The hit YouTube interview show “The hot ones” promises “hot questions and even hotter wings.”
On that show, celebrities are asked questions as they battle it out with a range of 10 increasingly spicier spices – and it's the mix of those pointed questions and answers with physical reactions to the heat that proves the secret sauce behind the show's success.
The 2024 Wealth Management EDGE Conference had its own tributes featuring industry powerhouse Michael Kitces and Jason Pereira, a senior partner and financial planner at Woodgate Financial.
“There was nothing prepared,” Kitces said before the hearing began. “Everything you see here is authentic. This is the first time I had to sign a waiver before going on stage.”
Pereira noted that an EMT was on hand if things got too heated for the couple. Pereira then began serving wings and threads.
After donning a blue shirt to match Kitce's signature outfit, Pereira began the session by asking about the relative merits of AI in the wealth management industry. Kitces said he was skeptical of how advanced the current iterations of the technology were.
“Speak like a person,” he said. “We interact with it, but it's not intelligent … It knows how to put word patterns together.”
Kitces said this technology was in its infancy and had a long way to go before it was more than a tool for advisors rather than a replacement. He said enthusiasts had “fallen in love with the idea of what it will be”.
“It's not that far yet,” he said.
The only area he saw use for so far was “solving the blank page problems” inherent in creating emails to clients and capturing meeting notes.
“It's much easier to edit than to create,” he said. “No one gets editor's block; you just get writer's block … my expectations are much higher than where the technology is.”
The sauces dispensed by Pereira were slowly climbing the Scoville scale. And he agreed that advisers shouldn't worry about being replaced by AI.
“It's a very good golf club now, but it's not swinging the clubs,” he said.
As they consumed more than a gallon of milk and nearly two dozen wings, the heated discussion turned to the effect of private equity and venture capital on the industry.
“At its core, private equity is good for making money with money,” Kitces said.
Kitces said private equity can positively impact businesses by allowing them to thrive through injections of the otherwise unattainable capital they need to grow. However, the downside can destroy founders who don't meet high growth targets.
“Founders can be zeroed out because you haven't hit the big numbers that the venture capital firm is looking for,” he said.
Pereira alluded to the latter price increases in Orion and InvestCloudwhich he has experienced firsthand in his own business as an area where advisors lose.
“At a certain point, you're trying to get blood from a stone,” he said.