Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day

Scott Bok (0:02)

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Joe Weisenthal (0:18)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:22)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:24)

Tracy, how good at Excel are you?

Tracy Alloway (0:28)

Not good compared to a lot of people who listen to this podcast, I would imagine. I mean, I can do some basic stuff, like auto sum, and you know, so some, no, it's not. That's like literally clicking a button. I can write like a couple formulas in the little command prompt, but I think everyone can do that.

Joe Weisenthal (0:43)

I can write some really rudimentary formulas, but I never really got to the degree that some people are. But the good news is I saw that-

Tracy Alloway (0:51)

We don't have to learn it anymore.

Joe Weisenthal (0:52)

We don't have to learn it. I saw that Claude code, they have some extension where you just talk to Excel in English, and you say like, you know, build this kind of formula and make these changes and import this. I haven't played around with it, so I'm not 100% sure it would work. And to be honest, because of my limited Excel skills, I wouldn't even be able to verify if it worked in the first place. But my sense is, you know, that maybe that seems like maybe that's changing.

Tracy Alloway (1:16)

I would guess that it works pretty well. And imagine if you're someone who's been working probably in finance for like 20 years and you became known as not an I don't want to say Excel spreadsheet monkey, Excel spreadsheet gorilla. Like, you know, someone really admired for their Excel skills. And suddenly you've been disrupted.

Joe Weisenthal (1:36)

Totally. Well, sometimes you see these things online or like they show this stuff like, oh, the investment bank, investment analysts or junior analysts just got put out of a job. And like, there's, I'm pretty sure there's more to the job. So I do know that like building models and so forth, there's an important thing in finance and Wall Street in various capacities. I'm pretty sure that's not the entire job. I'm pretty sure automating Excel is only part of it. But nonetheless, technical skills are technical skills. And if that changes, who knows, maybe the job could change.

Tracy Alloway (2:06)

Well, the question I've always had about Wall Street is, how much of it is driven by your own personality and sort of client facing skills versus, I am a brilliant analysis who is not only able to come up with amazing ideas for mergers and acquisitions sort of working girls style, where like Melanie Griffith is in an elevator and is like, I know what your company needs to do, needs to merge with whatever versus like, I'm just really good at hobnobbing with executives.

Joe Weisenthal (2:37)

It's probably a mix, right? That would be my guess. That there's someone is really good at, oh, this company that owns parking lots of this. The city could buy another parking lot company and so forth. And then another person who's really good at staying out and taking the class for a nice dinner. I don't think you could really, or I don't really want to have a conversation about the degree to which AI is going to disrupt all of these white collar jobs until I have a better handle of what the white collar jobs are in the first place. I feel like we should start there.

Tracy Alloway (3:04)

How important are Excel skills actually in this business?

Joe Weisenthal (3:07)

What is the sort of distribution of skills that it takes to thrive in some of these capacities? Anyway, very excited to say, we really do have the perfect guest to talk about some of this. Someone we talked to last year and that was about sort of the history of investment banking over the last several decades and the sort of connection between global capitalism and investment banking. We wanted to have him back on the show because as an investment banking veteran, someone who could maybe talk about the inside and how people work and how the culture change and how technology changes. So we're going to be speaking with return guest Scott Bok. He is the former longtime CEO of the investment bank Greenhill, the author of the recent book Surviving Wall Street and comes back on Odd Lots. So Scott, thank you so much for coming back with us.

Scott Bok (3:50)

It's great to be back. Thank you.

Joe Weisenthal (3:53)

For listeners who, in case they didn't listen to the previous one, which they should, when did your career span on Wall Street? When did you first get into it? Give us the sort of the 30-second Scott Bok career bio.