YouSaid · the spoken record

John Spears

lines on the record: 112
first: 2022-12-25
most recent: 2022-12-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think you used exactly those words. So I was just fascinated by this man. And I wanted to see if he'd be willing to meet with me and describe his feel for stocks and maybe give me some advice on how to be an investor. And I wrote him a letter. And maybe in a month later, I received a reply and he invited me to come to his office in New York City. And I took some time off from school.”
2022-12-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH019: Winning the Long Game w/ John Spears · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Indeed, indeed. And I read about Charles Allen in an issue of Time magazine, a business section, that he was kind of in the Forbes 400 type thing before there was a Forbes 400. But he was worth, this would have been in the 60s, he was worth about $500 million. He had started with nothing. He was a runner on Wall Street. He started his own firm. And by the time he was 29, he was a millionaire. And then he lost, I guess he lost all of his money in the stock market crash around 2930s. Then he made it back, but his story in Time magazine described the diversity of businesses that he had invested in, the different kinds of stocks, including some venture capital types things. And it just sounded very, very interesting to me. And the author of the article described Charlie Allen as having a feel for stock.”
2022-12-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH019: Winning the Long Game w/ John Spears · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it was sort of a money gene or an avarice gene, get rich gene. I just saw that was, I don't know, it was just. Just interested in it from an early age. I mean, I've read about Warren Buffett's early age, and he was that way with, I think he'd go to barber shops and he'd install Gumball machine or something, which takes coins and you get a piece of candy, piece of gum, and you go around and collect the coins. And he did some of these things that struck me as interesting. He said that it often has been the case that people. Who made money did things at an early age that were sort of independent entrepreneurial in a very small scale way. But, I mean, I remember reading about Joseph Kennedy. I think he, as a teenager, might have rented a bus and hit like a little bus company.”
2022-12-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH019: Winning the Long Game w/ John Spears · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really did not have a clue about what I was doing. And you can lose money in stocks too. So I started trying to repair my lack of knowledge by going to the library frequently and sort of one at a time taking out books on investing.”
2022-12-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH019: Winning the Long Game w/ John Spears · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You give us Well, the first one was a joy, British Petroleum. I think I invested $250, $300 in that stock, and it went up about 50% a short period of time. I thought, this is great. Now, this was a stock that was just, it was recommended to me by a broker. I said, okay, I'll do this. Sounds okay. There was no independent research. I was just buying a piece of paper. I didn't know that much about bridge petroleum. Anyway, it was easy money. It's great. But then he recommended this all-sides company, which sounded so interesting. All sides was aluminum siding, but they also were going into new business of making pre-fab manufactured homes. And they were architecturally very contemporary. I liked how they looked. And so I bought some of the all the site and went down 50%. Half my money in that stock. And it was an awakening that I”
2022-12-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH019: Winning the Long Game w/ John Spears · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“of the local branch the bank branch of private and national bank who took an interest in all this cash and checks I was depositing and invited me out to lunch with an interesting entrepreneurial thing that was kind of a little bit of a doing some research to try to get around a hurdle a twist”
2022-12-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH019: Winning the Long Game w/ John Spears · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I could send door to door by a street, and then I could call in advance house to house and arrange for appointments to see these Christmas card sample books. And then the flyer that I created had a little picture of myself so that it would allay any fears of a robber. They could see this kid. And it was kind of cute. I had an old beat up Volkswagen bug and a little hippie sunflowers on it. And anyway, I found out that I could call door to door and at about a fifth of the telephone calls resulted in an appointment to drop off the sample books. And if they made a decision by the next day, they got what I call the quick decider's discount. They'd get 20% off. And doing that was quite successful. I guess in today's dollars, maybe making over $40,000 just part-time work doing this while still in high school. So they have.”
2022-12-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH019: Winning the Long Game w/ John Spears · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had to walk around carrying these heavy books door to door to try to make some sales. But I had this thought, I became aware of something called a reverse telephone directory, which street by street, door by door gives you the telephone number of each house, named, address, telephone number. So I thought, well, maybe I could come up with a little advertisement.”
2022-12-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH019: Winning the Long Game w/ John Spears · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. When we moved to Gladwin, Pennsylvania outside of Philadelphia, there was a fair amount of construction going on in the summer, and I would keep track of it and bring cold coke and mark them up, double them up. That was one of the schemes. Yeah. But also, I'm not sure whether this is a question you were going to ask, but I had kind of an entrepreneurial breakthrough in high school continuing with this Christmas card business. learned about fancy expensive Christmas cards that were sold in stationary departments of department stores such as John Wanamaker or Strawberge and Clothier in the Philadelphia area. And they were heavy sample books. And I got in touch with these Christmas card companies and got the right to sell their product in the main line of Philadelphia. And problem with it is that all the houses were on at least two acre lots.”
2022-12-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH019: Winning the Long Game w/ John Spears · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You were very entrepreneurial. That is correct. Yeah, I sold it as a space ride in the hammock. I sold that as a nickel ride. There was a magazine. I don't know whether it's still around titled Boys Life. Might have been associated with Boy Scouts or Cub Scouts, something like that. And they had money-making schemes, including selling door-to-door engraved Christmas cards, custom engraved Christmas cards. And I did that. And it was fairly easy to do because the houses were close together. It was not a wealthy area with large lots and that kind of thing. So yeah, it was just kind of doing these things to make money.”
2022-12-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH019: Winning the Long Game w/ John Spears · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“pages every day and i was fascinated with all the numbers what's an eighth main what's a quarter mean what's the monetary equivalent of those figures and it just struck me that it's pretty amazing you could make money with money without doing all this work outside and you could uh you could do it in an air conditioned office so it was really a tendency toward that kind of laziness or maybe just seeing a more efficient and more delightful way to spend one's time”
2022-12-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH019: Winning the Long Game w/ John Spears · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's correct. It began with a tendency toward lassitude. I had always been a worker as a kid. I was just kind of a worker. I had a lot of energy. And one of my ways of working was to work in gardens, pulling weeds and the pay at that time was 50 cents an hour, which might be $3 an hour an hour or something like that in today's dollars. That was work done in the summer. It was hot work, sticky. Get your hands dirty. And I had the good fortune of having my grandfather within a bike ride away in the town that we lived in, Oaklawn, Illinois. And my grandfather was an investor. He bought dividend paying, typically large sort of blue chip type companies. And he looked at the financial.”
2022-12-25 · We Study Billionaires · RWH019: Winning the Long Game w/ John Spears · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT