Speaker 1: Pushkin. So this is absolutely true. I had in any suits.
Speaker 1: I went to Paul Stewart and I bought two suits
Speaker 1: and I saw these suspenders. The guy said, you're working
Speaker 1: on Wall Street. You know the guys on Wall Street.
Speaker 1: We're suspenders. And I'd never wearn suspenders, but I saw
Speaker 1: the red suspenders with the gold dollar signs, and I
Speaker 1: thought this would be funny. People will think it's funny.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. People didn't think it was funny. I mean,
Speaker 1: this was for me. This was like, huh, I'm going
Speaker 1: to Solomon Brothers and going to play at being an
Speaker 1: investment banger. Why not dress the part. I didn't realize
Speaker 1: that I was about to enter an irony free zone.
Speaker 1: I was just trying to make work fun and instead
Speaker 1: I looked like this asshole who actually would wear red
Speaker 1: suspenders with gold dollar signs. And it was it came
Speaker 1: across literally, you were the wolf of Wall Street. I
Speaker 1: was the wolf of Wall Street. I was not. It
Speaker 1: was like the antelope of Wall Street or the or
Speaker 1: the rabbit of Wall Street. I was not at the
Speaker 1: Wall Street. Hi, I'm Michael Lewis, once the rabbit of
Speaker 1: Wall Street. Welcome to other people's money a Liar's Poker Companion.
Speaker 1: Thirty years after I published my first book, I'd gone
Speaker 1: back and recorded the whole thing as a new audio book.
Speaker 1: The book is what it is as I wrote it,
Speaker 1: but this is where I crack opened all the stories
Speaker 1: behind the book. We're now at episode two, Churning and
Speaker 1: Learning on Wall Street, one of the many titles I
Speaker 1: considered and rejected for the book as a whole. I
Speaker 1: had absolutely no idea what I was doing on Wall Street,
Speaker 1: and when I got to Solomon Brothers, they were people
Speaker 1: who were apostle to my ignorance. But there were people
Speaker 1: who helped me along and kind of taught me stuff,
Speaker 1: sometimes while even knowing they were doing it. And these
Speaker 1: people found their way into the book, often pseudonymously. So
Speaker 1: just recently I went back to a couple of these
Speaker 1: people to see kind of what they were remembered from
Speaker 1: that time. One of them was a bond salesman who
Speaker 1: was next to me at the desk where they plopped
Speaker 1: me down in London when I got out of the
Speaker 1: training program. In the book, I called him dash rip Rock,
Speaker 1: and here's how I described him. He was American and
Speaker 1: only twenty three two years younger than I. Still in
Speaker 1: the way of the world, he was light years ahead
Speaker 1: of me. Dash rip Rock was a proven moneymaker. Dash
Speaker 1: often made remarks I didn't understand, such as buy two
Speaker 1: year notes and short Old Tens, or short Solomon stock,
Speaker 1: or save a client, shoot a geek and expect me
Speaker 1: to figure out why on my own. Often I hadn't
Speaker 1: a clue what he meant. But Dash, for all his pithiness,
Speaker 1: had a kind heart. And eventually, after he had sold
Speaker 1: four different money managers in three different countries on whatever
Speaker 1: new scheme he was promoting, he'd elaborate. In this way
Speaker 1: I learned about trading, selling and life. You called me
Speaker 1: up to Hampstead to your house and said I want
Speaker 1: you to look at something one night. So I went
Speaker 1: up there, and that's when you showed me like a
Speaker 1: lot of hand think. It was handwritten, it was typed out.
Speaker 1: It was like three hundred pages typed out. And I
Speaker 1: sat and read it, and then I looked at you
Speaker 1: and I said, you're going to sell seven thousand copies
Speaker 1: to the seven thousand employees of Solomon Rose, and then
Speaker 1: you're going to be unemployed and never get another job
Speaker 1: on Wall Street again. And you laughed and said, I've
Speaker 1: already sold the rights. It's coming out, ladies and gentlemen.
Speaker 1: I'm now in a position to reveal, for the first
Speaker 1: time ever the true identity of my first mentor at
Speaker 1: Solomon Brothers, Dash rip Rock. His real name is Scott Door.
