What do you feel like insurance agents need to do in terms of branding themselves, their agencies, the carriers they represent? When you are marketing something you're not in control of, you're not in control. The very last thing I do, I get agreement from them and then I end the call with making damn sure whatever I say I'm going to do gets done. How many hours did your team spend last week on the cost of reduce? Comparisons, loss run extractions, now multiply that by what your producers cost per hour. That's the number that outmarket eliminates. The reason that I love a sin is they are the only vendor focused on helping agents automate all of their manual finances in accounting practices which is really the boring stuff but that's really where the rubber meets the road in terms of profitability to your agency. You know, we're going to write business with carriers that make it easy for us to write business with. If the conditions have to be right for you to succeed, your success is conditional. It's not real success. Play like champions man. We go. Insurance agents from around the world, welcome to the Insurance Gas Podcast. My name is Scott Howell, your fearless host and leader, insurance agency owner and insurance specialist for our protect insurance and financial services. Base start of Huntsfield, Alabama and before we get started in today's episode, please help me welcome. He is a six foot three soft more from Mobile, Alabama, Parade first team all American, Rivals five star recruit. He is a fantastic insurance agent and a great American. Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together and welcome the incomparable Mr. Bradley Flowers. How are you Bradley? Man, I'm fantastic. I'm good. I'm back at the office. Babies are healthy. Things are great. Bradley have joke for you. You know, you tell who's waiting on me to shut up. How many insurance agents does it take to screw in a lot bulb? I don't know, but I feel like this is going to be funny. Takes 100. It takes one to screw the lot bulb in and 99 to tell you how they would have done it different and better. Yeah. You just described, you just described IOA and insurance soup all rolled in one. Oh, oh, I got you. Bing, bong. Got you on that one. Yeah. Anyway, tell me about how life has been going with you today. I'm not getting sleep. Well, I should take Laurel's getting way less sleep than I am. Let me ask you a very serious question. After having 16 kids. How many? It's my favorite. No, no, no. How many truly, this is a serious question. After having 16 kids, how many months does Navy still teen six training last before you feel like it's over? Well, it's way worse for the moms because they have to have to wake up. Shout out Laurel flowers. I think so you get a little bit of a break when they start sleeping in their crib good. And then it starts back over when you move to the big kid bed. Because now they get out. I would say conservatively two years. Do y'all do this thing where if they come in your room to sleep, y'all, you out. Get out. Go back to your room. Go do that or do you? Well, we have one kid that does that and he's the tiniest one. So I don't even notice that he's in the bed. Right. So I just let him get in the bed. And once he gets older, probably like when Clayton was like six or seven, I'd be like, go back to your room. You know, so I've got a I got a 19 year old college baseball player staying at my house. And that great does that. That goes and gets in your bed. No, no, no. So but that grocery bill runs you about $500 a week. Yeah. Buddy, you want to talk about doing some eating? Yeah. Mm hmm. Yeah. Mm hmm. Anyway, we have got an all star guest. I am wildly excited about having our guest on today. He has a resume of success. He has starred in many of the early 2000s series on television that most of you grew up with. He was here in person, Bradley. You had 1000% asked for his autograph and picture. I can tell you that right now. Ladies and gentlemen, I want to give him the introduction he's always deserved. He has an alumnus of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and holds chartered property, casualty underwriter CPCU and certified insurance counselor industry designations. He's been a featured keynote speaker for numerous organizations, including the federal Bureau of Investigation. I'd say just like me, you know, the federal FBI is always calling me to do speaking engagements. National public radio, CIO magazine, insure tech connect, society of CPCU and many others listed here. Prior to joining WTW, he launched the digital asset practice for a large national brokerage as well as served as their head of innovation and corporate venture capital studio. He also co-founded a Web 3 project called Web 3 Labs, which was built to bring blockchain technology into the insurance ecosystem. He was named the Fintech and Digital Asset Vertical Leader for WTW in 2026. He is a recognized expert in Fintech and Digital Asset Risk. He's in gentlemen. It is my profound honor today to introduce to you second time guest on the IGP, Mr. Garrett Drogey. How are you, Garrett? Doing well, guys. Thanks for having me back. Good to see you. Oh, great to see you as well. I think before we get started talking Fintech and blockchain and all this other, we need to recognize the fact that you appeared on an episode of one of my favorite television shows of the early 2000s Dawson's Creek. I did. Actually, a few episodes of Dawson's Creek and One Tree Hill as well. So that's what you get when you go to college and willing to North Carolina. That's right. So if I go to the Google machine and I look up your name and type in Dawson's Creek, it will you too be like come up and give me some of your scenes in there? I'm sure if you type it in precisely enough, it will. You can see it on IMDB and all the digital homo Hollywood websites. So people can fact check you. It's legitimate. And