I'm assuming that we're uniformly drawing numbers (without replacement), and stop when we *explicitly* see that the currently drawn number is smaller than the previously drawn number. That means, if we draw $N$ first, we still draw another number and see if it is smaller than $N$, which is going to happen for sure. With this setup, it's certain that we'll draw numbers at least $2$ times. This way, the problem has a beautiful answer, however the OP should still clarify the question to help other readers who can benefit. Let $X$ be the number of draws in this experiment. Since $X$ is nonnegative and integer we can express the expected value as $$E[X]=\sum_{k=0}^{N-1} P(X>k)$$ Here, $P(X>k)=\frac{1}{k!}$ because for number of draws to be bigger than $k$, the first $k$ draws must be sorted, which happens with $\frac{1}{k!}$ probability no matter what $N$ is. Expanding the sum yields: $$E[X]=1+1+\frac{1}{2!}+\frac{1}{3!}+\cdots+\frac{1}{(N-1)!}$$ Notice that this converges to $e$ as $N\rightarrow\infty$