Bogleheads® Conference 2024 Bogleheads Hall of Fame Induction 2024 Alex Frakt & Larry Auton
00:00:00.000 | (audience applauding)
00:00:03.160 | - Thank you all for being here tonight.
00:00:08.500 | It's lovely to see this group.
00:00:10.600 | Of course, I've seen this video on several occasions,
00:00:13.760 | but it never ceases to move me.
00:00:15.440 | So tonight I'm thinking about the people
00:00:17.760 | who aren't here with us, Jack Bogle, of course,
00:00:21.760 | but also some of our former leaders,
00:00:24.760 | some of our real thought leaders still,
00:00:28.080 | Taylor Larimore, who is still with us,
00:00:30.660 | but just not with us tonight, and Mel Lindauer.
00:00:35.260 | Those are our two Hall of Fame inductees so far,
00:00:39.200 | and we plan to induct some additional individuals tonight.
00:00:43.680 | I have been thinking about this group
00:00:46.280 | and how our focus is on community and education,
00:00:50.700 | financial education, and how well this conference,
00:00:55.360 | I think, embodies those two things.
00:00:57.240 | So it's lovely to see the new people
00:00:59.600 | who have joined, so many people with the tags
00:01:02.360 | that say they're first-time attendees.
00:01:04.240 | It makes me so happy to see that,
00:01:06.920 | and we hope to just continue on with this conference,
00:01:10.920 | and the Bogle Center will hope to continue
00:01:14.040 | furthering people's financial education.
00:01:17.140 | If you wish to support our mission,
00:01:19.440 | which involves the conference and we support the forum
00:01:24.880 | and the local chapters, please,
00:01:28.360 | you can make a tax-deductible contribution
00:01:31.280 | to the organization, and you can also volunteer.
00:01:34.420 | I think I've heard from several people already
00:01:36.800 | that they would like to be more involved,
00:01:38.660 | and we would love to have you more involved,
00:01:40.900 | so please check in with me or check in with someone else
00:01:45.120 | who is wearing a board tag, and we can help connect you
00:01:47.960 | with things that you can help us with.
00:01:50.400 | We would absolutely love that.
00:01:51.860 | So thanks to all of you for being here.
00:01:54.520 | Right now, I want to invite Andrew Bogle up to the podium.
00:01:59.520 | Andrew is Jack's son, Jack's youngest son,
00:02:03.640 | and he is a member of our board and a really valued member.
00:02:07.800 | All of our board members are valuable,
00:02:09.480 | but Andrew really helps us think about
00:02:13.280 | what are the best ways to honor Jack's legacy,
00:02:16.200 | so he helps us stay connected with what Jack would want
00:02:20.560 | and what the family would want.
00:02:22.400 | So I'll ask Andrew to come up here now,
00:02:26.760 | and he is going to induct our new members
00:02:29.360 | into the Hall of Fame.
00:02:30.520 | Andrew, thank you.
00:02:31.660 | (audience applauding)
00:02:34.820 | - Good evening.
00:02:37.040 | Thank you for making the time, effort, and expense
00:02:39.640 | to come to BogleHuts 2024.
00:02:41.480 | I am honored and thrilled to serve on the board
00:02:44.600 | of the John C. Bogle Center for Financial Literacy,
00:02:47.320 | and it's my distinct pleasure to be with all of you tonight.
00:02:49.920 | Thank you.
00:02:52.080 | As Christine mentioned, I'm the youngest child of Jack.
00:02:56.360 | He loved being in the spotlight,
00:02:58.000 | in case you didn't know that.
00:02:59.480 | (audience laughing)
00:03:01.420 | As a child, I couldn't comprehend it,
00:03:04.000 | and candidly, it brought out a feeling in me
00:03:07.120 | of not wanting to be in the spotlight, ever.
00:03:10.040 | (audience laughing)
00:03:12.480 | But at some point on my journey to some level of maturity,
00:03:16.920 | relatively speaking, it occurred to me
00:03:20.320 | that a possible driver of his enjoyment of the spotlight
00:03:23.160 | wasn't actually his craving of publicity,
00:03:28.480 | though it could have been a little bit,
00:03:30.880 | but rather, he saw it as serving as a conduit
00:03:35.080 | to bring the spotlight on a new way for everyday investors
00:03:39.360 | to learn that there was a better way for them to invest.
