The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 044: John LeFevre - @GSElevator: This Episode Might Offend You

Episode Date: August 10, 2015

Episode 044: John LeFevre - @GSElevator: This Episode Might Offend You This episode is different from any other I’ve recorded for The Learning Leader Show.  Turney Duff describes my guest best for CNBC: “In some memoirs, the author tries to pull back the curtain to provide a glimpse into a particular time and place, but LeFevre attempts to rip the drapes right off. He gives a naked look at how business in the world of finance is conducted. LeFevre captures the "Glengarry Glen Ross"-type of attitude that some believe is required to be successful on Wall Street. He doesn't shy away from witnessing and partaking in some of the seedier antics of sharing non-public information, price-fixing, misogyny, drug use and good old-fashion cut-throat office politics.” John LeFevre created the Goldman Sachs Elevator Twitter account (@GSElevator) as a parody of banking culture. He tweeted anonymously for years as he gained hundreds of thousands of followers with his notoriously outrageous and often offensive tweets. He was eventually revealed as the author of the account.  That Twitter account propelled him to earn a six figure book deal titled, “Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance, Debauchery, and Billion-Dollar Deals.” Episode 044: John LeFevre - @GSElevator: This Episode Might Offend You Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher Radio. The Learning Leader Show “I feel an obligation to call out social injustices.” – John LeFevre Some Questions I Ask: What are the specific reasons behind your success? What was your strategy behind growing the @GSElevator Twitter account? What is an average “day in the life for you?” When someone receives a six figure advance for a book, when exactly do you get paid? Will this book become a movie? Do you care if people like you? Are you okay with being polarizing? What did you do with your first bonus check? ($75,000) In This Episode, You Will Learn: Why John is so transparent and has spoken up about the Wall Street culture His PR strategy to grow a twitter account How Tucker Max initially helped with his book deal If it’s wise to give Lena Dunham a $2 million book advance Crazy stories about his day to day life in NYC, London, and Hong Kong Why he felt compelled to share information about illegal happenings including bankers colluding on fees Why he said writing this book turned him into a feminist How John has learned and grown up from his earlier days (he’s married and a Dad now)  “Investment bankers take themselves too seriously.” – John LeFevre Continue Learning: See why over 725,000 million people follow John on Twitter: @GSElevator Read his book:  Straight To Hell: Deviance, Debauchery, & Billion-Dollar Deals Read his articles for Business Insider: John LeFevre You may also like these episodes: Episode 003: The Incredibly Interesting Story Of Maurice Clarett And How He Built A 6 Figure Income After Spending 4 Years In Prison Episode 002: How To Take Over And Set Bigger Goals With Chris Brogan Episode 004: How Todd Wagner (and Mark Cuban) Sold Broadcast.com To Yahoo! For $5.7 Billion Episode 010: Shane Snow – How To Accelerate Success Using Smart Cuts Did you enjoy the podcast? This episode was different and very interesting with the inimitable John LeFevre.  Who do you know that needs to hear this?  Send them to The Learning Leader Show! Episode edited by the great J Scott Donnell   From CNBC: Turney Duff describes my guest best for CNBC: “In some memoirs, the author tries to pull back the curtain to provide a glimpse into a particular time and place, but LeFevre attempts to rip the drapes right off. He gives a naked look at how business in the world of finance is conducted. LeFevre captures the "Glengarry Glen Ross"-type of attitude that some believe is required to be successful on Wall Street. He doesn't shy away from witnessing and partaking in some of the seedier antics of sharing non-public information, price-fixing, misogyny, drug use and good old-fashion cut-throat office politics.”   John LeFevre created the Goldman Sachs Elevator Twitter account (@GSElevator) as a parody of banking culture. He tweeted anonymously for years as he gained hundreds of thousands of followers with his notoriously outrageous and often offensive tweets. He was eventually revealed as the author of the account.  That Twitter account propelled him to earn a six figure book deal titled, “Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance, Debauchery, and Billion-Dollar Deals.” 

He says, which one of you is the equities guy? Which one of you is the bond guy? Which one is the M&A guy? Let me tell you something. You bankers, you come here every year with your little tin pot of money thinking your big shots. You don't have an effing clue. And then he just turned back around and hung out with his chick.

And he just shut us down. He nailed us and shut us down just like that. It was amazing. It was a good learning experience to, you know, you might think that you've made it, but there's always another level. Are leaders born or are they made? Our host, Ryan Hawk, believes that leaders can be made through determined, focused work on learning the art and science behind the makeup of other successful leaders.

Now it's time to inhale knowledge and exhale success. You're listening to The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk. Hey guys, it's Ryan, and I'm doing a little bit different intro tonight because tonight's featured leader is a little bit different from the normal guest I have on this show. It's John Lefebv, also known as at GS elevator on Twitter. The reason it's different is because this episode contains some things that some listeners may not like. There is bad language, some offensive comments, and just sort of certain things that certain people might not want to hear. And so if you are offended by any of those types of things, I would encourage you to just simply go to the next episode. That's completely okay. I understand that it's not for everyone. However, there is a good message in John's story because he talks about some of the things he learned. We also get into the fact that he started

a Twitter account from nothing and grew it to over 720,000 followers. We get into the specifics into how he did that and how that one Twitter account led to a six-figure book deal. There's a lot of stories we get into. Like I said, some of them are offensive. If you are easily offended or offended at all by bad language, by drug use. Some of the things he speaks about women are not things that I agree with, but he's also progressed and he's a better person for it at this point and fully realize that and you'll hear him talk about that at the end if you do listen to the episode.

So I understand that and it's okay if you guys don't want to hear this one. But I do think there are people who will enjoy this one because you want to learn from all different types of people. I pride myself on being very open-minded learning from all different types of people. And John certainly fits in that category. So I hope you guys like it for the ones that do listen to it. Feel free to give me feedback. Even if you don't like it, you can send me an email, shoot me a note on Twitter. I'm happy to discuss why I decided to do.

have John on as a guest. Without further ado, it's John LaFev. All right, John, I'm looking at one of your articles here that you wrote for Business Insider. And there's so many funny things you wrote. There's a lot of one-liners about guys that you should avoid. And this one that just came across my eye, because I've actually seen this before, and you've obviously seen it a number of times where you said, avoid the guy who uses his business card to impress women in bars. Tell me about some stories that you've had. with guys like that. You're talking about the 25 people to avoid on Wall Street. That's right, yes.

Yeah, all right. No, I think it's just, you know, reflective of kind of douche culture, right? So, you know, we used to see it all the time where you'd see a guy in a bar talking to a girl and all of a sudden he would whip out a business card or, you know, another time you'd see a guy go up to a girl, even a girl that you might have been with. And he's like, hey, you know, tonight these drinks are on Goldman Sachs. And so we always had these like running jokes. Anytime we were in a bar and we saw, you know, somebody like that, whether it was name-dropping where he worked or giving out a business card, doing anything dushy.