during that time, were you getting kind of the big head like, you know, I'm kind of a big deal or okay, I didn't know if you absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I moved to Hollywood shortly after that thinking, well, that's clearly what's going to happen for me. Exactly. This will be the rest of my life. Right. Okay. Getting my delorean for a second. At what point being in Hollywood and doing that and I'm guessing like going in reading scripts and auditioning those kinds of things. But the natural progression leads to insurance. Right. Exactly. I tell people I use my degree in theater more than anybody that I know because so much of our job is performance, connecting with people and improvising, right? Like I was in a meeting last week where the buyer said, hey, I appreciate you sending the deck over ahead of time. I read it. That's not what I want to talk about today. So I'm going to put that aside. We're going to talk about something completely different. And I love that to me. That's like, all right, great. Let's improvise and I can lock in with him and everybody else was panicking. But that's, you know, that's what you get when you have a theater degree. So I think I missed my calling. I think I should have been in hell. Yeah. You both did. Well, I don't know. Well, this guy right here, I just feel like in another life, I'm doing something besides insurance. But I think I am not the minority. I think most people in insurance feel that way. I think you could very easily be like one of these bar stool sports, Brandon Walker tight, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Personalities or, you know, tick tock, one of these, I mean, you're way funnier than most of the people that are like tick tock famous. Like way funnier. The problem is, is like, your funny would probably get you canceled as fast as you would be. Right. And I've talked to, well, I don't want to get into that. That's not the podcast. This isn't the podcast. But like, that's how that's how a Met Scott Garrett is like Scott and I friend each on snapchat and he would send like these long monologues that were just hilarious. And it was stuff that if anybody but him said it, it wouldn't be funny. You know what I mean? And you do have a bit of a performative nature to your storytelling, you know, and you watch a lot of comedy so you pick up on the timing, whether you know or not, you know, and you have made me a better storyteller just from doing this podcast. And that's a huge part of insurance, dude, a storytelling. Yeah, a storytelling man. You know? Hey Garrett, I have so much to talk to you about today. I want to get to it because, you know, we don't, in the grand scheme of things, have much time to spend with each other today. But I wanted to talk to you today about specifically the block chain and kind of where we are with that right now because that was like a hot button topic a few years ago. It was like everybody was talking about the block chain. And I remember even Bradley back when I was a kid, I was like, "Oh, I'm so happy."
we were doing our first one city world tour. We actually had a panel that talked about the block chain and what you know, we sold what I think is the first insurance themed NFT. Maybe the only one. I believe. I believe. And we sold it. We sold a series of tickets. It sold five tickets. Great. It was a great use case. And there was a, uh, each person that bought one got some sort of prize that unlocked whatever and CJ Hudson pillar actually bought the first NFT. I don't know if it was the first, but I've done that before where I said this was the first and somebody's like, no, this was actually the first, you know, whatever, but they always say, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So we did that too. Yeah. And how does that, the blockchain stuff play into AI too? Well, and, and, and I just wanted to know like where we are with it today because unlock back then you just don't hear a lot about the blockchain anymore like you were. You were here and all, you know, this is going to be the future of insurance and everybody's going to be on blockchain. Where where are we today with it? Yeah. So I mean, blockchain and then we moved on to the metaverse. And then now everything's AI. You could, you could assume that the metaverse and blockchain both died. Right. It's definitely not the case. So if you look at what's happening in finance right now, every financial institution from the biggest bank down to the smallest community bank is trying to figure out how to use blockchain, stablecoins, digital assets to move money because it's a more efficient way to move money across borders. So you don't have the same settlement periods. You have, you have a lot of efficiency that you can gain. And so it frees up time that that capital is unavailable to you. So you can, you can invest it and you can make it, yeah, more efficient capital use. So everybody from JP Morgan down to, you know, you name a bank. If you Google them in blockchain, you will see they're all building on chain with stablecoins or or something. You might see tokenized deposits or tokenized real world assets. These are all blockchain tools. So yeah, it's still very, very, it's, it's bigger today than it ever has been. Well, I, I a long shot. It's also if you look at me, we've seen this movie before, like, if you look at like the dot com bubble, right, like prior to the dot com bubble, everybody was getting like filthy rich off building nothing internet companies. And then you have the dot com button, there's all this hype dot com bubble. It dies. And that almost affords more of an opportunity for the people that still take it serious because the hype's off of it. You know, I mean, great point. The same thing happened with crypto and a little scared the same thing is going to have with AI. But it's it almost like history repeats itself in that sense. But he said he made the comment just now. He said all these banks from the biggest to the smallest are trying to figure out how to do this. Are you saying that this it's kind of a race to to to to see who figures this out? Is that kind of what we're talking about? Yeah. Well, they're in most cases, they're not just trying. They are doing so. I could tell you, you know, there was a huge announcement last week with a consortium of visa, mastercard coin base, stripe, bank of America, right, all I think 140 companies that are joining together to form an alliance for an open stablecoin project. Right. So like these are weekly headlines that we're seeing. But Bradley's point is well taken because I think what's happening now is crypto is kind of growing up where we don't use that word as much anymore. It's all digital assets or or tokenization. And it's now institutional. So whereas 10 years ago, it was these, you know, it feels a little weird. It 100% a lot of it was real scam. Yeah. There was good stuff in there. But today it's it's much more institutional capital that's invested in it. And that that changes, you know, everything. Yeah. It's interesting. There's a lot of people that get really rich in the time frame where when people think, oh, that's there's nothing to that. It's over with. It's dead. Yeah. And I saw something interesting too that's in this realm that it's not necessarily crypto on why big banks created Zell. Have you seen this? So when when Venmo and Cash app were created, apparently there's like, I think it's a trillion dollars that lives in Venmo. Well, the banks are like, we're not making interest on that money. Like it's it's in Venmo. And so they created Zell as like a loss leader just to capture some of those dollars back. And so a lot of times for banks, it's just like everything's a hedge. It's not that 100% it's not that bank of America is passionate about crypto and blockchain is that they don't want to be left out. And so it's a threat to the business model. Yeah. And and I think it's now been proven with, you know, especially stablecoins because crypto, you know, it's it's always going to be speculative. Right. Yeah. You could believe in Bitcoin or not, but it is a speculative asset just like any other investment, whereas stablecoins, especially the well well backed stablecoins like Tether and Circle, right? These are one to one with the US dollar, right? Except it is. So you think of them as digital dollars because they can they represent a dollar. They're backed with a dollar in reserves that's monitored by a third party. So that, you know, there's not going to be a fluctuation. There shouldn't be. There can be some unique quirks that can happen that cause it to DPEG from a dollar. But it's it's very atypical. What's you just described to me sounds very excuse the expression stable. That was kind of joke. Thanks guys. But is that is that the future of our currency? Are we going to be one day instead of is it going to be on something like this stable coin that you're talking about right now and I apologize. I don't know anything about it. But yeah, no worries. I think 100% the future of finances digital because it just look dude. I had to go to the bank because I had to send a wire transfer the other day. Yeah. I said at the bank for an hour and 15 minutes. He went to the bank I don't even get to send the wire on a day that I couldn't and he got there at 401. They didn't do wire transfers after four o'clock and nobody was in the bank. Crypto is going to solve the crap out of this. And it already does. Yeah. Yeah. And so if you look all the major ways what we used to send wire transfers it still do. Western Union Swift which is the network that banks use to talk to one another around the world. They're all using stable coins and blockchain now. Okay. So because it's it's an instant settlement. Right. Whereas before you go down to your bank and want to send money across a border somewhere that money has to sit for sometimes a week before it can be validated and delivered to that party. And so a lot of people especially in the US haven't quite understood crypto's value because we have a very stable currency and thankfully so. But if you had relatives in somewhere in Africa or Latin America where their currency fluctuates 30 40% sometimes. Timing becomes critically important. Yeah. And the fact that the bank will take a huge percentage just to transfer that money back home. Right. Whereas. We deal with that when we happen our VAs. Like I pay I pay like like a lot of the VA companies when they pay the VAs they charge the VA the exchange rate next to the fee. We don't because we're just paying three VAs but like we do it we like you know if I pay a VA 1500 box it costs me like 17. Right. Yeah. Exactly. And now if you talk if you're talking about millions of dollars. You pay yours through wise. Yeah. That's how we pay ours. And it's interesting to to parlay that into AI you know I remember a few years ago you had a bunch of people. A lot of them very well known. A lot of them very smart like really like crapping on crypto. Warm Buffet types you know and it's like Jamie Diamond. Jamie Diamond. Even though now they're now you know doing that. I like. I like Jamie Diamond a lot but the if you you don't need to have to peel back you don't have to peel back many layers of the onion. You just have to peel back like that skin on the outside that you can't eat. And you're like oh this person has a vested interest in this not happening. It's the exact same thing with AI. Like if I get on LinkedIn right now and I scroll for 10 minutes I'm going to see two or three people like poo pooing on AI and almost every single one of them all not almost every single one of them sells a service that AI threatened somehow. Yeah. And it's like my argue and I've argued with some of them some of them have blocked me after you make too good of an argument. My argument is this instead of like talking down to this new technology that's literally changing the world. Make your product stronger. Like that's what you should do. You know this might be a very crude example and non-PC example forgive me. How do you keep people from hijack and airplanes? Give all the passengers guns. Like like that's a best that is definitely one of the options. Now somebody makes you out of window back. You know saying but it's like make your you know
