SPEAKER_03 0:00

The one of the crazy stories. But uh yeah, I was 26 years old, wearing a suit in the middle of Tucson, Arizona. Uh, I had just become commercial field sales leader for a giant corporate insurance company uh that has great hands. Um, and uh it happened to meet a guy named Craig Pretzinger, who who uh yeah, was an incredible person, um, went golfing with him. And over the course of the day, one, you should never golf in like an Oxford or button-up shirt and pants. I was dying in Tucson. Uh, and I came from California, so I I looked like an idiot. Um, but I I still remember this day. There was a shot that Craig took where he whipped the ball almost completely, skidded over the top on a par three. It proceeded to hit the water hazard, bounce on the water hazard, and roll within like probably about six inches of the cup, close to a hole in one. And so yeah, that's how it plays that hole. I knew you from Wrangler. Um I'm an insurance dude. Boom.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

We die, we quote, we got the fluffy, no, no script, just real world stuff, don't pay off to system. That's legit, sell a lot the insurance dude. That's it.

SPEAKER_01 1:20

Yeah, so I mean, I can I can't believe that you're on this that you're on this, and I didn't see your name come across, you know, just busy over here in lovely San Diego. Okay, but let's preface that that you actually chose the name. What which they did. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:36

Well, you know, you did it subconsciously. You we could feel our vibe. We missed each other. Yeah, such a small industry, but it blew me away. It's it's great to see you, man.

SPEAKER_01 1:44

Yeah, good to see you. Yeah, good to have you on the insurance dudes. This is gonna be fun. It's been a while, huh? Yes. Well, I mean, that was what I was drinking, so that's pre-2015.

SPEAKER_03 1:56

Yeah, it would have been I graduated college in 2010 and I I started, you know, running the agency in California and then got hired like probably three years into that on all state corporates. So I mean, don't say that now. I'm feeling actually really old, but yeah, it it was a few moons ago. Let's say that.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

Yeah. Well, the kids accelerate the situation. I'm sure everybody listening, I'm sure the three people listening will uh can can agree if they have the kids. So what why Andrew, why don't you take us back to to your backstory, how you got into insurance, and then you know, we'll sprinkle in some some fun times from the from the good old days.

SPEAKER_03 2:31

Dude, I love it. Uh yeah, and you you guys virtually kick me if I I start going on tangents or in different directions. Like I I I was a closet hacker as a kid and and like breaking and fixing computers and making video games. Hated school, hated college. And yeah, coming right out of it, I thought, all right, maybe I'll I'll do some work somewhere, go to law school eventually or something. And of course, like everyone, I I had an uncle who like worked in insurance. How you ever find your way in insurance? And I started at this little Allstate agency in in uh in California, a two and a half million dollar agency. Uh, and from the second I started at that place, I had two thoughts. One, holy shit, I love this. And two, oh my God, this is the most broken system I've ever seen, which presents challenge and extreme opportunities. So proceeded to take that agency, grow from two and a half million with my partner there to God, it's about 25 million in a couple of years, which of course sent the red flags up at corporate. They came down, shut us down, and we're like, you have to be doing something illegal. You guys need to stop immediately. Came and audited us, and they went, oh my God, this is brilliant. Like, well, do you want to come to Northbrook and work for corporate and and take over uh the commercial region for Arizona and the Southwest? And so I was young and nuts and said, hell yeah, let's go. But yeah, then I took over, yeah, commercial field sales leader through that. I met a ton of incredible people, including this one uh across me right now. Tons of agents out there got to learn, helped uh re refit their their quoting system. But also, yeah, just met these great leaders there, guys like Dennis Bailey, Jim Turner, and and Grant Wood, and got got to really hit outside my my comfort zone. And they put a lot of trust in me being a young kid and in a position God knows I shouldn't have been in. But yeah, did well in that and then got asked to join uh Argo Group as their head of digital, built that from zero to 120 million in in revenue over uh a five-year period, and then got even crazier and went, I'll start my own reinsurance company in 2020 and ended up becoming an insurance MJ, but it's now the largest wildfire parametric or one of the largest wildfire parametric insurers on the West Coast and started uh uh bought a couple other businesses and stuff like that in between. But yeah, that then about a year ago, as you can tell, I kind of have an addiction to uh creating creating new pro-entropic business models, as I call them, things that get wildly more valuable as things get more volatile. I just kept seeing in the market, I I hadn't been a broker for God, 20 years now, guys. And I kept looking and just going, how in God's name is no one figured out how to give people discounts for doing mitigation? Would fix this entire system for wildfire, for severe convective storm and all that. And so uh after enough sleepless nights of going, this makes all the sense the world, why no one's doing it. I I had the insane idea of like, all right, let's jump back on, uh, start all over again. Uh so yeah, here I am.

SPEAKER_01 5:25

Starting over.

SPEAKER_03 5:26

Well, sort of. Yeah, I still get to be a part of the other companies that are growing and doing great, but there's nothing like God, starting a company again from like ground up and and getting to be like fresh in it. I I don't know. There's no rush, there's no drug, there's nothing like it on earth like creating uh yeah, gold for nothing.

SPEAKER_01 5:44

The beginning is fun, or you're just molding the putty.

SPEAKER_03 5:48

It is. Uh, and like look, I think it it's indicative. This will ring true to someone. I had an investor once tell me, he's like, there's two people in the world. I was like, what's your investment strategy? Chris Sokka, actually. So probably one of the greatest investors of all time. And I'm like, tell me what your investment strategy is, why you're so successful. And he said, it's very complex. Uh, here it is. There's only two people in the world. There are chaos muppets and order muppets. And when a chaos muppet meets an order Muppet, something magical happens sometimes. It was pretty good. Uh speaking of magic. But yeah, so I'm a chaos muppet. And so, like, I I love, I love the feeling of like just pure chaos. You don't know what's gonna happen the next day, you got a thousand things to do. Like, yeah, I I live for it. Love it.

SPEAKER_01 6:29

You love it and complain about it. Exactly. A little bit of mama comes along. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 6:34

No, come on, man. You can't if you can look around the rest of this place, you go, Jesus, man, you have a problem. Like, I'm on the highest of the spectrum. I'm guessing you are too.

SPEAKER_02 6:44

Oh yeah, oh yeah. But I mean, I I think that's what makes a great entrepreneur is somebody who can just hyper focus and they love the chaos, you know?

SPEAKER_03 6:53

It is. I I commonly tell people, whenever I'm about to hire someone new, I I do kind of something similar. It look like I I've kind of only found like two people that that end up in this, and it's like the war movies where you know bullets start flying and shells start going off, and there's one guy in the trench, like cradling himself, rocking back and forth and crying, and then there's another guy standing on on the parapet, like building sand castles with bullets flying around him, like whistling. I mean, yeah, it it it it tends to be that true. And I and I think if you love that kind of unknown and chaos, you start to understand that like one, the world, the world is driven by chaos theory and a lot of complexity theory. And you start to learn you actually can control outcomes if if you're able to deal with a lot of really bad shit that that can happen. Oh, sorry. Am I allowed to cuss, guys?

SPEAKER_01 7:41

You could yeah, you could say that, you just can't say the company, the company, Dave.

SPEAKER_03 7:45

But yeah, sorry. So yeah, the the the the new uh company is Rock Rose Risk.

SPEAKER_01 7:50

No, no, but you can't say the insurance company, but it's all good. Got it. We'll we'll get that. We'll just edit. It's interesting, dude. It's it's interesting because I think that from a very young age, people are groomed to be the rank and file, right? So to be the all I heard was the chaos. What was the other one? The lame one? Order Muppet. The order Muppets. So, you know, the 90% or the 99% are the order Muppets because they listened, right? Like, I love my wife, and she's on a hike in freaking Switzerland or something right now. But it's like for the most part, she follows the order, she believes in all the rules, and she thinks the rules are there because blah blah blah blah blah, right? Like she buys into the bull the matrix, which is that's nice, you know. And I don't, and I think that's probably why we like each other because you know, sometimes is because of this, you know, that the dynamic there. For sure. But then, like those of us who were forced into that rule when it didn't fit because our braids operated differently, a little quicker or more scattered, or whatever it is, you know, whatever you want to call it, like we get out of out of it and we're like, wait a minute, we don't have to do all that, right? We could we can do what we want, you know, and then all of a sudden it's like boom, you know, or you go crazy.

SPEAKER_03 9:02

It is. And like, look, you know, I I think Chris's point in it what was saying, look, they're both puppets, like and the thing I've learned, like in you know, making an ungodly amount of mistakes and and building business divisions and and creating companies, you have to find an order Muppet who can put up with your chaos Muppet because otherwise, like if Craig, if you and I tried to start a business, like God knows. We we'd be playing with Legos, we'd be doing a thousand different like next ideas. And so the magic happens. And you know, my my current one, uh, Ryan, Brian Valdez, like 20 years claims experience, like uh at a big company. And like, yeah, you you kind of connect and mesh, but yeah, takes all types, man. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_02 9:45

I would love to get into uh how how did you figure out this uh how to predict wildfires with a 96% accuracy?

SPEAKER_03 9:55

Yeah. Um, so I failed most of my math classes and I don't get HD. What I did learn over time, and and this should be an encouragement to anyone else who liked failed calculus, uh mathematics and arithmetic are two extremely different things. And I I've become obsessed with with mathematics and and obviously have to be on the technological side. And but yeah, it all started with um we had been building machine learning models at Argo doing reinsurance on mortgage derivatives on asset backed security. So we were basically backstropping Freddie and Fannie at the time, and we built a machine learning model that that was able to predict default rates and major markets and and give us a good clue on what the overall default rate for Freddie and Fanny would look like, and then write a reinsurance. Very simple policy, too. Like if more than 50 basis points of the mortgages in the country defaulted, like we were gonna lose $100 million, or if it didn't, we'd make 10 million. So um, but kind of use that that same premise, which is looking at wildfires, understanding like, okay, this is a rare event. There's 50,000 wildfires every single year on the West Coast. Three of them become camp, Kincaid, or Palisades. And I had at the time been involved a bit with like Santa Fe Institute looking at like chaos theory and understood if you look at these events, they're compounding events. So you can have a smoker who lights a cigarette on a gasoline-filled brush and it'll burn. And if there's nothing around it, it won't burn. And to get one of those camp or Kinkade or, you know, big events, you have to have hundreds of millions of small little factors go wrong in a perfect lineman to have this cascading effect, which becomes like a large-scale catastrophe.

SPEAKER_01 11:36

And isn't it based off of some like the origins of this thing? Like from this like Russian scientist, like Barkel Barkowitz or something. I just saw a freaking video. I just saw a YouTube video that was all about this. And it was like they thought that it was, oh, there's only certain predictors. You can't predict everything because of all those millions of different variables, but actually you can, right?

SPEAKER_03 12:00

Which is what to a sense. So what I became very good at is not predicting weather. You can't predict weather no matter how we try. Um you can predict, you can predict when there's a lot of factors that have lined up and something could go very wrong and understand like those elements and compounded. So yeah, to your point, uh there's Markov simulations and and actually the main one who who really built this, it's called self-organizing criticality. There's a guy named Per Bach, who worked at the Santa Fe Institute. Brilliant, dead now. But um, he he came up with this theory that all complex systems, um, so you know, economies, biology, mortgage systems, wildfires, these systems they layer redundancies, small little redundancies on top of each other. So you don't have a fire, you know, break out every single day, you don't have your power fail every single day, you don't lose your cell signal every single day. The problem is when you start layering on thousands of redundancies on top of one another, you create these fault lines where if a million little things go wrong, the actual entire system will collapse in on itself and catastrophically because you've gotten created a billion redundancies against it. And his point was actually most complex systems have to reset to that point. That's why we kind of see there's a ton of other stuff. I'll I'll send you guys the book. Name of the book is How Nature Works, what was his main piece, but it is a phenomenal one. He goes into how you how they predicted time scale variants uh of tsunamis, earthquakes, all this stuff. It's cool.

SPEAKER_02 13:27

That's crazy. So were you like, did your company predict the palisades and all that stuff? Or were able to know that, like, hey, this something bad's gonna happen? I mean, it's been it's been happening, right?

SPEAKER_01 13:39

I mean, haven't they said it that there's gonna be a big fire or whatever in California forever?

SPEAKER_03 13:44

So here's like the the there's gonna be another huge one. Um probably this year next. Um in there's 17 spots you could I could point out on a map tomorrow and go. Now here's the wild part. And in like the new company, um, you know, one one of the easiest strategies we've had of you want to know how to predict like where the next wildfire is gonna happen, the next Palisade, go spend six months, get on a plane, visit every single local fire chief, sit down and have beers with them, become friends and go point out the hill that you think uh where where are you not gonna be able to send your guys? They'll blatantly tell you, uh, and all the politicians, regulators, the people live here, they'll all go like, oh yeah, like burnt, they're always named like burnt house road, which you go, okay. That should be your first indicator. But yeah, they'll say very plainly, like if nothing's done there, that becomes a suicide box. And the only thing we're gonna be able to do is tell everyone to to run and escape. And and actually, not even just wildfire. If you guys get a chance, you should watch the new documentary on Katrina on on Netflix. Oh yeah, we watched, I watched that. Incredible, right? And so, like, everyone forgets there was a hurricane in the 1950s that that they literally same exact thing happened, ninth war, like flooded, like everything the same. And so I think our problem as humans is one, we have huge cognitive biases, and one of them is positivity bias and recency bias, where we go, you know, it's the most recent thing that'll happen. But you know, I I'll give you guys a fun question. It's good proof of recency bias. In the past 200 years, what do you think the single worst catastrophic event in California history has been? Caused the most damage and destruction.

SPEAKER_01 15:16

San Francisco fire.

