YouSaid · the spoken record

David Yarrow

lines on the record: 148
first: 2020-06-25
most recent: 2020-06-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“The next day I got redemptions or the next week of $600 million. And that was it. That was it. So something that I was exposed to, there was an exogenous variable effectively to all intents and purposes killed the business. And you asked a question quite a long time ago. It might have been in a previous millennium, but you asked me the question, what did you learn from investment from your time in banking? I think the thing that I took away from it most was that I must never again put myself in a position where your work ethic can be totally undone by things be totally beyond your control. It's rather ironic I say this as the coronavirus is about to hit its peak in parts.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anyway, so I get this phone call saying this guy Bernie Madoff Madoff has handed himself over to the FBI in this biggest Ponzi scheme. And I go, who's he? And they say, well, he runs a big hedge fund out of New York. I said, well, it won't affect us, silly idiot. Bunch of crooks in this game. I knew about a group of people called Fairfield Greenwich that were a feeder to him because this was a well-known fun, but I thought it had no impact on us. And how wrong was I? Because what I didn't know was that... So much of the money that had got invested with Bernie Madoff had also invested with us. And when I set the fund up in 1997, the only people that were going to put money with me were my dog and my sister. So in 1997, I said, you can have your money back in a week's time. And I kept that rolling.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I was very cautious about that. Rollbank of Scotland bought one of Eurobank's citizens and it just didn't stack up that these were where they were in terms of 300 years of prudence, a culture of prudence had gone to five years of a culture of building the balance sheet. Anyway, to cut a long story short, we got through 2008, I think it was the 8th of December. I had a Christmas lunch with my team and said, well, listen, you know, it's been a shitty time, but most people have had their bollocks put on a plate and we've lost three or four percent of people's money. So we're going to come out of this okay.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About 1450. But in 2007, a nation of 6 million people, and we've got two of the top 10 banks in the world, that doesn't stack up. It stacks up. We might have had three of the oldest universities and one of the worst football teams, but not two of the biggest banks in the world.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And something I had to give, and it gave. And of course, if there is a little bit of money knocking around because of previous success, well, then the lawyers take their teeth in and all hell break. This is moving forward now that when the world really did start financially to implode, which was around the first signs in 2006, I think it was the investment bank Bear Stearns and then just continued to spiral downwards from there. And because I was going through the kind of final parts of that divorce, I was had a disposition to be cautious anyway. I just couldn't maybe subconsciously my whole mindset was to be cynical and miserable. So and also something's got to be wrong. I mean, Scott's quite a savvy bunch. I think the three oldest universities in the world are Scottish.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you mean I would drink too much? And I would, I think I'd leave it at that, but I don't think I was, I wasn't a happy person. Then you go in the following day to face more hell. And also then if you do, and so many people do get divorced, sadly, but it can, it's about as big a test as you can have. Unless there is someone on the other side and you fall in love with somewhere else, and I hadn't, neither of us were, there was no infidelity. It was just like ships in the night, two people that were, one was being a mother, which is the most important job in the world, and the other was being a depressed hench file manager full of self-inflated ideas of their own importance potentially.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Time for me. And when markets are your way, when your fund is performing through luck or judgment, those cracks can be papered over in a cocktail of champagne and good food and wine and people playing up to you because you're the guy. But of course, as soon as the performance deteriorates, which inevitably it will from time to time, those cracks become very conspicuous. And my life kind of blew up. My marriage didn't survive. I probably took it out of myself quite a bit in the evenings.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About six months and six to six to nine months. The reality, Tim, was that I was not equipped for it. I was not equipped suddenly to be having a wife, a daughter, 45 people, a billion dollars, whereas wine back two years before, I was just a kid with a dream. And it was actually too much for me. And I couldn't cope because suddenly everyone wanted a little bit of my time at home or in the office. And I had to add a lot of stakeholders in my life. I'm not saying that that's a bad thing. I do again now, but I'm more mature. I can cope with it. But then I just couldn't. And I just felt lonely. I felt unhappy. And I didn't know when the me time was. There was no real.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's why the book Nassim Talib's book Full By Randomness plays a big role in my thought processes. I was just lucky. But I went from running a small amount of money to employing 45 people, to running a billion dollars.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things became there was no impact on the markets of the first plane going in, absolutely none at all because people just assumed it was an accident. And the whole, I'm sure you remember the visuals of that hole on the tar, it just seemed a bloody big hole for, I'm not trying to be Monday morning quarterback, but I took the decision. There was no skill in it. It was just instinct. whole denewment of 9-11 and whatever I went from being someone that was seen to be a nobody. I hasten to add we didn't make any money from this we just avoided our clients losing any money so when they got their returns for the month of September in the post their return was 0.3 whereas of course a lot of people had lost 15 20% of their money”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is on the day of nothing. This is on the day. And so by the time the second plane went in, we'd cleared the decks for every client that we had of every holding that we had. I think Goldman Sachs, I think it was in those days still now, but they were looking after me. They sold everything that we had. If you go back to those, whatever they were, 19 minutes or 18 minutes between the two planes, and when one of the CNBC anchors died two or three years ago, Mark Holmes, they played his, I thought, extraordinary performance on kind of an incredibly professional of those 19, 20 minutes. What I find still extraordinary was that it was really only two minutes before the second plane went in that”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course, because it was 215 or sort of 5 to 2 European or British time, our markets were open. And I was running a very, very small pot of money at that time, but I still had responsibility. I probably had about 60 or 70 investors. And I just, it was just didn't like what I saw. And markets had been tough anyway. Ericsson, the Swedish mobile telephony company had warned the previous day. And also, I was with my wife and I was on a road trip in America. And I thought, you know what, this just doesn't look good. And because I'd read all the books, I just thought, why don't I just take my risk off? And because markets were open.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we were. And in 2000, we had our first daughter. And everyone looked at me and said, bloody hell, Yarry, you've not done bad. You've got a lovely young family. You've got your own business. And then she was barely one year old. We went over to America for a wedding in September 2001. And at the end of the wedding, we said, well, tell you, why don't we, rather than going back to the UK, why don't we just go on a little bit of a US road trip? And on the Tuesday morning, I was getting ready and I was just in the lobby of the hotel when I saw the first plane go in or what looked like the repercussions of the first plane going in.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And then the big Scandinavian telephony stocks and Nokia's, the Ericssons, and then there was the whole Y2K, the turn of the millennium situation. I often say to people, if you set up a business on Monday and you get married on a Tuesday, metaphorically. Lot of things are going to have to go right in your life for that decision making crammed into one kind of week albeit wasn't but I kind of set up a business on Monday and kind of got married on a Tuesday did you get married?”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I set up my own fund and I didn't really know I was 301 at the time. And there were a few things I had to negotiate in the markets, but it wasn't that demanding. There was the big run in tech stocks that you'll remember in the towards the tail end of the 1990s, 1998, 1999.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And didn't have any obligations. And I thought, Flow, don't do it now. I never will. And the idea of continuing to be that bud fox and plenty of six-figure numbers on that zip file kind of call, I'd done that for eight years. And for most people, it's enough. That's a tough job. I do feel, and the job is slightly anachronistic now, but that job of being your kind of Bud Fox salesman. And we'll come on to Jordan Belford because I spent quite a bit of time with him over the last 12 months. But it was a slightly more elevated phone call than Jordan. Walt Wall Street.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Moved to America for a while. And when I was working in Wall Street, I got to meet some of the first hedge fund managers. Some of them were in Boston, some of them in New York. And I thought, this is a kind of cool job. You're the guy that can sit around and not have to make calls the whole time, but maybe be slightly more cerebral. Spend a bit more time just doing your own research and be judged by the quality of your decisions, not the quantity of your calls. The problem is that no one wanted to harm me as a hedge fund manager. So I thought in about 1995, 96, I left the investment bank and set up my own fund management business. I wasn't married.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I learned so much. I learned failure, humility, surrounding myself with bright people. And I made a lot of friends. And I think I encourage younger people these days to remember that friendships and the contact, the people you can call are so important, particularly at times like this when you need to be calling people and need to have a degree of contextuality. You're right. In 1988, going into a dealing room, whether it be a Salomon's dealing room or in my case, it was an investment bank called Nat West Markets, having 500 people in one room was incredibly exciting. You didn't, again, you didn't really have a clue what was going on. And someone else was paying for you to learn.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“American banks, they've got an executive role and they've got to understand exactly what's going on in terms of their risk-rated assets and the risk portfolio of those assets. Whereas in the UK, there was a period where there were a lot of banks and you could have a figure at the helm that was just there to add a little bit of grey hair and gravitas without having a fucking clue what was going on.