Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 3 April 2026
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
There's obviously a lot of talk these days about AI and possible destruction of white collar jobs. Intuitively bankers might be expected to be victims of this. But before we can answer whether AI can disrupt an industry, or a line of work, we have to know what the job actually entails. What do investment bankers actually do, and why are they paid for it? To answer this question, we speak with Scott Bok, the longtime former CEO of the investment bank Greenhill. Scott is also the author of the book Surviving Wall Street: A Tale of Triumph, Tragedy, and Timing. We discuss how the industry changed in his career, what type of people thrive in it, and how AI could change the nature of the profession.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Bloomberg Audio Studios |
| 0:04.4 | Podcasts Radio News |
| 0:07.3 | Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal. And I'm Tracy |
| 0:23.3 | All the Way. Tracy, how good at Excel are you? Um, not good compared to a lot of people who |
| 0:30.9 | listen to this podcast. I would imagine. I mean, I can do some basic stuff like auto some and, you know, |
| 0:36.3 | 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. I can write some really rudimentary formulas, but I never really like got good at it to the degree that some people are. But the good news is I saw that. We don't have to learn it anymore. We don't have to learn it. I saw that Claude, uh, code they have, or Claude, 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. |
| 1:12.8 | But my sense is, you of my limited Excel skills, I wouldn't even be able to |
| 1:10.8 | verify if it worked in the first place. But my sense is, you know, that maybe that seems like |
| 1:15.4 | maybe that's changing. I would guess that it works pretty well. And imagine if you're someone who's |
| 1:21.3 | been working probably in finance for like 20 years and you became known as not an, I don't want to |
| 1:26.5 | say Excel spreadsheet monkey. |
| 1:29.0 | Excel spreadsheet gorilla. |
| 1:30.3 | Yeah. |
| 1:30.9 | Like, you know, someone really admired for their Excel skills and suddenly you've been |
| 1:35.3 | disrupted. |
| 1:36.1 | Totally. |
| 1:36.7 | Well, sometimes you see these things online or like they show this stuff and like, oh, the investment |
| 1:41.4 | analyst or junior analysts just got put out of a job. |
| 1:45.7 | And like, there's a, I'm pretty sure there's more to the job. |
| 1:48.5 | So I do know that like building models and so forth, there's an important thing in finance |
| 1:52.8 | and Wall Street in various capacities. |
| 1:55.8 | I'm pretty sure that's not the entire job. |
... |
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