00:03:43.760 | So it wasn't necessarily about the spotlight.
00:03:48.080 | Rather, it was a continuation of my father's frugal ways
00:03:53.080 | since it was free advertising.
00:03:55.580 | (audience laughing)
00:03:58.580 | Being the youngest of six kids,
00:04:01.180 | I was always behind my brothers and sisters
00:04:04.520 | with my knowledge, and relatively speaking,
00:04:07.000 | a tiny little kid even compared to my peers.
00:04:09.300 | So I wanted to explore what I might be able to do
00:04:12.920 | to possibly decrease that gap.
00:04:16.880 | So whether by nurture, nature,
00:04:19.660 | or just plain stubbornness like my father,
00:04:22.540 | I am or became very curious.
00:04:25.340 | I asked a lot of questions.
00:04:28.360 | I talked to a lot of people,
00:04:30.460 | and they were very kind and generous
00:04:32.880 | with sharing their knowledge and time with me.
00:04:35.880 | Similar.
00:04:36.720 | (audience laughing)
00:04:41.760 | Unexpected.
00:04:45.840 | Similar to what all of you do both here
00:04:48.240 | and on the forum of sharing your knowledge
00:04:50.160 | and time with everyone else.
00:04:52.120 | For that, I'm gratefully grateful.
00:04:54.300 | So in some ways, I was an early Boglehead.
00:04:58.600 | I wanna express my gratitude to all of you.
00:05:03.400 | You all spent an inordinate amount of time and expertise
00:05:07.140 | to not only assist other people,
00:05:09.520 | but also, and I would argue just as importantly,
00:05:12.840 | to make everyone feel welcomed, looked after,
00:05:16.580 | and to make them feel good
00:05:18.200 | about having a shot at the financial future.
00:05:20.640 | Tonight, I'm here to thank and honor two men
00:05:29.380 | who have done so much for the Bogleheads Forum.
00:05:31.720 | Unlike my father, they did not seek the spotlight.
00:05:35.420 | Larry and Alex are instrumental for all of us Bogleheads
00:05:40.880 | to share knowledge and ask questions on the forum.
00:05:43.780 | Through their time, effort, expertise, and thoughtfulness,
00:05:49.720 | they truly keep the forum up and running.
00:05:52.200 | Larry was an early volunteer,
00:05:56.400 | initially offering both his services and expertise
00:06:00.120 | and setting up and hosting a Bogleheads website
00:06:03.560 | back in the 1990s when it was called
00:06:06.360 | the Vanguard Diehard on Morningstar.
00:06:10.640 | It took some time, but finally in 2007,
00:06:15.560 | Larry stepped up and used his own funds
00:06:17.520 | to host the website.
00:06:19.340 | Since then, he's kept both the server
00:06:22.240 | and the forum software up to date on bogleheads.org.
00:06:25.920 | Alex has been an administrator of the forum
00:06:29.440 | since its inception.
00:06:30.560 | He sets forum policy, and in coordination
00:06:34.240 | with other forum administrators and moderators,
00:06:37.400 | helps with the interpretation and enforcement
00:06:40.520 | of those policies.
00:06:41.720 | Alex is a final arbiter when there are issues
00:06:45.720 | from the forum moderators that they feel
00:06:48.120 | they need further clarification or final resolution.
00:06:51.360 | As Lady Geek told me, Larry is patient
00:06:56.280 | and exemplifies someone who is a true expert,
00:07:00.360 | since, like my father, he's able to distill complex systems
00:07:05.360 | in simple terms and concepts that everyone can understand.
00:07:10.620 | And his primary motivation is to help others.
00:07:13.600 | She went on to describe Alex in the following way,
00:07:18.340 | quote, "If I had to describe Alex in one word,
00:07:22.380 | "it's purpose.
00:07:23.380 | "What no one but the moderators can see
00:07:26.900 | "is his persistent determination
00:07:28.860 | "to keep the Bogleheads forum aligned
00:07:31.660 | "with its core principles, to have civil discussions,
00:07:35.440 | "and to treat its members fairly.
00:07:38.580 | "It is my honor and pleasure to induct and welcome
00:07:42.840 | "Larry and Alex to the Bogleheads Hall of Fame.
00:07:45.780 | "Please help me in congratulating them."
00:07:47.980 | (audience applauds)
00:07:50.980 | - All right, I don't have a speech,
00:08:08.380 | and Larry, who I always like to be behind the scenes,
00:08:13.020 | has bowed out, so.
00:08:14.400 | (audience laughs)
00:08:17.460 | I'm going to take credit for the whole site.
00:08:21.000 | (audience laughs)
00:08:22.820 | So the quick history, which I'll do real quick,
00:08:26.420 | and also, I think if anybody has questions,
00:08:30.180 | they said they were gonna do the note card things,
00:08:31.780 | 'cause I'm gonna not talk very long,
00:08:33.880 | so if you have questions about anything to do
00:08:36.740 | with the forum or the site, and it's running,
00:08:39.820 | yeah, I'd rather answer questions than just talk, but.
00:08:43.040 | So for anyone who, I mean, the history of it is,
00:08:47.980 | it was a forum that got started by Mel and Taylor
00:08:51.220 | on Morningstar's forums, or Morningstar's site,
00:08:55.580 | they had a little forum section,
00:08:57.600 | and they wanted to carve out a place,
00:08:59.540 | this was during the dot-com boom,
00:09:01.460 | between Janus Junction and Fidelity, whatever,
00:09:04.160 | and just to talk about index investing,
00:09:07.280 | passive investing strategies, and so they did,
00:09:10.400 | and it became, quickly, the most popular forum
00:09:12.400 | on Morningstar's site, and I was one of those people
00:09:16.380 | in 1998, '99, who just asked a question, Taylor answered,
00:09:21.000 | and I just, I really enjoyed the,
00:09:24.820 | just how friendly it was, and how civil it was,
00:09:27.880 | compared to most internet forums then, and now,
00:09:33.040 | and so I hung around, and I started answering questions,
00:09:36.480 | and within about a year or so, Morningstar,
00:09:41.480 | there was a problem where there was so much activity
00:09:44.780 | on the forum that it was very difficult
00:09:47.260 | for the people trying to answer the questions
00:09:49.840 | to keep track of what was being asked,
00:09:54.840 | they just had a really horrible user interface,
00:09:57.380 | and I complained about it to them,
00:10:01.440 | and then I said, look, I'm gonna show you how easy this is,
00:10:04.600 | and I wrote a little program that scraped off
00:10:06.880 | the 50 most recently updated conversations,
00:10:10.280 | which, at the time, was three or four days' worth of threads,
00:10:15.200 | and I just, I managed my wife's immigration law firm,
00:10:18.320 | it was just like four people, five people,
00:10:20.520 | and I just stuck it on a page on our site,
00:10:23.840 | and I just, every, well, if somebody would check it,
00:10:27.240 | or every 15 minutes, whichever came first,
00:10:29.200 | I would go see if there was anything new on Morningstar,
00:10:31.720 | and I just had a program that listed
00:10:34.120 | 50 most recently updated threads,
00:10:36.200 | and it was just a tool for folks like Taylor
00:10:38.920 | to be able to find out what was going on.
00:10:40.960 | This was running for a couple of weeks, maybe a month,
00:10:45.520 | and so all the regulars, the regular,
00:10:48.920 | were using my site, and then I got it here,
00:10:53.840 | on June 23rd, 2001, I got an email that says,
00:10:58.680 | hi, Lowall, that was my username back then,
00:11:01.480 | perhaps I could contribute to your little project.
00:11:03.600 | I've been working on a back burner project
00:11:05.440 | that would provide a searchable text index
00:11:07.960 | of the Diehards Forum.
00:11:09.880 | I have a robot that pulls the conversations,
00:11:11.760 | and I'm working on building a searchable text index.
00:11:15.080 | I plan to build a page that, like yours,
00:11:16.720 | points back to the original post on the Morningstar site.
00:11:20.320 | Let's see, would you be interested
00:11:22.120 | in some kind of collaboration?
00:11:23.920 | And it was signed LDA.
00:11:27.240 | And it was from lda@winix.com,
00:11:32.160 | and I said, okay, who is this guy, right?
00:11:36.120 | So I go Googling around,
00:11:38.400 | and I find that this is Larry Autin.
00:11:41.040 | And who's Larry Autin?
00:11:42.120 | He was one of the pioneers of the internet.
00:11:44.840 | He was one of, when the internet was a dozen computers,
00:11:49.120 | he was the administrator of one of them at Bell Labs,
00:11:52.200 | where he was a researcher, he worked at Bell Labs.
00:11:55.800 | And he wrote, this will be important later,
00:11:59.640 | he actually wrote the original software, the Usenet,
00:12:03.680 | which was these newsgroups,
00:12:05.240 | or sort of the precursors of forums,
00:12:07.260 | used to build, used to allow moderation of the forums,
00:12:12.260 | 'cause the original Usenet, it's just everybody posted,
00:12:15.480 | and there was no moderation.
00:12:16.880 | So I wrote back to him, sure, let's do something.
00:12:22.240 | And within a couple of weeks, we had a site,
00:12:26.440 | and it was an index, and a list, my list of 50,
00:12:30.800 | and then I wrote a short little thing
00:12:32.600 | with five sites of interest,
00:12:35.160 | and who are the diehards, and what is index,
00:12:40.160 | and it just had a couple column, one column of links.
00:12:43.700 | By the way, Scott Burns, I had a link to your site,
00:12:47.440 | wherever you are, it's one of my five original.
00:12:50.400 | (laughs)
00:12:52.480 | And that just ran, I mean, for the next six years,
00:12:57.480 | it just ran, 'cause we were just indexing stuff
00:13:01.300 | on the Morningstar site.
00:13:02.840 | And then things started to fall apart on Morningstar,
00:13:07.720 | because there was a troll,
00:13:08.720 | they wouldn't do anything about it,
00:13:10.720 | and some other guy who, like me, said,
00:13:12.760 | you've gotta fix this, and he started something,
00:13:15.760 | he started his own forum, it went by the name of Phoenix,
00:13:20.620 | but he just said, this is a proof of concept,
00:13:23.660 | I wanna show that it's not necessary
00:13:25.740 | to have to put up with what we're putting up with
00:13:28.300 | on Morningstar.
00:13:29.340 | And a whole bunch of people moved over
00:13:33.660 | within three or four days, and he contacted me,
00:13:36.460 | and he said, this is great, but I can't actually run this.
00:13:41.260 | (laughs)
00:13:43.260 | It's like, I'm doing this on a free server,
00:13:44.980 | I have no, you know, I don't know, I can't handle this.
00:13:47.240 | He's like, would you guys like to take this over?
00:13:49.320 | And I talked to Larry, and we had been in discussions,
00:13:51.920 | like, maybe we should just shut this down,
00:13:54.200 | because it's harder, there was less and less activity
00:13:57.880 | on the Morningstar site as people were running away.
00:14:00.120 | So anyway, we said, okay, we'll try it.
00:14:01.800 | And this was in 2000, let's see,
00:14:05.700 | 2007, right?
00:14:10.000 | And so we quickly, within a week or so, we took it over.
00:14:14.020 | And then I'm faced with, okay, how am I gonna do this?
00:14:16.080 | All right, we have it, I have some ideas.
00:14:18.620 | So I had to write policies and figure out
00:14:22.440 | what kind of conversations we were gonna allow,
00:14:24.680 | and I'm thinking, I wanna build a community
00:14:28.520 | that reflects what I found attractive when I first posted.
00:14:33.520 | So, and that's the basis for our policies,
00:14:37.880 | is sort of what would Taylor do,
00:14:39.200 | or how, you know, that's sort of how I thought about it.
00:14:42.600 | So no religion, no politics, we keep the topics down.
00:14:47.600 | The idea is to just make it a civil place,
00:14:52.360 | and that's, and you can see in,
00:14:55.840 | well, look at all these people, you know, it's worked.
00:14:58.240 | So I guess that's, if there's any questions?
00:15:03.240 | All right, let's see if they're on crypto.
00:15:06.680 | (audience laughing)
00:15:11.400 | Can we get dark mode?
00:15:12.840 | (audience laughing)
00:15:15.640 | Sue, is that a PHP?
00:15:17.600 | - It's a browser extension,
00:15:19.080 | no one can see anything in there.
00:15:21.840 | - I should talk about, so for the first few years of this,
00:15:25.200 | once the forum started, I was spending
00:15:27.820 | somewhere between five and 10 hours a day
00:15:30.200 | as moderating, and writing, and watching everything.
00:15:33.600 | I have stepped way back, and when Sue came in,
00:15:36.400 | so the lady geek right here,
00:15:38.840 | as she was a part of Wiki, you know,
00:15:43.480 | putting together the Wiki,
00:15:44.520 | and then she sort of called Larry, or contacted Larry,
00:15:48.000 | and said, "Can I do some site admin stuff?"
00:15:50.920 | And he just sort of handed to her.
00:15:52.160 | He's like, "Yes, please do."
00:15:53.160 | And she's become our site, our backup site admin,
00:15:56.920 | and day-to-day, you know, sort of manager
00:16:00.160 | of the moderators and things.
00:16:02.560 | And now I just check in once in a while
00:16:04.080 | when there's issues.
00:16:06.920 | So it's Sue and the moderators.
00:16:09.160 | Oh, that's the other thing I should say.
00:16:10.440 | A lot of the questions don't answer,
00:16:13.120 | but a lot of the policies also have to do
00:16:14.760 | with the one most finite resource we have
00:16:17.320 | is moderator time, so you try to do things
00:16:20.200 | that keep things from getting out of hand
00:16:21.860 | for the moderators.
00:16:23.300 | So, dark mode.
00:16:25.000 | One of the other things we do is keep the costs down,
00:16:27.000 | 'cause it's coming out of our pockets,
00:16:29.320 | is we use, everything's open source software,
00:16:34.120 | and we try to keep things, you know,
00:16:37.000 | pretty close to the, without a lot of customization,
00:16:40.360 | and keep it simple for us to manage.
00:16:43.240 | So, if there's a PHP BB dark mode?
00:16:46.240 | - The browser extensions.
00:16:48.720 | - Okay.
00:16:49.540 | - They have dark mode, like Chrome.
00:16:50.380 | I'm gonna try it, but--
00:16:51.560 | - Okay, so maybe see if there's a Chrome--
00:16:53.140 | - There's a Chrome thread on it.
00:16:54.280 | Is it on the administration area?
00:16:56.080 | - There's a thread on it, of course there is.
00:16:57.600 | Okay.
00:16:58.440 | (audience laughs)
00:17:00.160 | And then the other one here.
00:17:01.120 | What do you consider one of the highlights
00:17:02.640 | of your time with the Bogleheads?
00:17:05.800 | Well, maybe this?
00:17:07.340 | (audience laughs)
00:17:09.040 | I mean, it--
00:17:09.880 | (audience applauds)
00:17:12.880 | I don't know, it was, I mean it's just great
00:17:18.040 | to meet the people, to meet, you know,
00:17:21.000 | Bill Bernstein, and these people,
00:17:22.720 | I love their books, so it's, so that part's good.
00:17:26.080 | But it's always good just, just seeing
00:17:31.260 | that it has a positive impact on,
00:17:35.100 | you know, the larger community.
00:17:38.040 | Because this is, I do this as a volunteer.
00:17:40.100 | I have my, come from a family,
00:17:42.240 | my mother volunteered for everything,
00:17:43.580 | my grandmother volunteered for everything.
00:17:44.940 | This is sort of my way of volunteering,
00:17:47.540 | 'cause I don't have a lot of money to give to things,
00:17:49.540 | so I can give my time, and, you know,
00:17:54.540 | sort of built this thing that I, you know,
00:17:58.700 | that I had the ability to do.
00:17:59.940 | I had the background, whatever, to do it.
00:18:02.540 | So, well, I guess just seeing that it continues.
00:18:07.540 | Lots of forums, as forums as a class
00:18:11.040 | are sort of disappearing.
00:18:13.340 | You know, Reddit took a lot of 'em down,
00:18:15.000 | Facebook took a lot of 'em down,
00:18:16.200 | so ours is really unusual to have a forum
00:18:19.220 | that is not just continued, but actually continues
00:18:22.180 | to grow at a slow rate over time.
00:18:25.080 | So, that's it, I guess.
00:18:28.160 | All right, thank you.
00:18:29.000 | (audience applauds)
00:18:32.000 | (air whooshes)
00:18:34.580 | [BLANK_AUDIO]