Hello everyone and welcome to At Barrens. I'm Andy Surwer.

And welcome to our guest, Scott Bach, former CEO of the investment banking firm Greenhill

and also the former board chair of the University of Pennsylvania Trustees.

Scott, great to see you. Thanks for joining us.

Great to be here, Andy. Thank you.

So let's start off with your investment banking hat on. And let me ask you, how are you advising clients to navigate the markets in 2025 going forward? Well, I think there's a lot of, obviously,

uncertainty right now. That's an overused word, but it happens to be the correct word.

And I think until things kind of stabilize, you know, in terms of where tariffs are going to be,

and how global our business is going to be, I think a lot of companies are going to be just pausing a little bit before they undertake any major mergers and acquisitions.

Right. I mean, we've heard about companies pausing for

quite some time. I mean, how much pausing can the economy cope with, I guess, is a question, right?

It certainly is. And yeah, for a while now, M&A bankers have thought we're on the brink of a boom.

I mean, we've heard that for a number of months and quarters now, really. It hasn't quite materialized because it seems like there's always something new.

And, you know, so much of the M&A business really is global in nature.

If I think back in my career, so many of the deals, you know,

there are not trillions of dollars of deals every single year.

And so much of it is about building big global enterprises. And if we're going to

roll that back, it's going to change the game quite a lot.

Yeah, you have a new book that you've just written called Surviving Wall Street, a tale of

triumph, tragedy, and timing. And, you know, it's a little curious to me, Scott, surviving.

Is that the right word? I mean, it seems like you've succeeded. Well, I feel like I thrived, yes, but I thought

here is the rationale for the word surviving in the book. Because I looked at my career,

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