you show strength, like make your product stronger instead of just trying to scare everybody into not using, oh, your data and data and write, and don't get me wrong, like there's some concerns, but like the thing that pisses me off about it, Garrett is there's some young agent that looks up to this person that sees them talking about how AI is gonna cause them, they're gonna go to jail for using AI and insurance, right? And they don't do it, and then they're substantially behind when everybody realizes like, oh, you actually have to have this to survive. Totally. And it's interesting to see those two parallels, you know? I totally agree. And Bradley, you've heard me say this before, but there's a quote that I love that I always think about whenever I'm challenged by something, and the quote is, it's difficult for a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it. And that was on your slide. And I used it all the time, 'cause it's such a good thought process. Of like, does this challenge me because it threatens me in some way? - Right. - And is that why I don't believe in it? And because that's, I think where most people are with AI, also with blockchain, you know, it's a good parallel that it threatens certain business models. And so you force yourself to believe that it's somehow overhyped. There's a lot of industries that are just one knob turn away. Now sometimes the thing that's preventing them from being replaced is something substantial, right? Like I'll give you an example. So I met with my CPA earlier this year. Recorded the meeting on granola, okay? Legal in Alabama for you to, you know, only one party has to know about it. Dropped it into Claude. And Claude said, here's the 10 things he was wrong about. - Wow. - Now, I could, Claude could do my taxes. And my taxes are pretty complicated. Claude could do my taxes. The piece that prevents me from doing that is what happens when I get audited in three years. So I'll give you a business idea. Somebody that will audit, or that will resign off on Claude done tax returns, right? And charge a lower fee, whatever. But speaking of Claude and speaking of IndyTech. So Garrett and I were on a panel at IndyTech together. We got off stage. We were over there on the side and he goes, have you seen Claude co-work? And I not only had not seen it, I had not heard of it. - And it's all that Bradley uses now. - And I purchased a Claude subscription on the flight home, almost immediately upgraded to a max plan. And I typically don't work nights. I think I've been on a computer every night after my kids could have been since then. Like, it's completely changed the way we do business. So it's the whole and theropic ecosystem is unbelievable to me. And there's insurance specific stuff too that's unbelievable as well. But it's, where do you see this going as it relates to insurance in your role? At a very high level, at a very large firm. - And when is it gonna make agents obsolete? - That's really not the question. But, we've made this argument on an earlier podcast. Is that, I don't buy some of these firms that announce, oh, we laid off 400 people due to AI. 'Cause it's like, wait a minute. If you can replace 400 people with AI, why not keep those 400 people and make them more productive? You know, if they're able to do fully agree. - Yeah, fully agree. - It's an excuse, which just furthers the beast of AI, it's scary, right? And doesn't serve anyone. He's now the employees are scared of it, you know what I mean? - 100%. And I should preface this by saying, this is Garrett's personal opinion, not the official opinion of Willis Tower Watson. - The whole Twitter thing, opinions are mulled. - The opinions are my own. Yeah. I mean, I think AI, how exciting for a young producer, or just young person in our industry, because it's a force multiplier, like nothing we've ever had. So puts you on par. There's no reason you can't punch above your weight and compete on any kind of deal and be empowered to get a meeting that was previously at a reach or elevate your own personal knowledge, even though you didn't have access to a mentor that could train you in a certain area that you were passionate about, right? Like, I think of, yeah, how lucky I was. So prior to insurance, now we went, mentioned my illustrious acting career, but I was actually a developer, so I taught myself how to code in high school. I started a company while I was out in LA 'cause I was not getting hired as an actor. And ended up selling it and kind of falling into insurance. But I had that technical background. And so when I got into insurance, literally no one would call me back, except for tech companies, because I could talk to them at the code level and say, look, I've seen your platform, C++ or Java, I speak those languages. I can tell you what that means from a risk standpoint, and nobody else was talking to them about that, right? And so I just had this passion for technology and merging technology and insurance together. But if I was working for a firm that didn't specialize in technology or something, it doesn't matter. Like, what a cool industry we work in, where you can literally be passionate about anything in this world and build a career about how to ensure that thing, right? And so now you can use ClawD and all the others to upskill in a way that just wasn't possible when I, you know, 20 years ago when I got in. - Hey guys, it's Bradley. Let me ask you a question. How