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Foreign.
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Show is sponsored by Wide Charts. This is the time when a lot of advisors start pressure testing their year running client education sessions, reviewing estate plans, and getting ahead of mid year portfolio conversations. And the reality is, most of the work still lives across spreadsheets, PDFs, and tools that don't connect. Y Charts pulls all of that into one place. You can take a portfolio instantly, see how it's tracking, compare it to targets, and turn it into something you can actually use in a client conversation without rebuilding everything from scratch. It's the difference between preparing for hours and being ready in minutes. If you've got mid year reviews coming up, it's worth seeing how Y Charts can help you save time. Click the link in the show notes to start a free trial and get 20% off your initials. Wide Charts. Professional subscription. New customers only. Hello. Hello, Financial advisors. How we doing? All right. What happens when a prospect can stress test their own financial plan with ChatGPT or Claude before they ever walk into your office? The old playbook. We demonstrate our expertise through technical proficiency. And plan construction is getting commoditized in real time. Which raises a pretty uncomfortable question. What's an advisor actually selling when the client has the same tools that you do? This isn't a problem that we're going to solve with better software. It's a problem about what value really looks like in this business. And joining me today to dig into this is Michael Kitces, who needs no introduction. Michael has thought longer and harder about the future of financial advice than just about anyone in the industry. I'm Michael Batnick and this is talking wealth. Michael, it is great to see you. Nice shirt. What a surprise.
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You too. I'm loving this. Like Rith Holtz leaning into the blue. We are. For those who are listening, like, we have matching, matching blue. I'm just, I'm so honored, truly, that you went and got like Rifold's shirts in Kitsis blue.
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B
It's not. Yeah, it's. I was about to say it's not just like blue, blue. I think we might have copied your hex code. It's.
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A
Yeah, I mean like, it is all on. It is on. Like, this is amazing.
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B
Chef. Well, well, game recognizes game, so thank you for doing this. All right, Michael. So last week I've told this story, but this is a. A large audience, so I don't want to take for granted that everybody listens to every damn word I say. I'm sure they don't. I need. So I moved into my house in September and it was the Tail end of the summer. And when the sun sets, it just blasts heat into my home. We have no trees blocking the sun, just boom. So it wasn't a problem because it was the tail end of the summer, but now it's becoming an issue and we realized that not only do we need to like fix it. Oh, there's more. It's a more serious problem than that because we need like new duct work, new ac, new H Vac.
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Oh God.
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B
Like, it's a whole thing.
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A
The whole house is baking. Offset it. Okay.
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It's a whole thing. So the first guy came, we got a referral, and luckily he gave me like a broken down, itemized list of the work that we need to do. And it was $18,000. But to really fix the problem, we need to do a couple of different, like modular units and whatever. And it's going to be at close to like $30,000. So in 2026, I did what anybody who gets a quote of that size does. I took it and I uploaded it into Claude and I asked the questions. And not only did I ask Claude questions, now, mind you, I don't know the first thing about H Vac. I don't know, I don't know what stands for. Right. And so the machine is asking me questions and it's telling me to upload pictures of my house and how many units, how many floors do I have and what's the layout. And it's now guiding me into what I should be asking. So I have another person coming, another person come out. At this point I'm fairly not fluent, but I know the questions that I should be asking. And later that day I was seeing a demonstration from a company. In our industry, the company is not super important because it's ubiquitous. It's basically an advisor tool sitting on top of an LLM and they've done some neat stuff and you can upload your documents, which is, you know, that's a thing now that we could do. And it's give you like questions and answers and advice. Do you want to do a Roth conversion? Blah, blah, blah, blah, like very simply, step by step of what you should do, quantifying the trade offs and all that sort of stuff. And my first question was, is there a B2C version of this? And of course there is. And okay, so you see where I'm going with this.
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Yep.
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I think that a lot of advisors are dismissing the threat of AI because we know what happens with robo advisors. It was the same premise, obviously, on a much smaller version but at the time, it didn't feel like a small version. It felt like a legitimate threat.
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A
Yep.