Speaker 1: I said to you, I go, you have to change
Speaker 1: the names in this book because I'm making fun of
Speaker 1: the chairman. I'm making fun of you, I'm making fun
Speaker 1: of the firm. I'm hazing you mercilessly. It's you know,
Speaker 1: the pledge training all this, And I was like, you
Speaker 1: really have to change my name because I'm not ready
Speaker 1: to leave the business here at the age of whatever,
Speaker 1: twenty six or whatever I was at the time, as
Speaker 1: I remember it. When I asked Scott what he wanted
Speaker 1: his pseudonym to be, he already knew. Now Dash rip
Speaker 1: Rock turns out to be a character from the nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies. Don't but he ain't no Dash.
Speaker 1: And the training program there was a book equivalent of
Speaker 1: the Pickbook, you know that they sent out a freshman
Speaker 1: year in college back in the day, and they had
Speaker 1: all the pictures of all the people. It was probably
Speaker 1: one hundred twenty five people in that class. And I
Speaker 1: had nicknamed one guy in the class dash rip Rock
Speaker 1: because he was that guy lived on Park Avenue, you know,
Speaker 1: drove a Porsche, you know, had you know, five thousand
Speaker 1: dollars suits in nineteen eighty three, you know, so I
Speaker 1: thought that was a funny name, so I just stole
Speaker 1: it back from him. So when you read it, your
Speaker 1: takeaway was everyone, as Solomon Brothers, is going to read it,
Speaker 1: but no one else is going to be interested, right,
Speaker 1: I thought it was too much inside baseball at the
Speaker 1: end of the day. You know, what do you put
Speaker 1: on the cover? You know, I'm a bond salesman. I mean,
Speaker 1: who who cares? I mean, you know, nobody. There was
Speaker 1: no glory or drama in that world until really until
Speaker 1: your book. Did you do you remember the reaction in
Speaker 1: the firm when the book came out, a mix of horror, fear,
Speaker 1: and glee. I'd say it was like reading page six
Speaker 1: in the Posts, only three hundred pages of it there.
Speaker 1: You know, it was a parlor game, all right, who
Speaker 1: is this guy? And the ones that you protected by
Speaker 1: using pseudonyms and another were the ones you didn't protect?
Speaker 1: By putting their real names in. I think. I think
Speaker 1: I mainly protected the little people and mainly didn't protect
Speaker 1: the big people. The real names were the names of
Speaker 1: the people who were kind of prominent in the firm.
Speaker 1: But did people quickly figure out you were Dash Rip
Speaker 1: Rock Oh in thirty seconds? Yeah? Did you think, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm in trouble. Oh? I went I was, you know,
Speaker 1: looking for another job fairly quickly. But at the same
Speaker 1: time I was not super comfortable with you know, what
Speaker 1: was going on, and I got from a bond department
Speaker 1: at the time and who I was reporting to and
Speaker 1: responsible to, so and as you saw what happened shortly afterwards,
Speaker 1: firm fell apart. It was a good time for you
Speaker 1: to write that book and me to be forced to leave.
Speaker 1: Did you feel like you were forced to leave by
Speaker 1: the book? Yeah? Yeah, absolutely, I didn't know that. Really,
Speaker 1: It's okay, I don't blame you. What's funny about that
Speaker 1: is Scott and I had stayed in touch after Solomon Brothers,
Speaker 1: I mean loosely, and he never said that basically I'd
Speaker 1: ruined his career there, never brought it up. He'd gone
Speaker 1: on to have a long and very lucrative career, Like
Speaker 1: a lot of the people who I was at Solomon
Speaker 1: Brothers with, we all hit there at just the right time,
Speaker 1: with this kind of tidal wave behind us to serve.
Speaker 1: And he'd gone through a number of banks and hedge
Speaker 1: funds and had only just a few months before I
Speaker 1: spoke to him retired, But he was still struck compared
Speaker 1: to all those firms. How much power Solomon Brothers had
Speaker 1: exercised back in the day, Like how different a place
Speaker 1: it was in relation to the rest of the financial system.
