YouSaid · the spoken record

Brendan Moynihan

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73
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2014-09-16
most recent
2014-09-16
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1
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  1. “When he's sitting there having Jim was 6'162, probably 170, 175 pounds, lean, angular, may have been blonde and starting to go a little bit gray, fair complexion, and a gravel voice from yelling in the lumber pit for 10, 15 years or something. I mean, his voice sounded like gravel in the bottom of an empty coffee can.”

    2014-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 29: What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, with Author Brendan Moynihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “People are sending in checks. I go down there every day, get the checks, go home, box up books, bail them out. I mean, it was insane. And then Jim would give speeches in the futures industry, and he'd take a bunch of books and he'd like sell them one by one. And, I mean, it was not our job. But we got all the money. You know what I mean? It wasn't like there was a cut, but it was a hobby. I don't play golf or tennis, so it's like, this is what I do with my time.”

    2014-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 29: What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, with Author Brendan Moynihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “And then we just got really lucky. I sent out maybe twenty or thirty made up press releases. I didn't even know what a press release was, but I created one or looked at one and just made the same thing. So I sent them off to some of the news organizations. And Mark Holbert at Forbes Magazine picked up on it The day we self publish the book October 5th, 1994, it made a byline on the cover of Forbes magazine above Jack Welch's head that says biggest mistakes investors make, are you guilty? Bang, we were done. We broke even in three months, and then we just had books to give away, and we sold the German rights, and then we were just kind of off to the races.”

    2014-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 29: What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, with Author Brendan Moynihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “So I decided that we're going to self-publish it. I wrote a letter with a five-page synopsis of the book and a full copy of the manuscript and a self-addressed stamped envelope and sent it out to about 30 people of name in the industry, including Warren Buffett, who wrote back and said, sorry, Mr. Moynihan, too many requests, too little time. Warren Buffett. But I got his autograph. So we collected quite a few people. Ned Davis runs Ned Davis Research out of Florida. Ned put his name on the back cover. Bob Prector from the Futures Industry did Leo Muhammad, Chairman Emeritus of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Ken Fisher out in your neck of the woods, Little Blorb on the back cover of the book. So we wound up with a pretty good list of eight or ten people of some name who were willing to read the book and put a blurb on it.”

    2014-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 29: What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, with Author Brendan Moynihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “But in the course of doing the book, I found out that the author really doesn't get that much money unless you're like a really big hitter and you get in advance and it's a great book and blah, blah, blah. I mean, there are a lot of middlemen in between from the publisher to the bookstores or whatever. To the person who gets paid to do the indexing on the book, getting as much as I was or something, I'm like, really? I mean, I wrote the book.”

    2014-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 29: What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, with Author Brendan Moynihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Well, I think I've learned since then because I've written several since that just sometimes it's like something that's into your head and you got to get it out. I mean, I don't know if it's, you know, I'm not an artist by any stretch. My mom was. I did a bit when I was younger, but I guess you get something in your head and artists have to kind of get it out. So each of the subsequent books that I did kind of follow the same pattern where it's like I had this observation, I have something to say about it. I've got to figure out the best way to say it. And then I want to create a physical product out of it and then try to sell it. I mean, it's like... We were trying to make a fortune off of Jim's misfortune. And we didn't necessarily, but it's not a bad business card. We hand it out and it works.”

    2014-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 29: What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, with Author Brendan Moynihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “It was. And it was on a UNIVAC system. Again, there were wood-burning computers. There were no desktop computers at this place. We're talking about 1990. I'm sure they existed somewhere, but they didn't exist at this place. So then I took my stuff and started tapping it out on the weekends. And then I started doing nights where I'd work all day, go home, have dinner, put the kids to bed, go back down to the office, worked on the computer, add into it. And it took the better, I mean, between the research and the writing and the back and forth and figuring out how I was going to organize it. It took me the better part of three years, four years to really kind of get it all into shape. I don't know if you want to be bored with the details of, I mean, that was the writing side of it, the production side. It was a little interesting as well.”

    2014-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 29: What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, with Author Brendan Moynihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “So that was it for the night. I mean, we got eight hours that day. And then we did probably another nine hours the next day. I wound up with 17 hours worth of tape that I took back with me, all little microcassettes. And then I spent Thanksgiving day when I wasn't at the turkey dinner in the office, which was closed using the secretary's headphones and dictophone machine where you put the tapes in. And then you use foot pedals and you fast forward and rewind. And I started transcribing this thing. And then I started spending weekends transcribing it. And I'd never typed before in my life. So I basically used the Columbus method, hunt, seek, and land to type this thing out.”

