Scott Bok Explains What Investment Bankers Actually Do All Day

24:47Actually, we should talk about that because this is the other thing that's happened in investment banking is you have had the rise of private equity and also hedge funds, which are in some ways, you know, competing directly with bankers. One of the things you sometimes hear, actually, when it comes to the junior bankers actually working really long hours is this idea that, well, we all know they're going to go join Blackstone in like two years anyway. So we have to squeeze out as much as we can from them before that actually happens. How did that actually change the business? And I guess like how much pressure did that generate on the banks to respond and, I guess, retool their own offerings in response?

25:26Well, private equity really became the biggest client base for the whole industry, right? And that also was a very, very small, nascent industry. You go back to the early days, like Morgan Stanley had its first private equity fund. I can't remember exactly. I think it was like a$40 million fund. You go back to KKR's initial fund. People used to do leverage buyouts with like, you know, buy a$10 million company with$100 ,000 down and buy the rest with debt. You could do that. I feel like we could put$100K together. I think you may have missed the opportunity. Unfortunately, prices went up from there.

26:00But, you know, these things kind of fed on themselves, had some early success. And so really in the 1980s beginning then you had the rise of the private equity industry, you know, these huge players that for a long time, you know, did very, very well taking companies private, you know, kind of doing a number of things to boost their returns and then putting them back out into the public. That has also changed quite a lot where the industry is looking to, you know, all kinds of private capital, right? I mean, you know, Blackstone really pioneered this model of, oh, let's do real estate, let's do hedge funds, let's do private credit.

26:32And so you expanded to so many different fields. But that really fundamentally changed Wall Street because the rise of the private equity industry created a client that was kind of permanently in the transaction business, right? Not like a public Fortune 100 or 500 company that might do a deal every year or two or three. These were firms that did 10 or 20 deals a year. And so they became the most important clients. Their raising debt is raising money, I guess. That's a good one. Thank you. I stole that from Lloyd Flankfein, actually. Oh. I feel bad. I've been reading his book, which is why I keep mentioning him.

27:09That's a good one. Okay, you get a little bit further into your career and you get a sort of role where perhaps you get to think a little big picture and you have to, more junior people are the ones staying up late, etc. Talk to us a little bit about recruiting. And I admit, this is an area, of course, today that there's probably a lot of anxiety for people going into the biz. But talk to us a little bit about like, OK, some things obviously can be taught. Math can probably generally be taught. Put aligning bullet points on a PowerPoint. I think that can probably be taught, though fastidiousness and attention to detail, maybe inherently, maybe not.

27:47How would you talk to us a little bit about how you how you found people at the right fit, how you what that process was like? Well, that also, of course, has changed dramatically as the industry has grown. And if you go back to the early days, we recruited very few schools. I mean, it really was sort of the Ivy League and maybe a few others. And it was for a small number of jobs. So there were plenty of students there for that. Now, when the industry really exploded, those schools weren't producing enough people. And I can say in the early days of Green Hill, we had in terms of like what knowledge these young people had.

28:15We had a little bit of a strategy of, you know, let's take half of the class, just kids who are really smart. You know, they can do math. They can speak. They can write. They just got great grades all the way through. They're really, really smart. And let's take the other half as people who actually have some substantive knowledge that's useful. You know, they went to Wharton. There are other great business schools. The University of Virginia had one. We recruited a lot from University of Texas, Indiana University, University of Michigan. And so we'd kind of do half and half and figure, you know, the kid who majored in finance at Wharton can teach the kid who majored in English at Yale.

28:49Now, today what's changed is that the typical student, wherever he or she sits as they're in their senior year of college, I mean, they've had like four internships by now. They've taken various online courses. They come in so ready to roll, even if they majored in something that's completely unrelated to what Wall Street actually does. So you're getting someone who's almost trained before they even arrive. Now, you give them a lot more training, of course, but it's not the kind of thing where you bring in an English major, you know, as we did in the early days and teach them, like, here's what a stock is and here's what a bond is.

29:24You know, these students have been working on that since they were in high school. Maybe I'm sorry to say I think they should probably be doing other things in high school. But, you know, it's become a very, very competitive world, right? Even though there's many, many more opportunities for students to get a job on Wall Street today as they come out of college, at the same time, it's very, very competitive. Was there like a point where you started noticing that or like around when that changed? Because it certainly tracks that you like meet young people and they're like, oh my God, like how do they know all this stuff about things that maybe it's the internet or something.

29:56The things that I certainly didn't know about when I was in high school, really even college in many instances. But I'm curious when you started noticing that. I think maybe in the sort of the post dot-com bubble bursting, kind of in the early 2000s when business really started to pick up again and you had those several great years leading into what, of course, became the financial crisis. But there was such an increase in opportunity then. And now everyone was in on the secret, right? I mean, they could read about the industry. They could understand the compensation structures and the potential for themselves to get ahead in life.

30:30And, and so these students started kind of working backwards, like, okay, I want to get a first year analyst job. How do I do that? Okay. What, what internship should I get after, you know, freshman year? Well, you can't get a very good one then, but maybe you can get something tangentially, you know, does your, do you know somebody who works as a stockbroker? Can you be a, you know, work in the mailroom there or something? Well, after sophomore year, maybe you can do a little better than that. After junior year, maybe you can get, you know, something better than that. And by the time you show up as a college junior looking for that first-year analyst job at Goldman Sachs, you've got like five names on your resume that look like, wow, this person's been around the industry a long time, even though they're 21 years old at that point.

31:09Scary. Do you think as many people are going to want to go in finance given that – I mean, we've already been through shifts in the popularity of finance as a career. So at one point, it was the place that you wanted to go to if you were like a Harvard grad or whatever. And then it became tech for a little while. And now there's all this anxiety over AI disrupting particularly analytical jobs. Do you think it's going to be as popular a choice? I think it will evolve and fluctuate and probably decline over time. Just the industry is all about cycles, right? Markets are all about cycles. I mean, we've had an incredible run, incredible run.

31:49Okay, the, you know, COVID was a little bit of a hiccup, right, where markets sort of plummeted and things slowed down. But then, you know, it exploded in activity in just a matter of months later. So it's been a long run really since the financial crisis of, you know, really wonderful times, largely on Wall Street. And, you know, at some point there's going to be, you know, a retrenchment from that. There's going to be some kind of decline. You know, who knows? Maybe a war, you know, turns things around. Maybe a private credit problem turns things around. But something will happen. and I think can sort of dampen the interest again, just as happened with the dot-com crash of the financial crisis.

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33:49At IBM, we've seen this firsthand. But by embedding AI across HR, IT, and procurement processes, we've reduced costs by millions, slash repetitive tasks, and freed thousands of hours for strategic work. Now we're helping companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business, IBM. So let's talk a little bit more about technology and the technological changes that you saw in your career. So, okay, mention like you're using Lotus 1, 2, 3 in the beginning, which I have some memory of Lotus 1, 2, 3 and ease of data retrieval is so much different now.

34:31But talk to us about, okay, 2024, what recent years and some of the other ways, like what other technological innovations came out? What time-consuming activities did they shrink to near zero? And then what new things did people do on top once, okay, the technology is here. You don't have to allocate your time to this. You're now going to allocate your time to that. Talk to us what else you saw there. Sure. Yeah. I mean, look, in the early days, like even companies weren't even that aware of their own share price, right? I mean, not everybody had a Bloomberg terminal or CNBC screen on their desk.

35:06If you're sitting in Dayton, Ohio, so you didn't know. As bankers, you could bring very little information, and it was new to the client. It was interesting to the client. Over time, we used to do a lot of laborious work to create sort of a comparable companies analysis. Here are the 10 companies in your business segment. You trade at this PE multiple or this EBITDA multiple, and here's where the other guys trade, and here's how their leverage is different than yours. and here's how their stock is performing. That used to be a tremendous amount of work. Now really a machine can largely do that.

35:37And a lot of the other kind of creation of sort of standard charts on what's going on in the industry, even what's going on in your company can be done very, very quickly. So I think the pyramid, I have to think, is going to get less fat at the bottom because you're going to be really leveraging technology to do a lot of things It used to be somebody sitting up all night trying to find out what PE multiple Coca-Cola was trading at. And now you can get it at the touch of a finger. Does the edge in that scenario, if it's not about how much knowledge you're accumulating and can share with your client, is the edge more on the execution side of things?

36:17Just the knowledge or the client's belief that you out of everyone else in the IB business is going to be able to execute like a smooth deal? I think that's true to some degree and particularly among sort of the so-called independent firms like Greenhill was for a long time and many others are today. But I think among the larger group of competitors, I think a lot is going to come down to what else is in the relationship. Are you in their revolving credit facility? Did you do their bond offering? Are you doing equity research for them? Are you touching them in just every – are you doing their hedging?

36:54or you, you know, talking about currency, talking about commodity prices. And so I do think it, it may, that's why I think sort of the one-stop shopping is kind of a little more appealing again, because if, if nobody, if nobody really has the magic anymore, right. The magic is now a fingertips. And, you know, I mean, even a lot of things like you can, you can, you don't even need to do the XL model. I mean, you can say into a, you know, in the AI, if, if you have this stream of cash flows to this period of time, this discount rate, what's the number? I mean, it will give it to you without you typing a single number onto the page.

37:28But I think that with everyone having access, equal access to that information, I think it will come down to, yeah, maybe are you smarter than the other guys? Can you execute better? But probably in most cases, you know, what else are you doing for me? And, hey, I could give this to anyone, but I'm going to give it to you. So how much, and Tracy alluded to this at the very beginning, but how much of the job is being a good hang at the golf course, being able to get a good dinner reservation? And seriously, no, for real. Shouldn't it be pickleball? This is where when I think about if I were in this, I don't think I'd be very good at that.

38:05I start looking at my watch or yawning. Most likely I start looking at my phone and start looking bored, et cetera. The endurance to stay up. This is true. It's very obvious when Joe is bored talking to you. I speak from experience. So this should not be my field. But talk to us about that element and just the sort of people skills and all that. Now, of course, that's at quite the high level, right? It doesn't matter how fun you are to be with as a senior associate at J.P. Morgan. That's not necessarily going to win the business. But maybe your boss's boss, you know, whether he's in the right golf clubs and inviting clients and, you know, getting to know them on a personal level.

38:44Look, there's always going to be that element to the business. But that's a pretty small piece. And, of course, everyone has that, too, right? I mean, you can one-up others. You can bring somebody to the Masters. You can, you know, rather than to, you know, a country club on Long Island, you know, you can – there's different levels of sort of client entertainment. But, you know, look, it's important to build relationships. It always is. I think what, you know, whether you're talking about sort of personal wealth management or corporate financial management, what the advisors have to realize is like everyone in the world is calling on this guy and trying to get, you know, either his personal money to manage or trying to manage his corporate affairs and help him do acquisitions and so on.

39:28I mean, it's not, that's another thing really that changed a lot in the industry. It used to be that firms had clients, like, no, that's my client, and this one is your client. Now everyone - Now they're just all clients. Everyone's clients of everyone. Right. And it's kind of a free-for-all where you've got a lot of parties out there. And you being special because you invite somebody to something and get to know them better. I mean, everyone else is doing that too. And as a matter of fact, if you don't have the relationship, you're probably more prone to do that because you're trying to break in, get to know them.

40:00You mentioned this word earlier in the conversation, but can you explain culture to us? Explain all culture to us. No, the investment banking culture, because this is one thing that we hear all the time from, you know, especially executives, former executives at investment banks, this idea that, well, we have a culture that is different to someone else's culture. And whenever you hear them summarize the culture, it's almost always like we're client facing. And I've never heard a bank say it's not about the client, actually. Our culture is about something else. What does culture mean in investment banking?

40:35I think it's probably fair to say every firm aspires to the same culture, right? You aspire to be driven by excellence and attention to detail and client service. and you produce that great coverage through teamwork and training and mentorship. I mean, everyone aspires to all that. There are, though, different cultures. There are some places I think are much harder to work than others, although I think the industry has become a little more in common. I mean, I think there was a day when, you know, the difference in culture between like a Morgan Stanley and a Bear Stearns was vast, I would say.

41:14Say more about that. Like what would have been the difference? And, you know, there were some firms that sort of, you know, the word scrappy sometimes gets thrown around on Wall Street, right? And if you're the elite firm, like say, you know, back in the day, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs were, of course, they're still elite firms in many ways today. But, you know, as opposed to someone who's kind of scrappy trying to get business that maybe you wouldn't do. I mean, there was a day, one of the interesting things, not to bring up the Epstein files, but there was a day when firms had a lot of rigor over who they would do business with.

41:47And I know that Morgan Stanley, that was the case. I think at Goldman Sachs, that was the case. I mean, look, in the law firm business, there were firms that didn't like hostile takeovers. They thought that, oh, that's kind of unseemly for us to be trying to buy somebody else's business on a hostile basis. And so these firms that, you know, you could put in the category of scrappy were the ones that were trying to be a little more like, hey, if the client wants that help, I'm going to give the client that help. Or if the client has a little bit of a sketchy background. That's right. And, and, and, well, and also by, you know, maybe doing a transaction for someone that's a client that maybe of, you know, back in the day, a Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs wouldn't have worked for.