So even if he had like a popped collar or, you know, was wearing sunglasses at night. So we had this joke where I would pretend to be gay and go up and try to hit on this guy as he was hitting on the girl. So it was like a running joke, you know, of a cock block. And so actually this extended rather famously in the book. We were at a nightclub in Hong Kong, and we look across and I see Wayne Rooney, the soccer player, talking to this girl. And so I went up to him and I just start caressing his back. And he turns around and he in his kind of peasant sort of accent says, fuck off. And all my friends are laughing.

I go back to my table. We laugh. Five minutes later, I go back. He's still talking the same girl. I start caressing his back again. Turns around, I say, Hey, man, high five. Again, he's fuck off.

We're just laughing and laughing. So five minutes later, he's still talking to the same girl. I go back over, and I lean into his neck and just kind of blow into the, kind of the nape of his neck while I'm caressing, like moving my hand down to the small of his back. And that's when this kind of a little melee ensued. So since then, I've kind of toned down those antics. But, you know, I've always felt this obligation to, you know, it's almost a moral obligation to call out, you know, what I perceive as social injustices.

And that's certainly one of them. So is, you know, giving out a business card and saying, hey, ladies, I work at Goldman Sachs. This is probably the funniest opening to the Learning Leader show I've ever had, John. So I appreciate the stories. I'm really excited to dive into really what you're all about because you've led an extremely interesting, life. And I think that the thing that I admire most about you, while I don't think you fit the normal guest I have on this show, I think the listeners can already tell that right away. I admire people who are willing to be extremely brutally honest and to be open and transparent

and not really be afraid to tell it like it is and say things that people might be thinking, but are really afraid to say. that's, I think that's a good quality while you're going to be a, you're a polarizing guy already. If people read about you, they, you know, there's, you have, you have probably a boatload of fans, but you also have some haters and some people are going to talk poorly about you. So let's take it back a minute to the way I became aware of you. So I, it was years ago, and I'm on Twitter, and I see somebody retweet at GS elevator, which stands for Goldman Sachs elevator. And I click in to.

it and it was a, I don't remember the exact tweet, but it was really funny. And I click in and I kind of look at your profile or see your recent tweets and they all were hilarious. And they were about things that supposedly were said in a Goldman Sachs elevator. I know your following has grown so much since then and upwards of what, I know I haven't checked your followers, but it's, I know it's probably over 700 some thousand people. Yeah, I think it's like 720, 720,000. Yeah. So talk to me a little bit about the origins, the beginning of how and why you created this, this Twitter account. And for a while, you were anonymous. People did not know it was you.

And then it became public. But talk to us a little about that journey of creating that brand and how it grew to be this big, huge, massive success and led to this big book deal that you now have. Yeah, sure. So it actually started as a joke. I was in a bar in Hong Kong with some banker friends of mine, and we were talking about, this was the summer, the end of the summer of 2011, there was this Twitter account that was very popular for about two weeks, and it was in the New York Post and the Daily Mail, the New York Times,

and it supposedly reported the conversations overheard in the Condi Nast building in New York, which is, of course, the headquarters of Vogue magazine. And we were just laughing, saying to ourselves, wow, you know, if people find this kind of stuff funny and entertaining, imagine, you know, if they overheard the things that we talk about, the things that we say, our sense of humor, you know, the racism, the sexism, the misogyny, the excess, the outrageousness, if they heard that, you know, it would evoke the full gamut of emotion. So you would have people that were just thoroughly entertained, people who would find it funny,

and then at the other side, you would have people that were shocked and appalled and offended. And so, you know, we were just drinking and drinking. And I said, all right, well, I'm going to start, you know, Goldman Sachs elevator as a joke. And I'm going to post things that I think, again, not literally to be about Goldman Sachs or not literally things that were overheard in elevators, just kind of reflect the mentality of Wall Street or what has then evolved into not just banking culture, but what I characterize as, you know, bro, frat, douche, banker culture. And so that's, that's, you know, how it started. I chose the name GS Elevator, because if you think back to the time, it was right when Occupy Wall Street was starting. People hated Goldman Sachs. You know, you had the CEO of Goldman Sachs going on TV saying that he thought that his bankers were doing God's work.

You had Rolling Stone calling them vampire squids. So, you know, it was pure marketing to pick Goldman. But, you know, more specifically, beyond that, in my experiences in banking, I've always felt that Goldman Sachs reflected. or, you know, had a, was kind of an amplified version of Wall Street culture. And so this Twitter account was supposed to be an amplified version of this elitist mentality that I was, you know, illuminating. And that's how it started just as a joke among, among a few friends. And I did it anonymously because I felt that, you know, my identity wasn't relevant to

kind of the character or the platform. And, you know, it took off from there. It was viral within two or three days. really that quickly what was the key was there a specific tweet a specific moment that that because you mean people try to do these things all the time and they fail i know you've had a bunch of copycats that haven't caught on i mean what was the specific reason behind the success honestly this sounds a bit pompous but i think it was a very catchy idea and the timing was perfect and twitter you couldn't do this on twitter today because twitter has has evolved and kind of plateaued but

But at the time, you know, people were just generally interested in this stuff. And from my experience in banking, anytime we did a deal, you know, on the bond desk, which we can get to later, we always had to manage the press about the financial press that is. No one else really cares about, you know, a lot of the deals that we do in banking. But there are, you know, capital markets, magazines, and the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, they report on the deals that we do. And we always had to kind of spin deals and manage the press.

So I was always kind of pretty good at managing the press. So when I started the account, and actually not two people really know about this because they've never really asked, but when I started the account, I probably put out about 10 or 15 good tweets in the first day. And then I sent an anonymous email to, I basically blasted media people, you know, page six, zero hedge, Gawker, the daily mail. And I had some contacts that, again, I approached, even though I knew them, I approached them anonymously. and that really helped. So within two days, I was on Gawker. I was in the New York Post. I was in the daily mail. And then it just, you know, that's how you get followers. And that's how it just kind of blew up. But again, you know, it all came down. As far as I can tell, you know, it came down to content. But, you know, there are a lot of good Twitter accounts, amazing Twitter accounts that only have, you know, 100 or 500 or 1,000 followers. And they put out great content. But they're just, it's almost like they're shouting into the void because no one's there to see the material. So, for, For me, what was important was before I focused on putting out good material, I wanted to have at least a decent base of, you know, several thousand followers and some decent media attention. So I focused on that almost immediately and it worked, you know, spectacularly. So you were really deliberate in your attempt to grow this thing.

I mean, to basically have a PR strategy with media types. That point, it seems like to go from a joke to saying, hey, I want to really try to grow this thing. Yeah, but even though it was a joke, and, you know, it was a joke throughout that, you know, I was very, very deliberate about it. So it was, okay, how do I start? I need to be very finance specific. I need to lend credibility to this voice. So, and I was in banking at the time, all my friends are. So, you know, I have access to good information. So very early on, all of my tweets were about specific bankers, specific deals, specific gossip. And so it lended credibility to the voice. So when I, you know, I had access. So when I, I reached out to the media, they looked at it and said, wow, this is a genuine insider, you know, giving real information. So it had a lot of credibility, and that helped, you know, with the explosive growth. But that can only really take you so far. So after I kind of played that strategy out, I reached the next phase, which was, okay,

I probably need to make this a little bit more, not necessarily dumb it down, but make it more broadly appealing with some more kind of general commentary that isn't necessarily about Wall Street. It's just about this kind of elitist, duchy, frat, bro banker mentality. And so, you know, that was kind of the next step of the evolution of the process. And then, again, you kind of play that out. And then I was limited by being in character, because there were a number of things I wanted to say. I wanted to comment on current events or issues or make political statements. but I was kind of confined within the parameters of being within 140 characters within this fictional character who is supposedly tweeting kind of things overheard on Wall Street. You know, you can only take that so far.

So that's what got me onto writing guides and lists for Business Insider and other places like that. So that was kind of the next iteration of my evolution. But again, every step of the way, there were copycat accounts and people that were trying to emulate me. And they just, they never got anywhere. So I firmly believe that a lot of this does come back to the quality of the material and the quality of the content. And then, of course, you know, again, I'm sure we'll get this at a later point in the discussion. But it's once I started having success with the guides and lists that really the publishers started calling. And then, you know, very quickly led to a book deal.

Which, yeah, it's incredible. Just the rise. I think there's, while not everybody can relate to exactly what you did on a day-to-day basis, I think a lot of people can relate to the fact or the desire to want to grow, whether it's a Twitter account, any social media being able to be a writer. I think a lot of people want to be a creator of content. And that's what you successfully did. So there was a deliberate strategy. I'm curious as to what were your goals.

Did you specifically think of what you hoped this would accomplish? I mean, like I said, by basically, you know, sending out everything to all the media people. what did you think could come from this? Yeah, I mean, that was just a game, and I wanted to be, you know, I wanted to be successful at it. I didn't really have any clear goals. I wasn't even trying to make money off of it. I mean, I've had people offered to pay me, you know, sometimes I've even had people

offer to pay me, say, $5,000 for a single tweet, and I've said no, because I thought it would be kind of, you know, it was against everything that I stood for. So making money wasn't necessarily a goal. It was just a hobby that was an inside joke with some friends, and we had fun with it, but But at the same time, I always thought that one day I would want to potentially write a book. So, you know, I started in investment banking in 2001 right when I got out of college, and I jumped into a world that I thought it was amazing, it was exciting, you know, was thrilling, working on deals that show up in the newspaper the next day, being surrounded

by so many smart, aggressive, ambitious people. You know, I loved working in banking, but at the same time, I was always a little bit cynical in that I felt investment bankers tend to take themselves too seriously. They consider their work almost like rocket science, and I kind of have to be almost the opposite of that. And they define themselves rather pathetically, to a large extent, obviously not everybody, but to a large extent, they define themselves as human beings by the fact that they work on Wall Street or they work for gold of sex or mortgage selling. And I just found that to be a bit sad. And so I'd always been cynical. And part of that cynicism manifested itself is, you know, we were doing all the same.

these crazy and outrageous things, both in the office and out of the office. And so I thought I would write down some story notes and just collect them over the years. And so I've just been collecting these stories, both my stories and the stories of my friends and the stories that we hear for the last 15 years, you know, in New York and London and Hong Kong. And it's a fairly interesting time, you know, going from the dot-com bubble bursting through the financial crisis and then traveling all over the world. I thought, wow, you know, this is a pretty interesting perspective. You know, I don't necessarily want to write a book. I just, I don't want to forget any of this stuff. And then, of course, the Twitter came along and that evolved. And it became very clear that the voice on Twitter

resonated with people. And so then I decided, well, this could be a fairly good platform from which I can share some of these amazing stories that I've collected over the years. It's incredible. I mean, the stories are, they're crazy. I mean, so let's, let's now, we move on. So you are able to get a book deal basically from having a great Twitter account and also writing some posts for whether it's on your own blog or business insider or other people who distribute it. Talk to me about the book deal. How did that come about? What's the process for that? A lot of people want to write a book. A lot of people want to get paid prior to writing the book. And a lot of people are not able to do that. So talk to me about that process.

Yeah, sure. So I got connected with Tucker, Max's agent. Yeah. And I just emailed with Tucker today. That's crazy. You said that. A great guy. And actually, and I don't know Tucker at all.

I've emailed them maybe a couple of times, but I would say Tucker is amazingly misunderstood. I mean, he's very smart, very intellectually curious. Yeah. I mean, I'm a huge fan of his now. And I would say that I'm not a fan necessarily of, you know, his three New York Times best-selling books, but I'm a fan of his, of his kind of evolution into this thoughtful, intellectually curious person. But anyway, that's a different point. His agent and I started talking, and we put together a proposal.

I guess this was over the course of 2013. And so, you know, I think to anyone that's looking at writing a book, you know, the hardest thing I think is finding a good agent. And so I was very lucky there. And at the time I was, you know, I got in touch with him. I didn't have to reach out to him. He reached out to me. at the time, you know, Twitter was so huge in terms of its reach and prominence and platform

that having the presence that I had made it almost a no-brainer for an agent to pick me up and say, okay, well, you have this audience. If you can put together quality material, it's a pretty easy sell to the publishing world. And so that's what we did. We put together a proposal, which for me was an outline, a marketing strategy, and two, I used two sample chapters, and we sent it out to, I think, 15 or 20 publishers, and I got about eight or nine bids, all of which were in the kind of, I don't like to talk about numbers too much,

but they were in the 99th percentile of nonfiction book advances. So, you know, a decent kind of six-figure type number. Okay, I was going to say, like, I was thinking percentiles could be anywhere from 10 grand to 10 million, so I wasn't sure exactly. Yeah, no, you know, a decent kind of six-figure number. Okay. And so I signed with Simon & Schuster in January of last year, 2014.

And again, they knew my identity. They knew that the Twitter account was not literally about, you know, elevator conversations in Goldman Sachs. They knew that, you know, I had never worked there. Although I was, and I'm sure we'll get to this when we talk about at banking, you know, I was offered a job there and tried to take it but was unable to for, you know, complicated reasons. But again, the book was never supposed to be about, you know, it is about Goldman Sachs, just as much as it is about Morgan Stanley or Citi River for J. Morgan. It's about my experiences

from banking, you know, from a vantage point that has never really been explored. And I guess, you know, before I finish the publishing story, maybe I can frame that just so that the listeners kind of have an understanding of what I'm talking about. Because, you know, everyone's heard about Lyra's Poker, everyone's seen the movie Wall Street, and this notion of bankers behaving badly can be, you know, drugs, hookers, excess, you know, fast cars, all that stuff can be a little bit of a cliche. And sometimes even myself, having been a banker and being a fan of this genre, sometimes I I still roll my eyes when I see, okay, here's a story about a crazy investment banker.

It seems kind of tedious and boring to me. But what I was trying to capture, and again, this is what made it so interesting to the publishing world, was that this is a vantage point that has never really been explored before in that I worked with, you know, investment bankers and with traders. So, I mean, very, very different cultures within the bank there alone. I worked with buy side clients like hedge funds and sell side clients, you know, corporate issuers like General Electric or Ford or Rolls-Royce. And then I worked all over the world and did deals because most of the deals I worked on involved more than one bank. So I did deals with every single bank on Wall Street. And so I think it was really the vantage point that the publishers were really interested in. So I signed with Simon Schuster, as I was saying, and the deal received a lot of publicity at the time.

Yeah, I remember that. I think there was a lot of resentment from, you know, I don't know, from the finance community, you know, financial journalists and even from the quote unquote Twitter elite, I think people felt that I kind of waltzed my way into this big, high-profile book deal without, you know, ever having written anything more than, you know, some tweets and a few guides and lists. But, you know, again, that's for other people to kind of criticize and be resentful. I felt that always we earned it. But a week after my book deal was announced and it was on the front page of the New York Times

and the Financial Times, Andrew Ross Sorkin, of the New York Times, released my identity, which again, didn't bother me at all. The Twitter account had been anonymous. But in terms of the book that we wanted to write, it was impossible, and it is impossible to tell any of these stories credibly with any type of specific details without having my identity come out because it was such a specific vantage point that we were always counting on me being outed. It was part of kind of the process to lend credibility to me. But then of course, that got completely twisted by the media. So they said, okay, GS elevator never worked at

Golden Sacks. And this is effectively a fake, which is, you know, as I saw at the time and I still see it now, totally, totally absurd because it was never literally about any of that stuff. So I was out and then Simon Schuster came out and said, yeah, obviously we know who this person is. That's not what the book is about. We will support him. And then about a week after that, they decided to pull the plug on the deal. And I still, to this day, God's honest truth, I have no idea why they backed out. I don't know if they had pressure from higher-ups or there was pressure from Goldman Sachs.

Because, again, I know when I'm kind of taking on the establishment, I'm writing a book that, depending on your interpretation, illuminates the Wall Street culture and describes it effectively as a culture of pervasive deviance. You know, I know when other people have tried to do that, the so-called establishment

has taken an issue with that and kind of put pressure in an attempt to almost kind of suppress that message getting out or even attacking the credibility of that message. And so that is when I started to experience people attempting to, you know,

you know, attack my credibility, kind of misrepresent the premise and the joke. You know, again, this was all just a silly joke, the joke that I had started. So, I mean, that was a bit frustrating. But so, you know, I had this big Simon Schuster deal. I lost it a week after I was outed for reasons that I don't understand. But fortunately for me, the next day, you know, I wasn't surprised. I wasn't angry. And the next day, a new publisher came calling and I signed with them.

And since then, everything has been, you know, pretty smooth sailing. Did you write the book after the deal or do you have a lot written before the deal? No, I wrote it all after. Really? So you got the deal? Do you get paid right away or do you have to turn it in before you get all your money? The way it works is generally, I don't, publishing to me feels like almost like an oligopoly. I mean, all these guys have exactly the same royalty agreement. They have the same payment schedule. I mean, there's no, you don't negotiate a publishing deal.

And even that the nature of an advance, I think is misunderstood. I mean, if a book is going to be a bestseller, the advance is totally, totally irrelevant. The long-term economics don't change. It is simply as described an advance. But, you know, obviously it has benefits, right? If they're going to pay you a six-figure number, it means they are now sharing the risk with you that your book might not do as well as everyone expects. And so they share that risk with you.

And the other thing, I guess, it helps is if they're paying you a six-figure number, it's going to incentivize them to work as hard as possible to make sure that it is a success so they can lean on their sales reps and lean on their accounts to make sure you get better store placement. So an advance is still important for those reasons. But economically, if you think and know your book is going to be a success, the long-term economics don't mean a difference. So to your question, you get 25% on signing, 25% when you deliver your manuscript, and you get 25% when it is released and you get 25% three months after it comes out. So it's not really even in advance.

It's kind of along the way with you. Yeah, well, I mean, it is in advance in the sense that you'll have, you know, 75% of it by the time the book comes out. Yeah. Which is cool. There were other, I mean, some publishing, some of the smaller publishing houses, they try to compete and they'll say, okay, well, we'll give you half up front and half on publication day.

But by and large, it's kind of basically, you know, split into kind of quarters or even a third. I remember Tucker, Max, actually was on a podcast and he said, Lena Dunham of girls, I don't know if you watch the show. I actually don't watch that show, but I just heard him talking about this. She got a $2 million advance on her book, and Tucker said he thinks, so basically there's a million people watch girls. That's it.

It's not a huge number. You know, it's like 9 million people watch The Bachelor, so it's like nine times as big. But Lena Dunham got a $2 million advance. on her book deal. And Tucker said he has absolutely no idea what in the world those people are thinking because there's no possible way that that book's going to sell enough in order for that publishing company to make their money back. I don't necessarily agree with that. I mean, that's an insane number.

And, you know, again, Lena Dunham is kind of the darling of the literary elite. You know, kind of liberal New York, the New Yorker New York Magazine, you know, it is kind of the feminist community. I think you could probably justify paying that kind of number. And I think over time they would probably have at least made their money back. I don't know if they did. I mean, from what I read of the book and heard about and saw her on Howard Stern, it seemed like a pretty terrible book.

So, you know, with a bunch of fake stories about fake rapes and that type of stuff. I mean, it's pretty terrible. But, you know, again, I don't have a huge opinion. If anything, actually, she pretends to be this great kind of, I'll give an example. When she was doing her book tour, she was selling tickets. And then the tickets started selling in the secondary market for like, you know, five times the price of the ticket. So she wanted to go out and say, look, I want my real fans to, you know, help, you know, to get to meet me and interact. And, you know, please stop doing that.

Like, let's create some more dates for her tour. so that the ticket prices weren't so expensive. So she really tries to be this kind of supposed person of the people or however you want to describe it. But at the same time, you know, if she's taking a $2 million advance, that's taking a lot of money from a lot of other would-be authors who could really, really use the money. Yeah.

I just thought it was interesting in the book publishing cultures. I don't know a lot about it. I'd never published a book. You know, something that I'd like to hopefully do someday based on some of the knowledge gleaned from speaking with interesting and entertaining educational type people like you, John. So I think it's just, I like learning about that, and it's a part of your story. It's a big part of your story.

And I remember we've been emailing for months now, and you were gracious enough to send me a copy of your book. And so I read through it, and I was on an airplane recently and read through it, like, people sitting next to me could, like, it's always weird when you're, like, openly laughing on an airplane, you know? And I don't know if there's books that have brought you to that level, but yours, did like throughout a three and a half hour plane ride I was on. So it was almost embarrassing as I'm reading through it. I set it down towards the end of like these people are going to think I'm crazy. But it's a great book. I'd love to dive in a little bit maybe to give us a little teasers of it because I was entertained by it.

But I think also when it comes to the industry you work in, I'm not sure, you know, people who are in industry, banking, Wall Street, all of that. I think they obviously get it. But people who are not, we kind of get the feel for it. watching Wolf of Wall Street or something like that. You know what I mean? Yeah, I know. And I read that you've talked about that. We've talked about that a little bit.

And I like to, and it's impossible for you to sit there and give the Cliff's Notes version of what you do. But on a basic day when you were doing it, you know, putting deals together, doing road shows, everything that you had to do. What is the day in the life like John Lefeb when you are doing what you did on Wall Street, whether it's in New York City, London, Hong Kong or anywhere in between. Yeah. Well, you know, culture is very significantly between banks and even within the banks. So an M&A investment banker, the life that he leads is probably very different than the life that I would lead on a trading floor versus, you know, in the life of even a trader who manages

the bank's money. They're all very different cultures, very different day-to-day activities. So my job was to – and then again, to your point, how that role is in New York. is very different than how it is in London, and I obviously get into this a lot in the book, exceptionally different to how it is in Asia. But generally my job as a fixed-income syndicate manager is to help connect people who need to borrow money so they could be a Chinese startup. It could be a sovereign nation.

It could be a blue-chip company like Walmart or IBM or Microsoft. help a company like that that needs to borrow $100 million, $500 million, or $5 billion, help them borrow that money in the capital markets. So I, through the public bond market. So I help advise them on, you know, the right structure, the right pricing, how to market it, how to basically sell their deal to investors. So I kind of do that on one hand. And again, that's why I've always felt this vantage point is so unique,

because I sit right in the middle, working with investment bankers and all of their clients who need to borrow money. And then on the other side, I work with the salespeople who cover the buy side. So these are investors, hedge funds, pension funds, asset managers, you know, guys who need to invest their money. And I just effectively bring them together. So my typical day is working with issuers who mandate our bank to help them raise money. And then I go out and sell those deals with our sales force to the investors who have the money. So I basically come in every day to a room that has, you know, 500 people or in New York, I guess, you know, 1,000 people.

And one big room, you know, everybody has four or six computer screens, a big dealer board with, you know, a hundred phone lines. So, you know, it's called a hoot or a squawk box, you know, on their dealer boards that they can immediately communicate with Tokyo or Hong Kong or London or New York or anywhere else in the world. It's just one big, almost like a locker room. I mean, you know, Nerf footballs are getting tossed around. Jokes are getting tossed around. It's mostly guys in that kind of environment.

And I stare at computer screens for, you know, 12 or 14 hours a day. And then we check out, go drinking with our clients and then, you know, pass out and wake up the next day and start it all over again. That's kind of my job. So I think for a lot of people in a lot of industries, I don't know, maybe I'm just speaking for myself here. But when they see you start in New York, then you get asked to go to London. And then from London, you get asked to go to Hong Kong. Like that's a, that's, that's, that's kind of crazy in their own right now.

There's obviously a subset of people who are like, that is awesome. I'm all in, you know, but I don't know if that's the majority of people. What was that like being transferred or asked? to move for promotions basically all around the world. Well, it's just something I always wanted to do, and I wanted to do it before I had kids, because I knew eventually I would settle down in the United States and just have the kind of white picket fence lifestyle. And so I thought while I was young and free, it would be great to, you know, go to London.

And, you know, by the way, when we were in London, it was every weekend we were in Paris or Milan or Stockholm or, you know, Requejevac or wherever the hell we wanted to go. So, you know, it was just a great fun experience. London is one of the great cities of the world that I think should be experienced when you're young. And then they asked me to go to Hong Kong, and, you know, Asian bankers work notoriously long hours. I'd never even really been to Asia. I had no interest to go there. So they asked me three or four times to go out there, and I always said no.

And so I was looking at, this was after I'd been in London for about three years, I was looking at either moving back to New York or going to Asia. And just the opportunity in Asia to see, you know, the emergence of what was going on in China with, you know, 12% GDP growth and just a whole region recovering from the Asian financial crisis. So, you know, whenever it was 1998, it was just too good of an opportunity to pass up. So I agreed to at least go out there and consider it. And, you know, it only took me about two hours after I landed at Hong Kong airport to realize this is the greatest place in the world. You know, it's a tropical island that masquerades as a legitimate city. So, you know, you fly in, all of a sudden you're surrounded by these five-star resorts and these, you know, wonderfully attentive people and just has this kind of vibrant, energetic, transient party lifestyle that, you know, it's just,

It's very alluring. And Hong Kong was the greatest experience ever. You know, the only reason I had to leave was because it was, you know, taking so many years off my life. But that tradeoff, you know, I had to reprioritize, you know, having a family and kids over the lifestyle they were living. But yeah, it's some, you know, kind of people always thought that like when you're doing investment banking, going to London or going to Asia is kind of this relegation or this outpost. But more recently, it's, these are all coveted seats. And it's a promotion because people, you know, AJ is the place to be right now and everyone wants to get out there. I was laughing in the middle of your story because I remember, you know, I was reading it through your book when you went on that, they sent you on like a trip to test it out, right?

To say like, hey, you know, let's fly over there and make sure you could live there and meet all the people you're going to be working with. And I'll let you tell the stories of how that trip went. it sounds like the bulk of that time was not spent kind of understanding and meeting people it was spent. I guess for the lack of a better word, it was spent partying. Yeah, I mean, it was my due diligence trip to determine whether or not I wanted to relocate my, you know, put my career on a completely different track, you know, break up with my girlfriend in London and move to Asia. Like, this is a big, life-changing decision.

and I spent that entire trip. I was either in the spa by the pool or out at the bars. I mean, it was just too much fun. That's great. And now I love to get into some of the stories, just to give a little snippet of your book. So first of all, you titled it straight to hell, which is an interesting title because you read on how to title books, you know, how to market them, how to, what to use, you want to make sure people are comfortable talking about.

your book at a cocktail party and I'm not sure your title makes people super comfortable. So I'm curious as to why is it titled that way? It's just, again, this goes back to kind of a running joke of the behavior and the norms, you know, almost like the moral norms on a trading floor in the banking community. So, you know, we'd always joked about how outrageous our experiences were and how generally, again, despite the Wolf of Wall Street and all this other stuff, people have no clue how devious this kind of mentality is. And again, it doesn't just attract a deviance. It kind of just, it breaks you down and builds you up and makes you almost even more deviant. And so at one point

towards the end of my kind of Asia tour of duty, we are traveled across the world to go to a client's, and I don't want to give away the location because I don't want to be too specific about who it was. But we had a client's wedding. And again, when you work in Asia, the expat community is so close. So as a white guy in Asia, all of my friends are either clients, colleagues, or competitors. So it's this really incestuous world. So when one of us gets married, in this case one of our clients got married, the wedding was, again, all investment bankers, all hedge fund managers. and it was just this entire group from Asia that flew to the other side of the world to this wedding.

And, you know, you can take us out of Asia, but you can't necessarily remove, you know, the way that we tend to operate within society, which is to say, you know, we've always said rules, and I've said this online before, rules are for the, and this is a Douglas Bader quote, the great World War II fighter pilot, he said rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of why. men. And that was effectively how we lived our life. We just followed the rules. We thought we were better and smarter than everybody. So we would just pick and choose the rules that we choose to follow. So when we went to this wedding, we acted like we were still in Hong Kong. So we went to the church. We converted the chaplain's office into a cocaine room. And we just used it for kind of a select group of wedding guests and groomsmen to kind of come and go. And we had these communal piles

of cocaine set up from a drug dealer that I had met the the day before. And towards the end. Trustworthy guy. Yeah, it worked how great. I think I still have his number. Towards the end, after the wedding, the bridesmaids needed a place to change before the reception, which was to be held.