many hours did your team spend last week on policy reviews? Quote comparisons, loss run extractions, now multiply that by what your producers cost per hour. And that's the number you reinvest into writing new business. Go book a demo at outmarket.ai. Our agency runs on it, Scott's agency runs on it, several of the top 100 brokers in the country run on it, over 250 agencies and growing fast. Owners are winning new business, cutting errors, getting their producers back to selling. Your client data never mixes with another agencies and is never used to train AI models. Best in class enterprise security because this is the most sensitive data your agency holds. You're open running the same day, no integration, no IT project, no setup, outmarket.ai today. Hey guys, it's Bradley here. I wanted to talk to you day really quick about a send. A send is different because they're the only vendor focused on helping agencies automate all of their manual finance and accounting practices. On the agency bill side, they make agency bill feel like direct bill, which is like music to my ears in an agency that operates in an E and S world. They collect and send the payments automatically to carriers. On direct bill, it'll even help agencies, fetch commission statements, reconcile, fix discrepancies, post statements back into the AMS like with vendors like Veriforne applied, help agencies close their book faster.ai.ai. You and your people get paid faster. It's basically like all of your carriers download commissions, even if they don't download commissions. And we all know a lot of them don't do that. They're changing the game for agencies focused on efficiency because it's the one place for accounting and service to get full visibility and moving money in and out of the agency, taking a bunch of the manual work away. They're also rolling out some really nice, unique features powered by AI that help agencies be efficient like manually creating or automatically creating invoices from carrier quote docs, using it to suggest matches when you're reconciling commissions where policy data does an align perfectly between your AMS and your statements. There's a lot of really cool things that Ascend is doing. And guys, I was a user of Ascend first before we ever decided to partner with him on the podcast. I highly recommend everybody out there, check out Ascend, hit your wagon to them. They're going places really smart folks over there. Check them out at useascend.com. Tell them that the insurance guys podcast sent you. Thanks. If I've got a dig for something on a website that I need, hit the little crawl extension, find this for me. And I'm able to work while that does that. The thing, I just got back from 30 days on paternity leave. I used a dispatch like crazy. Have you used dispatch? There's a tool called claw dispatch. So if you have clawed on your computer, and you have clawed on your phone, and it's the same account, you can open up dispatch and you can say, do this thing on my computer, and it will open your computer up and do the thing you tell it to do. Without you being in that country. Yeah, it feels like magic. Yeah, yeah. So I would be like, hey, find this document on my computer and send it to me. Boom, done. Hey, go on my computer, pull this up, tell me what this is. And that's sort of thing. It's unbelievable. And then there's some insurance specific stuff. Is it a Chrome extension? It's part of all of my computer. Yeah. Yeah, like there's a bunch of folks that are doing like great stuff in insurance. You know, outside of the generic tools like outmarket, I know you're involved with their friend of the show here that's like, I feel like give us the resources of a large firm. Even down to stuff like policy checking. I think he's frozen. Uh oh. Nope, you froze. I'm still here. There you go. In my back? Yeah, your back. That good North Carolina. Yeah, it's it's having teenagers home at summer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Streaming. 4K. Rolls-Roye, Def. Re runs of Dawson Creek. Yeah, they're really exactly. That's what he said. Every night the family gathers around the TV and plays one of his shows. Yeah, that's right. Every night. Yeah. I remember Kevin Bacon made that joke and it was hilarious. He's like, yeah, every night we go down and we just spend the wheel and we watch one of my movies. But yeah, like there's a lot of like, like a look at like outmarket and and be a time it's doing some good stuff. Like there's there's a lot going on.
that even if you're scared of the clods and the open AIs and all that sort of stuff, there's insurance specific stuff in a controlled environment that you can use that's unbelievable. - 100%. - And it makes you feel like you have the resource. Like I'm giving you a simple example, like we are not a big enough firm to hire people to be policy checkers, but without market, like I can have the resources of that for a very, very small, you know what I mean? - Totally. - That's what I mean. - You know, it's a force multiplier, right? It puts you on a level playing field with much larger competitors that do have those resources. And I'll be honest, like some of those policy checking tools, they catch things that humans don't. - I'll be honest. - Because they don't get interrupted, right? Like they're not distracted with a phone call that comes in, forgets where they were in the policy or has a sick kid at home, right? Like it's just all it does is eat, sleep, breathe, policy check. - Michael, Michael, I'm sorry, what? - Michael Leibor, you know, Michael Leibor, he said something hilarious on our podcast. He was talking about his open-claw agent that he built. And he goes, it doesn't need a F and lunch break. It's kids don't get sick. And there's the way he said it was hilarious, but it's true. And it's also like, you know, like I got into an argument with someone that was like, well, AI makes mistakes. AI agents will make mistakes. I'm like, yeah, so do humans. The AI will tell you, but you know what I mean? One agent that we built that's working really good so far is to like a large percentage of our companies don't download our carriers. So we had a VA, have a VA, that whose sole job is to go find those renewal offers. And I built an AI agent that did that. So now all she has to do is make sure that the AI agent did its job. And that's kind of where I see like the future of work. It's like the low level non revenue generating work is gonna go to AI. The humans are gonna do two things. Higher revenue generating work, more important work and making sure the AI agents are doing what they're supposed to do. Like that's kind of the way that I see it. And then to add onto that, you could even build an AI agent that's the supervisor. So then all that person has to do is check the supervisor, you know? - 100%. I fully agree. And I, you know, I think all those firms that are laying off hundreds of people saying that it's all AI, you are also seeing the headlines where they're now rehiring people because their token usage in AI was off the charts. And it actually costs them more to use AI solely for, you know, as opposed to humans. So I'm a big believer, I'm a big fan of humans. I don't think we're going anywhere. I don't think we will be replaced. I do think we will be augmented. And I think, you know, it's great. Somebody asked me today about some of the, you know, the startup firms that are generating headlines in our space, the corgis and whiff coverages. And, you know, I think that's good for all of us, right? Like challenge the model, right? We've all seen the death of the insurance agent, insurance brokers are going away. Like, I think we don't buy that story anymore. But 100% will be changed. And I think that's a good thing. If it's for the benefit of the client. Yeah. Yeah. Corgi and, uh, with coverage are interesting. Out of those two, I would definitely bet on the with coverage guys. Because what they're doing is not too different than what most agencies do. I would agree. I don't know what those are. Pat West had a hilarious tweet and I apologize, Garrett, if you're friends with the people from Corgi. The week that guy went viral for the making his employees work every day of the week. Pat West said, "Many of you have never watched an idiot with a bunch of money, try to start an insurance company and it shows." Yeah. So I'll give you the rundown on both of those after the week and off the air. Yeah, it was funny, Garrett. So I was at the best practices summit in January. And this was like a week after with coverage announced their fundraising round with the brazen messages and all that. And the average revenue in the room was like 8 million. Right. So me and Kevin Payner's there, we're like the small fish, right? And that's all anybody was talking about as a with coverage. And another agent, I don't think it was Payner, somebody else that also is heavy personal lines like I am, was like, "Why are these guys so worried about this?" And I was like, "Because you and I have been in the personal line space, we've seen this before. Like we've seen this playbook. Come out, make huge claims, agents are dead, two years later, hey agents, we're working with you now. You know, we've seen it. This is the first time they've really attacked the middle market space. And nobody knows how to deal with it. And all the way they might actually have something. It might not work out the same way. But if nothing else, it's going to change the way people operate. And we've even tweaked some of our commercial strategies based on what with coverage is doing. Where do you see that? That's what I mean. Yeah. That's why they're good for the ecosystem. Because you say, "You know what? Actually, I kind of like part of that model and I can take that for myself." So I think that's brilliant. Yeah. And maybe like lemonade, I think. I mean, lemonade kind of kick started the whole insure tech revolution. My disappointment to lemonade is that I wish with their money, their resources, their attention, they would have picked a bigger problem to solve. Right? Rather than renters insurance. Yeah. I think that's my overall disappointment with a lot of insure tech carriers is like, "Yeah, we're going to change insurance industry. What are you going to do? Renters insurance in Ohio." Like, come on guys. Pick something. Pick something. Like I don't like Ken, but at least Ken insurance is like going into catastrophic prone areas and trying something. But where do you see in your role at Willis? We've seen a lot. We've had a lot of a little bit of noise lately with AI exclusions on policies, things like that. I had an insure tech we insure last week. He's like, "I know our ENO is going to have an AI exclusion on it really soon." It didn't. Where do you see that kind of that going? I know I attended a talk with the National Association or webinar with the National Association of Insurance Commissioners around AI compliance. It seems now all the attention is being pointed towards carriers and the AI companies themselves, not really agents and brokers. What's your thought on all of that? I mean, it's too early to know where it's going to go. I think the same. I'm not seeing. I know the ISO forms exist. I haven't seen them outside of a few obvious examples of where they probably should be added to a policy. If you can't underwrite the AI risk, then I think the carrier is within their right to say, we're uncomfortable with this aspect of your operations. Otherwise, let them under the hood, let them underwrite it like they would anything else and price for it. But yeah, I don't know. I don't know where it. And then it goes. So this creates a market for a new product like a supplemental ENO excess ENO for just --Well, you're seeing that, right? There are products out there that are for generative AI risk. And I may or may not have a meeting really soon with somebody to talk about creating one. Great. I mean, I think my example is always, if it's silent, the answer is we don't know. If it's covered, if it's not covered, you can't be sure. And so if you want the Tommy Boy, I want the guarantee on the box, then go, you know, buy a product. I feel like where we're going with it is the cyber endorsement on the bomb. I feel like what we're going to see is, okay, you're going to have a sublimit of $50,000 for AI mistakes. And then you got to buy the full cyber policy air quotes. Yeah. I think that's where it's going. If it goes anywhere at all. Like we had a freaking barber shop insured with somebody and it came back with an AI exclusion. I'm like, on the GL, on the GL, and I'm like, okay, you know, probably live with that one. Yeah. Yeah. My brother, the barber, is not using AI to cut hair. But yeah, it's interesting. I feel like every night that I don't spend time learning stuff on AI and behind. Like I feel like we are in the middle of a gold rush. I do too. I think every one of us feels like we're all behind. Somebody else has figured it out slightly better than I have. And we're all kind of in that moment. I just encourage people to get in the pool. Start playing with co-work, figure out what it can do. And that's the next generation of great ideas are going to come out of your nights and weekends where you're quad co-working. You're going to stumble on something that becomes the next $10 million idea. I had a lady ask me at a talk I was giving a couple weeks ago or a couple months ago. I get it, but I don't even know where to start. And I said, ask the AI where to start. My advice as well. Like, just say, hey, this is my business. Where can I improve? And that's, I've gotten some really good. I use Clawed a lot just as like my like business partner. Hey, I'm going to do this. What do you think? Because I have the connector set up. It knows a bunch about my business. In the last four or five podcasts, you have mentioned things that you did with Clawed that sounds like business partner discussions with Clawed. Like I ask you to, how is this conversation going to go? Kind of stuff. like a notebook LM. Have you used notebook LM?
- Oh yeah, yeah, tons of fun. - So I was, I'm in a mastermind group that they do this thing where you have to every month that you're a member, it unlocks more courses basically. And it's really, it sounds scammy, it's really valuable stuff. Well, I was, I was meeting with one of the employees at this mastermind, I was like, I really need help around this subject. And he's like, well, there is this video in month three that they unlocked, but I can go and send you the slides. So I take the slides, drop them into notebook, LM and it creates a podcast on the slide. So I'm able to get without having to read, you know what I mean? It's wild. - Lots of people are uncomfortable with, with digital asset terminology, risk profiles. It's just not something that most people find themselves ensuring. And so we have a lot of people that, that whether they ask for it or not have been introduced into digital asset insurance. And built a training module that anyone can sign up for this agent that will walk them through how to ensure digital assets and how to think about the risk profile. And it does it at their own pace 'cause there's knowledge check-ins and if they're learning an accelerated pace, it'll speed up the curriculum. And if they're not catching up with the basics, it'll keep them there and in the 101 course for a little bit. And yeah, what an amazing time we live in. - Garrett, I had one last question for you. I know we're gonna have to get off here in just a minute. But for these retail independent agencies, agency owners that are out there, what advice would you give them relative to artificial, utilizing artificial intelligence? Let's just say over the next three years, for the next 36 months during this, as Bradley said, gold rush, what advice would you give them in terms of what to do? 'Cause I mean, a lot of them are like me and they're not quite as tech savvy as you two guys are. What advice would you give them? - You know, I'm old enough and have been in the industry long enough to remember when cyber insurance was born and became a thing. And I remember the overwhelming majority of agency owners and brokers had a reaction like, I don't wanna learn this new thing. I'm close to retirement or I've been in this industry for 30 years. I don't wanna learn a new product that sounds way too over my head, too technical. And now would you even consider not talking about cyber risk with any one of your commercial insures? - Sure. - Right? I think we're in the same place with AI where you can't afford to stick your head in the sand today. And if you do, it's pretty much the death of your firm at some point. You'll either sell to someone or you'll run out of steam competing with the people that are using it. I do believe that. And so Bradley's point is exactly the one that I make, which is even if you don't know where to start, ask the AI. And we've said clawed a million times. You can use GPT, you can use co-pilot, you can use whatever you've got. Just ask it, here's who I am. This is what I do. This is my business and I want you to act as my business partner, my consultant, and help maximize my usage of AI for this firm. Do all your research on us, our competitors, and tell us how to pivot for the next 12, 24, 36 months. Build me a business plan that will execute and keep us on pace with all of our competitors in ahead of them. In seven minutes, you'll have a complete three-year business plan road map that will be pretty good. So start there. And the head and your sand thing is so important. It's like, so do you know why? So who's the best major league baseball player? You just can be. Yeah. Mike Trout. No. Show Hey, a ton. Okay. NFL, my