David Yarrow on Art, Markets, Business, and Combining It All | The Tim Ferriss Show

David Yarrow tells Tim Ferriss the full arc of his career: shooting the 1986 World Cup final in Mexico City at age 20, capturing an iconic photo of Maradona, then leaving photography for eight years in investment banking and hedge fund management. He recounts running a billion-dollar fund, dodging the 2001 market crash on 9/11 by instinct, and ultimately having the business destroyed by the Bernie Madoff scandal's redemption wave. After divorce and rock bottom, he returned to photography and cracked the fine-art market, learning that editorial sales were worthless but framed prints could sell for six figures. The conversation covers his wholesale gallery strategy, why Dallas and Chicago beat New York and LA as markets, his use of celebrity collaborations tied to charity, and his philosophy of third-party affirmation, optimism, and always believing his best work is still ahead. Recorded March 27, 2020, the talk is also threaded with his investor's view of the early COVID market panic.

• Yarrow gambled by leaving his $7,000 of camera equipment unguarded behind the goal at the 1986 World Cup final to get a wide-angle shot of Maradona, who looked directly into his lens as he was lifted on shoulders, saving his entire tournament.
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• On 9/11, watching the first plane hit from a hotel lobby during a US road trip, Yarrow ordered Goldman Sachs to sell every client holding before the second plane hit, so his investors lost nothing that month while others lost 15-20%.
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• That single instinctive decision grew his fund from a small pot to employing 45 people and running a billion dollars in about six to nine months, an expansion he says he was not equipped to handle.
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• The Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme indirectly killed Yarrow's fund: investors hit by Madoff also pulled money from him, triggering $600 million in redemptions in a single week because of his one-week liquidity promise.
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• After a great white shark breach photo cost him roughly $25,000 to capture but earned only ~$17,000 in editorial fees, a Texas attorney nicknamed 'Jaws' offered $10,000 for a framed print and bought three, revealing fine art as the real way to monetize.
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• After being rejected five times by the Palm Beach gatekeeper of American fine-art photography, Yarrow returned with a South Sudan civil-war image he shot on Christmas Day; the dealer said it would 'change the second half of your life' and agreed to represent him.
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• Yarrow studied two rival business models: Peter Lik's vertically integrated own-the-galleries approach (a cautionary tale due to lack of third-party affirmation) and Nick Brandt's wholesale gallery model, choosing wholesale for the credibility of outside endorsement.
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• Years later, on a flight, Yarrow saw his own Maradona photograph appear in the Diego Maradona documentary and got so emotional the flight attendant thought he was a drunk nutter and cut off his scotch.
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• Yarrow's father told him to go into banking because it was 'a robust honorable profession whereas photography is just a hobby.'
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• Yarrow jokes he has only ever sold two things in his life: hedge funds and pictures of elephants, noting the elephant is an easier sell because it can't turn into a giraffe overnight.
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• The tiger-cub manager who took over Yarrow's fund was down 68% year-to-date in six weeks during the COVID crash but refused to hedge, and by the time of recording had already cut those losses in half.
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• Yarrow once sold prints for 20 bucks outside a London Underground station in 1987; 35 years later he sold a picture for $200,000 at Art Miami.
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• There are only about 20 'big Tusker' elephants left in the world, found in just two Kenyan national parks, Amboseli and Tsavo.
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• For a Montana shoot Yarrow lay on a saloon bar with chicken wings strung around his head so a live wolf would walk along the bar to bite the meat off him; locals now reenact it as a Friday-night bar game.
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• When Yarrow brought Cindy Crawford to that bar, an excited drunk patron standing next to her literally wet his pants, and the stain is visible in the final picture.
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• Each great white shark trip cost Yarrow about $10,000 and required shooting from 5am to 9am in the half-hour before and two hours after sunrise, when seal pups can't see the sharks coming.
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• Yarrow produces prints in editions of 16, donating two-thirds of them to good causes; Cindy Crawford works with him for free because proceeds go to the Madison, Wisconsin hospital that treated her late brother, totaling about half a million dollars.
  02:11:54

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