It's got fancy offices, screens, and those dress shirts where the collar is a different color than the rest of the shirt.

You see a fellow wearing one of those and you just know he's got kids he doesn't talk to.

But while the image of investment banking is common knowledge, the function is much less common of knowledge.

So what the hell do these guys really do?

I'm here outside the offices of Goldman Sachs.

Just behind these very doors, dozens of my high school bullies are chained to ergonomic chairs, staring at Excel, and cracked out on prescription stimulants.

Investment banks like these have long been some of the most prestigious places to work on Wall Street.

Landing spots for young people to make fuck you vest money, coupled with long hours and taking loud phone calls in restaurants.

An entire culture has been crafted around investment banking, yet the question remains.

What do bankers actually do?

Investopedia defines investment banking as a type of banking that organizes and advises large complex financial transactions, such as mergers or IPO underwriting.

And they say more, but no chance I'm reading all that.

It's time to stop beating around the bush and go straight to the source.

Someone, a real life person, who actually investment banked.

On a high level, investment bankers advise companies when they're either trying to raise money, either debt or they're selling shares.

And then on the day to day, what does that look like?

A lot of Excel financial modeling and a lot of PowerPoint presentations.

A lot of that is sitting around and waiting for comments from your bosses and your boss's bosses.

Sounds electric.

Steph Moy is the founder of the financial service company PIN and a former investment banking analyst at JP Morgan.

And it would appear from her experience that the exciting world of investment banking is actually much more like the dull world of banking.

Anytime you want to do anything in investment banking, it goes through iterative cycles.

Your boss sees your work and then he gives you comments and then your boss's boss sees your work and then your boss has to approve it and then it gives it to you.

And so it just goes in circles.

I just don't think it's that interesting of a job and it's such a small piece of what you hear about in the news.

Hold your horses.

I thought investment banking was the pinnacle of America's financial system.

A veritable thunderdome of dealmaking and drug taking where razor sharp minds driven by lust and ego come together to dominate financial markets and buy a house in Sag Harbor.

When you talk about an investment banking analyst, essentially what you are doing is you are working in a very, very high end sales role.

So essentially you are at the mercy of your senior bankers whose job it is to provide financial advice to large corporations.

Liam Killingstad has a mustache.

He is also an ex investment banking associate at Goldman Sachs, and he was kind enough to walk us through a day in his life as a former sad Goldman Sachs.

The typical day would be wake up at or between six and seven, roll out of bed and immediately head to the office.

Nine a.m. to 10 a.m. make sure that you have your inbox at zero.

Overnight, you're probably going to be getting anywhere from 10 to 100 emails.

It's going to take forever.

OK. Around 10 is when the senior bankers usually come in.

The VPs tend to get stressed out about 11 a.m.

There is a gym in the building.

You lose a lot of control over your time, and I mean time like the time you have to go get dinner with your friends on Saturday.

IBanking is famous for its rise and grind work culture that has been well documented in countless films, TV shows and people posting their significant others on social media.

So who are the moolah cabooses that these dummies are so smitten with?

Investment banking is a fantastic job out of undergrad for two types of people.

The first type is the individual who has for their entire undergraduate career wanted to go work in the financial services industry.

And then there is the second group, which I think I fell into, which is the ambitious group of people who have no idea what the hell that they want to do with their lives and are aware that the floor from an earning perspective in investment banking is relatively high and that the exit opportunities tend to be relatively extensive.

That's right. If you're going to be smart, young and aimless, might as well do it on a hog of a salary, which is almost guaranteed to be well over six figures in your first year as an analyst.

What's going on here?

So, dude, what do you what do you do for a job?

Yeah, I do invest in banking.

Do we do y'all do investment?

Is this the whole group here?

Yeah, we got the whole group.

Oh, wait, you guys.

Thank you, sir.

No, dude, you guys hot in the vest or just the chest and not your arms.

First year in investment banking.

What's the salary expected to be?

Depending on how the market's going, let's say a buck or go lower.

Buck fifty to two hundred.

If it's a really good market, you should probably do to translate this for poor people by a buck.

What do you mean?

A hundred thousand.

However, for an industry that thrives off the grunt work of those willing to grind it out for mad bills, threats have been looming in recent years.

As interest rates have risen to stamp out inflation, a slump in dealmaking has led to layoffs across the investment banking industry.

And while investment banks have often used massive paydays to justify their intense culture, young people are beginning to find equally lucrative opportunities elsewhere.

Tech companies like Meta can offer high pay and you get to play ping pong with Mark Zuckerberg.

Other finance gigs can also pay a high salary and you don't have to play ping pong with Mark Zuckerberg.

It's not the same environment that you saw a couple of years ago where people were hiring investment bankers, particularly young investment bankers in mass.

Shonali Basak is the lead Wall Street correspondent for Bloomberg TV and a writer at Bloomberg News.

When I had a conversation with the Morgan Stanley CEO, for example, I had asked him, you know, can you see yourself hiring again at scale?

And he said, listen, we've done two acquisitions.

Our headcount has already grown so much.

When we talked to Blackstone's executives two years ago, they had 30,000 applicants.

This year, 62,000 applicants.

They've more than doubled in two years in terms of applications at private equity, private credit, real estate.

And this has raised the question, has one of the most slay jobs in finance lost its luster?

I don't think JP Morgan is going to disappear overnight.

But, for example, a few years ago, the direct listing, I think Spotify did that, where they kind of went directly to an exchange and listed their shares.

And they didn't use an investment banking process and therefore an investment banker to facilitate that.

And so I don't think it's out of the question that investment banking as a practice will decline.

I do think that a lot of the stuff that analysts used to do is getting automated away.

A lot of it becomes more and more just like people management, which, again, is why some of the prestige of this job is going away.

I think you actually lose some of the learning.

The business is under pressure.

Can you go to other people that are doing the jobs that investment bankers used to do?

A lot of the private equity firms are building capital markets businesses and they're doing business at significant scales.

KKR, Blackzone, Apollo, these are businesses that used to be inside of, you know, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley.

Now, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan are still doing this at scale.

These are massive, massive businesses.

They don't go away tomorrow.

But certainly there are other places that are now doing similar things.

Has it lost its veneer?

Has it lost its touch?

Maybe.

So investment bankers facilitate complex financial deals.

At its most entry level, that looks like waiting eight hours for your boss to tell you about a slide deck you have due at 3 a.m. that no one will ever look at.

The grind.

And up until recently, investment banking could justify its culture by offering uniquely high salaries and job security.

But today, with increasing competition across financial services, high interest rates and other industries offering similar pay and better work-life balance right out of college, iBanking faces an identity crisis.

Will college grads continue to see iBanking as a top job in finance?

Will analysts keep falling asleep into their sweet green bowls at 3 a.m.?

Will major banks continue to dominate capital market deal flow?

And will my high school bully, Connor, forever remain trapped inside of this building, adjusting the margins of some useless PowerPoint, forever unable to craft a meaningful life out of the massive paychecks doled out to him by some stale, lifeless industry?

Only time will tell.

But for now, and for good work, I'm Dan Toomey.

What does your partner actually do?

He has multiple laptops.

If he works at home, there is two computers, and there's money involved, and banks.

Well, I think it's actually, it's made very clear.

She's in, she invests.