SPEAKER_03 15:17

It's a good one.

SPEAKER_01 15:18

The old, what was that, the 20s or something?

SPEAKER_02 15:21

Yeah. Jason. What what about the um one of those earthquakes? The uh Whittier?

SPEAKER_01 15:26

Whittier in the 90s?

SPEAKER_03 15:27

That that was Northridge. And that was a young pump during that. It wasn't either though. So I was at high school.

SPEAKER_02 15:34

Was it the Palisades fire?

SPEAKER_03 15:35

That's that's now the second recency.

SPEAKER_02 15:37

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 15:38

That's now the second biggest. And you'd go, okay, wildfire's gonna be the next one. No, here's the crazy part. The single worst event in the past 200 years was the flood. Luce from getting elected.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

Yeah, nailed it. Nailed it.

SPEAKER_03 15:50

Oh man, yeah, I'm I'm stealing that joke for the next one.

SPEAKER_01 15:53

What about COVID? I mean, COVID was a kind of a problem.

SPEAKER_03 15:56

Was but in terms of like destruction, death, it it was actually the flood of 1862. Um, there was a good old 1862. So, right, like I had never heard of it before like getting into something. I've never heard of it. I mean, 1862 is old news. You'd think. So this flood was so bad, it destroyed one-third of tack of all taxable land in California, killed tens of thousands of people, and it was so intense that the mayor at the time, Leland Stanford, the guy they named the university after, he had to go to his inauguration in a rowboat. And like, look it up. You can see like pictures of him doing his inauguration speech in a rowboat because it was under four feet of water. But it goes to show you like this is how most of the world works today, and and how most people think, which is like what happened a week ago, and we forget one, the Earth's been around for a few billion years. There's a very big sample set in terms of like events and frequency and severity. Yeah, like we think 1862 was a long time ago. That's probably a one in 100 year flood that we're wildly overdue for, and everyone's gonna go, oh my God, I I can't believe this happened. Uh, we're all surprised what we shouldn't be.

SPEAKER_01 17:02

So did these catastrophic things like occur about every hundred years? It's like like the Spanish flu was a hundred years, right? And then it's just interesting. It depends on the event.

SPEAKER_03 17:13

There is what they call um invariance where like basically um you can kind of look and see like these what how big how big will it be every one year, every 10 years, every 100 years. And there's like a pretty it's a non-linear curve, but it's a curve that you can track. It it happens more. Now, obviously, we've seen a significant increase in the frequency and severity of these smaller, you call them smaller events, but severe convective storm, these wildfires. So they weren't katrinas, they didn't cause $120 billion worth of damage until now. Um, but they caused 20 billion, you know, they caused 15. And they started these like, but those are big events compared to like it used to just be quiet for six years, and then you get a big big event and then nine years and then big event.

SPEAKER_01 17:56

So gosh. What about the the San Andreas Fault? That's common. That's coming.

SPEAKER_03 18:03

Yeah, but I I think earthquake's more mitigated against relative to the others. Yeah. Well where are you living? Uh what state are you in? I spend part of the year in uh upstate New York and Rochester and part of the year in Bermuda. So two very different places, yeah. So like you used to live in California, right? Yeah, I'm born and raised there for 25 years.

SPEAKER_02 18:23

So they dragged me out to Arizona. So d what do you think about living here? Like no knowing the risk and and everything in California, what would you advise? Friends and loved ones.

SPEAKER_03 18:34

Well, I mean, look, it's why I created the company. You know, it's every it's the most insane situation I think we could ever imagine. Everyone's still sitting around while house is on fire pointing, going, like, who started it when all we need to do is put out the fire. And that's, I think, the thing like what what really like kicked me in the ass. And it's funny, everyone's at fault, no one's at fault. Every government official's at fault, and at the same time, every homeowner's at fault, and at the same time, every insurance company and every insured, like everyone's at fault for the situation we're in.

SPEAKER_01 19:03

We're all working real hard to screw it up.

SPEAKER_03 19:05

Yeah. And it at the end of the day, we used to have, you know, I used the the you know, example to our carriers we work with of like, guys, like, what do you think the price for terrorism would be after 9-11 if the response afterwards had been, oh shit, that was really bad? And okay, no, they went like, okay, we're gonna spend $100 billion reinventing air infrastructure and creating TSA. And we just have somehow like kind of lost that factor. And so, uh, you know, lo and behold, who would have ever guessed that insurance actually could play probably one of the most important pieces of that of going, okay, we have got to do significant fuel reduction to decrease it, do significant hardening on all properties that are we exposed. And we've got to find billions of dollars to do it and just magically, like, who ends up losing the most money when these events happen? Insurance companies. And so, yeah, that that's why this I think, yeah, every time I tell the idea to someone or bring up the company, I mean, we're we're blessed. It's been growing like a rocket ship. But every single time I bring up some, they're like, yeah, that makes it no duh. Like, of course, you should get a discount on your insurance for doing mitigation. And that's how like everyone wins in that scenario. If I go to an HOA, HOA was paying 250 grand uh, you know, three years ago, now they pay 1.2 million. I can talk to the carrier, and the carrier goes, like, we raised it to 1.2 million because we have no idea how to price for the wildfire or anything else there. And we put together a 40 to 50 page risk report, do a full site assessment and look at it and go, look, if we took 400 grand off the premium here, brought it down to 800,000, let's call it, and we took 250, $300,000 that premium, you know, work with our partners at Burnbot to do a massive uh fuel reduction project with some semi-autonomous robots and put new siding, those deevesmans, those underdecking and stuff like that, we can lower the risk 40%. Everyone wins. Like insurance company are gonna start making a lot more money. The person's insanely happy because we're gonna start bringing their their premium down significantly, and we actually can start to rebuild the infrastructure that that's been failing here. That's so awesome, dude. I love it.

SPEAKER_01 21:07

Actually, making things happen.

SPEAKER_02 21:10

Yeah. So so in that case, who pays for this?

SPEAKER_03 21:13

So like it is literally that that simple in it, where we we have about 15 carriers we work with now, or it keeps increasing. Average discount right now to date. Uh we we got licensed and opened in April. Average discounts about 35% and and did two and a half million at premium last month. Um, and the way it works is literally just like I told you, we go to an HOA, that HOA has had an 1,000 X increase, or we go to winery and they've had a 800% increase. We talk to our carriers or their current carrier, but we go, look, you know, have a very strong track record in writing wildfire and understanding it, how it works. Um, there is a significant way to reduce this risk. If we take that money out of the premium and use it to do mitigation, everyone wins. And so, like it's literally just take it's money that's just going to. A balance sheet, and that balance sheet's just sending it into a giant, like flaming pit when a loss happens. And so we're just redre- I like to say that's our market share is the $230 billion we just lit on fire, you know, in January.

SPEAKER_01 22:13

Love it.

SPEAKER_02 22:14

That's cool. Yeah, because they're safer. I mean, everybody's safer. You're you're getting a percentage of what they would be just paying the premiums, anyways. So it's like really is a win-win.