Speaker 1: It can't be exaggerated in terms of how much you
Speaker 1: control we had over the level of US interest rates
Speaker 1: and therefore global interest rates at that period, because there's
Speaker 1: obviously nothing now to compare. It's interesting what you just
Speaker 1: said about control of interest rates, because Solomon didn't have
Speaker 1: control of interest rates. I mean, the Fed has control
Speaker 1: of interest rates, so but on a very micro level,
Speaker 1: like where this bond trades in relation to this bond, No,
Speaker 1: but on the absolute level of rates in a way
Speaker 1: even now, you know, a single hedge fund or a
Speaker 1: single player can momentarily have a big impact on one
Speaker 1: sector of a market or one specific issue or something
Speaker 1: like that. But back then Solomon until a number of
Speaker 1: events shrank their control. There were periods where they would
Speaker 1: go in and they would buy every single thing that
Speaker 1: the Treasury would auction, and they would just keep buying,
Speaker 1: and if any prices went down, they would just buy
Speaker 1: more until they turned things around. And that worked at
Speaker 1: an incredibly high percentage hit rate because they were willing
Speaker 1: to lose more money than anyone else on the path
Speaker 1: to making a ton. Solomon Brothers may have felt like
Speaker 1: it was an incredibly powerful position entrenched, but even then
Speaker 1: its privileged position was under assault. We just didn't fully
Speaker 1: realize it. It was just a different culture than say,
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley is where everybody knows enough to be paranoid.
Speaker 1: Everybody knows that someone's coming to get you and will
Speaker 1: things were coming to get us, and we were oblivious
Speaker 1: to it. What happened was that the banks and the
Speaker 1: investment banks went from much smaller organizations, you know, with
Speaker 1: people who could jump around department a department with history
Speaker 1: majors trading bonds, to much more specialized worlds where you know,
Speaker 1: you have thousands of PhD programmers who are fighting to
Speaker 1: get one algo a millionth of a second faster than
Speaker 1: another algo and that there's no narrative that really helps there.
Speaker 1: Your potential role is shrinking the whole time, right, it's
Speaker 1: becoming much more just you're sitting at the casino and
Speaker 1: putting your chips on red or black as opposed to
Speaker 1: having an edge. You know, the anomalies have been arbitraged
Speaker 1: out of the business, which is how we made our
Speaker 1: living for the last thirty years. And when did you
Speaker 1: realize you come to the end of the line. When
Speaker 1: I left the last European bank, who would have been
Speaker 1: around fifteen, I went to work for a client, and
Speaker 1: I went to work for a large global macro hedge
Speaker 1: fund where you were basically trading, yes, doing some analysts work.
Speaker 1: I was writing for the firm, But there's essentially it's
Speaker 1: essentially acknowledgement that there isn't really much of a role
Speaker 1: for the bond salesman. Correct If I went back and
Speaker 1: wandered the trading floors in the hedge funds of Wall Street,
Speaker 1: now would I see anything that's even vaguely familiar to me?
Speaker 1: Or has the world changed that much? No, it's nothing
Speaker 1: that was familiar. So the world that Liar's Poker describes
Speaker 1: is thoroughly changed, but Liar's Poker itself remains in some
Speaker 1: kind of time warp eternity. Why on earth are people
Speaker 1: handing this book out to kids at Harvard and saying,
Speaker 1: you got to read this if you want to know
Speaker 1: how our business works. You know, it's because it's a
Speaker 1: really fun era and it would give a you know,
Speaker 1: someone young who was idealistic about coming in and being
Speaker 1: able to make a difference. You know, it gives them
Speaker 1: some hope that is obviously completely misplaced given the modern
Speaker 1: trading environment. Gives them some hope of what that that
Speaker 1: they could have some fun. So that's the fund's been
Speaker 1: bled out of it. Yeah, there's no there's no eating goldfish,
Speaker 1: you know, standing up in front of five hundred people
Speaker 1: in the trading form Solomon London anymore. So it's used
Speaker 1: to persuade young people that this is still a place
Speaker 1: full of life, where really what it is is a
Speaker 1: place full of machines and silence. There's just no noise.
Speaker 1: That's the amazing thing about particularly hedgephones, even more than
Speaker 1: the banks. You know, you're just basically tending the machines.
Speaker 1: No one actually talks on the phone anymore. That's the
Speaker 1: most obvious physical changes. People used to stand up on
Speaker 1: their desks and yell and get an arguments and occasional
Speaker 1: fist fights, and then they were on the phone, and
Speaker 1: you know, there'd be one hundred open phone lines, and
Speaker 1: it was just this huge cataclysm of noise and risk
Speaker 1: and fear and greed. It was it was a drama.
