Financial Modeler's Corner
00:25:11 · Giles Male, Paul Barnhurst
[00:25:11] S1: I agree. And and I spoke about this a few years ago somewhere where I said, you know, on average within a cohort of say 30 people, you will have a pocket, maybe 5% of people that are genuinely very good. And interestingly for me, the people that rate themselves as experts quite often aren't the best in the group. It's the ones that rate themselves as intermediate or they know they're pretty good, high end intermediate, but they're so aware of everything they don't know that they are really hesitant to call themselves experts. I don't know if you've had that experience. [00:25:45] S0: A 100%. And, you know, honestly, when people ask me, I think of myself as intermediate. I recognize compared to a lot of people to say I'm advanced, but I rarely use Lambdas. I don't... I almost never use VBA. I mean, there's so many areas where I know I could be much more efficient in Excel. Now that's not to say I don't know more in the sense of... I probably know more formulas and have done more in Excel than 90% of people, but I... That doesn't mean I'm an expert. I think there's a there's a very high bar when I think of a true expert. I think of someone like a dim. I think of many of these MVPs, though I'm an MVP that I look at, I'm like, I wish I had forgot about as much of Excel as they know. You know what I mean? Like, they forgot more than I'll ever know type of thing.
00:25:45 · Paul Barnhurst, Giles Male
[00:25:45] S0: A 100%. And, you know, honestly, when people ask me, I think of myself as intermediate. I recognize compared to a lot of people to say I'm advanced, but I rarely use Lambdas. I don't... I almost never use VBA. I mean, there's so many areas where I know I could be much more efficient in Excel. Now that's not to say I don't know more in the sense of... I probably know more formulas and have done more in Excel than 90% of people, but I... That doesn't mean I'm an expert. I think there's a there's a very high bar when I think of a true expert. I think of someone like a dim. I think of many of these MVPs, though I'm an MVP that I look at, I'm like, I wish I had forgot about as much of Excel as they know. You know what I mean? Like, they forgot more than I'll ever know type of thing. [00:26:25] S1: And the funny thing is Dim would probably rate himself seven or eight out of 10. Like, there's no way he would say nine or 10. And I've had people when... Because we we quite often, like, send out questionnaires, self assessment questionnaires for training. I've had a group where somebody literally put 10 out of 10 and in the free text box, I do not need training. And that that... That's mind blowing to me because very quickly, you see, like, they do need training and they do need help.
00:26:25 · Giles Male, Paul Barnhurst
[00:26:25] S1: And the funny thing is Dim would probably rate himself seven or eight out of 10. Like, there's no way he would say nine or 10. And I've had people when... Because we we quite often, like, send out questionnaires, self assessment questionnaires for training. I've had a group where somebody literally put 10 out of 10 and in the free text box, I do not need training. And that that... That's mind blowing to me because very quickly, you see, like, they do need training and they do need help. [00:26:51] S0: So I'll share one story on that. I'm interviewing a guy for an FP and A role. This is... So ten years ago now, probably. And I I would always ask a question. I ask people to rate themselves on a scale of one to 10 in Excel. And it wasn't about the answer because then I'd ask them to explain why they rated themselves that way. [00:27:09] S1: Yeah.
00:27:09 · Giles Male, Paul Barnhurst
[00:27:09] S1: Yeah. [00:27:09] S0: Right? To kinda really get their thinking and see where they're at in Excel. And this guy said a 10 out of 10. Okay. And he raised himself, well, I can do anything I need to, blah blah blah blah blah. And I go, hey. By chance, have you ever heard of x lookup? And it was fairly new. It'd been out a year. No. Have you heard about this? No. And kinda went on and go, do wanna change your answer? And he looked at me begrudgingly and said, fine. A nine out of 10. Just like, wow. Are we arrogant? And he was really smart, and I actually put him forward to the next round and see what the other manager would say. And they interviewed him and go, he could do the job, but I wouldn't wanna work for... Work with him because he was just so arrogant, and we didn't hire him. [00:27:48] S1: And I think that's also... If you think back to the the point about trainers, that's one of the skills of a good trainer as well as times you're gonna have to deal with real world people, personalities, and and, you know, people that are gonna disagree with you or try and put you off or whatever it might be. On the training front again, and we should probably start talking about AI, do do you think we're gonna... Do you think we'll have a job, Paul, in two years as as trainers, or is AI taking it all over? [00:28:14] S0: AI is gonna change it, but trust still matters, and there will be areas you want a human. So I don't think so. But if it does, I guess I'm hoping for a not a universal basic income, but some call it a universal high income, and I'll just go retire.
00:28:14 · Paul Barnhurst, Giles Male
[00:28:14] S0: AI is gonna change it, but trust still matters, and there will be areas you want a human. So I don't think so. But if it does, I guess I'm hoping for a not a universal basic income, but some call it a universal high income, and I'll just go retire. [00:28:31] S1: You know, the thing that always jumps out to me when you when you look at... Let's take our field in financial modeling. You look at all the experts that share so much thought leadership at the moment. My my worry is whether it's a year, two years, five years down the line, if all of those people just stop because, you know, AI is just doing all of this work for everybody anyway, Where does the thought leadership come from, or or does AI just fill that gap, which fills me with fear? Don't know if you have have any strong opinions on that.
00:29:04 · Paul Barnhurst
[00:29:04] S0: I haven't given that a ton of thought. I think the thought leadership will continue. What I fear is it's gonna get watered down over time. So a good example is Carl Seidman recently shared... He he had shared a financial model, and then he was attending some... Something Someone was sharing. The financial model they were sharing looked almost exactly like model he had built. There's, like, 90% the same. And what he realized, he had recently done a training where he built a lot of it with, I think, Claude or, you know, one of the AI tools. And we're furious. Everything's gonna look the same. We as humans, one of the things that makes us great is the diversity via thought, the diversity that's out there. I would say even in the modeling field, even though, yes, there are standards, we all have a signature. As, Jeff Robinson said, he's done... Trained thousands of people, right, there in The UK, he made a comment once. He goes, I could usually tell who trained them when I'd see a model because... Or, you know, what style they had been trained in because everybody has a unique signature. Do we really want that to go away? That's what I worry about, whether it's thought leadership, whether it's modeling, whatever it might be. AI doesn't have the creativity that a human has. And so there's just something to be said value. Right? We've all seen it. Where you're reading a post, and the information may be valuable, but you could tell it's 100% written by AI, and it just turns you off because you're like, I want some original thought. I wanna connect with the person here. That's what that's what I fear more than anything even though I think we'll continue to have content develop, we'll continue to have thought leaders regardless of how good AI is. Is the next generation gonna lose a lot of that creativity and part of what just makes us who we are?