Again, this is like this, you imagine a blue sky day. Like, God is just shining his radiant light down on everybody. It's the most beautiful old church you've ever seen. And here we are just six sweaty bankers in tuxedos. just sweating around a table in the, you know, chaplain's office. And so we get kicked out by the bridesmaids, and so we have nowhere else to go. So we relocate our little kind of party to the kids playground behind the church. Oh, God.

And here we are just, again, five or six guys sitting on those little miniature color, you know, brightly colored plastic picnic tables that are just, you know, we just look like giants on these things. and we're just huddled around, just ripping lines of cocaine, you know, behind the church as the wedding party is kind of relocating to the front for the reception. And so I just said to my friend, I said, wow, you know, if I ever write this book that we joke about, I'm going to call it straight to hell. And so that was kind of the title that stuck. Even before I wrote a single chapter, that was always the title. Wow, incredible, man. That's an incredible story.

Yeah, and that story didn't even make the book. Wow. So I know you mentioned there's a ton of stories that you have that didn't even make it in the book. But another one, I think this was back in 2002 when you got your very first, I think this might have been your first bonus, which was about $75,000. And you had went to one of your mentors and said, you know, I'm going to save this and invest it. And I'll let you take it from here. But what did he say to you after you told him your plans of what to do with that $75,000? Yeah, you know, I think it's interesting because it speaks to how you get kind of brought into the culture and then how your just mentality warps over time.

So, you know, here I am 22 years old. I get given it on top of my salary, I get given a check for 75 grade or something. What was your salary at that time? I don't know. I can't remember. They probably about, my salary was probably about $80, $75,000, somewhere like that. Okay. This is a long time ago.

I mean, salaries have gone up. So again, that doesn't sound like a very impressive number. but salaries have gone up a lot since then. So, you know, 22 years old, you get a $75,000, give or take, I can't remember. And then, you know, they just cut you a check for $75,000. Yeah. Pretty happy.

Oh, yeah. And so I told my boss I was going to invest it because I wanted to buy an apartment the next year when I got my next bonus, which, again, hopefully would be much bigger than my first bonus, because that's generally how banking works. I mean, it's just the bonus structure is a fairly steep, steep curve. and to that point of the curve, my boss looks at me like I'm an idiot. He says, what the hell's wrong with you? It's going to be so easy for you to save this amount of money in a couple years from now.

You know, think of the marginal utility of a dollar. You'd be insane to save it. He's like, I want you to go out, take a vacation, and just spend your entire bonus in one week. And so that's what we did. I convinced, you know, two or three of my friends, we went to San Trope and spent, you know, all that money in five days, which actually was not that difficult to do. So you're just taking your friends on a vacation to... No, no, no, no.

They brought their $75 grand too. You spent $75K on yourself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What did you buy? People don't understand how... Again, you feel like, you know, people don't realize how much money there is in the world. We went there with the intention,

three bankers making $75,000 in their pocket to spend. and we were, you know, the poorest guys at every place we went to. You know, we would have bottles of moat at our table and girls wouldn't even talk to us. You know, I remember one time, again, I didn't even get to this in the book, but we're in San Troupe. And three guys, we see this beautiful, beautiful girl facing us. And with his back to us is, I guess, her husband or boyfriend or this older guy that she is with. You know, he's probably in his 60s, and she's in her 20s. And here we are thinking, we're three, you know, decently good-looking guys.

We've got some money. We've got, you know, bottles of champagne. We're sitting at the pool at the Bebos Hotel in San Trope. And so we're kind of gesticulating behind this guy's back, trying to get her attention, basically saying, hey, you know, ditch that guy, come hang out with us. And she's just kind of being a little bit flirtatious with us and at least acknowledging us. So he can generally sense that something is happening behind his back. And so after a few minutes of this kind of holding up champagne glasses for her and all this stuff, he slowly turns around, looks at each of us. And then he says, I still remember, he says, which one of you is the equities guy?

Which one of you is the bond guy? Which one of you is the M&A guy? Let me tell you something. You bankers, you come here every year with your little tin pot of money. thinking your big shots. You don't have an effing clue. And then he just turned back around and hung out with his chick. And he just shut us down.

He nailed us and shut us down just like that. And it was amazing. It was a good learning experience to, you know, you might think that you've made it, but there's always another level. And we learned that that day. We gradually got befriended the guy and got to hang out with him. He was some, you know, billionaire from Cleveland, Ohio. and he left his wife and kids every summer to travel with his European girlfriend.

It's just kind of eye-opening. Oh, my gosh. Incredible. There's so many stories I want to get to. But there's one of them, and we talked about this before we started recording. So about the industry itself, and you have a chapter in your book titled, I'll call you on yourself. And I'd love for you to dive in a little bit about that aspect of your work and how, and this is probably not a shock to people who've read about this,

but there's definitely some illegal type action going on in the industry with people not calling on the proper phone saying, hey, hang up, I've got to call you on your cell. So could you share more about that? Yeah, sure. I'm glad you brought it out because, you know,

I don't want people to think that the book is just about deviance and debauchery. I mean, I think I do raise some really substantive points about, whether it's sexism in the workplace or, you know, illegal or potentially, well, certainly unethical practices that go on in the industry. I mean, there's a lot of, I would say, revealing things that haven't really been talked about before. So the culture that you're talking about is kind of I'll call you on your cell, basically

is all of our phone lines are recorded. All of our emails are recorded. All of our chat rooms are recorded. So whenever somebody calls you and they say, hey, let me call you on your cell, you know, or this is on a chat room or an email, you know, hey, I need to talk to you on your cell phone. You know that you're about to hear something outrageous. So it's either like an X-rated story from the night before that they don't want to have recorded on any company lines, or it's about, you know, doing something that is unethical or illegal. So it's kind of part of the culture that we would almost laugh about. kind of circumventing these recorded lines to have these conversations. So a lot of times it was just crazy antics that we just didn't want recorded. But other times it was legitimately about breaking a law. So, you know, we would trade, a lot of things that we do just list off some examples.

You know, we would collude with other banks on fees that we would charge clients. So, of course, we could never talk about that on recorded lines. A lot of the stuff we would do would involve kind of the quid, you know, quid pro quo or favor trading, specifically with between bonds and the guys, so people like me who determine where the bonds get sold to and the people that are receiving the bonds. So, you know, if there's a big hot deal coming, you know, a hedge fund manager will call me up and say, hey, I need you to take care of me on this deal. What do you need in return? And sometimes what I need to return could just be, I need him to look at another deal. Or I need him to take a meeting for me. Or, you know, I need

him to share some information about, you know, some non-public information about deals that other banks are working on. And even sometimes, you might just say, hey, how about I take you after dinner tonight and we have a great time? And then tomorrow, you know, when we're allocating this deal, you'll hook me up. And by and large, people will say, okay, sure, that's fine. And so these are the kind of conversations that you don't want to have on recorded lines. So there's a whole culture of kind of this, you know, I'll call you on your cell mentality. And and we would use it every day, specifically as it related to, you know, when we were trying to collude on fees. That's crazy.

And so it's just the whole industry, I think I was fascinated by the book just because of, one, obviously it was really funny, but two, to learn more about the complexities, the some things, some illegals happening, so to speak, I don't know, I was just shocked. So it was certainly entertaining, but it also was educational to me, which is what I say a lot about this podcast is I like to have guests that come on that both can educate and entertain and you've certainly you've certainly done that John and I really appreciate it. So I'd love to hear now. So this is this is the world you were living in. And you know, I know we've emailed a lot. So as far as what have you transitioned to? What are you doing now?

Are you, is writing going to be your primary source of income? What is your day to day life like as of as of now. Yeah, I mean, all the, all the stuff I've written, I mean, obviously I got a well-publicized book advance, but beyond that, I haven't accepted any money for any of the stuff I've written because, you know, I just wanted to just have flexibility, and I did it for the most part just to boost my platform. So I don't consider myself a writer professionally. In terms of how I transitioned to where I am now, I got hired to be the head of fixing

income syndicate at Goldman Sachs at the end of 2010, and I had a contract dispute with a previous employer over a non-compete clause that prevented me. It was kind of a long, arduous process that prevented me from taking that position, even though I had already signed and accepted it and resigned from my previous job. So that was kind of a messy, complicated, traumatic experience in terms of, well, traumatic, you know, I lost a bunch of money, I lost some good friends who are people that I thought were my friends, et cetera. And so at that point, I just said, look, you know, life is too short to not at least do something that you think is, you know, will make you happy. So, of course, everybody has bad days. But, you know, I think I try to live my life

along lines of saying, as long as I have more good days than bad, then, you know, I'm generally doing all right. But it got to the point there at the end where I was just having way more bad days and good. And, you know, kind of layer that in with what I was doing in my personal life, which was, you know, going out every night, parting pretty hard on weekends. You know, there wasn't a lot of substance. We would just sit by the swimming pool and get drunk and get crazy and, you know, just generally be pretty terrible human beings. And so I realized that, I don't know, you know, life, there's more to life than that. And so I just, I got on an airplane and flew to Houston, Texas, which is where I spent a few years growing up and decided that I wanted to

spend my life playing golf and drinking beer and having a family. And so that's effectively what I decided to do. Even before I got the book deal and wrote the book, I just wanted to just kind of chill out for a while and be kind of more, you know, I'm surrounded by old, retired white people next to a golf course and it keeps me out of trouble. I've got two kids under the age of two. But again, that's not to say that I don't do nothing to stimulate myself intellectually or financially. You know, I've invested in a couple of startups, one in the tech space, one in the, actually in the fashion space. Obviously, now I've got the book deal. There are a couple of projects that have sprung out of the book.

You know, the book, I think, I'm being told that it will debut on the New York Times best sellers list. So that's kind of an accomplishment that will, I guess, open other doors for me to pursue other opportunities. To answer your question, I mean, I generally just try and spend most time with my family and hang out, but I do have some projects that they keep me busy, but I don't really plan on being a full-time writer per se. Do you see your book being made into a movie? Yeah, I would say that I've always thought it made a better movie than a book, to be honest. I thought it just would give it much more flexibility, much more life, and it would allow me to use much more the material that I have kind of behind some of this stuff. So I've had, even going back a couple of years, even before I sold the book rights, I've had some pretty in-depth conversations with people in that space.

And I even, I turned down a movie deal, actually this was a TV show deal, before I even sold the book rights because I wanted to wait. And so, you know, these conversations have evolved along with the book. And now that the book is out and doing relatively well, you know, I'm not allowed to talk about it because I'm bound by a confidentiality agreement. but I would say that there are some very advanced, very constructive conversations around, you know, a possible translation of this book into kind of a film or TV show. As I was reading it, that's one of the thoughts I had going through my mind is that I got to believe that this thing will be turned into a movie. It just felt like that.

And I also would believe that there's probably more books in your future if that's something you want to do. Yeah, it's tricky. I mean, to your point about the movie, I agree with you 100%. percent, I think it would be amazing. But as I'm sure you know and can expect, you know, a lot of the projects that get started, they never see the light of day. So even if I wasn't bound by confidentiality agreement, I wouldn't even really want to talk about it because, you know, you can only really count on this happening when it happens, so to speak. So I mean, if it happens,

that'll be great. It'll be a lot of fun. And hopefully it'll be something that will be, you know, fun experience for everybody, but I'm not necessarily counting on it. With respect to another book, again, yeah, I've had, I have probably 20 stories for each story in the book. You know, it's a balance, right? You know, there's only so many stories that people want to hear about drugs and hookers and excess before they say, okay, right, we get it. Bankers are assholes or Wall Street is a dushy culture. But hopefully that's why, again, I've tried to say, listen, this isn't about those cliché. This is about the vantage point. This is about, you know, this is about highlighting.

You see all these books and all these stories. They tend to be about a few rotten apples, or they tend to be about these tales of redemption or epiphany. And I'm kind of the opposite. I'm saying, look, I'm not passing judgment on this culture or my actions. I'm just writing it unapologetically. I'm writing it from a vantage point that hasn't been explored. And I'll just let, you know, I enjoy the hell out of my time

and had a great time doing and even great, great time. writing about it and hopefully that enjoyment is you know kind of you can is captured in the book so I'm not passing judgment I'll just let people draw their own conclusions yeah makes uh makes a lot of sense John I have to tell you man I know you have things to do so I want to be respectful for your time so I just want to tell you I'm really appreciate you your transparency your honesty your willingness to share to kind of shine light and and pull back the curtain a little bit on an industry that people have thoughts on, but maybe, you know, haven't always heard it from an insider. And you've done that. It's been incredibly funny. And I know it will continue to be as we move forward.

But I just wanted to thank you for that. And also thank you for being a different guest for my show. I found that this actually won a little bit different than what I expected. Not that I didn't know you were a smart guy, but you can tell you're a guy who really is curious, thinks about things. has a good understanding of life in general. And I think there's a lot of learnings here to go along with, you know, some might worry like, oh, God, this is going to be all cocaine and prostitutes and things like that. And I even thought that a little bit. But I'm really glad we did this because I learned a lot from you. I appreciate it.

And it's cool to see the progression you've made as well. I'd love to continue this conversation with you as we both progress because this is certainly both educational and entertainment. which is one of my goals with this podcast. Yeah, no, thanks for having me. I've had an absolute blast, and we'd love to, you know, keep it going and talk to you anytime you want to have me back on.