Speaker 1: There's no drama, now, He's totally right. There was a drama,
Speaker 1: and the telephone was at the center of the drama.
Speaker 1: I mean, the mortgage traders would hurl the phones at
Speaker 1: people's heads. There were weapons in addition to like instruments
Speaker 1: of communication, and when you walked onto the floor, you
Speaker 1: could hear all, you know, a thousand voices at once
Speaker 1: shouting into phones, shouting each other. But Scott aka Dash
Speaker 1: wasn't like that. You can hear from his voice that
Speaker 1: he's not a shouter. He's a low talker, and he
Speaker 1: would mumble into his phone. In the book, it was
Speaker 1: his phone technique that I used to introduce him to
Speaker 1: the I could tell when Dash was about to sell
Speaker 1: a few hundred million dollars of government bonds because his
Speaker 1: torso would jackknife in his chair so that his chest
Speaker 1: was almost in his lap, and his head went into
Speaker 1: the sound booth. Just before consummating the trade, he'd plug
Speaker 1: his empty ear with a finger on his freehand and
Speaker 1: speak rapidly in a low voice. One of his customers
Speaker 1: nicknamed him the Whispering Dash. Then suddenly he'd pop up,
Speaker 1: hit the silencer button on his receiver, and shout into
Speaker 1: the hoop, Hey, New York, New York, You're done. On
Speaker 1: October ninety two to September ninety three, one oh yeah,
Speaker 1: one hundred million by one hundred and ten millions. When
Speaker 1: he emerged from the tuck position without having sold bonds,
Speaker 1: I knew he'd been talking to his mother. It wasn't
Speaker 1: cool to talk to your mother on the trading floor.
Speaker 1: I love describing your phone technique the low talker. You
Speaker 1: were a low talker and you would sometimes high actually
Speaker 1: go underneath your desk so nobody could hear you. Why, Well,
Speaker 1: it was loud, Yeah, really loud. And the fact is,
Speaker 1: if you're in the middle, if you're orchestrating a transaction
Speaker 1: of you know, a billion dollars worth of bonds that
Speaker 1: are moving really rapidly in price, and the money to
Speaker 1: be made or lost is really large. Sums. You really
Speaker 1: don't want a trader's shouting, yelling, hectoring abuse. You don't
Speaker 1: want that leaking through into the phone, because the trader
Speaker 1: would be screaming, I hate that customer, you know, hang
Speaker 1: up the phone, I'm never doing another trade, and you're
Speaker 1: under the thing. You don't want him to hear that
Speaker 1: as you complete a transaction and hope he'll come back
Speaker 1: ten minutes later for another one. So that's why you
Speaker 1: did it. It was editing. I thought you were afraid
Speaker 1: of people hearing what you were saying. Oh no, no,
Speaker 1: not at all. You were afraid of the person on
Speaker 1: the other end of the line hearing what everybody around
Speaker 1: you was saying. Right, you can't let the truth leak through.
Speaker 1: You can't let the truth leak through. This great line,
Speaker 1: very dash, rip Rock. I want to thank Scott Dorff
Speaker 1: for revealing himself to the audience and for talking to me.
Speaker 1: Coming up after the break, we have one more pseudonymous
Speaker 1: character from Liars Poker whose identity we're going to reveal,
Speaker 1: maybe the most famous character in Liar's Poker, the human Piranha.
Speaker 1: Welcome back. In Liar's Poker. There's a long section, probably
Speaker 1: too long a section about my education in the Solomon
Speaker 1: Brothers training program, And for me it was a way
Speaker 1: of like explaining to the reader all about Wall Street
Speaker 1: through these people who came before us, who knew all
Speaker 1: about Wall Street. And these people were colorful and interesting.
Speaker 1: But one of them was just more interesting than all
Speaker 1: the others, and he was the human Piranha. The human
Speaker 1: Piranha came to tell us about government bonds, though he
Speaker 1: was so knowledgeable about the handling of money that he
Speaker 1: could have spoken about whatever he wished. He was the
Speaker 1: only bond salesman who made traders nervous because he generally
Speaker 1: knew their job better than they did, and if they
Speaker 1: screwed up by giving him the wrong price, he usually
Speaker 1: made a point of humiliating them on the hoot and holler.
Speaker 1: It gave other salespeople great satisfaction to watch him do this.
