Rich People Don't Talk to Robots
downtownjoshbrown.com
downtownjoshbrown.com
There are still some who still don't, but they are dying off.
I get the idea though that the expensive experts actually have access to back channels that can allow them to skip right to the result.
So unless the LLMs also are granted access to these sorts of exclusive channels, how can they compete?
It's often who you know that will get you results. So who exactly do LLMs know? And will those people even interface with LLMs or provide a way for LLMs to interface with their exclusive resources?
There's absolutely no upside to talking to a robot. Or a "hold" line. And it's worth keeping in mind that for services, the money flows in the opposite direction - work is buying your time on the keyboard/screen, but you are buying a non-robot experience.
And rich people buying convenience won't ever die out.
FTA: >> Rich people don’t attempt to save money by agreeing to sit on hold.
This is the salient thing. If dealing with something for an hour saves you $1000, but you could have made $5000 doing something else for that hour, you won't deal with it (even if you don't, in fact, spend that hour doing something productive).
[edit] I don't think this contradicts the OP at all, because taking this company to court is the alternative to wasting my time talking to their robots.
Of course some would charge you twice as much as others, which would still be very cheap compared to home, but that's not the comparison you make. You compare it to what the last taxi driver charged you and now you feel ripped off and disrespected by this particular taxi driver, even though now you are haggling about what is peanuts to me.
I remember a guy rudely criticizing my younger brother, who was a quiet, well-behaved little kid, for being wasteful because he took two napkins instead of one. Our family were guests on his $5 million yacht.
First generation wealth often have a quirky relationship with money. They're mulishly stubborn penny pinchers with some things, but spend money foolishly on other things. Some are completely allergic to all debt, even when it makes objective financial sense to finance a thing instead of paying cash.
I think it's just really hard to shake old habits that they worked hard to build and that served them so well in the past before they built their wealth, even if those habits are actually hurting them now.
See also Warren Buffett's breakfast menu... https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/warren-buffett-gets-a-mcmuffi...
If uber billionaires like Warren Buffet thinks having a McMuffin for breakfast is being frugal, oh boy do I have some advice for them.
1/2 cup oats
1 cup water
a pinch of salt.
Put it in a microwave, turn on the microwave and let it do its magic. Add som jam(but not too much) on top.
For the cost of his cheapest breakfast meal, I can buy at least a kilo of oats. Having a McMuffin for breakfast every day is squandering almost a thousand dollars every year.
I bet he also has coffee to go with it, another small fortune wasted.
Excellently explained in this article: The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor (January 19, 2012) <https://web.archive.org/web/20220607063905/https://www.crack...>
Some battles need to be fought, as writing a check to solve all the problems can lead to people taking advantage of a person who has that reputation. But I’d wager billionaires are sending their lawyers to deal with those small legal issues and aren’t showing up themselves, unless they really have to.
I'm not sure what's more profound with that: the hostility or stupidity. Patience isn't going to win the day here; there is a fundamental truth to what the article is saying. If there is such a thing in the future as a financial advising AI for individuals _and families_ of significant wealth, it won't be anything like what serves the "mass market". The complexity is incomparable, in addition to the expectations.
People like that prefer to be focused on exactly whatever their building, and babysitting the money is rarely that thing. They often approach their private wealth manager with a broad plan on goals, and the PWM goes out and executes them with light direction. There are lawyers and accountants in the loop as well, all working on paper to manage the cash pile. It's a long term, multi-generational relationship that often involves multiple parties, one of which is often some or many governments.
In addition, the PWM in this position prefers to get the client directly on the phone when possible. This is both to manage the relationship, and to sell novel finance products, often ones that aren't available on the open market.
Until we get AGI, it's just not quite there to be outsourced to AI. People at that level really prefer having a person be responsible.
Isn’t it self-evident that in general if you are good at this you would not be selling your advice? By definition, if you are good, you can accept the risk and win. Why charge a couple percent in fees when you could invest the money yourself?
The danger zone is for small investors, where it doesn't make sense to advertise to them because the regulations are too demanding, margins too small and people tend to be flighty or need lots of hand-holding. That is basically why it there aren't "invest in stock!" signs on every ad stand.
And good financial advice tends to be boring and doesn't change much. The same strategy tends to work in all weather - invest a little bit in everything, invest a bit more in things that do well and try not to take on unnecessary tax burdens.
Hedge funds generally charge a management fee plus a performance fee. This is why hedge funds and other similar structures are much more lucrative and acquire more talent.
The fact of the matter is that a bound on theoretical returns is not what dictates people's choice of career. You have to consider the lower personal risk that you take on investing someone else's money and only getting a percentage of it versus investing your own money and getting 100% of it. You have to consider the aspect of being able to learn from others as you work, versus having no mentors when you lone-wolf it. You have to consider that being a financial advisor is not just looking at investments and making trades. Maybe they look forward to their 45 minute call with Jeff Bezos or whatever, and that's what driving them to that career option.
Finally, I think people are hiring financial advisors for prudence, not because they expect to beat the market. For example, how much of your money should be available in 1 day versus how much of it might be stuck in the market for 10 years because some politician made a dumb decision? How much of your stock should you sell this year in order to replace your roof, or should you get a loan? Nobody is expecting to beat the market; they just want to avoid doing dumb stuff that can be avoided.
They indeed do not have good writers.
Liquidity.
You don’t invest $100 and make $120 after a year for sure . You invest $100 and maybe an all knowing “god” knows the outcome but there is a probability distribution (a model which can vary based on opinion) for us mere mortals. Depending on your investment goals you might trade to have more risk and more expected upside. You may diversify away from US to mitigate US specific risk but maybe such a portfolio wont perform as well long term.
Liquidity. Investing a million vs. investing billions needs different approaches. Someone doing something sophisticated may only be able to invest so much without revealing their hand. Someone investing a million people’s pension will act differently and probably more prosaic and predictable. No one will fire you for turning 100k into a million over someones lifetime but they will be angry if you turned it into nothing.
A typical scenario for say a pension (aka superannuation, aka 401k) is that when you are young you go for higher short term risk and higher potential growth mix of investments and as you get closer to retirement you derisk.
The idea is that a crash when young is no issue as the market will recover and probably you’ll get some bargain stock soon after.
When you are older you don’t want to lose 20% of your savings to a crash so more money gets diverted into lower risk stuff.
The point is that there is not one investment strategy that suits all. Therefore there is a place for fund managers to provide different risk profiles. They aren’t really getting alpha but they are useful nonetheless. They won’t be picking stocks based on trading ideas.
To compound this, these large funds deal with billions of dollars. If you place a market order for a billion dollars people notice. Just like if you had to spend a million dollars on ebay on used apple watches you are going to affect the price of those watches because of your bids. Therefore they will find it hard to seek alpha anyway.
The point is there is a place for funds that might seem like “dumb money” but just broadly follow indices and there is a place for traders with a model and a theory to try and beat the markets.
It's really fun, but it's an optimization game, not a gambling game. There are basically a lot of known "right answers" and the trick of financial planning is applying and adapting them to the particulars of someone's situation.
I think that's the point the parent was trying to get at, it's an industry where all the best talent never become hireable in the first place.
But that doesn't mean there aren't good financial advisors. They're not helping you best the market, they're helping you ensure a good financial future within the scope of your existing wealth and income. They do apply their skills to themselves, but you need a job and a big base of money before s&p returns will make you rich. :)
So, this job thing you're talking about, at some point it will happen you, if even by taking your time, your children and family time.
There's likely a level where is really not worth any money to have one of those traditional contracts taking your time and energy for cash. That threshold is probably not as high as it seems to be, if not for land and housing prices.
Building wealth takes money and time. The money needs to come from somewhere.
For those who are good, who have been doing it for a long time, and are wealthy, it gives them something to do and a reason to get up in the morning. There is a lot to be said for that.
Highly recommend subscribing.
A proper vacation is being able to spend 2-3 months abroad and taking it easy with no specific plans. The author describes a highly optimized itinerary where every meal and every day counts. Sounds like more stress than a vacation.
Americans have more money, but Europeans have more time and stability.
In my opinion though, if you’re affluent enough to go on 25k vacations, why are they not affluent enough to take several months off at a time to actually enjoy a proper time off?
But then there are specialized holidays, where you need people to be with you. One example is my hobby being a diver. Going on a private diving safari needs planning and documents. Depending where you go are the documents, but you still need a boat, a crew and a dive guide and/or trainer.
It's still very enjoyable for me, as I love diving, but it also needs planning.
I can imagine going to a Taylor Swift concert: being able to have reserved tickets at prime seating with backstage meet & greet afterwards would be a different level compared to stuck in parking lot and standing in crowded unreserved area.
It'll be a lot better than current 'select a few options' chatbot support than we have.
If anything it’s a bigger risk to the company–an LLM with broad access to genuinely useful account management tools could easily be manipulated into doing things it shouldn’t, so it would have to be implemented very carefully.
Deep wisdom here.
Chatbots and LLMs are for peasants. You know you're going to have to deal with a Comcast LLM soon. It'll be more useless than the existing customer service.
This isn't really affluent on the level of being able to hire a personal assistant unless you're talking about the upper end.
Try to stop caring what rich people think for at least a day or two per week and focus on what poor people think, and maybe we won’t all end up shouting “Jo-na-than!”
You end up with in-network people, which is different from having very good people.
LLMs are useful because they're a diverse range of experts that are composable and immediate. We've never had something quite like it, and many people are still struggling to understand how to use it.
Most of this talk sounds like the kind of denial that a lot of people on HN were doing when LLMs were first seen as a way to write code. Well, they do write code. They make us more effective, so maybe we need less of us in the future. Or maybe the pie grows because the kinds of things LLMs enable mean there are just more tasks developers can do, and so more developers are needed.
Either could be true. The denial is built of fear.
Also this guy's tone is pretty repugnant. Like, who thinks and talks like this? Seems comically retro. The only ones I know are those who derive their identity from money, whether they are rich or not. Mostly not. Ironically, a pretty poor existence.
Edit: grammar checked with an LLM - not an expert.
I guess as I get richer I am supposed to be like Josh Brown wants me to be.
His income maybe depends on that?
Josh Brown doesn't know that you exist.
He doesn't care if you ever become rich or not.
> His income maybe depends on that?
He is probably making better income than you by providing service to people a lot richer than you might ever be.
You can keep using robots.
Well written, insightful, contrarian, and real.