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that your banking system and our banking system are very different. If you look at right now, if you look at the big, the senior banks, the chairman of the banks that are being interviewed right now during this meltdown in financial markets and talk of depression, they are entirely fluid in the language of collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps. If you're a chairman of a British bank, you just have to be familiar with opening an envelope and opening an office. And my father's role was very much more, there's a ceremony today. Someone's got their 50-year, give them a watch. They've been working 50 years. I don't mean sound that disrespectfully, but the chairman of”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It just seemed the normal thing to do. I'll never forget a conversation with my father, who I had a difficult relationship. He was a kind of patriarchal Edwardian character. That was just the way he was. He didn't mean it. That's the way he was of that old school downtown Abbey type generation that would never express words like love and congratulations or whatever. It would be very difficult to get that kind of appreciation out of him. And I remember him saying to me, he said, David, you should go into banking because it's a robust, honorable profession, whereas photography is just a hobby. And it kind of dates the conversation that anyone can say that because it says, well, that must have been in the 80s when someone said that. And my dad was an industrial, but he was... Also, chairman of a bank and a kind of ambassadorial way.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A great read, and it was RJR Nabisco, wasn't it? And then Michael Lewis, who just a superb writer, just brings it home. And I think Lars Perker about the dealing room floor of Salomon Brothers was almost like the Bible if you were, whether I'm sure it's true in America as well, if you'd been at Harvard or Princeton, MIT and I was not at an Ivy League college like that, but Edinburgh University was certainly a good platform for people building a career in those days in the UK.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because everyone else is doing it, and I'd watch Wall Street, and I thought Gordon Gecko and Bud Fox were super cool. And it was inside. It wasn't like minus 25 in Cargre. And it just seemed like what everyone else was doing. Way back in 1988, the Big Bang had happened in the UK. That was when there was a consolidation of the whole broking industry. And Oliver Stone had produced Wall Street about 1985, that era of 1985. And the books we read were books.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think they're both nearly bust now, by the way. I think Wagetti's really well being bought back by the family because they had to buy it back after the private equity past de parcel. And Nat West is certainly bust.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Much of a bigger magazine than it is now, regrettably. But I didn't see many people that set a goal for me to try and attain in terms of getting job affirmation, getting better what they're doing, really enjoying their life and taking pleasure from it. There was, I think, quite a lot of fairly unhappy pressmen on tour. I remember coming back from that Olympics and I had two job offers because I'd finished and the two job offers were the identical salary. There was a job offer of what would equate now to $20,000 to work for what is now Getty Images, which you'll be familiar with. And then there was an offer of 20,000. To work for Nat West Bank. And to the enormous surprise of people at Getty, but to the profound delight of my parents, I chose Nat West Bank.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of artists are insecure and I'm insecure. It manifests itself in lots of different ways. I think a lot of people would see me as not having one ounce of insecurity, but I do and I worry about things that I probably shouldn't do. But I had a problem that there was no one there in the photography world that was 20 years older than me or 25 years older than me that I looked up to and I said I really want to be that man when I'm older. That's what I really want to be. I want to be him. There was no guiding light. And that's not meant to be disrespectful to any of these individuals who are great fun in the evenings most of the time, but a lot of them had fairly dysfunctional lives and didn't, I didn't really see where the end game was. They were pressmen. They were working for either big newspapers or in those days, of course, supports illustrated was.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stories, and I'd love the glamour of it all and being where the world was focused to be at that men's downhill with the world watching it was hugely exciting. But I just worried about what it was all about, what my craft, what was I trying to do, I was just getting another picture that perhaps the world didn't need. There was something else, Tim, that concerned me that I am...”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In that everyone tends to try and help each other, certainly the top, the bottom, maybe people are in a hurry and then the people that are insecure can be a little bit bitsy. I'm sure it's the same in every industry. But I would see too many photographs that were the same. And it worried me with my very limited understanding of economics from my schooling that how on earth could you have a profession that would evolve if there was just so much supply of what you were doing? You'd go and try and get a different photograph of a bobsleigh coming down the bobsleigh track. And then before you knew it, there were 25 German photographers, always watching the Germans. They're very good. So there'll be 25 German photographers working for Stern or whatever. They would have exactly the same or a better image. And I came home from that Olympics full of...”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Indeed. And so I enjoy Calgary, but I had my moment there where in those days the Olympics would be sponsored, there'd be lots of sponsors, but two of the key sponsors would be Kodak and Fuji. That kind of dates me, because we were still working on film. And at the end of the day, you go to these enormous labs that would be sent up, sponsored by Fiji and Kodak, and that you'd hand in all your 35mm film, you'd hang around for three hours, and then you get them back, and then you'd wire them to whoever you're worrying them to. And I remember so vividly then worrying that no matter how hard I was trying to get a different type of pitcher, that I would go around the editing room because there's degrees photography, press photography is actually quite collegiate.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is not a bad way to spend the evening in 1988. The other thing that was remembered for was that Britain had the world's worst ski jumper called Eddie the Eagle. And he was... So they gave that to me because they thought, well, that's a good pair up. We'll get Yarrow to photograph Eddie the Eagle. And of course, Eddie the Eagle, they had a film about him as well quite recently. They did.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You take one bad move and then you're at the bottom in a heap. So you're getting to be in the position to take the photograph is part of the challenge in the first place. But I did, it was in the golden era of swisking and where there were the men's and the women's downhill and slotting was dominated by the Swiss. And I got a bit better at photographing skiing. And then I got the offer to photograph the Olympics in 1988. And that was in Cargary in Alberta. Those Olympics were remembered for two things. Firstly, one of the most beautiful women ever to ice skate called Katerina Vitt. So that's what most of the photographers that were good were given to do to spend the evening's photographing Katerina Vitt dancing around a nice ice.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Didn't recognize It's my Scottish accent. But it was the days when you had some amazing skiers. And then you had the crazy canuts, you know, the Rob Boyds, the Podorskis, the Ken Reeds. And you yourself, you had Bill Johnson, who of course won Olympic gold as well. And they were all crazy mad good skiers. But that first stretch in Kitzball is like the White Cliffs of Dover stacked on top of each other. And if you're trying to sidestep down inside the ropes with 20,000 Austrians outside the ropes going, look at that British idiot. He doesn't know how to ski and you got your long lens around your neck.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get, the better you should be as a photographer. Those Cartier Breson said the first thousand pictures you take will be your worst thousand pictures. That was certainly true of me. And the following year, I just continued to work quite a bit in skiing. Skiing was easier to photograph because if you're doing the men's downhill, whether it be Kittsburg or the Larberhorn or Aspen or Lake Placid or wherever it might be, you can pre-focus on a gate and then wait for that skier to come around the gate. So there are still lots of difficulties in it, partly skiing down and always remember trying to photograph the toughest men's downhill in the world, which is the Harnam Khalm and Kittsburg. The star, the racer. In Kitzpool, in Austria.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was the outlier, but it gave me a chance and a lot of these self-help books and your books are at a higher grade than the majority of them. But there is a lot to be said for the old idea that if you're the smartest person in the room, get out of the room. So whatever the polar extreme from being the smartest person in the room was, I was at that polar extreme in Mexico. I was the worst photographer of the British press corps. And that is good because that means that if you've got any sense of self pride, the only ways up. And I just went back and practiced and tried to get better at the things that I wasn't good at. I think there's a lot to be said in photography. The fact the older you get.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, to begin with, I was just happy that it had saved my bacon because it had diverted people's attention away from the fact that 95% of the pitchers I'd taken of the other matches were out of focus. So in many ways, it was...”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or were they going to support their son and the person that had revitalized the city? And 75% of the people in the stadium that were Italian supported Argentina.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The planners hadn't done a good job because Italy met Argentina in the semi-final in Napoli. And that for most Neapolitans constituted an enormous dilemma because who are they going to support? Were they going to support their home country?”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. And of course, your world and his world collided because the home of Tango was Boka, wasn't it? The Bocca Arab Buenos Aires, he played for Boka Jr.'s, which is one of the two great famous football clubs in the big capital. That's right. And Boker Junior fans are very partisan. He had a habit of playing for clubs in cities that are renowned for wearing it on their sleeve. And for many years, he played in Naples in Napoli in Italy. And people would in Napoli, they would have two pictures above their bed. They would have Jesus Christ and Diego Maradona. And when the World Cup was in Italy, two World Cups, one World Cup after the World Cup by photographs,”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't land in Halifax just yet. So luckily we didn't land in Halifax, and I did try to explain to her that I was a photographer, and that was my picture. But I was hoping to actually go down to BA and see Maradonna. And I still very much hope to do that when the current crisis is over. It would be quite special to meet him. And he's got the Pacific knows, obviously knows of the picture and reminisce of when he was the greatest player in the world.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I've always had a bit of an affinity for Argentinians ever since that day that they were far more From the whole tournament. It was photography is about those one or two big pictures. It's not to me about portfolios of hundreds and thank goodness because I really didn't then. And it led to doing an Olympics the next year. I still had to finish my studying. And there was a lovely moment I was flying over to LA about, I don't know, about six months ago. And the Maradona movie, you know, directed by the same guy that did the Erton Center movie, and Amy Weinos. I thought, well, I should watch this. And about two-thirds of the way through the movie, which is excellent, my picture came on my TV screen in front of me. And I couldn't believe it. I don't know about you, but I always get quite emotional on planes. I don't know what it is about altitude and emotion. I go, this is my bloody photograph. That's my photograph from Maradona.