SPEAKER_01 22:23

It's not 100% the cash either. It's like actually helping and saving people and their property. It is.

SPEAKER_03 22:29

And like, look, it's the single most important trade I'd view is like human civilization, is like our ability to adapt and and kind of just like lost that after a while. And it happens to all civilizations as they get more complex and big and intricacies on how things are executed. But you know, the the original like kind of vision here was SpaceX, crazy enough. But if you look at like what happened with SpaceX, you had NASA, one of the greatest parts of our government, that started to like atrophy and become overbloated with like the amount of bureaucracy and work and complexity. You had a private industry step in and go, okay, we want to try and do this better and be incentivized towards it. And they end up, they don't replace the government entity. What they end up doing is becoming like the best partner on earth to it and actually advancing it far faster than it was. And that that is exactly again, what the hell do I know? But that is kind of my big theory on the earth. If you look around, you know, I always have entrepreneurs going, like, oh, you know, what startup should I do? Should I do an AU AI startup? Should I do me know the next chatbot? And it's like, no, like go look out your window right now. Like, go look at the road. The roads that you're driving on are using the same pavement for the past 50 years. No one's looked at any machine learning model on how to like increase durability of, or I don't know what they have, of like, you know, asphalt. And like look at power lines, like stuff like that. All of our infrastructure right now, we've just kind of taken for granted because we built a lot in a very short amount of time and we're very proud of what we built. But it's all very fragile when you look at like the giant spectrum of what can happen on the earth and how dangerous nature can be. And so there's just a wealth of value to like bring out there. If you're kind of looking at the world in a very, very in a very realistic manner, that everything's breakable. Everything fails. Entropy is infinite. And so where where can I like kind of focus in that? And I think insurance. I'm I'm not just doing that because uh I've spent my whole life in it and run the best insurance podcast in the world, but um Yeah, buddy.

SPEAKER_01 24:27

In the world.

SPEAKER_03 24:28

It it is um technically in the world. Yeah, but we can it is one of the most important pieces that we can use to actually probably fix this entire infrastructure because I don't think anyone else is.

SPEAKER_02 24:40

Yeah, I love that. I love that um it's like what it's like what's hiding in plain sight, right? Because we do take so much for granted. Well, yeah, we let we let stuff go. My house shows that. It's a good example.

SPEAKER_03 24:55

And like look, maybe I'm just like slightly autistic, but it it's always the way my brain's worked. And like when we grew the original like agency so quickly and they thought it was illegal and you know, came down and looked at it. If they were blown away at how simple it is, I still use the same strategy as today. The way we did it and why I ended up becoming like a commercial field sales leader is because I looked through our entire product book and went, all right, what's our most profitable, you know, line of business? What are we able to sell the hell out of that people love? It's like, oh, Inland Marine and BOPs to plumbers. And so, you know, your natural thing would be like, all right, I'll go buy leads or, you know, I'll go join an association. And like you're you're in the same vocal lane as everyone else. You're you're just part of the noise. My thing was like, I'm just gonna start taking plumbers to lunch. And, you know, luckily they had a dad who who did did quite a bit of HVAC and plumbing for a while. And yeah, just kept talking to these guys and going, like, damn, if I just go to a plumbing supply house, like I could meet 500 plumbers a day. And so started there, started just literally knocking on every plumbing supply house door, Hajoka Ferguson. And guys, like, what can I do to sit out here and ask people for quotes? And they said nothing, like, get out. Then I got a little smarter and went, like, you guys like free food. And so we ended up buying a couple Santa Maria smokers, and God, if we didn't turn into I we were literally the top writer of commercial in the state, if not like the nation, within like a few months, literally handing out free barbecue at like 7 a.m. These guys are monsters, but free barbecue for a quote. And I've always kind of used that asymmetry of like, you know, everyone's always there's so much gold in plain sight that like we tend to like go past because like we're looking for the shiniest part when instead we should be looking at the thing that like if we went, my God, if that got taken away from me today, like I would like I own an HVAC um like startup because think of that. Like, how much do we take for granted that I can sit in this room right now and it's 80 degrees outside and it's me in here and I'm okay? You sit, you sit in one room that's 90 degrees for five minutes, you'll go insane.

SPEAKER_02 26:58

And like, but I just had that happen to my family. We just replaced our entire thing, had the same thing happen.

SPEAKER_01 27:06

It just happened to be yesterday. No, AC, the AC went out, and it and it's been cold, so it was like no big deal. But the last three days at San Diego has been gray, raining, cold. And then yesterday, when the AC went out, it was 85. So this room, like I was in here like doing stuff, and I'm like, oh my god, like I I feel dizzy. And I like open the door and I go out there. That room was hot, but it was cool when I went in the other room. You can't see up in the thing, but yeah, wild. Crazy. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 27:39

So I went on vacation, came back, and our a our AC went out, our our furnace went out, and dude, every part of our furnace was like on the fritz. So, like, even though the furnace went out, it was like the AC needed to be replaced. Um, ducting was all torn out and all this stuff. So we're like, dude, we got to replace this. But it was like 85, 90 degrees, right? So the day, like right when it went out, I was like, all right, we got we got to get somebody out here. It was gonna take at least a week. First, I got quoted multiple weeks, and I was like, dude, that can't happen. My wife has something called aqua genioparitis, which is like an autoimmune disease that like like liquid actually, like humidity, because it's humid out here. The humidity like feels like it's burning her skin. My God. So we were at home. I put like an AC unit in there, fans, nothing's working. We had to get the RV, put the RV down by the beach, and I I had to do this big rush thing to get everything. But like every got back from vacation, needed to work on the business, and this happened, it was like all hands on deck because we just can't live like this. We have four kids, so it's like moving all the unit down there to like, and we homeschool to so it was just it was madness for two weeks because to your point, something that we take for granted, like I should have just I should have just replaced the system.

SPEAKER_03 29:02

Well, no, here's the wild part. Like, well, how that company started it, and I can't take any of the credit. I I helped co-found it now. I'm I sit on the board. My buddy Charlie runs it. But he came to me one day, he was a property manager and he said, Hey, I'm losing multiple deals a week because tenants and landlords are fighting against each other over these HVACs, and the same thing's happening. HVAC goes out, they go, if I don't get it fixed tomorrow, like I'm gonna my hair slot's dead. So so we just started like, and I told him, Look, I don't I write wildfire insurance, like I don't write HVAC insurance. I'll help you go find some insurer uh out there who does it, and looked everywhere and went, like, you can find like sudden and accidental, but there's almost no company doing warranties or guarantees on HVAC, at least for commercial. And it was something as like simple as that. Now, the crazy part is you're not gonna like, um, as as we dug into it, I I guess it's just like curiosity. I can't stop myself. And same with like kind of most entrepreneurs, you just like you gotta keep digging into the problem. Realizing like the whole system's broken, like firms have basically taken up every single HVAC company, turned it into commission-based models. I hate to tell you, your system that was like completely on the fritz and like destroyed might have just needed a $50 compressor replaced. But the difference was that HVAC technician who came out, uh, if they replaced your compressor, they would make like $200. Uh, if they replaced your system, I'm guessing they charge you like eight grand and they made six grand off of it. And so, yeah, looking at these systems and and understanding like the basics of it of like, sorry, I mean like the the incentive system, like the actual distribution system, it has ended up in an incredible business that that yeah, Charlie's been killing it on. But yeah, it's uh it's everywhere.

SPEAKER_02 30:40

So here here's the crazy thing is that we we could have replaced a part, which that's what we were going to do to get us by until after the summertime. They replaced the part, but then it didn't support it. So we could have just replaced the furnace. But because the pain was so deep at that point, I said, if I'm gonna replace the furnace, I'm gonna do, I'm gonna do it all together. Why the why the hell would I not? Because of the pain, you know what I mean? So like that's why I think that's such a good model, is because yeah, 14 grand later, I I have a whole new rebuilt system because I don't want to deal with this shit anymore.

SPEAKER_03 31:13

They make you sit in the pane, then a little bit longer, a little bit longer, and then they then they go, well, you know, you only could do this one, but well, yeah, actually, like I it is a good metaphor for it of like, well, why haven't we like changed our like we know there's gonna be a huge hurricane that just blows Miami off the map, and like we all know it's coming, it's gonna happen in the next 20 years, probably the next like 10. Like literally gone. Like, but there's no pain. Like, there's not enough pain for us to go, like, we should build a seawall like they did in Galveston in 1906. Like, pain seems to be the only thing that drives us uh significantly enough, uh, for better or worse.

SPEAKER_02 31:51

Well, if you have salespeople, you know exactly that's exactly brother.

SPEAKER_03 31:57

Yeah. So that's interesting.

SPEAKER_01 31:58

The guy, the guy came, you know. I was like, look at all the stuff. I'm a little bit handy, you know, the little water reservoir thing. I'm like, okay, that's not full. Let me go check the breaker. Okay, the breaker's not tripped. Now it's a little bit past my my wheelhouse, you know. But the guy comes and looks at it, and apparently it's it's a motherboard to something. I'm like, I didn't even know it has that, right? But the lady's like, oh, do you know what it was it anything big? And I go, well, he said the motherboard, and that, you know, I'm glad that I'm not involved in in any of this. So it is the motherboard. You gotta trust it. It's the motherboard, it's gotta be expensive.

SPEAKER_02 32:34

So good. All right. I wanted I I want to get into something really controversial. I think you might be the right person to answer this question, especially with your history and and everything that you've done. But are you ready? That that's a good hook. So whoever's editing this video, please put this at the beginning. So, so here's uh here's the deal. You used to be an agent, captive agency, you grew captive agency. You saw the model wasn't for you and decided to do some other things. The models changed quite a bit, and we're in a time where commissions are getting this is this is what I see. Commissions have gotten smaller. Agencies that thrive were like the $2 million agencies, then went to the $4 million, then the eight. Now it's like 20, 30, 40 million. So they're consolidating and growing these bigger agencies and kind of getting rid of the smaller agencies. Where do you see the captive model going and how quickly do you see it going there? God, that that is a great question.

SPEAKER_01 33:34

I mean, it's just did a thumbs down above your head. Did it really? Yeah, I did one of the one of those like I can't imagine doing it.

SPEAKER_03 33:47

Yeah, that was like telling you. The first part is like I I actually like it wasn't I I didn't like the model and like what what made me do what I did, like change jobs and I mean, besides promotion. Well, I mean, you got to move to Tucson. What's the point? I mean, who doesn't want that? From Manhattan Beach. So yeah, I mean collateral move. I still love it. It is the naked Pueblo. It was this obsession with like, how do you fix this problem? So the thing I couldn't stand as a captive agent was like, here's the price of the product, and like just go sell it. And if you had a good price that year, you're gonna beat everyone, and if you didn't, you were so well. Like, and I kept looking, going, like, how the hell does this get priced? I I could listen to a thousand agents, I could use my own intuition and know, yeah, that landlord policy is wildly underpriced, and that system's being used wrong. If you put the pipes or 1978 copper, it drops at 20%. And so I just started going, like, well, I'm gonna go back in the chain. I'm gonna start working at like corporate to understand that. And I when I went to corporate, like they went, okay, it's ENS. And like, okay, I went to ENS. When I worked at ENS, they went, like, it's actually all driven by reinsurance. So I went out to Bermuda and like, so like it worked at a reinsurer. And so here's the crazy shit is having, I like to say I have a very, very weird resume. It's probably only one of five people in the world that can understand what a Taylor order expansion does on a gradient boosting model for machine learning and is sold like a renter's policy to a grandma. The stipulation is I can't do anything else with my life, so I better like it. But I've ended up at the beginning of this circle again, because to your point, that's actually where all the issues and problems start in like data collection and capture. And so I think there is there's always a future for agents in general and and likely the captive side. What I don't think there's a future of is one acceptance of inefficiency and then piling that amount of overhead into the cost of product. Our industry is probably one of the only on earth where the product started making less money and got more complex. And so we added more people into the distribution chain. We started MAs and MGUs and all this stuff. Start looking at you like, Jesus, there's like nine more people involved than there was like 10 years ago. It's why it costs a lot more.

SPEAKER_01 36:06

It's a county with a hole out there, right?

SPEAKER_03 36:08

Nine guys standing around and one guy digging. Dude, I it it's it's exactly what it becomes. And so ironically, I think now there's probably not a better time to be a captive agent as long as you have access to like other markets. But I also think if you're just trying to sell down the middle stuff and you haven't figured out a way to completely optimize what ends up being 80%. And I would say there is a lot of things that are still the same. Like having started this, and I came back and went like, my God, accord forms, SOVs, filling this out, transacting back and forth with carriers, like our alpha business. What?

SPEAKER_02 36:45

Yeah, why get rid of accord forms? It's so much fun. I love those.

SPEAKER_03 36:49

You would think, well, back to our conversation, boys, like pain. Like it's the most painful thing that's ever existed. And you know, very little has been done.

SPEAKER_01 36:57

It's like you gotta make your own PDF every time.

SPEAKER_03 36:59

It's like what and now, like, look, we're talking about a future where like I can literally create a movie out of like generated image and one sentence. Yeah. And so like when we started this company, that that was like, uh, people are like, oh, you're gonna like, you know, try and predict wildfires. Like, no, like we're gonna spend 99% of our time figuring out how to take the 80% that we spend going back and forth with a carrier doing discussions and actually like automate that layering, structuring a product, you know, iterating on endorsements and all this type of stuff, and still keep like the 10% up front, the most wildly important, which is like interacting with a human being and explaining to them why their premium went up 800% or how you could potentially protect them from not dying or you know, protect their house. And so, yeah, I I yeah, I wouldn't be in it if I didn't see an insane amount of value to be created right now.

SPEAKER_02 37:52

Sorry, not a great question, uh answer on the captive side, but so anybody that's worried heard it from the horse's mouth that the the risk is pretty low. Have you run a produ a model on this?

SPEAKER_03 38:06

On like starting to automate like the forum?

SPEAKER_01 38:08

The lifetime of of the agency force, like of agents.

SPEAKER_03 38:12

It's so this is like the insane part. We have never reached a point of like there's guys hanging on or like in the hospital making calls, like, or you know, signing up at the funeral home. There's such a lack of people coming into the market, which creates even more opportunity. There's so much acquisition going on that the quality is like kind of decreased. And so, one, I don't think like this is my opinion. I I don't think you can just be the generalist, like it, or that's not my skill set of like, yeah, I can just sell home and auto and like crush it away at that and just do it all day long. Now, there's a billion places in the market right now, casualty, DNO, cyber, everything you can imagine, uh AI, like insuring that stuff where you look at it and go, there's no one, the older generation are not stepping in. They still have a massive amount of premium on the books, property in that or liability. And there's like massive differentiators here that if you went deep on, if you got very, very strategic about how you automate and make an efficient system, you could make more money than ever at this point now, especially at the multiples. It's trading it, you know, 13, 15x even to multiples. It's like this is the greatest industry to be in.

SPEAKER_01 39:18

I mean, you could eliminate a lot of the like you could create a carrier that eliminates a bulk of of all the decision makers that in the chain, right? You don't need the underwriter because that could be predicted. You you don't need the Idol claims can all be automated. Like it seems like you could take a lot of the pieces out of the equation and make it much more affordable to the general public and profitable for the carrier.

SPEAKER_03 39:42

I I think so. I think I I am I I am pessimistic to a pretty good degree on like the current state of AI. I think there's a lot of overpromise. Um great book out there called Empire of AI. I just read last week that did a phenomenal amount uh of research on how much we're promising AGI and all this. I also think at the same time, like there are industries like insurance, telephone repair, I'm looking at a tree trimming business, arborism, they go, this thing hasn't changed in a hundred years. You take a little bit of automation, a little bit of intelligence towards that. There is huge asymmetries you you you could pull out of it. And so I I kind of look at it in a in a positive light, too, of like we're you look at California right now. I mean, you're there, Craig. Like we about 80% of the people we talk to are underinsured or uninsured now at this point. And it's like, oh my God, this is the fifth largest economy in the world, and we're seeing this happen. Like, damn, is something gone wrong here? And great opportunity to fix it and like figure out a new way of creating the system.

SPEAKER_01 40:45

I mean, I don't know if you know, but the the like agencies like uh Jason couldn't even write business for a year.

SPEAKER_03 40:52

So uh what what were your like main lines that that you were writing?

unknown 40:55

Nothing.

SPEAKER_02 40:55

I mean, dude, for the carrier that I'm with, you know who it is. Um I mean, they don't even write homes here. So it's like the only thing that they so here's the here's this is like the the worst thing I could say on the podcast. But like here in California, but I don't care. I mean, they could fire me if they want. The the only line that they have in California that does that doesn't go away, that goes away the least is autop. I mean, that's it. They've gotten rid of all the other stuff. So you can broker some of it, but then they like switch companies and all that stuff. So the opportunities out here are very different for that specific captive, at least right now.

SPEAKER_03 41:36

Yeah. I now here's the wild part though. That that I think the most of the common, you know, citizen don't realize. And I've talked, I I personally know a board member at probably one of the places you're saying I've talked to multiple of the CEOs of the top five like main carriers, they all want to write in the state. They they don't want to exit California, they don't want to exit Florida and Texas. They're not the problem is the system has become overbearing on it. And so actually, what having done like a lot of the research on it, whenever I talk to these guys, most of them are actually not that scared of their own exposure and risk and being able to understand it. You can understand what a wildfire risk is by like visiting a property and understanding like a few of the factors on it. The issue is like from the reinsurance side, you have the California Fair Plan. The California Fair Plan has a little addendum in the back that has uh an assessment clause. And that assessment clause says, hey guys, if we blow through all our reinsurance layers and our reserves, um, we're gonna assess you relative to your market share. So now I'm a big insurance carrier. I have a 17% market share. If I sit there and say no to 100 risks and they all go to fair plan, I have just essentially written those 100 risks, 17% of it, because it all went to fair plan and now I own that portion of it. It gets even scarier now if the guy next to me at the table goes, I'm gonna start exiting the state faster than you, because guess what? My market share goes up. So my bill of things I never wanted to write at a price I never thought it should be written at is increasing. And it's creating right now like this insane rush to the exit. And I think again, you know, here's the the irony of it. It's not the regulator's fault. Fair plan itself constantly says, like, we've got to be able to charge more, price more. It comes down to like there's this core thing that we all look at, which is like there's a huge bill to pay, which is like if we don't figure out how to mitigate this risk, there's actually going to become a point where like we can't charge enough premium or people like literally cannot pay it. Right. And it's gonna be uninsurable, period. And so normally, kind of see the government or like some sort of like entity step in, and for lack of for some reason, like it we've just gotten to that point where it's so difficult to do 10,000 acre wildfire burn to pass a new law that says, Yeah, we're gonna use like there's a company, RSG3D, spray on concrete onto a you know, wall that'll Allows it to be, you know, flame retardant. It's it's wild, but again, it's all opportunity if it's looked at correctly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 44:07

I with everything I did say, like I I think the opportunity, at least from my eyes, is the independent model, just because I mean, your fiduciary responsibility moves from being a fiduciary for the company to a fiduciary for your actual clients, which you can't do in a captive model because you have to hawk what they have regardless of how of the other competitors in the market, right?

SPEAKER_03 44:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:32

And the company's fiduciary responsibility is to the shareholder, not to the 100% to the agent who's driving the revenue. Or or the customers.

SPEAKER_03 44:40

It is. But you know, at the end of the day, there's a field sales leader who's got to make a growth number that they're not able to do and the same thing and like think you're on the different side of the table on it. And actually the truth is like both the same. Like that the recommendation I'd give, now look, I took it a little overboard, which is like you have to be so unrealistic about the world, especially just as like entrepreneurs, as you guys know that. We go, like, yeah, like I'm gonna start reaching out to like the chief risk officer or the head of like data modeling and go, there's a problem here. I'd love to be a part of the solution. Like, here's here's research I've done and here's like XYZ. Is there anything I could do? Generally, that's always been my strategy. Like, I'll just work for free. I'll do someone's job for free because I'll I'll get it paid back at some point. And so, like, yeah, they're all dealing with it. They're like, oh my God, like how do we write this? Now, in a big corporation, it's really hard to move, but like as a captive, you have this massive advantage compared to an independent, which is like they definitely don't trust an independent over a captive, and they're gonna go, okay. But again, to your point, it's not the same thing as sales, like it's all about endurance. It's the reason I run 10 miles a day and I'm a very bad runner. It's just like I've gotten very addicted to the feeling of wanting to vomit um and feeling horrific because then you kind of understand, like, yeah, that that's how you get everything in life is just like grind, like grind, grind, grind.

SPEAKER_02 45:58

Yeah, yeah, I'm there with you on the working outside. Again, that's an ADHD thing. You gotta feel it. You gotta, you gotta. It's funny too, because uh going way for full circle, talk about the chaos thing. I didn't realize this until I had a son with ADHD. And the fact that we're actually Yeah, but we create our own drama, you know? And to the point of like us not working out, if we don't work out, we feel things differently. It like calms the rest of the world for the rest of the day. So putting in that build your door.

SPEAKER_03 46:40

You have to. You you I don't know, there's balance to everything. And like if we're gonna live the extreme lifestyle we're forced to with ADHD and being entrepreneurs, like you're gonna have to find a extremism to balance it out. And there's very bad extremisms that like, yeah, I mean you can easily get into. And so I again probably not the healthiest thing I do. Like, it definitely isn't. Like, I just tore a labrum and like I constantly get shots and like I'm getting too old for it. But damn, does it like it? I've never lived better. I've never been happier doing that.

SPEAKER_02 47:07

It's better than the drinking thing. I mean, you guys were telling some wild stories prior to the podcast. Yeah, get into that. And it's better than the alternative. I I I love I just got into lifting weights and I used to hate it. Just absolutely hate it. But to your point, man, like getting that point where you feel like you have to puke, you get used to it. And you're like, I and I tell my kids this. I said, because I have a bad back, I have a few discs that are like less than 50%. So, like, you know, there there was a period of time that I was laid up for over a year and could barely move at too young of an age. And so, like, I tell them, dude, if I push my body and push it hard for an hour or an hour and a half a day, then the whole rest of the day, I feel freaking great. Like, I feel great because I had pushed, I felt so much pain, that polarization, that the rest of the day I feel awesome. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 48:05

It is. There's also call us the the Taoism of the insane person that's Andrew. But like I tell most of our guy, like when you're in a startup, especially like a tech startup, one, everyone always thinks, like, oh, like someone has the answers. It's the entire point of a startup. No one's done it before, and like no one has the answers. There is a couple of things you can always do that'll pretty much like guarantee success. One, always just go talk to like customers and like understand the problem. The other thing is look at exactly what you don't want to do and go do that thing. Uh, and I maybe this is like an ADHD thing, but it's to your point, like, and I'm the same way with like lifting weights and stuff like that. And it's every single thing I've ever found. Okay, I don't want to sit here for four hours and read through the specimen documents on this ENS policy. Oh, wait, I and I started to realize like, oh, wait, that's how everyone feels. So if I'm the one person who does that, I can understand why the endorsement is structured the way it is and maybe talk to the carrier and like provide some feedback on like why the smoke could probably be mitigated and not like, you know, limited, sublimited to a mass amount. And every single time I've found some asymmetry or value, it's been in that exact thing, which is like, I really don't want to do that thing. Everything's driving against it. And that's the thing that keeps everyone else from doing it, which ironically raises its value if you figure it out and you end up doing it. 100%.

SPEAKER_01 49:20

Yeah. Yeah. When you find yourself organizing your email folders, you go, okay, what am I hiding from right now? Right? Because this is not fun to do, but I must be choosing it because there's something that I perceive is worse that I need to do.

SPEAKER_03 49:34

Yeah, some sick irony about the world in that. But yeah, how you build muscle, it's how you stay alive, it's how you you make a business. I love it.

SPEAKER_01 49:42

You brought up reinsurance, and I I just find that whole thing interesting. I just like a quick little TLDR on that experience. Oh my God.

SPEAKER_03 49:54

Dude, that's that's that's not quick.

SPEAKER_01 49:57

A bigger you could do a long TW TLDR.

SPEAKER_03 50:00

I'm in time, but I would love to do like more. But so reinsurance side. One, yeah, most insane industry you could ever imagine. It's all basically based out of Bermuda, an island that's like 60,000 people in 21 square kilometers, London, um, and like, you know, Munich and Swiss. It is a 600-year-old industry that basically had the greatest job on earth, which was I'm gonna be um be an investor. And here's my investment strategy or I'll insure. I basically am going to protect you against something I know is probably gonna happen pretty confidently once every 10 years. When it does, I will pay out my claim and then I'll raise my rates on you 300%, and I'll collect money for nine years, and not I'll have two renewal dates a year. I'll have a hundred clients, and each of those clients will pay 50 million, 100 million dollars like in premium each, and like Gucci. Now, there's a whole crazy back end of this. Obviously, there's a really good book on understanding like this side of it called Against the Gods by Bernstein. It's called The Remarkable History of Risk, but tangent. Why Bermuda is the way it is? What was the main thing that made insurance big? Shipping. That's why Lloyd's is big. Shipping and obviously a horrible part of shipping humans, but also like goods and Dutch East Dutch East India Company. One of the biggest places that they shipped was the Americas. And if you look, Bermuda's actually not in the Caribbean, it's it's up here in North Carolina. So that was the place all these ships would stop part way through to check to see if they had a claim. And so you kind of had this like giant like center of insurance where now hundreds of billions runs through. Um, and so that that's kind of like background on it. Insurance at its core is a very simple premise. I'm going to distribute risk for things that are very infrequent and very severe, fat-tailed events. I'm going to spread those among much bigger balance sheets that are very much optimized for that return profile. And if I spread it out, we can all absorb these shocks as they happen. The reinsurance side is still very, very different than the insurance side. Extremely tight-knit community, an incredible. And I mean, the people you will meet on that side, like my old boss at Argo, this incredible guy named Matt Wilken, he had a PhD in um quantum physics. He's like one of the most brilliant humans I've ever met. Yeah, and he's like trading risk and like doing cat risk and stuff like that. And Ryan Mather, who was the other one, like genetics PhD. And so, like incredible risk minds that are making these huge, huge bets. I mean, like, you're wrong, you're gonna lose 200, 300 million dollars in company's capital and potentially like sink it. Um, and yeah, also this industry that's now facing this wild change, which is all these things we thought happen once every 10 years, they kind of happen once every three. And the thing that we expect to happen, which is adapt to it and change the system is not happening. So, what can we do if we're a thousand miles away on an island and that system's not being fixed up there? So it's very much like they are, you know, people we talked to when I was in in Lloyd's last week, like a third of the, or sorry, uh, yeah, one third of the conversations were like reinsurers because like you have to understand that whole stack and an insurance company can't take that risk on the same way. Um, and again, I'm probably getting too much into nuance, but like insurance companies' balance sheets are built to take frequent but very unsevere losses at a very high frequency. They can't take the loss of 5,000 homes at once. That's why they have to spread it out to six different reinsurance companies. And so if the reinsurance companies go, we can't cover that, the insurance company goes, we can't cover that. And if the state goes forced to cover it, they go, Great, we're gonna charge something more like you don't think we can't lose money, but still are like somehow. Which that's the California because they said you can't raise your rates. They have lockdown rates said you can't use like, well, now you can use like cap pricing. And to be clear, now there's like a lot of changes coming through. But it again, I I kind of look at it with a very, very like caveman view of it doesn't matter how much you change the rates. If you have a wood structure that's sitting in a canyon that burns every 20 years, and you can look at a map and see it burn every 20 years, and the local fire chief tells you that place is going to burn in the next few years. And when it does, we will just tell everyone to evacuate because we're not going to commit suicide. We're not gonna send in 20 guys to die. It is a tinder box. Then what price do you charge on that for that $2 million home at times 100? You you can't. No, no one can afford to pay that. But now, if you look at it, now here's the crazy part. You look at it, you sit with the fire chief, sit with our partner at Burnbot, and go, all right, how much would it cost to do a 10,000 acre fuel treatment every year? We take a robot, literally grind up every piece of dead vegetation, cut down excess trees, like remove dead fuel loads, make sure like water can reach this like easier rate of fire break. You go, oh my God, you know, it's gonna cost 10 million. You go, great. One, there's just an increase of a hundred million dollars in premium, and there's probably gonna be a six billion dollar loss off the back of that. So now, again, sometimes it's crazy enough where you're like, no one's doing it. And so that that's kind of the position we find ourselves in of like, great, we'll do it. Like, we'll talk to literally fire chiefs, regulators, whatever we need to, and and make it happen because the system's gotta get fixed.

SPEAKER_01 55:20

Make something out of the all the materials that you grind up too. Like, I mean, it seems like you could even get some money back on the chewed up wood and all that. Make some IKEA stuff.

SPEAKER_03 55:30

You absolutely could. Actually, the one that's like really interesting is biofuel, being able to utilize this stuff. Now, the issue is like all physics, like nothing comes for free. So you have to ship it somewhere. And so now you're talking about like I have to use fuel in a truck that's in a two-lane highway in Tahoe and get it out to Nevada and like ship it. So, but to your point, like that that's that's all I ever like, Craig is why we were we were friends, still friends. But you see these things, you're like, how is no one like making money off of a bunch of free lumber? I just paid seven bucks for like another two by four. Like, I'm like, how much more expensive could a two by four? It's insane. We're grinding the things up and like pushing it into the dirt because it's like there's just too much of it.

SPEAKER_01 56:12

They did a portable, a portable bio uh fuel creation system.

SPEAKER_02 56:18

Well, I think it goes to your point earlier. The the infrastructure is built up so much, there's so many deals between so many different people that they have to get the wood from the same people that they've been getting a deal. You know what I mean? Like it's like there is so much of the way it is because that's the way we've done it for so long.

SPEAKER_01 56:34

Right. Like they don't want it, right? They don't want the innovation because that's gonna disrupt their industry and they have all the money. It's interesting, right? There's a lot of variables here. I don't think we're gonna solve it on this podcast episode.

SPEAKER_02 56:46

No, but I know Andrew has to go, and I want to make sure that he can tell everything he needs to about his company and and how to get a hold of them and everything.

SPEAKER_03 56:54

Yeah, well, look, I again, well, right now we we only work with commercial properties. Um, you can reach out on our website, rockrose risk.com. Um, but yeah, I, you know, primarily we're we're obviously drinking from the fire hose for for lack of a better word, but uh some exciting news about um about uh uh running around and expansion coming out. But yeah, I you know, I I just love talking to anyone who's it I love talking to agents still. I mean, those are some of my favorite people to still take calls with, like these agents who have been doing it for 30 years, or you know, like farmers guys who've owned an HOA book that have like figured out the niche in the community, know so much about the product. Such good people. And like, yeah, you know, it's you know, I I guess to like what what you're saying, Craig, there's a system that like builds around it that creates a lot of like negative inertia, like that that pushes against anything changing. And yet so many like individuals inside the system, you guys, like again, anyone can create a podcast and like there's so few in this direct direction, but like, God, there's like millions of people who work in insurance, like this is a massive industry. And so, yeah, it's just like anyone who wants to, like, feel free to reach out if you are a commercial property owner, HOAs, resorts, wineries, strip malls, hotels. We we do every single aspect of that. 15 plus carriers that we work with from London, Bermuda, and the US. Pretty confident if you're willing to to put in the work, like we we can get you a much more reasonable policy again and actually do something to fix the system. Super cool.

SPEAKER_02 58:29

Love it, man. Appreciate uh you go in the distance today. I know you're a busy dude, and and you've we've gone a while, man. So thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 58:37

So good to reconnect. I'll grab your, I think Emily has your number, so I'm I'm gonna I'll reach out, man.

SPEAKER_03 58:42

Yeah, man. Don't be too hard to reach now that you're in San Diego living the surfer life. I only have a month left. And Jason, what part of California are you in? Huntington Beach. I used to surf Huntington Pier all the time, like in high school. That was like my all right, so yeah, guys, we we we'll we'll meet in person. I'm out in California literally every other week at this point now.

SPEAKER_01 58:59

So I'm I'm yeah, I'm like two blocks from Moonlight Beach right there. The stairs on D Street, they closed right before we got here. They still haven't finished them. I don't even know what they're doing. There's one guy like sanding it because it's structural, it's not standing. That's what I said up. Like, I bet you everybody of the area would go and you know hit hammers against it, whatever needs to be done. Nah. Where do you hang out down there, Craig? Huh? Where do you hang out down there? Moonlight Beach or go to George's or something like that. If you're a crazy Craig fan, you know where to find them. Yeah, I'll be uh you'll see me on my e-bike. Well, I got an e-bike and I'll tell you, I know you got to go, but the e-bike is my favorite form of transportation that exists.

SPEAKER_03 59:39

I'm I'm thinking of getting one.

SPEAKER_01 59:40

It is you do not understand. It is the most fun thing you could do. And it's faster. I got a rad bike, but now some girl past me. I was going 25, and some girl passed me. And I'm like, wait a minute. I ding ding ding ding, and she came back and I go, What the hell is that? And she I'm like, how fast? And she goes, it was about 35. And I'm like, oh man. But but that might be where now you need, you know, motorcycle license and all that kind of stuff. Like this, like you're the best thing about the e-bike is the freedom because you're kind of a pedestrian, you're kind of a car. So you can drive in the street, but then when it's uh, you know, pedestrians go, you can go also. So God, you're that guy driving the e-bike 25 miles out of 50 thing, listen. Yeah, somebody listened to this show. I cut in front of them and they were probably not happy. Man, yeah, don't get 100% get one. And I'll I'll tell you like I went through the whole thing. So it's I've been looking at the highest test one.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:38

My wife, my wife made me sell my motorcycle. So I'd be like, oh, I thought the same thing is here. I was like, ooh, this looks dangerous.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:45

For getting around here, I mean, if I get in my car and I try to drive somewhere, it's gonna take me forever, you know? So it's like you could go in the middle of the cars, it's fantastic. And that's the pod. Yeah, love it.