42:24Now you've got a credential in that industry. Now, now you've done a media deal. Now maybe you can do the next media deal. Maybe you can swim upstream toward the more prestigious clients. So I think at one point the cultures were a lot more different than they are today. It's sort of flattening now, right? It's kind of flattened. I think, you know, look, this is probably a function of scale of activity and of things like technology and of things like, you know, just so much open information on everything. You know, everyone can sort of copy everyone else, right? It's pretty obvious what a good culture is.

42:55Hire smart young people, train them well, treat them decently, and they'll grow up to be, you know, good bankers. You know, pay attention to your clients, have integrity. you know, et cetera, you'll build a good business. But those aren't secrets, right? Everybody knows those. I have a question. It's sort of this longstanding puzzle within finance. It might be relevant this year because there are some very big companies that might come public. Why does the IPO process as we know it exist and persist? Because this is one of the longstanding academic things is why is there frequently a pop? Why do the companies have to pay large fees to underwriters, particularly given you'd think the internet could just have an auction, right?

43:37An auction out the allocation of shares you want and then get the market price instantly and so forth. And yet, this has been tried for a very long time. And going back to the dot-com era, there have been attempts to disintermediate the traditional IPO process. With almost no success, SPAC's tried, that seems to be sort of not a particularly a counter signal, perhaps. How would you describe the persistence of the IPO? Well, you know, first of all, start with public companies, right? That's what you have after you do an IPO. You know, that market really has shrunk. I mean, it fell in half. The number of public companies in America fell in half in the 25 years or so that our firm was an independent firm.

44:15So that, I don't think that's a good thing. I think it's a good positive thing to have more companies in the public realm where there's more information and more under, you know, From the world of private, where nobody really knows much about your company, to public. I think having a lot of, you know, a lot of sort of activity around that, you know, a big, almost like PR campaign. You know, lots of information. I sort of think it's like a corporate bar mitzvah. And you like stand up there on the thing and like. Choose a DJ. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It is a bit like that. I mean, I remember for our own IPO back in 2004, we had like 60 something one-on-one meetings as well as big group meetings in places like New York and Boston and so on.

45:00But if you're trying to get known by a lot of investors in a real hurry, you kind of need to go through something like that. And, you know, and that's not like the industry has been some sort of a, you know, where the fees are fixed and there's nothing you can do about it. I mean, for a long, long time, an IPO was, I remember it was 7%. That was an underwriting commission. You know, I remember we worked and advised a Visa when it did what was then the biggest IPO in 2007 or something like that. And that was like a fraction of a percent, you know. So it sort of succumbs to competition, right? And somebody says, okay, yeah, if I'm doing a classic early year Silicon Valley IPO and we're raising$100 million, yes, I think a$7 million fee is fair for that.

45:42And probably your competitors feel that way too. It's a lot of work. It's a little bit risky. But when you're doing an IPO that's in the hundreds of millions, the billions, and maybe today the tens or hundreds of billions, the fees will be very, very small and driven by pretty ferocious competition, I'm sure. Did you say Green Hill IPO'd in 2004? Yes. So that's kind of late, right? Well, certainly in the context of some of the larger investment banks, because I think by then even Goldman had gone from a partnership. That's right, in 1999. Yeah. So what was the sort of push-pull process of actually going public for you?

46:17What were the considerations? Well, for us, it was that there had been a long, I mean, obviously some bigger firms like Morgan Stanley went public in 1986 and I think Goldman in 99 or something like that. But for a firm like ours that was kind of a smaller, more focused firm, the long history of that was that you normally sold the firm. And even in its fairly early days, you'd kind of build something, prove you had a team, prove you had a brand, prove you had some clients, and you'd go out and sell the firm. There were many, many cases that happened. And we viewed the IPO as an alternative. An IPO as a way to realize the value you had created, but also keep what you thought was the special culture, to go back to that word.

46:58You didn't want to change things. You didn't want to give up control, et cetera. And so that was really what drove us to go public, and I think many others as well. But also in an IPO process, you're raising capital, right? What does capital actually mean for a boutique advisory firm like Greenhill? That used to be the case. That was the original idea, that you go public to raise capital. And to some extent, that's still true. But you look at, even take these mega technology companies, say, do they need capital? They can raise all the capital they want in the private markets. So it really has evolved from that to wanting liquidity, I would say.

