(audience applauding) - Thank you all for being here tonight. It's lovely to see this group. Of course, I've seen this video on several occasions, but it never ceases to move me. So tonight I'm thinking about the people who aren't here with us, Jack Bogle, of course, but also some of our former leaders, some of our real thought leaders still, Taylor Larimore, who is still with us, but just not with us tonight, and Mel Lindauer.

Those are our two Hall of Fame inductees so far, and we plan to induct some additional individuals tonight. I have been thinking about this group and how our focus is on community and education, financial education, and how well this conference, I think, embodies those two things. So it's lovely to see the new people who have joined, so many people with the tags that say they're first-time attendees.

It makes me so happy to see that, and we hope to just continue on with this conference, and the Bogle Center will hope to continue furthering people's financial education. If you wish to support our mission, which involves the conference and we support the forum and the local chapters, please, you can make a tax-deductible contribution to the organization, and you can also volunteer.

I think I've heard from several people already that they would like to be more involved, and we would love to have you more involved, so please check in with me or check in with someone else who is wearing a board tag, and we can help connect you with things that you can help us with.

We would absolutely love that. So thanks to all of you for being here. Right now, I want to invite Andrew Bogle up to the podium. Andrew is Jack's son, Jack's youngest son, and he is a member of our board and a really valued member. All of our board members are valuable, but Andrew really helps us think about what are the best ways to honor Jack's legacy, so he helps us stay connected with what Jack would want and what the family would want.

So I'll ask Andrew to come up here now, and he is going to induct our new members into the Hall of Fame. Andrew, thank you. (audience applauding) - Good evening. Thank you for making the time, effort, and expense to come to BogleHuts 2024. I am honored and thrilled to serve on the board of the John C.

Bogle Center for Financial Literacy, and it's my distinct pleasure to be with all of you tonight. Thank you. As Christine mentioned, I'm the youngest child of Jack. He loved being in the spotlight, in case you didn't know that. (audience laughing) As a child, I couldn't comprehend it, and candidly, it brought out a feeling in me of not wanting to be in the spotlight, ever.

(audience laughing) But at some point on my journey to some level of maturity, relatively speaking, it occurred to me that a possible driver of his enjoyment of the spotlight wasn't actually his craving of publicity, though it could have been a little bit, but rather, he saw it as serving as a conduit to bring the spotlight on a new way for everyday investors to learn that there was a better way for them to invest.

So it wasn't necessarily about the spotlight. Rather, it was a continuation of my father's frugal ways since it was free advertising. (audience laughing) Being the youngest of six kids, I was always behind my brothers and sisters with my knowledge, and relatively speaking, a tiny little kid even compared to my peers.

So I wanted to explore what I might be able to do to possibly decrease that gap. So whether by nurture, nature, or just plain stubbornness like my father, I am or became very curious. I asked a lot of questions. I talked to a lot of people, and they were very kind and generous with sharing their knowledge and time with me.

Similar. (audience laughing) Unexpected. Similar to what all of you do both here and on the forum of sharing your knowledge and time with everyone else. For that, I'm gratefully grateful. So in some ways, I was an early Boglehead. I wanna express my gratitude to all of you. You all spent an inordinate amount of time and expertise to not only assist other people, but also, and I would argue just as importantly, to make everyone feel welcomed, looked after, and to make them feel good about having a shot at the financial future.

Tonight, I'm here to thank and honor two men who have done so much for the Bogleheads Forum. Unlike my father, they did not seek the spotlight. Larry and Alex are instrumental for all of us Bogleheads to share knowledge and ask questions on the forum. Through their time, effort, expertise, and thoughtfulness, they truly keep the forum up and running.

Larry was an early volunteer, initially offering both his services and expertise and setting up and hosting a Bogleheads website back in the 1990s when it was called the Vanguard Diehard on Morningstar. It took some time, but finally in 2007, Larry stepped up and used his own funds to host the website.

Since then, he's kept both the server and the forum software up to date on bogleheads.org. Alex has been an administrator of the forum since its inception. He sets forum policy, and in coordination with other forum administrators and moderators, helps with the interpretation and enforcement of those policies. Alex is a final arbiter when there are issues from the forum moderators that they feel they need further clarification or final resolution.

As Lady Geek told me, Larry is patient and exemplifies someone who is a true expert, since, like my father, he's able to distill complex systems in simple terms and concepts that everyone can understand. And his primary motivation is to help others. She went on to describe Alex in the following way, quote, "If I had to describe Alex in one word, "it's purpose.

"What no one but the moderators can see "is his persistent determination "to keep the Bogleheads forum aligned "with its core principles, to have civil discussions, "and to treat its members fairly. "It is my honor and pleasure to induct and welcome "Larry and Alex to the Bogleheads Hall of Fame.

"Please help me in congratulating them." (audience applauds) - All right, I don't have a speech, and Larry, who I always like to be behind the scenes, has bowed out, so. (audience laughs) I'm going to take credit for the whole site. (audience laughs) So the quick history, which I'll do real quick, and also, I think if anybody has questions, they said they were gonna do the note card things, 'cause I'm gonna not talk very long, so if you have questions about anything to do with the forum or the site, and it's running, yeah, I'd rather answer questions than just talk, but.

So for anyone who, I mean, the history of it is, it was a forum that got started by Mel and Taylor on Morningstar's forums, or Morningstar's site, they had a little forum section, and they wanted to carve out a place, this was during the dot-com boom, between Janus Junction and Fidelity, whatever, and just to talk about index investing, passive investing strategies, and so they did, and it became, quickly, the most popular forum on Morningstar's site, and I was one of those people in 1998, '99, who just asked a question, Taylor answered, and I just, I really enjoyed the, just how friendly it was, and how civil it was, compared to most internet forums then, and now, and so I hung around, and I started answering questions, and within about a year or so, Morningstar, there was a problem where there was so much activity on the forum that it was very difficult for the people trying to answer the questions to keep track of what was being asked, they just had a really horrible user interface, and I complained about it to them, and then I said, look, I'm gonna show you how easy this is, and I wrote a little program that scraped off the 50 most recently updated conversations, which, at the time, was three or four days' worth of threads, and I just, I managed my wife's immigration law firm, it was just like four people, five people, and I just stuck it on a page on our site, and I just, every, well, if somebody would check it, or every 15 minutes, whichever came first, I would go see if there was anything new on Morningstar, and I just had a program that listed 50 most recently updated threads, and it was just a tool for folks like Taylor to be able to find out what was going on.

This was running for a couple of weeks, maybe a month, and so all the regulars, the regular, were using my site, and then I got it here, on June 23rd, 2001, I got an email that says, hi, Lowall, that was my username back then, perhaps I could contribute to your little project.

I've been working on a back burner project that would provide a searchable text index of the Diehards Forum. I have a robot that pulls the conversations, and I'm working on building a searchable text index. I plan to build a page that, like yours, points back to the original post on the Morningstar site.

Let's see, would you be interested in some kind of collaboration? And it was signed LDA. And it was from lda@winix.com, and I said, okay, who is this guy, right? So I go Googling around, and I find that this is Larry Autin. And who's Larry Autin? He was one of the pioneers of the internet.

He was one of, when the internet was a dozen computers, he was the administrator of one of them at Bell Labs, where he was a researcher, he worked at Bell Labs. And he wrote, this will be important later, he actually wrote the original software, the Usenet, which was these newsgroups, or sort of the precursors of forums, used to build, used to allow moderation of the forums, 'cause the original Usenet, it's just everybody posted, and there was no moderation.

So I wrote back to him, sure, let's do something. And within a couple of weeks, we had a site, and it was an index, and a list, my list of 50, and then I wrote a short little thing with five sites of interest, and who are the diehards, and what is index, and it just had a couple column, one column of links.