Speaker 1: The human Piranha was short and square, like the hooker
Speaker 1: on a rugby team. The most unusual thing about him
Speaker 1: was the frozen expression on his face. His dark eyes
Speaker 1: black holes really rarely moved, and when they did, they
Speaker 1: moved very slowly, like a periscope. His mouth never seemed
Speaker 1: to alter in shape, rather it expanded and contracted proportionately
Speaker 1: when he spoke, and out of that mouth came a
Speaker 1: steady stream of bottom line analysis and profanity. I love
Speaker 1: the environment, you know. I love the tension, the competitiveness,
Speaker 1: how fast moving it was, you know, psychologically, I loved
Speaker 1: the immediate feedback of doing a big trade. So that's
Speaker 1: the human piranha. Unlike dash rip Rock, I was too
Speaker 1: scared of the human piranha to call him and ask
Speaker 1: him what he'd like his pseudon him to be, so
Speaker 1: I just gave it to him. His real name is
Speaker 1: Tom Bernard. He was only, like, I don't know, six
Speaker 1: years older than me, though at the time he seemed
Speaker 1: like the soul and the embodiment of a firm that
Speaker 1: had been around for a hundred years. I thought of
Speaker 1: him as the person who had sort of created the
Speaker 1: firm culture, or helped create the firm culture, but in fact,
Speaker 1: like everybody else, he had just adapted to it. The
Speaker 1: thing that really struck me about the culture that's very
Speaker 1: different and something that you know, I've had to unlearn
Speaker 1: the behavior over the years was a gallows schumer. When
Speaker 1: any thing really bad would happen, there was always a
Speaker 1: race to who had the gallows jokes the quickest. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I encountered that day one at Salomon Brothers, and that
Speaker 1: lasted through you know the Liar's Poker years when you say,
Speaker 1: when something bad happened in the world, Well, if a
Speaker 1: celebrity would die, you would call around and the guy
Speaker 1: who had the sickest jokes the fastest, you know, would
Speaker 1: get all the high fives. I remember coming out to
Speaker 1: snowmass to ski, and I had been on the phone
Speaker 1: with the office all morning, and so I'd gotten all
Speaker 1: the latest jokes on celebrity death, and so I'm on
Speaker 1: a ski lift with these Midwestern ladies and I started
Speaker 1: rattling off the jokes and they looked at me like,
Speaker 1: what rock did this guy just crawl out from money?
Speaker 1: They couldn't wait to get off to ski left with me.
Speaker 1: So it was kind of an Aha moment. I realized
Speaker 1: that that that stuff really doesn't travel outside of Wall Street.
Speaker 1: Where do you think it comes from? What's its purpose?
Speaker 1: That's a great question. I guess the idea that you can,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of break social boundaries, or I'll tell
Speaker 1: you one story it actually happened. The culture was the same,
Speaker 1: but this happened in the early nineties when I was
Speaker 1: at kid or Peabuddy. I sit right on in a
Speaker 1: trading desk, and I'm always listening to all the conversations,
Speaker 1: and it appears that this guy is scolding a clerk,
Speaker 1: which you know, we yelled at our clients, and we
Speaker 1: yelled at our competitors, and we alled at each other,
Speaker 1: but you know you didn't yell at a clerk. Kind
Speaker 1: of my ears perked up. And the last thing the
Speaker 1: guy says is, Okay, well, I guess you got one
Speaker 1: less guy on the assembly line, so it's going to
Speaker 1: take a little longer. Just get him here by Thursday.
Speaker 1: He hangs up, make turn around and say, Mike, what
Speaker 1: are you doing? What is that about? And Jeffrey Dahmer
Speaker 1: had been arrested at weekend for cannibalism, and my salesman
Speaker 1: was on the phone with the Ambrosia Chocolate factory in
Speaker 1: Milwaukee ordering crates of candy. They were going to call
Speaker 1: them damer bars. They were crunchy and send them all
Speaker 1: to all their customers. And you know, you had to
Speaker 1: guess what you were crunching on. So I'm the adult
Speaker 1: in the room, you know, was ahead of the group.
Speaker 1: So I was supposed to be the adult in the room.