47:37You want to have a marker that says, here's what my company is worth. And you want to have the liquidity to be able to transact at that price on any given day. So I think that has driven more IPOs in recent years than the earlier notion of, wow, we need to build a new factory, or we We need to invest a lot to build an overseas business or launch a new brand. So we need to do an IPO to raise money. Has something changed on the IPO front? Maybe I missed it. But I feel like several years ago, maybe in the mid-2010s, I still used to read a lot of stories about so-and-so won the Uber deal. And this would be a big thing.

48:19And they're flush left on the S1 or the Prospectus or whatever it is. Morgan Stanley getting Facebook or something like that. Yeah, stuff like that. And now I feel like I don't. Has something changed there? No, that's still a thing. Okay, that's still a thing. You still want to be on the left. But, you know, again, the industry became very, very big, very, very competitive. And so, you know, it used to be like there was one lead underwriter. And then you got into, well, you're the global lead. You're the co-global lead. You're the lead left. Massive lead inflation. Title inflation. Everyone gets to be a lead.

48:50It's like getting an A at Harvard. I understand they dish a lot of that. Participation trophies for investment bankers. Remember the Uber one? Wasn't there a banker who became an Uber driver for a while? Yes, there was. Yes, there was. Remember that? Because he wanted to show that he, and I get it. He understood it. It's like, that's cool. He really got it. He really took the job seriously, and he drove for Uber and stuff like that. But still in my mind, I was like, does this really make a difference from Uber? They're just selling some shares, and then they're moving on. It's cute. People used to do that sort of thing.

49:21I think, by the way, I can't remember his name. He was kind of slightly after my time, I think. But that banker is still at Morgan Stanley and is, I'm sure, going to be the one driving the pursuit of Elon Musk's large IPOs to come. Michael Grimes. That's who it is. Oh, Michael Grimes. Of course. Yeah. He became an Uber driver for a while. Yeah. He was a big deal at that time. I remember. He's definitely in the mix today with some of these big potential IPOs. We should actually talk about league tables, though, because I feel like this is sort of perhaps an inordinate amount of what an investment banker's life is actually about.

49:57And back when I was covering the banks, the league tables were the things I probably got called up about the most. Lots of banks explaining to me why the league table rankings were not, in fact, an accurate reflection of their business. How much do those actually matter? I think whether you're, frankly, if you're number one or number four, number seven, you know, or number nine or 11, even, you probably have a pretty equal chance at pursuing something. But look, the bankers do, you know, do aggressively fight to try to be number one in something, right? But again, with the increase in just availability of information and transparency, I mean, it used to be that, you know, there was a lot of gamesmanship around the league tables.

50:41You know, you'd say, well, we're number one in, you know, in IPOs. And you'd look into the footnotes and it would say, you know, this includes all deals for, you know, radio stations with a market cap more than$250 million. And, you know, if you're trying to pitch some media deal or something. And you'd always have some way to slice and dice, like US IPOs, UK IPOs, this industry, this deal size. Now it's kind of all out there. And it's, you know, there's 10 or a dozen firms that are very, very competitive. And the fact that one ranks number one versus four is not a big deal. It's hilarious. Michael Grimes, he not only drove for Uber, he mastered the online game Farmville before Facebook's IPO.

51:24They spent hours playing that. And hey, if that paid off for him, good for him. And now he's back because it looks like he'll probably be involved. A lot of people master Farmville for free with no expected payout. He turned it into something. And I guess it's likely to be involved or perhaps positioning himself for a potential role in the SpaceX IPO. Final question for me, but I'm just curious. So like, OK, we don't know what the future is going to look like, but I'm curious. Like people you're talking to or things you're seeing, the AI question. And there's some obvious things today. hey, anyone knows that you can do a very good comp analysis already with almost no knowledge.

52:00You're like, what are some comps here? And maybe that's not the kind of output that you would show to a client, but it might get you 95 % of the way there. And so that's extraordinary. And we talked about Excel files and stuff like that. What else? Like, what does it feel like AI is going to do to this space? Or what would be your guess? Or where today would you imagine we're already seeing AI change the nature of the job? No one really knows the answer to that question, of course, because it's such a fast-moving technology. But look, I do think it will change a lot about how bankers interact with clients.