By the way, Scott Burns, I had a link to your site, wherever you are, it's one of my five original. (laughs) And that just ran, I mean, for the next six years, it just ran, 'cause we were just indexing stuff on the Morningstar site. And then things started to fall apart on Morningstar, because there was a troll, they wouldn't do anything about it, and some other guy who, like me, said, you've gotta fix this, and he started something, he started his own forum, it went by the name of Phoenix, but he just said, this is a proof of concept, I wanna show that it's not necessary to have to put up with what we're putting up with on Morningstar.

And a whole bunch of people moved over within three or four days, and he contacted me, and he said, this is great, but I can't actually run this. (laughs) It's like, I'm doing this on a free server, I have no, you know, I don't know, I can't handle this.

He's like, would you guys like to take this over? And I talked to Larry, and we had been in discussions, like, maybe we should just shut this down, because it's harder, there was less and less activity on the Morningstar site as people were running away. So anyway, we said, okay, we'll try it.

And this was in 2000, let's see, 2007, right? And so we quickly, within a week or so, we took it over. And then I'm faced with, okay, how am I gonna do this? All right, we have it, I have some ideas. So I had to write policies and figure out what kind of conversations we were gonna allow, and I'm thinking, I wanna build a community that reflects what I found attractive when I first posted.

So, and that's the basis for our policies, is sort of what would Taylor do, or how, you know, that's sort of how I thought about it. So no religion, no politics, we keep the topics down. The idea is to just make it a civil place, and that's, and you can see in, well, look at all these people, you know, it's worked.

So I guess that's, if there's any questions? All right, let's see if they're on crypto. (audience laughing) Can we get dark mode? (audience laughing) Sue, is that a PHP? - It's a browser extension, no one can see anything in there. - I should talk about, so for the first few years of this, once the forum started, I was spending somewhere between five and 10 hours a day as moderating, and writing, and watching everything.

I have stepped way back, and when Sue came in, so the lady geek right here, as she was a part of Wiki, you know, putting together the Wiki, and then she sort of called Larry, or contacted Larry, and said, "Can I do some site admin stuff?" And he just sort of handed to her.

He's like, "Yes, please do." And she's become our site, our backup site admin, and day-to-day, you know, sort of manager of the moderators and things. And now I just check in once in a while when there's issues. So it's Sue and the moderators. Oh, that's the other thing I should say.

A lot of the questions don't answer, but a lot of the policies also have to do with the one most finite resource we have is moderator time, so you try to do things that keep things from getting out of hand for the moderators. So, dark mode. One of the other things we do is keep the costs down, 'cause it's coming out of our pockets, is we use, everything's open source software, and we try to keep things, you know, pretty close to the, without a lot of customization, and keep it simple for us to manage.

So, if there's a PHP BB dark mode? - The browser extensions. - Okay. - They have dark mode, like Chrome. I'm gonna try it, but-- - Okay, so maybe see if there's a Chrome-- - There's a Chrome thread on it. Is it on the administration area? - There's a thread on it, of course there is.

Okay. (audience laughs) And then the other one here. What do you consider one of the highlights of your time with the Bogleheads? Well, maybe this? (audience laughs) I mean, it-- (audience applauds) I don't know, it was, I mean it's just great to meet the people, to meet, you know, Bill Bernstein, and these people, I love their books, so it's, so that part's good.

But it's always good just, just seeing that it has a positive impact on, you know, the larger community. Because this is, I do this as a volunteer. I have my, come from a family, my mother volunteered for everything, my grandmother volunteered for everything. This is sort of my way of volunteering, 'cause I don't have a lot of money to give to things, so I can give my time, and, you know, sort of built this thing that I, you know, that I had the ability to do.

I had the background, whatever, to do it. So, well, I guess just seeing that it continues. Lots of forums, as forums as a class are sort of disappearing. You know, Reddit took a lot of 'em down, Facebook took a lot of 'em down, so ours is really unusual to have a forum that is not just continued, but actually continues to grow at a slow rate over time.

So, that's it, I guess. All right, thank you. (audience applauds) (air whooshes)