Speaker 1: But I realized there would be a mutiny if I
Speaker 1: shut this down. So I negotiated that they couldn't send
Speaker 1: any damer bars to the Wisconsin accounts because somebody had
Speaker 1: a cousin or whatnot that god eaten by Jeff. You know,
Speaker 1: wouldn't be as funny, but it would be. So when
Speaker 1: the bars arrived on Thursday, everybody dropped their phones and
Speaker 1: jumped on them to send them to clients, and you know,
Speaker 1: go with this Gallo's joke. So that's the kind of
Speaker 1: thing that would not happen anymore. Yeah, that wouldn't happen anymore.
Speaker 1: There's so much that happened that wouldn't happen anymore. And yet,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm not totally sure that deep down underneath
Speaker 1: the surface of the behavior, the spirit of the place
Speaker 1: has changed at all. Back then you just saw the
Speaker 1: spirit of the place on the surface. Anyway, this is
Speaker 1: the human piranha Tom Bernard who had one really big
Speaker 1: effect on me. He was the one who sort of
Speaker 1: let me know I'd really made it. Its Solomon brothers An.
Speaker 1: He did it in a particular way that people still
Speaker 1: talk to me about This is how I described it
Speaker 1: in the book. The most important call of all came.
Speaker 1: It was from the human Piranha. I heard you sold
Speaker 1: a few bonds, he said. I tried to sound calm
Speaker 1: about the whole thing. He didn't. He shouted into the phone.
Speaker 1: That is fucking awesome. I mean fucking awesome. I fucking
Speaker 1: mean fucking awesome. You are one big swinging dick, and
Speaker 1: don't let anybody tell you different. It brought tears to
Speaker 1: my eyes to hear it, to be called a big
Speaker 1: swinging dick by the man who years ago had given
Speaker 1: birth to the distinction, and in my mind, had the
Speaker 1: greatest right to confer it upon me the legacy. Before
Speaker 1: the lights go out on Liar's poker, the last flash
Speaker 1: is going to be just big swinging dick. That's the
Speaker 1: thing thing everybody remembers. And it wasn't mine, it was yours.
Speaker 1: But where did you get it from? You know? It
Speaker 1: was something that was said on the trading desk. I
Speaker 1: never heard it until I got to Selomon Brothers. And
Speaker 1: I think that the young people kind of bastardized the meaning,
Speaker 1: because when I would hear good Friend or Strauss or
Speaker 1: you know, Craig Coats, the senior guys use it. They
Speaker 1: would use it in the context of, you know, if
Speaker 1: there was an opportunity to take a ton of risk,
Speaker 1: they would say, well, if we don't buy them, you know,
Speaker 1: some other swinging dick will come in, and it meant that,
Speaker 1: you know, you were on the edge of being overly aggressive,
Speaker 1: and you know, some big swinging dick will come in
Speaker 1: and take down a block of you know, half a
Speaker 1: billion over priced from GMAC. But then as the eighties
Speaker 1: went on, it the definition became just as it was
Speaker 1: in Liar's Poker. So it went from being something a
Speaker 1: term of maybe slight opprobrium or disapproval to a compliment.
Speaker 1: That's my perception. Yeah, yeah. What's funny about that is
Speaker 1: something similar happened with the book itself, not just since
Speaker 1: I saw him the brothers. I think inside the mind
Speaker 1: of John Goodfriend, the CEO, in the beginning, he did
Speaker 1: not regard it as a compliment. And Tom Bernard remembers
Speaker 1: that beginning this Monday morning, John Goodfriend begins a meeting
Speaker 1: by describing your book. He says that one of our employees,
Speaker 1: in line of Michael Lewis, has written this book Liars Poker,
Speaker 1: and he gives his view, which was not very positive,
Speaker 1: but he said he said that he thought we all
Speaker 1: should read it, but he didn't want us to buy
Speaker 1: it because he didn't want you to get the royalties.
Speaker 1: So right after the meeting, I ran out to the
Speaker 1: syndicate desk, which was, you know, right outside the meeting room,
Speaker 1: and our publicist, Bob from North Carolina was there. Do
Speaker 1: you remember him? Yeah? I do remember him. So I
Speaker 1: went up to him. He had the galleys and I said, Bob,
Speaker 1: am I in this book? And he said yes. I said,
Speaker 1: am I in it by name? And he said no,
Speaker 1: but you'll recognize yourself. So I looked around and good
Speaker 1: friend wasn't there. So I ran out to Barnes and
Speaker 1: Noble to buy the book because I was, you know,
Speaker 1: in curious, curious what you had said about me, and
Speaker 1: so I'm looking around in the fiction section. I couldn't
Speaker 1: find it, and I went up and asked the gentleman
Speaker 1: at the connor. I said, you know, do you have
Speaker 1: Liar's pokon? He points over to the nonfiction section and
Speaker 1: I said, why is that in nonfiction? And that that
Speaker 1: was the question I had after good Friends. You know
Speaker 1: description of the book. You know, after I read it,
Speaker 1: I realized, you know this is true. I don't know
Speaker 1: why I asked a guy, because you know it's you know,
Speaker 1: it was a very accurate portrayal of the environment at
Speaker 1: Solomon at the time, and you know everything you said
Speaker 1: about me, and you know it was true. Your character
Speaker 1: as it appears before the Trading class is maybe the
Speaker 1: second thing that will go out last with a book.
Speaker 1: People remember the human Pirunha. You were scary? Did you were?
Speaker 1: You were aware that you were scary? No, I was
Speaker 1: aware that I was intense, but you know, it was
Speaker 1: a very very intense environment, you know I was. I
Speaker 1: think you called me a Dennison of the trading floor,
Speaker 1: and I was thriving on it. So good Friend tells
Speaker 1: everybody to go read it somehow without buying it, which
Speaker 1: would have been hard to do. Oh yeah, I think
Speaker 1: everybody had Salomon Brothers read the book. I think there
Speaker 1: was a feeling among many that it was you were
Speaker 1: telling stories out of school that yeah that if you
Speaker 1: know someone talks about infidelity at the country club with
Speaker 1: the guys and it gets back to the wives, you
Speaker 1: know that that person isn't too popular and with the
Speaker 1: guys anymore, you know, So there was some of that that,
Speaker 1: you know, you were a bit of a tattle tale.
Speaker 1: It was the one little niggling feeling of kind of
Speaker 1: guilt I had about the whole enterprise was telling stories
Speaker 1: out of school, and if if there had been any
Speaker 1: real cohesion in the firm, I probably never would have
Speaker 1: written in the first place. But I would say something
Speaker 1: that's funny, and it's a code of the whole story,
Speaker 1: and it's that. As time went by, John Goodfriend himself
Speaker 1: softened in his attitude towards the book. He would come
Speaker 1: to like any public talk I was giving in New York,
Speaker 1: and we would chit chat afterwards. And then he confessed
Speaker 1: that he'd bought hundreds of copies and he kept him
Speaker 1: in his office, and he'd signed them and given them
Speaker 1: away to people when they came to visit him. So
Speaker 1: we come full circle. We come to a place where
Speaker 1: everybody seemed to be kind of okay with it in
Speaker 1: the end, and you can hear the human Piranha is
Speaker 1: not really the human Piranha anymore. He's softened. All those
Speaker 1: rides on ski lifts and Aspen has turned him into
Speaker 1: a slightly different person. He was a creature of that
Speaker 1: moment in that place, and now he's different. Coming up
Speaker 1: in the next episode, we're going to get another perspective
Speaker 1: on what life was like at Solomon Brothers in the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties and early nineties. How do you think Liar's
Speaker 1: Poker would have been different if I'd have been a woman?
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh. I can only speak for myself. I
Speaker 1: don't think I could have been that balanced. I think
Speaker 1: women feel it deeper in a way. There were times
Speaker 1: when I was sobbing. Or was the time I went
Speaker 1: to a lawyer and said, can I do something about this?
Speaker 1: You know I was treated poorly. Other people's Money is
Speaker 1: a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show,
Speaker 1: please remember to share a rate and review. You can
Speaker 1: buy our new Liars Poker audiobook, unabridged and read by
Speaker 1: me the author at Pushkin dot Fm, slash Liars Poker,
Speaker 1: and also at Audible define more Pushkin podcasts, listen on
Speaker 1: the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1: You were better with customers than anybody I'd ever seen. Really, yeah,
Speaker 1: because you believed in what you were selling, and that's
Speaker 1: where that naivete thing comes in. And you know, it
Speaker 1: really served you well because the customers really didn't see
Speaker 1: you as a you know, as a used car sales.
Speaker 1: They saw you as a as a proselytizer. I had
Speaker 1: the ability to seem like I knew what I was
Speaker 1: talking about right when you actually had no clue.