52:33Because the information now is going to go from kind of available, but you have to sort of work to dig it out, to available just literally at your fingertips. And by the way, not just to you, the banker, but also to your client. So I think differentiating yourself as a banker inside one of these firms or as one of these firms relative to your peers trying to win the IPO, trying to win the M &A deal, trying to win the bond offering is going to be more complicated. You'll be more efficient in preparing your materials. You'll be more efficient in communicating with that client and delivering interesting, insightful information to them.

53:08But a lot of that information is going to be commodity-like. And so the real challenge is going to be, you know, if a client has access to all the information you do and they're getting all the feeds of, you know, various data they like and so on, and you have a one hour meeting with that client, how are you going to use that meeting, that one hour meeting? You know, they already know a lot as you're walking in there. So how do you use that? It's got to be more about, you know, the human dimension, the tactics, why this company may be more amenable to a deal now than they were in the past. You know, things like that that are more about psychology, really, than about math.

53:44I feel like the trend is towards extroverts with large balance sheets, I suppose. Yes. All right. Scott Bach, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. We love catching up with you. I know we got to do it again. I would love to. It was great fun. All right. That was great.

54:12Tracy, I love talking to Scott. Yeah, it's great. I'm glad we met Scott. I think just this idea, and it came up at the very end, about the information asymmetry just being gone. And it feels like that's not something that is just true with AI now, right? But it feels like there is a version of this story that you could say going back for the last 45 years in which degradation of the information edge that a bank would have had over its clients for all kinds of different largely technological changes since then. Yeah. I mean, I found that conversation fascinating. I guess the two takeaways for me are the first technological revolution in investment banking and the idea that, well, we don't have to spend as many hours like actually pulling physical SEC filings or something like that or looking up quotes on a Quotron or whatever.

55:06And what replaced that work was more meetings. Yeah. Right. I feel like humans can always. Find a reason to meet with each other. Exactly. Humans love meeting. I know. Oh, my God. It's crazy, isn't it? It's ridiculous. Humans just love touching base. And anyway, maybe I'm revealing my own. Your own biases. My own biases of how humans use their time. I think it's very good that we have an extrovert and an introvert on the show. We get both sides of the story. But the other thing I was thinking is the trend towards bigger, bigger balance sheets, more services, the one-stop shop idea. And it feels to me like, okay, if you can't have an informational edge anymore and if you do have this sort of flattening of culture for various reasons because everyone's getting smarter and smarter about what a good culture actually looks like and they're able to sort of execute on it in various ways, then it feels to me like it's very much going to be fought just on size and scale.

56:05You know, I don't think share buybacks are evil the way a lot of people do, but it is interesting. We could just go back and ban them. That was so interesting. I always forget that, that they haven't been around that long and that they were seen as market manipulation at one point. We could just ban them. I mean, the fact that capitalism worked fine for a very long time without share buybacks would probably be, probably wouldn't be the end of the world. We should do another episode on this. But that reminds me, the other thing I was thinking was this idea that like, well, we had an entire, I mean, multiple industries really that grew up whose entire sense of purpose was about doing transactions, right?

56:45So you have the traditional Wall Street banks, but then you had private equity and private credit. And so you just have this explosion in deals. I wonder if Michael Grimes is going to ride on a rocket to get the – to go into space. He's going to do a little space joyride to get that. There was one thing – oh, you know what I thought was also very interesting? And I think this says a lot about culture in general beyond just banking. The idea that at one point, for better or worse, and maybe for better, that there were like clients that the banks wouldn't touch. Yeah. But they end that they're like, no, we're above this.

57:22This is not what we do here. Well, some of them had investigators like on staff to go out and investigate potential clients. I think that's really interesting. And a certain level of, you know what, we're going to leave some money off the table because this is not what we do here. We have standards and so forth. And I do feel like these days it's just money. It's just across the board. It's just accumulating more and more money. And so the idea of some money isn't good enough for here, like it does not feel like that's a thing anymore. And maybe, well, I think a lot of people would say in retrospect, they should have had better standards about who they do business with.

58:02Yeah, it feels much more amoral now. And I mean that in the sense that like there's a possibility that people hide behind that and say like, well, we shouldn't be making qualitative decisions about our clients. We're just here to, you know, share the good gospel of capitalism. All right. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armand, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, and Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks.

58:34For more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash Odd Lots. We have a daily newsletter on all of our episodes. And you can chat about all these topics 24-7 in our Discord, discord.gg slash oddlots. And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we talk about the business and culture of investment banking, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

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