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JB Josh Brown Josh Brown CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management, the investment advisory firm he co-founded with Barry Ritholtz.

“I have this heuristic where I tell people rich people don't talk to robots. Rich people pay someone else to talk to the robots and then take whatever that information is and bring it back to them.”

The Compound and Friends · September 2026

“I have this heuristic where I tell people rich people don't talk to robots. Rich people pay someone else to talk to the robots and then take whatever that information is and bring it back to them.” — Josh Brown, The Compound and Friends

Context

Jens Nordvig had just noted that clients still pay for vetted, human-filtered market information even with so much free data around. Brown answers with a rule he says holds in both the hedge fund and wealth management worlds, then extends it to travel agents and Expedia. The claim is not that the machines are bad but that paying a person to operate them is itself the status good.

Listen to the episode → More from Josh Brown →

Transcript

The Compound and Friends Around 25:56 into the episode
Josh Brown

Yeah.

Jens Nordvig

…of years ago, we thought, okay, that's. Phasing out completely. But because there's so much information out there that is not vetted at all, there's actually some that really want to pay for having something that has like an extra layer of like total real-time personal color and vetting on top.

Josh Brown

I have this heuristic where I tell people rich people don't talk to robots. Rich people pay someone else to talk to the robots and then take whatever that information is and bring it back to them. Like within reason. Wealthy people don't plan vacations on Expedia. If their travel agent is utilizing Expedia for information, that's fine. But they want a person who's responsible. And I think that corollary is a pretty good one, both for the hedge fund world and for wealth management world. You talk to the machine. Tell me what it says. Call me back. I think that's always, there's always going to be a component of that.

Jens Nordvig

And it's also a matter of making sure that the machine, even though if the machine is mathematically correct, like the machine might get outdated. So we need to continually make sure that we know what's happening in the market. Like there's a lot of our models that is based on, okay, what's the…

Josh Brown

Right.

Jens Nordvig

So we can give like one, it's okay if I give a specific example. Yeah. So like Korea is a pretty interesting country now, right? Because it's probably the country where the AI revolution is impacting everything the most. Obviously in the US, AI is very important, but it's US is a bigger country…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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