    2014-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 29: What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, with Author Brendan Moynihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “And I probably need to put my head down because it's not drinking beer, and all the afternoon is not something I really do. So So I went, there was a guest room. So I go to the guest room. About half an hour later he comes in hanging on the door and he goes, Brendan, Brendan, we're in big trouble. We're supposed to meet for dinner in 30 minutes, and we've got to leave right now if we're going to make it. No, no, no, no. Now you may be in big trouble, but I'm not in big trouble. I'm not going anywhere until this room stops spinning and it's not going to be anytime soon. So you go ahead and with Pat if you want, but I'm not losing.”

    2014-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 29: What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, with Author Brendan Moynihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Anyway, I'm like, okay, can we get started in the morning? So we got started in the morning. I had to take a quarter, had all the tape, had extra batteries, ready to go. This is just a little dictophone. It's like the size of a business card, a little bit larger or whatever. And Jimmy goes to the pantry and pours himself a screwdriver. This is eight o'clock in the morning. I'm like, well, I know Jim had sort of mentioned, like when we went to lunch that day, he was like, oh, I think I'll have a drink. I'm like, okay, it's lunchtime and they're going back to work. So, you know, Jim had a screwdriver then, and then Jim continued to drink screwdrivers and just talked into the tape recorder. Well, I asked a few questions here and there, but he basically was just doing a brain dump, and I was just going to transcribe it all later. So I don't know, maybe three in the afternoon, I kind of give in and say, okay, well, I'll have a beer. So I go to the former and I have a beer, and after about like an hour and a half of drinking beer, and he's drinking, I don't know what by then. I'm feeling a little like loose. I'm like, you know what? You've been at this for eight hours. You probably need a little rest. You've been talking and drinking for eight hours.”

    2014-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 29: What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, with Author Brendan Moynihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Like, I'd never seen this thing. I didn't know what it was all about. So I sit there for like another, I don't know how long that was, two hours, another two hours of my life, I was never going to get back. So we got to the end of the thing, and I told her, Jim is 50 years old at this time. I turn and look, and the guy is sobbing. He has seen the movie before, okay? And he's sobbing at the final scene of this thing where the guy shows up. Richard Gear, like supposedly like he's riding a horse and carrying flowers and coming to get this girl or something. And it's like, you've got to be kidding me.”

    2014-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 29: What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, with Author Brendan Moynihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “So then Jim turns on a Kentucky basketball game or something, and I don't really follow sports, so I was kind of like, okay, I'm going to burn two hours here, like, you know, doing nothing. I don't really care about this. So Jim watches the basketball game and I'm like, okay, great. I'm like, okay, I'm ready to get started. Let's watch a movie. So he puts in this movie called Pretty Woman. I don't really watch movies.”

    2014-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 29: What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, with Author Brendan Moynihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “So that was May 31st, and then the beginning of November, he calls me and says, you know, I can't do it. I tried. I can't talk to anybody. So I'm going to mail you a plane ticket. You're going to fly up here and stay with me for a weekend, and I'm going to tell you the story. I'm like, all right, great. So the weekend before Thanksgiving in 1990 on a Friday, I flew up to Chicago. He picked me up at the airport, went to the house, got there, I don't know. Five, six o'clock, or something, and as I said, she goes, gentlemen, I lived this once. I'm not going to live through it again.”

    2014-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 29: What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, with Author Brendan Moynihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Because it was a lunch, so it was an hour, right? I mean, he just told me kind of the highlights and said, you know, somebody said I should write a book. I said, well, I can do that. I said, if you will tell the story to someone who hasn't heard it before so that you will be animated and full of inflection and just tape record it, send me the tapes, and then I will transcribe it and I will match it in with my theory. And I told him what my theory was, and I'd worked for him, so he was a little bit familiar with what my approach was.”

    2014-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 29: What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, with Author Brendan Moynihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “And that's a good with names, but for some reason the 10 digits aren't as much of a challenge in their combination. So I don't know. I mean, there's some dates I can remember certain things or certain things strike me as important. So I remember them that... Go in one ear and out the other.”

    2014-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 29: What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, with Author Brendan Moynihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Four years there. I learned from a pretty smart guy there who'd been around for a long time and kind of continued my real world education rather than going to graduate school. And I got married, had my first son, and wound up working for a guy named Jim Paul for the last year that I was in Chicago, and I had gotten recruited back to Nashville, and it was at that lunch with Jim on my last day of working for him. I was in the futures research department at Dean Litter, and the last day of my employ with him, he took me to lunch and he told me the story about, or part of the story about how I'd lost the money. And he said, somebody said I should write a book about it. And I said, well, you know what? I can do it. I can take your flowery story and marry it with my dry theory. And that was May 31st, 1990.”