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Gold Math. And I just took the split decision at the time that a lot of photographers weren't given the number of Argentinians coming onto the pitch, that it was a gamble worth taking. I thought, well, you know, if I lose the equipment, as long as I've got close to Maradonas is the right call, as it turned out, I got dead close to him, dead onto him just as he was lifted on another player's shoulders. And with a kind of biblical narrative behind of the stadium and thousands of people, he looked right in my eyes with the World Cup. And of course, those were the days in film, so you didn't know what you'd got. You didn't know whether you got it sharp. You didn't know whether you got it in the lighting right. But I went back to the net where I'd left my 7,000, which was a lot of money in those days, $7,000, $7,000 of equipment. And there was my lens and my camera.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was my first inkling that it might be by a decent part of my life. The problem was I was fairly shit as a photographer, which I think was very integral to becoming part of my life. I was lucky, I had a good final. I was in the right position for the first Argentinian goal. And then when Maradona's Argentina won, the most extraordinary thing happened in that probably about 20 or 30,000 Argentinians came onto the pitch. And it was just a scrum. I had a big, I had two lenses and two cameras like most photographers in those days you'd have one big lens recovering the midfield area and then a shorter lens recovering the gold mouth areas. And I thought, if I take my wide angle lens and try and get as close to Maradona as possible, I might get a picture, but it's going to, in order to be nimble, I'm going to have to leave that 400 2.8 lens.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I remember going to the stadium at six o'clock in the morning. The game is at midday. And I bribed the Mexican guard with a bit of whiskey. And I said, listen, do you mind? One of my rules of the thumb to take whiskey everywhere. I said, do you mind if I walk from onto the pitch? And in those days, the Aztecer, they had a Monday night football there not too long ago. But the Aztec held her around 120,000 people. And he allowed me just to walk from one goal to the other. And I could see my footprints in the dew and the ground. It was a bit of an epiphany for me. I felt, well, I'm doing this at 20. This is surely got to be a big part of my life. And you'll know the saying from Mark Twain where he says the two most important days in a person's life, the day they're born, the day they find out why.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Focus, you'd have to move the focal rim manually. And it's a trade, it's a skill. And I was crap at it, basically, which meant that the only good pictures I got were of the players lining up at the beginning of the match because they weren't moving too much. FIFA had another rule that if you're from a country that had qualified for the tournament, every single one of the tournament would be allowed one photographer on the pitch for the final. And Scotland obviously had been the first team to get knocked out. That tends to happen habitually. And of course all the photographers that are on expense bills for the newspapers back home had been sent home with Scotland. And then they would just get their pictures through AP or Reuters or whatever. So I was left as a 20-year-old with a press pass for the pitch on the World Cup final.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's not really focused on the football tool. The games were, a lot of them were played at midday or at 3 o'clock in the afternoon because of European TV time. And if you can imagine a high sun in Mexico and maybe some African players or Latin American players, it was a great chance that you got very little facial detail because their faces were underexposed and then the top of their heads had a kind of like biblical halo on top of them. But these were the days in sports photography where in order to get a moving figure in focus, you had to do a thing called follow focus because autofocus hadn't been invented then. This was also in the days of film. And follow focus basically meant that you moved the ring focusing rim of the camera in tandem to the movement of the player. So if you had a player coming towards you like 100 meter runner, you would try and get as many different pictures of him in...”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wasn't at all good. I was very, very average. And also photographing Scotland became very, very difficult because I really was much more interested in watching the game rather than taking photographs of it. And there was a moment when Scotland were playing Uruguay and Uruguay had a player sent off in the first minute of the game. So Scotland had to just beat 10 men to qualify to the next round. They were managed at the time by someone I'm sure a lot of Americans will know, Alex Ferguson, whom for many years managed Managed United as they're Alec. And there was a moment when there was a Scottish Centre forward who missed an open goal. And back in the times newspaper, and I was working then for the London Times, all they could see was the striker with his head in his hand and my head also, my head in my hands, with my camera nowhere near. And they thought, well, this guy, Yarrow, he's really not.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's unlike the NFL, it's been characterized by blatant corruption for many years, which you find the NFL hasn't. But putting that to one, it's like the IOC, but the IOC's been blatantly corrupt as well. But this was before people knew that FIFA took bungs in order to give World Cups to places like Qatar and to extend Russia. But it was 1986. six years, six, sorry, six months after the earthquake that had devastated Mexico City. And I arrived as a Scottish fan first and foremost, and they always used to say the Scottish journalists are really just fans with typewriters. But I did have an press pass which allowed me to go on to the pitch of these games. And the reality was that I was 20 years old.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mexico for the World Cup in Third year out of The one benefit of having that working for the magazine was that FIFA in those days would be much more accommodating with regard to accreditation.”
2020-06-25 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #443: David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT