A life-size picture of Mr. Halaby, a former police officer, greeted us on a banner in the foyer of the private dining room. Once we were inside, I saw a large chart on a stand up front. It turned out we were there to learn about equity indexed annuities, a complicated insurance product that I wrote about with a fair bit of skepticism back in 2008.

In short (and short is hard when trying to break down products like these), equity indexed annuities tend to work something like this: You hand over a sum of money to an insurance company for a period of time, and at the end you are guaranteed to get at least that much money back if you don't take some money out along the way. You generally don’t get a monthly check, and you agree not to take large amounts out during that period unless you are willing to pay a penalty. As for that equity index part, the insurance company will generally add money to the amount you initially plunked down, providing a portion of the gains reflected in whatever stock index the insurance company is using.

Mr. Halaby’s staff distributed material before dinner that included a chart that looked like the one at the front of the room. It showed an equity indexed annuity performing 8.29 percent better, after an 18-year period from 1998 to 2016, than the S&P 500 stock market index.

But the pamphlet’s chart has some fine print — so small that my 47-year-old eyes could barely make it out — that disclosed the following: The index it was using was not accounting for the reinvestment of dividends from all those stocks.

A quick email the next morning to Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S&P Dow Jones Indices, confirmed the following: When you do reinvest dividends, that basket of stocks does 33.72 percent better than the annuity.

I had hoped to ask our host some questions after the steak, which was cooked medium unwell (no one asked how I wanted it prepared). But by then, Mr. Halaby, who has an active license to sell insurance, including annuities, was gone.

I made an appointment to meet him at his office the next morning, and he did not seem happy to see me once I told him who I was. He disparaged my employer and profession and accused me of attending under false pretenses.