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And also, I just. And. And so they think, well, it's not. It's not about the answers. It's about the relationship. My clients love me. It's about the relationship. Okay. I'm sure they do enjoy spending some time with you. Four times a year, whatever it is. I have thoughts here, but I invited you on the show to hear your thoughts about the future of our industry when the things that. The things that clients couldn't get on their own is now very much achievable on their own.
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A
So. So lots of thoughts here, Michael. But I actually want to come back for a moment to your story. So how did this end? Like, when you. So. So I'm still paying from Claude.
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B
I'm still paying somebody.
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A
You're coming back to them. So. So. So talk to. So how did those conversations play out? By the time you're on the second person giving you the quote and the third person giving you the quote, and now, like, you got an iteration or two of Claude, because you know what? Woe to the first person in. You didn't know what to ask. He just lobbed you a quote, and then you're, like, uploading it to Claude and getting educated. So I'm sure, like, your interaction was very different by the second and third person giving the quote than the first, because you're doing cycles on this.
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B
Accurate.
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A
So. So tell me how that changed.
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B
Okay. So I am still paying somebody to do this. I did not go so far as to become an H vac expert. I am not going to.
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There's an interesting line, right? Just like, some things you might. I know. It's a toilet thing. And I'm like, all right, I actually found enough things on YouTube. I'm just gonna, like, fix my toilet thing and. And do it myself. Right. So there. There's probably some range of. I actually got so educated. I can still do this, and I got more educated. But, like, I. I'm. I'm still gonna pay someone to, like, do the. Do the thing at the end of the day.
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B
So the actual outcome is not super relevant, I don't think, to our conversation. But ultimately, here's what I did. I am getting a split unit in my bedroom because this. My bedroom was an extension. So it's on, like, the. Whatever, third floor floor, fourth floor of the house. And we are going to redo some of the duct work to make sure that the wind, the air is not going into my bedroom. Unnecessarily, we're going to block that off, and hopefully that will allow more air to circulate to the rest of the house. And we're going to start there with some sort of triage. So I'm spending $6,000 to start instead of 30.
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A
And which of the three contractors gets that gig? The fourth. The fourth.
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Because the first three were very generic, so to speak. No, no disrespect, but they were all sort of. One guy asked me what sort of equipment I want, and I said, wait a minute, I don't even know what type of equipment. When you say equipment, do you mean. He goes, no, like the, The. The. The unit. The big unit outside your house.
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I have no idea. I mean, I'm, like, leaning into this because I like. I just do tax code off the top of my head, like how anything in my house works. So I.
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A Bosch, a Mitsubishi. Like what, dude, why are you asking me that? You're out. I said, let's go with the Bosch.
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A
I thought that was a car, but
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sure, yeah, let's go with the Bosch. And then the second conversation was a little bit better. He said the first. The first quote is bullshit. For X, Y, and Z, you could do all that work. It's not going to fix it. You actually need to spend $48,000. And then the third guy. Actually, I'm sorry, it was the third guy that came in and said, no, no, no. These guys, listen, they're trying to get as much money as possible. I think we can start small. I don't think you need to do open heart surgery. I think we can do, you know, something cosmetic.
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A
So is that just a coincidence of the sequence? If you happen to get the third guy first, you would have gotten to this solution immediately.
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B
Great question. I think that if before the LLMs, I might have gotten a second quote, and the second quote was substantially higher than the first one.
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A
I think you would have been thankful about the first one.
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B
Right. So the big. The big takeaway. Exactly. The big takeaway for all of us, not just financial advisors. And I think this is a great thing, is that the knowledge gap is shrinking. You go see your. You go to a mechanic, and I have no idea. I don't speak that language. So they could say whatever they want. And now guess what I'm going to say. Thank you very much. Can I please see an itemized breakdown? And I'm going to plug it in. And I know that this transformation is not going to happen overnight, and it's not going to happen Everywhere. But we are in a very, very competitive industry.
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Correct.
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B
We compete with each other, but more likely we, not more likely we compete with the pool of DIYers and, and
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there are plenty of people with inertia and like everything.
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B
So the pool of people. So here, here was my operating assumption and I do believe this to be true. I haven't changed my mind. There are people that will never hire a financial advisor under any circumstances. Their personality, whatever, they don't value it. They legitimately can do it themselves and their tools are getting a lot better. But fast forward the tools it's going to be and I don't know how fast this happens, whether it's three years, five years or 10 years. But when you are able to ask CFP type questions by uploading a few docs, it's just going to become harder. So I don't think our job goes away or our value goes, goes away overnight. But if you are not seriously thinking about what does this industry look like in 5 years you are going to wake up with a big, big problem.
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A
So, so I wanted, so I actually keep this for a moment in the, in the frame of your H Vac woes as it were because I, I think it actually translates more to what our future looks like. Then, then you may realize Michael. So here, so here's a couple of lenses that I would, I would give to this. After the first person came in and you got to run that quote through Claude, you became both a more, I'll call like a more knowledgeable, sophisticated consumer. Which is why when the second person came in you were like no, no, this is BS like I already know the first person was swinging high. I'm not thinking the first person looks great because you quoted me 48. I'm thinking the first person is high and you're more absurd. So I'm going to a third. So you became a more sophisticated, better consumer and you weeded out someone who just sells high priced stuff to everybody they meet in hopes that some of them won't realize that it was too much and more than they need. So you're now systematically winnowing people in category in like contractor number two out of the whole business, which I would argue is probably going to lift up everyone's average H Vac experience outcomes in the end. So we're weeding out some people that aren't, aren't necessarily doing the best work specific to their customers. By the time you got to the third person, you are so much more knowledgeable now that you could come to A more customized, personalized solution. Right? We're just going to do the ductwork and the other things that you couldn't have even asked and arrived at as a solution before you could throw the stuff into Claude. And I would dare say that it probably would have been much harder for contractor number three to even have that conversation with you and explain it to you and show why that was a valuable alternative solution, aside from it's literally just cheaper. Until you had gone through the learning process of having your conversations with Claude and going back and forth about the pricing and the options and upload the pictures of your house and all the other things. So, meaning you, you couldn't even get as personalized and specific of a good recommendation to be so engaged with contractor number three until you got the LLM experience after the first one or two and got an opportunity up sort of knowledge yourself up to the point that you had a better conversation with your, I'll call it, H Vac advisor. You had a better conversation with your good H Vac advisor because you had the LLM there. It actually got to a better solution than you could have on your own if you were not knowledgeable even with that person. And you probably never would have gotten to them because you would have gotten person number two would have freaked you out and said, damn, I'll just take the first one. It was cheaper and been done with it. So as I look at it through that lens, so you actually came to the table as a more engaged consumer. You got better, more personalized advice because you could engage more constructively in the conversation because of the knowledge upgrade. It was high enough stakes that it was worth spending some time on. Not enough that you want to rebuild your whole H Vac, but enough that you want to spend the time. And you, I'm not trying to dunk on contractor number two, but on the scale here, I'm like, and maybe you weeded out some business from not the most ideal player in the space who seems to just quote really high things to everybody he meets and hopes nobody notices. So I see like a space where lower quality actors are being weeded out. Higher quality actors get more engaging conversations. You get a better, more customized solution specific to what you need in your circumstances that also actually happens to be less expensive. And now you're going to go tell everybody about contractor number three, assuming he actually does good work when he implements it, because he was the one who most engaged with you with a good conversation after you did all the LLM things.
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B
And contractor three made a fraction of what one or two would have made.
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A
So is contractor number three running out of business or does contractor number one and two overpaid or is the reality contractors number one and two have to charge that much because they also have like a 10% hit rate on their sales and because they're mostly just like blasting high prices and waiting for someone to say yes. And contractor number three is going to be able to get his crew work next Tuesday because he got to a deal fast with you and can get his crew out there immediately. And the other guys are sitting around with crews that don't have work while they're trying to do high price pitches that aren't working, waiting for one to land.
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B
Well, interestingly, contractor one and two probably have big teams. I think one or two might have had some PE money behind them. And I'm like not saying that like lol. Like actually I genuinely believe to believe that to be the case. But obviously there are a lot of parallels between that industry and ours. We are in the service industry. We are, we are servicing things that really matter. In our case, somebody's financial well being. In the case of H Vac, like my ability to like not be super uncomfortable at all times. My house, which is, you know, something that I value.
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A
Pretty high stakes. Yeah.
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B
So Josh had a really interesting take on this. When I told him this story, he said it's so interesting. Don't you see the irony here? And I said no, please tell me. In our industry, we've spent the last decade saying that the asset management is a commodity and it was the planning work where clients really got the value. And I don't like, I believe that to be the case in, in, in most, for the most part, I think that story was, was genuine. But what if the advice stuff is now the commodity and some of the more sophisticated asset management strategies are the thing. And I know it's not black or white, but I did think that was, I don't know.
- [16:41]
A
I mean I still come back to even including the story that you had the, you know, I'm not trying to overstretch the analogy, but the person that won the business was the one that did the most personalized planning for you, not the one that sold the best H Vac equipment.
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B
Yes.
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A
And the person who did the planning for you didn't get replaced because you have an LLM. They actually won the business because you have an LLM and they won it away. The planning oriented H Vac person won the business away from the other two people who just tried to Sell superior product. Because your LLM engagement pulled you away from the product people and over to the planning person with whom you had a better conversation. Because the LLM actually helped you get up to speed enough to have that conversation. Otherwise you wouldn't have known what questions to ask. And I certainly to me there's plenty of parallels to that. In our business we both sat across from enough clients over the years. I mean there are clients we're sitting across from like I know they want to ask questions and be engaged. They so don't have enough financial knowledge and literacy. They don't even know what to ask. Which means huge portions of our job often are just educating clients to try to get them up to speed enough to be able to make good decisions, to be able to act on the recommendations we're giving. Maybe to be more engaged in the conversation. Because I'm trying to ask them do you want to go down planning route A or B? And they don't even understand the choice in front of them. I'm like cool, if an LLM wants to do that. My clients just come in better engaged, more ready to have conversations at deeper levels that get us to the actual like really hard stuff that's, that's tough to go through and problem solve. Like I'm in, I'm in the bucket. Like contractor number C, like number C, letter C, number three. Let me like I'm just getting to more meaningful conversations faster with clients who are more engaged in the process. Because if you brought that even deeper conversation back to contractors number one and two, they still weren't ready to have that conversation with you. They weren't planning, I would dare say they weren't planning oriented. They were trying to sell superior equipment.
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B
So here's, I think where I'm at, I think that advisors right now that are dealing with 55 and up or whatever the line is, you don't need to be hyperbolically worried.
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A
Pre retiree and retiree.
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B
Yeah, they're, they're good. They will hire an advisor for the next 15 years. But where I think it's going to be really challenging are the sub, wherever you draw the line. Sub 500 sub million dollar accounts, whatever it is, the 37 year old advisor who's or the 37 year old client who's starting to earn good money, who's thinking about turning it over to an advisor. I think that in five years time, 10 years time, the DIY options that those people have are going to be extraordinary. So I think that advisors need to do a couple of things you need to first be aware of. You need to wake up and understand what's happening and you need to provide more value, faster, better and probably a little bit cheaper.
- [19:42]
A
So I don't disagree with some of the core that you've got there. Right. A more educated consumer by all the different means is a more educated consumer. So my glass half full version, deeper, more meaningful conversations with my clients, the class half empty version, lightweight value is not so valuable anymore because they just literally learned it on the Internet or Google or Now Cloud or ChatGPT or whatever their their LM of of choices. So I mean I do agree with you that far and I don't think that's changed in how technology has always kind of rippled through the business over, over time. Right. I 20, 30 years ago I could actually create meaningful value for young people by explaining to them what a mutual fund is and the difference between a stock and a bond. And now I don't even know what the exact status. But like literally the majority of folks under 35 have a like Robinhood or Stash account now and are literally buying stocks directly that merely 30 years ago you literally couldn't buy unless a financial advisor sold it to you for a commission because there was no way to buy a stock directly, nevermind understanding what the difference between a stock and a bond was. So I do think there is a collective sort of leveling up of the consumer. Either they are more knowledgeable or at least it's easier to get knowledge on demands in the moment that you want it. Right. They don't necessarily go read books about stocks and bonds for fun. But I need to make an investment decision or allocate my 401k or I've got some kind of investment question in front of me. I used to just go Google a bunch of articles. Now I go to an LLM and it's reads me and even faster than surfing the Internet for random articles hoping any of them are good. So I do think there's a more sophisticated consumer and I do think that sort of raises the collective bar on how valuable is just the education part that historically was very baked into a lot of our jobs and how quickly do we actually have to get to what I would just call like the. The real advice part which is when we get past the education and the guidance and the basics and we get into really good hard complex decisions where there is no right outcome. But we're trying to make decisions in the face of uncertainty. Right. Who knows whether the new duct approach is actually going to work even in a true planning context. Your H Vac planner, it sounds like basically, basically came to the table with, well, we're going to start here, hopefully this addresses the issue. If not, we're going to make mid course actions to correct and take additional steps to get you down the journey until eventually you get to your goal, which is a house you enjoy being in without getting baked to death. So you're on a journey with your H Vac planner as well. Very much in the way that we do with our clients. But you didn't necessarily start with so tell me about the difference between Bosch and Mitsubishi. Like you got that from the LLM. So you had much deeper conversations with your H Vac planner.
- [22:47]
B
So think about, I think a lot of advisors are like, well, betterment and wealth front were a thing and we were supposed to be afraid of that and remember TurboTax? Like that was a thing and it still is a thing and it didn't kill the accounting industry and betterment and Robo and wealthfront didn't kill our industry. But what about when you are able to upload your financial documents and it gives you sort of some planning advice, how you should think about setting up your basic trust and will, you know, to the extent that such such things exist. And then it gives you a direct index for you and then a long, short direct index for you and it gives you the holdings and it allows you to connect to the custodian and you hit enter and it spits out the tax ramifications. Not here today, but very easy to imagine a world where all of this does exist at scale.
- [23:47]
A
Yeah, so, so first I, I mean I will say, I guess the, the structure, I hate to use grand words like the, the structural way that AI shifts, the way that we interact with technology and knowledge. Like I will say, I, I don't actually think robos is the best way, is the best analogy for it. Some, like someone will make a package version of AI advice directly to consumer. That's probably like your robo in a box comparison. AI to me structurally feels more like what the Internet shift was, which is there's just this giant volumes of information that consumers never had access to at all. Like you know, advisors or professionals. And expert professionals in lots of professions were literally like the gatekeepers to knowledge and information. And then all knowledge known to mankind became available on the Internet on our computer and then 10 years later on a smartphone in our hand and suddenly we had unlimited access to information. I mean when you start looking at how that played out look, our industry changed dramatically. I mean we, we really got paid primarily to sell access to products that you could not buy without a person to sell them to you before the Internet. I mean it's, it's, it really is profound how much the profession moved. The basics, dare I say air quotes that we used to cover basic budgeting. Where are the dollars going in your household that you can automate on Mint Monarch now? Claude hooked up to your Plaid account. There's so much that happens there that consumers have more access to information and to engage with information that it feels to me like another step in that progression. But when I look at what happened there, both in our profession, others like WebMD didn't put doctors out of business. It changed the way doctors have to interact with their patients because patients came in a lot more knowledgeable and sometimes inaccurately knowledge because they don't understand all the nuances because they read a few articles on the Internet. Our business changed. I mean consumers come in so much more capable today than certainly 10 years ago, but really 20 to 30 years ago. But to me collectively, it didn't put us out of business. It skyrocketed CFPs, it didn't kill the business as a whole. But it's nuking the ability to just get paid to implement a product through commissions because we have to add some kind of advice layer beyond, well, I can buy that on the Internet and I can read that education in an article. So what the heck am I paying you for? And there's a bunch of stuff that crops up there. Some of that's relationship, some of that's expertise beyond what's easy for me to go up till speed on. Some of that's a pure delegation function. Some of that's kind of an accountability, shared responsibility. Right. You know, I can make the decision and if I'm wrong, it's going to end in my divorce. And if you make the wrong decision, my spouse and I will fire you. Which means we get to stay together in across those clients over the years. So the value proposition does shift and I think it does raise the stakes. I mean, to me, Mike, what you're describing ultimately is the stakes of what it takes to add value on top of of the technology are going up when you hit a technology inflection point. And I do believe that's true. We'll still have, there'll be a version for advisors that we use with our clients. There'll be a version that goes direct to consumer as someone will make, you know, DIY robos for advisors which will mostly be used by do it yourselfers who were never hiring advisors. But we all go through a collective leveling up, as I think we did with the Internet, to say, you've got to be prepared for a more educated client. You've got to be prepared for a deeper conversation. To me, this is why I think the industry is very wrong about a lot of this discussion. Like AI is going to make us all have a zillion clients per advisor, because the tech will make us so efficient. My clients are going to come in with better, deeper, quite like your conversation with H Vac person number three was longer than the conversation with H Vac person number one and number two, so their load went down while they also sold a more targeted offering along the way. So the business model has to get more surgical, has to get more precise. You got to know exactly where your value points are and be prepared to spend more time with each client but in deeper, more meaningful conversations. Because you got so much of a better Solution with the H Vac planner than the H Vac salesperson.
- [28:19]
B
You're 100% right on that, in my opinion. I saw you speak out this about future proof, and I said, he's so right. I think the, the C suite has this idea that, oh my God, our advisors are gonna have so much more time on their hands. They're gonna be able to go from 80 households to 170. And you're like, guys, guys, guys, you are, you do not, you're not a financial advisor because you don't understand the mental toll, the exhaustion that happens when you speak to four clients in a day. That is draining, that is emotional heavy. You're not going to be back to back to back to back to back to back to back one. No.
- [28:53]
A
If you, if you actually break up the number, a lot of, the lot of the, like, you know, the senior leadership folks in the industry, they're talking about 70 or 80% of advisor time going into meetings. I mean, do that math. That's six hours a day. That's six meetings a day, five days a week.
- [29:07]
B
That's.
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A
Anybody ever tried that? Like, right.
- [29:09]
B
These are people that have never done that. So the other, the other glass half full take is that to the extent that AI is a good thing, it's going to create a lot more wealth. And when it creates more wealth, you will have a bigger pool of investors. And when the numbers reach a certain point and it's different for everybody, it could be 500, a million, 2 million, 300, whatever it is at some Point, everybody says, okay, maybe I can get there. But if I make one mistake. Yeah, this is just a lot. And people with money always pay to delegate. And to your point about the spouse saying, I don't care. No, no, no, honey, no, no, no. Sorry, sorry. We're not dabbling around with our $4.8 million, I don't think so. And those people will forever hire an advisor. So to be clear, I don't think that the industry is nuked. I don't think that, that advisors won't be able to add value. It's just going to be harder and especially for younger, more sophisticated clients on the, on the low end, I think that is going to be really challenging and advisors have to level up.
- [30:04]
A
Yeah, I, so I, I agree. Just, I think like the two, two closing notes I would, I would give to that though. The first. So if you actually look at some of the broader consumer research that's going on right now that folks like Cerule are doing, the group most willing to pay outright checks for financial planning advice right now are young people more than anyone else. Way more actually than the pre retirees and the retirees.
- [30:30]
B
When you say checks, what does that mean?
- [30:33]
A
Pay outright fee for advice. And I think part of that is, look, I mean, the reality from our industry's historical perspective, if you're a boomer, you get really thrown off when you're getting ready to retire and someone says this costs a fee because you got your financial advice for free for 30 years. It was like packaged into the commission and like the whole, oh, my God, there's a fee for this. Like, kind of freaks people out because they've never seen it before. Young people coming in today, I'm like, you know, I pay a cpa, I pay a lawyer, right? Like, I just assume, I pay professionals. So they assume that they're going to pay us a fee because that's how it works in professional exchanges with, with experts. And there is a point. I mean, this is really what happens, I think for any, any consumer when eventually they decide that they want to work with an advisor. At some point there was some combination of complexity and just cognitive load that says, like, look, I can figure out how to do pretty much anything on the Internet. I mean, I can, I can read my way to a doctorate degree on the Internet if I want to. However, there are other things I would rather do with my time and energy. And I've already dealt with, you know, stuff from my job and stuff at my house and things I got to work on and My own H Vac systems having issues. I'm like, I don't want to become a financial expert. Can I just pay someone and get this part of my cognitive load off? And the more complex my situation gets or the more hectic my life gets, the more I want to send off that cognitive load. And to me, I mean the fascinating thing for you know, whatever, it's like 25 years of arc history of the Internet. If there's one thing that hasn't happened from this amazing access to information, our lives have not gotten financially simpler over the past 20 to 30 years.
- [32:08]
B
That's all true. That's all true. 100%. But if the DIY pool increases by 20% over the next 10 years, by, by 15 or 30, whatever it is, just because these tools become so incredible and Google, it didn't happen overnight. That took time, right? It was around. But just fast forward 10 years, I think the industry is going to look a lot different.
- [32:28]
A
I, I think the indirect effect that you get from it. Look I, I do agree with you that ultimately it gets harder air quotes as I would frame it, it's simply the, the bar gets higher about how deep and knowledgeable and capable you have to be as an advisor to add value. Like to really, to really add value on top. I don't think that's a bad thing. It just. But it for the world.
- [32:52]
B
For the world, consumers should get better value.
- [32:54]
A
Correct. But it will be harder at the margin for a lot of folks in the business. Again, like I think this is why CFP is hitting record numbers because people are feeling the pressure of I got to get more knowledgeable. I think you're going to see a bunch of I call them like the post CFP designations like oh geez, once everyone's got cfp. That isn't even enough to differentiate me as an advisor in the marketplace. I got to go even deeper. I will say this is why I'm not in the camp of some other kind of forecasters and such of the industry saying we all end out in like a communication life coach realm because when clients come with questions of complexity, you actually have to be knowledgeable in your answers. Right? Like H Vac person number three wasn't winning your business because he had the greatest empathy about how unpleasant it is to be in your house when it's hot. He won the business because he knew H Vac equipment so well he could come up with a creative duct working solution with this equipment and that plugging in and how to fit it into your house and made an actual high leaned expert knowledge recommendation by going really deep with you on the technical stuff of H Vac in addition to being better at listening and understanding what you want, which went even better because you are more knowledgeable because you got up to speed with the LLM. So I do think we end out in a world where it's not just, hey, we're all life coaches with great communication skills. I think the expertise bar actually goes up as well because you have to have really complex conversations with clients where you can communicate well and actually be able to go toe to toe with them on technical issues where you know more than what they learned in the last 17 minutes in their LLM query about whatever is they're going to come in with, which is a lot because our clients have a wide range of questions when they come in. So I, I do think the bar, the bar goes up on communication and the technical knowledge that it takes to add value on top of what an increasingly educated consumer figures out for themselves. And I don't think that really nukes advice or the business. It just kind of shifts it. And if you want a template for it like last 20 to 30 years with the Internet playing out is not a bad model for what that looks like.
- [35:08]
B
All right, Michael, always appreciate the time you are putting out the best research in my opinion in the industry. For advisors, for people that might be living under a rock and have not come across your research, how do they find it?
- [35:23]
A
Various places. So we talk about a lot of it on our own podcast, Financial Advisor Success. So in all the usual podcast places. Also a podcast called Kitsis and Carl with Carl Richards where we talk about some of our research. If you want directly, just kitsas.com, k-I t c e-s.com There's a thing in the main navigation on all the different research sites we put out along with just lots of educational content for financial advisors, both technical and practice.
- [35:50]
B
Fantastic. Thank you so much.
- [35:51]
A
Awesome. Thank you, Mike.