When

it's your own career, your own wealth, your own opportunity, I think people are not very good at that.

And I think, in fact, most people are not good investors.

They're just not.

You know, and I think they have a tendency to sort of buy what's been performing well and to sell what's been performing poorly when obviously to some degree you should be doing the exact opposite of that.

You know, Warren Buffett has all kinds of great quotes about that kind of thing.

So I think people tend not to be that rational.

What are some of the biggest things that you learned about yourself writing the book that you wouldn't have realized otherwise?

Why, why is this s- why has this grown so much?" How would you articulate that to someone, why fundamentally there is just so much demand for financial services at the corporate level and so much more than there was, say, 40 years ago or 45 years ago?

Look, I, I think there, there liter- It's no exaggeration to say that there really was a, a, an epochal change, uh, that the, the world of sort of post-World War II, you know, big companies, building conglomerates, uh, you know, work at the same place for 35 years like my father did and, you know, not a massive amount of intense competition, not a lot of mergers, kind of stable, stable, uh, companies.

And, a- and, and, you know, maybe that meant slow growth at some point, and maybe that was part of a problem.

But in the early '80s you had really a lot of things change.

I think corporate culture changed a lot.

You know, Jack Welch took over from a guy named Reg Jones, who was, um, uh, uh, very involved at Penn, where I, I went, uh, a, you know, a very, very different kind of character.

Um, you know, the, uh, the, the tax law changed.

Do you think it's gonna be as popular a choice?

So talk a little bit about Greenhill and his extraordinary background and then meeting him and deciding to go join him in building Greenhill.

What's fascinating about the investment banking industry, and it really, you know, my book tries to tell the story of modern investment banking all the way from the 1980s to today, is how rapidly it changes.

And, you know, in the Morgan Stanley that Bob Greenhill joined, long before he's a generation older than me.

It's like 100 people and a few million dollars of capital.

I mean, that was Morgan Stanley back when he joined.

By the time I joined, it was obviously bigger than that, a few thousand people, very much a domestic US firm, but very focused on clients still, very much an investment banking-oriented firm.

But it was rapidly changing in those years that I was there.

Talk about those experiences and just how you manage those emotions that go so far beyond the business context.

Then what do you make of this escalation, really between the president and higher education? What do you think of where it is and where it's headed?

Well, I think it's, you know, in some ways, things haven't been going that well for the administration, right? They w- they were kind of rolling over the universities, I mean, th- the first Penn, where, where I was, uh, involved, then Columbia, turned to Harvard.

Harvard was really the first one to stand up and resist in a significant way, and I think that surprised a lot of people.

I'm, I'm pleased they did it.

I think many people are pleased they did it.

Uh, but that, that was fairly aggressive on their part.

I mean, if you're as big, uh, a name as they are, if you have the, the size endowment they are, you have a little more flexibility than some other schools do.

Do you think we could see more of this? Because th- th- this UVA resignation seems to have rocked higher education, alumni from the school, just people are shocked and dismayed.

Yeah.

... as opposed to like really hard work, schools have very different philosophies.

And there are schools like Harvard that have very small boards.

They have other kind of subsidiary boards, but if you read about the Harvard Corporation, for example, the people who've been in the news a lot just recently, I think that's maybe not even a dozen.

There are places like Penn where we had, at the time that the crisis really arose that I was, uh, involved in, I think there were 48 voting trustees, and there were probably 25 other emeritus, i.e., sort of retired trustees, but who still were around and interested and so on.

And I remember, 'cause we did a little study of the different schools and so on, a place like Cornell was much bigger than that.

Cornell had a huge board, much bigger even than Penn's 48, and I believe it also had a practice of letting emeritus members kinda come to all the meetings.

Can you talk to us a little bit about the crisis of the past two years, and what your experience was like? Um, because again, I think always hearing someone's perspective from the inside is so different than what you read in the headlines, and we're totally open-minded and, and wanna get your take on it.

Yes.

You know, I was thinking I would tell you about when I worked on the deal that merged all of the global Visa affiliates, like Visa is on the credit card in your wallet.

They were owned by regional banks.

There were many of them around the world and we merged them all together and then They did an IPO that was the biggest IPO in history at the time.

So that was a really interesting, very global transaction.

But the one I would highlight instead, and I talk about it a lot later in the book, is not any one deal, but it was a series of deals.

And I think it illustrated so much about the M&A world and how deals happen and why and things like that.

And on the topic of making deals, What are a couple of qualities you think makes a great dealmaker you've seen in your career that makes a great dealmaker? And which of those qualities are natural versus ones you can learn?

Wha- what was your interpretation of what was going on?

The book certainly tells the story of the evolution of our industry.

Again, going back, we were a pretty unique business for a long period of time.

There were lots, there's a whole chapter in there about all the many firms that followed us, particularly once our IPO not only was a success, but quadrupled in share price over the first 18 months, so we were worth $2 billion, and still not many more than 100 people including, you know, the receptionists and everybody else.

So the sector got more crowded, right? There were more players.

And I thought what made our firm so successful at the beginning was we had a different strategy.

And so you always have to think about what's the right strategy, not for the last five or 10 years, but for the next five or 10 years.

Thank you.

You think this was really a, a big sort of attack on so-called woke.

Yes.

I, I, I believed that 18 months ago.

To me now, it's completely obvious, but when I wrote the end of my book, the last two chapters are kind of a blow-by-blow tale of what happened at Penn, which is where all these, uh, attacks on universities really began 18 months ago, it was clear to me that it was way beyond antisemitism and free speech, that it was really was a, kind of an attack on DEI, an attack on so-called woke, uh, and not only, you know, is that, is that not what it nominally was supposed to be about, but I just don't think those things are even true.

You know, the vast majority of students at Penn and other schools are there studying things like computer science, economics.

They're trying to get jobs on Wall Street or at Google or things like that.

They are, you know, less than 1% of Penn students participated in any protest during that period, and yet the picture that's painted of schools like Penn is that they're filled with sort of radicals, that they're sort of like 1960s Berkeley.

I don't see how tariffs can help Main Street rise again, but what do you think?

what do you make, then, of what this administration is doing as it relates to questions about not-for-profit status of universities, Harvard in particular? rolling back grants to universities, Harvard in particular, but you could put Columbia on that list as well, around schools that they don't think are doing the

job.

Look, I'm very much against what the administration is doing to those schools.

I mean, I view a big part of why America is kind of on top of the world economically and leading in almost every industry sector is we have these great universities.

And even my friends from around the world all want to send their kids to America's elite universities.

So I would not want to see that system get undermined.

And look, the tax exempt status is really the nuclear weapon.

And I think today it's a very different thing.