    2014-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 29: What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, with Author Brendan Moynihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Well, it's not an elaborate background. I was raised in Alabama and I had the good fortune to one day in my senior year have Jim Rogers, who had started Parma Soros Fund. He's from Demopolis, Alabama. I was from Birmingham. He came and spoke to our senior class, I think out of his fealty toward the state and coming to visit. And I was at the University of Alabama, so he came and spoke. And after class, I went up and collared him and said, okay, you're a poor boy from Alabama and got to New York. How do I do it? So he said, well, I'm in town tonight if you want to go to dinner. So I went and had dinner with Jim Rogers when I was still a senior in college. I mean, I was already sort of determined that this is the industry I was going to get into, but I thought I got to take advantage of this guy being on the premises to talk to him. So, you know, I learned a little bit from him and struck up a bit of a dialogue. And way back then, when there were wood-burning computers and there was no worldwide web, I wrote to him and he wrote to me or I called him, he called me. And that kind of got me started. I interned when I was in college at a regional investment bank, and then I went to work with him for the first year after school. That was in Nashville, but I wanted to get to Chicago and New York, and I decided on Chicago for the futures market. So I went to Chicago.”

    2014-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 29: What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, with Author Brendan Moynihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “And you could say the same thing about the SP 500, which everybody believes is a stock index we've had for since 1928, but it's not true. It was created in 1957 on March 4th, and before that it was a 90 stock index, and 10 years ago, 40% of the stocks that are in it now were not even in it. If you go back 40 years, like 80% of the stocks that are in it now weren't in it. So, I mean, even the The gauge by which people are measuring one, how the market performs and then how managers perform against that is like an elastic measuring tool. It's a rubber band. It's not a fixed set.”

    2014-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 29: What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, with Author Brendan Moynihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “That does that. They forecast what the market's going to do or what the economy is going to do. They tell people what they should do with their money, what they reveal inside secrets. And I think that he said, you know, if you try to do those or you try to follow those, you might get lucky for a while, but you have to understand that was luck. It was not some special secret formula that you had or got from this person to bring you to that state. But yeah, no, I think you're right. It happens in every industry.”

    2014-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 29: What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, with Author Brendan Moynihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Well, Taleb put the label on there, so I don't necessarily want to speak to what his viewer perspective was on that. But from what I understand, that people are holding themselves out as experts with some sort of specialized knowledge or insight. That as a high priest class, only they can impart to other people. And there were people who made livelihoods throughout history by being hucksters or tricksters or charlatans. And I think that from my understanding of reading Taleb's work, that he thinks that there is a large cottage industry in the financial”

    2014-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 29: What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, with Author Brendan Moynihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Why would somebody reveal their secrets to making it? Why don't we examine what goes wrong and then if somebody's willing to bear their soul about that and share the mistakes, then as a parable, it might have more resonance with people about what not to do rather than what to do. And I think there's I'll get into it later, but I think there's a real premise for why it's essential to know the downside rather than all the different ways to make it on the upside.”

    2014-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 29: What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, with Author Brendan Moynihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “I was happy to have had it and I wasn't going to jinx it. But we had a very interesting discussion while we were in that room, and it turns out that he's read a lot of the same things that I've read. And so it was sort of a dialogue between him and me while the reporters were kind of taking notes, which is very interesting. So I don't know why he did that. But I think that it's because it was an opposite tact in that there are so many books out there on How I Made a Million Dollars in the Stock Market Last Year before breakfast. And in the million dollar book that I wrote, I even go back and try to find out how old is this? And there's a book from like 1881, I think, by James Briskin called The Beef Bonanza, How to Get Rich on the Planes. It was in the stock market. I guess it was a livestock market. But people have been forever, like, I'm going to tell you my secrets of how I got rich. I don't understand that. So I titled this book, What I Learn Losing a Million Dollars with my co-author. Again, Jim lost the money, not me. I want to be clear about that.”

    2014-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 29: What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, with Author Brendan Moynihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “Don't know. I had never met him when he put the title of my book in the Black Swan, and at that time he said it was the best non charlatanic finance book he'd ever read, and it was actually that mention that caused a little bit of a stir with email for me to reprint the book. So I reprinted the book based on what happened in the Black Swan. And then a few years later, he was at an interview with a dozen or so journalists at Bloomberg News and I happened to be a consultant there at the time, and they invited me to sit in on the lunch. And he recognized my name when I was introduced just because he had put it in his book. So I never really queried him about, I mean, I was thankful that he did it because he's not known for handing out compliments, so I was just happy to do that.”

    2014-09-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 29: What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, with Author Brendan Moynihan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT