesting thing about 2008 is the fact that the index fund conceptually was stress tested.”
24 / commitment
“We won't experience the same kind of, you know, piano falling on our head losses as these naive index funds will.”
25 / belief
“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.”
26 / belief
“At the time, Fidelity is managing just $3 million, and the previous owners, who I think are, you know, retiring, they literally give Fidelity, the firm, to Edward Johnson for free.”
27 / belief
“I couldn't find the exact date, but I believe my grandparents must have become Vanguard clients either in the late '70s or early '80s when nobody was a Vanguard client.”
28 / belief
“I am a Vanguard customer and I think 100% of the way that I am a customer is through their ETFs, not through their mutual fund products.”
29 / evaluation
“Now, up until this point in time in the history of American financial organizations, that's a footnote, right? That doesn't matter.”
30 / belief
“All of which, of course, is like the very, very best marketing that, I would say buy, you can't even possibly buy marketing like this.”
31 / belief
“You know, your life is going to be in great shape if you just compound that for a long time. And so I think for a lot of people it was, "I'm fed up with clever, give me straightforward.”
32 / belief
“I think one time he collapsed and had a heart attack waiting for the commuter train out of Philadelphia, and he was lying there on the ground, and the ambulance and the paramedics came, and he makes a bet with them that they won't get him to the hospital in time to save his life.”
33 / evaluation
“So yeah, I think, uh, I, I agree with Warren, and millions and millions and millions of people have had their financial lives changed because of him and would not have happened without him.”
34 / prediction
“I will say this 20% is a little misleadingly low because thanks to direct indexing and people constructing their own portfolios that look like indexes but aren't actually in index funds, the passive ownership in companies could be more like 30 to 40%.”
35 / evaluation
“" If you're interested in the market, it has historically performed well because it essentially captures the productivity growth and innovation of the world's most successful economy.”
36 / preference
“Like normally in a company, when I buy a share of Apple, it's because I think Apple is gonna compound their profits, their cash flows in the future at a higher rate than anything else that I could invest in.”
37 / prediction
“The answer I suspect Vanguard leadership would give you is you do actually need to grow to stay competitive because you need to keep investing in the platform and the current cash flows off our small management fees are not enough to make all the investments that we wanna make.”
38 / prediction
“You can see why they had the fear, which is if you provide this existence proof that you can run this business at cost and you don't need to pay huge sums of money to the people managing this, then our customers will demand the same from us, which is sort of right because you can buy an S&P 500 index fund from basically anyone today at basically no cost.”
39 / evaluation
“The industry ignored it for decades because conventional wisdom sort of "felt", felt in quotes, correct.”
40 / evaluation
“He also hates that because these funds will now be traded on an exchange, it means that you can short sell them.”
41 / evaluation
“Which is absolutely hilarious because now index fund licensing is basically the entire business of indices around the world, and it is extremely high-margin.”
42 / evaluation
“Now, all of that wasn't because of the assets decreasing in value. A lot of that was redemptions where investors are taking their money and going elsewhere.”