For sure. Now, where can the people who have not heard of you, where can they go to find you? Hopefully any fine bookstore near you or at Amazon.com. You know, the book came out a week and a half ago is doing quite well. I'm actually, I'll be putting out a bunch of new stories

on Business Insider and a few other websites. I can't say which ones yet, but over the next week or so, I'm sure people will see plenty of me. I'm releasing a few chapters that were taken out of the book, some of which are totally outrageous, and some of which were taken out by the lawyers because they implicated specific people

or specific companies, and they were worried about getting sued. So a lot of cool stuff coming out over the next couple of weeks. But, you know, GS Elevator on Twitter is certainly a great place to start. I hate to say it, but I would give anybody the money back guarantee on this book. If you don't like it, you can email me, tell me what you don't like about it, and if you make any sense at all, I'll have to buy it back from you because it was a fun book to write. It was fun going through these experiences. From what I understand, hopefully,

most people who have read it objectively have really enjoyed it. So it's been a great experience all around. Yeah, it's well written. It's incredibly funny. It's the, the life you've lived is, it's safe to say you've lived harder than 99.9% of the people in the world, I would guess, and somehow live to tell about it in an intelligent way. So I give you credit for that. It's extremely, but like I said, it's not just about parting. There's other, learning more about the industry and kind of everything that goes along with the lifestyle is interesting. And it's different, you know?

You know what's interesting there is, is the writing the book. I don't think of actually ever said this before. Writing the book, and this might surprise you since you've read it, writing the book turned me into a little bit of a feminist. Really? Why? Because I was always, I'm so, so annoyed with these kind of, you know, the people who start talking about how, you know, a woman makes every,

it makes 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work that a man does. And you think this is just ridiculous. There's just nothing credible about this. kind of feminist gender inequality, this wage gap stuff. It's completely bogus. The facts don't support it. You know, again, I've said this on Twitter. I said, listen, if a woman really made 77 cents on a dollar for doing the same work that

a man does, then a shareholder-conscious CEO would just hire all women. And he would be a hero to his shareholders, right? It's the same logic like why we send jobs overseas doing the same work. You outsource it. If Mexicans or Indians or Filipinos can do this, or Chinese can you. do the same work, then a CEO will say, okay, let's outsource those jobs. It's the same thing, and that guy would be a hero. Obviously, it's not true. And then, of course, you look at the facts, you know, women in their 20s make more than men in their 20s. That has something to do the fact

that they're better educated. Women in their 30s make more than men in their 30s, you know, without kids, you know, if you do kind of an apples-to-apples comparison, the reality is people, you know, women choose, and they have a better understanding of work-life balance, and they choose to spend more time with their families and kind of prioritize things that are rightfully so more important than job. And that is why they, you know, in aggregate, get paid less. So this whole wage cap thing is a myth. And then I started writing the book and I start thinking about how we treated women in the workplace.

And I really, I was like, wow, I really reflected on it. I mean, I'll give an example. My first boss referred to the hiring of women as the office beautification project. And I still remember this isn't, I didn't even get to this in books, I forgot about it. But he came running in one day with a resume, and he held it out. There was some woman he was about to meet. And he said, hey, it says, Glamour Magazine's Collegiate Woman of the Year. And he runs off to the interview.

And a typical interview is like 45 minutes an hour. He comes back 15 minutes later, and he just shakes his head. He goes, man, I guess looks were not among glamour's criteria for that award. And that was it. No job for her. Everyone just kind of laughed, and I was a new analyst at the time, you have to laugh along with it. And that's how you get wrapped up into this culture. And I talk about it more and more in the book.

It's like, I got a lot of job, you know, deal experience because I was good at binge drinking. I was good at hanging out with clients. I was good at golf. So two or three years in a line, I had more deal experience than most of my female colleagues because of the connectivity that comes from this locker room culture that the bank could then point at my resume and her resume and say, see, he's more qualified. That's why he got paid more. That's why he got promoted quicker.

It's a true meritocracy. And then you start to really think about it. So this notion of meritocracy in the workplace is kind of a sham. And then I think about, okay, well, am I complicit in this? Or did I just experience it? And then this is what I talked about in the book, where, if you recall, I had this analyst who worked for me, and he was kind of weak and wimpy around the trading floor. And he didn't have a lot of confidence or easy.

And so the trader came over and said, look, we got to toughen this kid up. So we brought the kid over, my analyst, and we said, here's what we want you to do. We want you to go and take a quiz of the trading floor, just the guys, and have each person rank the five sales girls on the credit sales team, rank them by their most, I don't know, the most suitable for having sex with, right? Most attractible. The person that you'd most like to, most want to sleep with. And so we made the kid take a survey.

And then he came back and said, all right, make a PowerPoint presentation and then present it to us with your results. And these are kind of the attitudes that just get, you know, embraced and celebrated on this trading floor or in any company that has kind of this locker room mentality. And it does create disparate opportunities between men and women. So in writing the book, I was like, wow, I kind of get it now. I'm sort of a fact-based feminist. So, you know, there is a lot more to this book than just drugs. and blacking out and, you know, crashing sports cars. Yeah, crashing a new Maserati.

That's tough, especially driving it while under the influence. Allegedly, I'm sorry, allegedly. So there's so many stories, it's insane, man. It's crazy. And it's, like I said, I think a lot of people try to write these types of things. It's hard. It's really hard to do, though, and do it well. And obviously, you do.

And I'd urge people to check it out because it's certainly entertaining. and it's educational, like I already said before. So, John, I'll let you run, man. But I look forward to us continuing this dialogue conversation. I'm excited to see, you know, as you continue to progress in your life. And now, you know, as you settled a little bit, you know, with wife and kids, which is, which is a great thing. And it's awesome. And to obviously being a dad and being a husband is the greatest thing in the world.

So I'm excited to hear more about that as you made this transition. And we got to, we definitely got to do this. again. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, look, I'm going to keep, you know, I know, I'm going to keep, you know, messing around. I give you, you know, example, I'm thinking about turning, I wrote a piece for Business Insider called How to Be a Man, that had, you know, three million hits or something crazy like that. And I've got a sequel coming out next week called, you know, 100 Rules to Live By. There was a publisher that actually wanted me to turn that into kind of a cynics guide to life. And weave in some of the other stuff I've written where, you know, you have short story.

stories and illustrations that kind of explain the genesis behind these rules and these guidance. So to your point where you started by saying, you know, here's, it's good and refreshing to have somebody who's says some of the things that we might think and just never say, you know, you always see these kind of guides and lists and they're so politically correct about how to be a good person, how to succeed in life, how to succeed in business. And it's just almost, you know, makes me want to throw up. So we're toying with the idea of just writing a totally outrageous version of that in book form that blends genuinely good advice, satire, and humor, and then incorporates a bunch of stories that kind of were basically too short for me to tell or too redundant

for me to tell in the book. So there's a lot of cool fun stuff coming up, so it would be great to stay in touch and also hear about how you evolved, given that you've said that at some point you want to write a book. So I'd love to love that. I'd love that. to kind of hear about your, you know, going through that process as well. Absolutely, man. I appreciate it. All right, John. Let you go, man.

I really appreciate it. Thanks, man. Thanks a lot, man. I appreciate it. This episode of the Learning Leader Show is over, but we have plenty more to keep you locked in until next time. Head over to Learning Leadershow.com for more information and to request your favorite entrepreneur, CEO,

world-class athlete, or anyone else that inspires you. You can also talk to Ryan directly by reaching out to him on Twitter at Ryan Hawk 12. Thanks again and we'll see you next time on the Learning Leader Show.