I've got to talk to my wife.

"Mr. Johnson, if you’re driving at night with your wife in the city, it's snowing, and you have a flat tire, do you ask your wife to go out and change it?"

I don’t have the cash.

"Mr. Johnson, you have stocks in your portfolio that are underperforming. We'll take you out of them to get you into Abbott Labs."

Why Abbott Labs?

"We have it on good authority that it's Warren Buffett's next purchase."

The older brokers in the office all threw around Buffett's name, so Blaine did too. Buffett was useful because everyone knew who he was and everyone thought he had made his money picking stocks. Blaine was picking stocks just like Buffett but using different criteria. The traders in New York would accumulate a block of shares, driving the price up, and then get brokers like Blaine to unload the shares quickly at the higher price—whereupon the price would, often as not, fall. "Seven months in at Lehman, I was one of the top rookie producers," Blaine says, "but every stock I bought went down." His ability to be wrong about the direction of an individual stock was uncanny, even to him. At first, he didn’t understand why his customers didn’t fire him, but soon he came to take their inertia for granted. "It was amazing, the gullibility of the investor," he says. "When you got a new customer, all you needed to do was get three trades out of him. Because one of them is going to work. But you have to get the second one done before the first one goes bad."

It wasn't exactly the career he’d hoped for. Once, he confessed to his boss his misgivings about the performance of his customers' portfolios. His boss told him point-blank, "Blaine, you're confused about your job." A fellow broker added, "Your job is to turn your clients' net worth into your own." Blaine wrote that down in his journal.

Then he caught a break. He met a girl who liked him. The girl went and told a friend about him. That friend was the business manager for the Rolling Stones. One thing led to another, and the Rolling Stones handed him $13 million to invest. It was that easy. This money constituted their tour fund, and they didn’t want to take any risks with it. "I went to my office manager and asked, 'What do I do with this?' And he looked at me and said, 'I dunno.' " Blaine was seriously unnerved: He knew how to sell stocks to strangers, but that skill had nothing to do with preserving a pile of capital. "All of a sudden, I got a real client," he says. "It wasn't from some cold call. I didn't want to lose the Rolling Stones' money." He decided to invest it in Treasury bills. "Right away, I’m in conflict with the firm. My colleagues gathered around this money and asked me, 'How are you going to gross this thing up?' " Meaning how would they be able to maximize their commissions. "And I said, 'What do you mean? It’s in T-bills.’ And they said, 'We can't make any money on this.' And that's when I said to myself, I gotta get out of here."

He quit Lehman Brothers and took a job at the Los Angeles office of Bear Stearns. But Bear wasn’t any better. He says he was pressured to make transactions rather than give good advice. The stories he told himself to feel better about his career became less and less plausible. The nicest thing he could say about himself was that he hadn’t broken the law. He hadn’t bankrupted anyone or anything like that. But when he stepped back from his job and really looked at it, he realized that a huge amount of his time and energy went into making people feel happy about his advice when they should have been furious. The problem was the constant tension between company and client, caused by the firm’s inability to know what the market or any particular stock was going to do next. “I always thought there was going to be a place where the client wouldn’t be compromised and the broker wouldn’t be compromised,” he says. “But it was the same everywhere. It was all about getting people to transact.” And these weren’t bucket shops; they were Wall Street’s most distinguished firms.

He gave up on picking stocks and started picking fund managers instead. He'd sell his customers not on Cadbury Schweppes but on some mutual fund that his Wall Street firm was promoting. "I thought it was better than me picking stocks," he says. "But ultimately, these guys who ran the funds were just picking stocks like I was. And they weren’t any better at it.” The only thing that changed was Successful Telephone Selling in the '80s. It now had a new title: Successful Telephone Selling in the '90s.