homes. One of the best. All right. If we take a group of people who are not a super fan of either sport, both of those guys walk in the room, who gets recognized by the most people? Who? I don't know. My home. My home. Okay. Here's why, like 10, 15 years ago, when social media was becoming a thing, like NFL, all these big sports organizations let their players create social media profiles, build their personal brand, all that kind of stuff. MLB does not, and I still think, or did not, I still think they do not. MLB controls what their players can and cannot post on them. Didn't know that. I didn't know. Same thing with professional golf. The reason most of the guys that went to live, went to live golf is because live golf let them create the YouTubes and things like that. Okay. Toys are us. The day that Toys are us started declining was the day they decided to outsource their e-commerce to Amazon. You go to, you went to Toys are Us's website. Oh, I want to buy this. It forged you to Amazon. Now people are like, we'll just go to Amazon. Right? I think this is that moment for not just insurance, like the world. If you do not at least pay attention to what's going on with AI, it's left in the dust. The end. Yeah. Full stop. Yeah. Period. Yeah. It's so funny that you, the two people we just brought up that you gave the example to, I started to say, well, if you're in Japan, I guarantee you I know which one. This is true. This is true. More than the other. I would recognize him. I would recognize Mike Trout. I would recognize my homes. I'd recognize LeBron. Yeah. I'd recognize Luca. Like, you know, it's so funny you bring that up because with a hat on and an airport, with maybe some sunglasses on, I bet you, I don't recognize 90% of any of them. You know, just because I'm, you know, walking through mind and mind business, I'm not paying attention that the, you know, most valuable player of the block, block, blog league is just walked right past me. There are kids now, young kids that will tell you their favorite sports team is the Savannah bananas. Yeah. I believe it. And it's because they do all the extra stuff. Yeah. It's like the same thing with AI. I mean, if I'm, if I'm able to process stuff way faster than my competition does, amortized out over several years. I've got a huge advantage, right? I mean, one reason that we grew during the hard market compared to our competitors here is we were already staffed up for both sales and service. The competitors here locally that we're the closest to in size and agency type, weren't staffed up in that sense. So they had to redeploy their salespeople to retention. Yeah. Playing defense. Yeah, playing defense. Whereas if you're playing defense all the time when things are hard, it's not a big of a deal. You know, so it's like the football team that doesn't practice two minute drill, you know. Hey Garrett, what, what are you talking, how do you talk to like you speak into like the FBI? What are we, what are we talking about there? What are we, you're talking block, so I'll bring, I'll bring this full circle because we started with blockchain. Today the conversation involving AI and blockchain is really around deep fakes. Oh no. You know, there's some well publicized claims of CFOs having conversations with their CEO in a team's meeting, turns out to be not, you know, their CEO and they just wired $10 million into a bank. And so there's real time video masking, real time audio masking technology that you can buy on the dark web for less than a hundred bucks. Right. So you could have been talking to not Garrett all this entire meeting and you would have no idea. You're an avatar just sitting here talking to us. Exactly. And all you need is 30 seconds of my voice. So you guys, how many hundreds of hours of audio is available on the internet? Either one of you. I've called his voice. 11 laughs. Yeah. So here's also, I always give this risk management advice to anybody that's worried about this because if you need 30 seconds of audio, and I can get that and I can get a piece of technology software that will spoof your phone number to where I can call people from your line. Right. So it shows up Bradley Flowers. But it's not you. But I've got your voice and I start calling your family and saying, I've been kidnapped. Right. And this is happening. And so you need a family safe word to make sure that doesn't happen. Right. And I think it's sick of hearing me say it. But I'm like, I'm a public speaker. I'm out there a lot. And I also post, I'm going to be at this event. I'm going to be there. Right. It'd be really easy for someone to grab my voice, call my wife and say, hey, I'm in New York and I just got kidnapped. And I need you to wire $100,000 to so and so. Right. That happened to a friend of mine in Scots that cloned his kid's voice called the mom said-- What a nightmare. --that he'd been in an accident. They never asked for money, which was like the weird thing, you know? So I checked this out. I played a prank on Scott the other day. Listen to this. Listen how good this is. It does this all time. There's this podcast. It's called The Insurance Guys Podcast. It sounds super boring. But there's this guy named Scott that does the most electric fucking introductions you could possibly imagine. Does that not sound exactly like Joe Rogan? I thought--
I mean, I thought it was him. - Like, yeah, you know, crazy. - I did that in like 10 seconds. Also did Donald Trump too. - Where are you going to do that? - To 11 labs. - Oh, yeah. - 11 labs. - Yeah. - Any, so here's where I think blockchain and AI intersect because we're going to need some form of proof of humanity in the very near future. We need it right now, which means I need to authenticate that I am who I'm telling you that I am because we can no longer trust our eyes or our ears. And so that will be when you're signing a contract or a mortgage agreement or entering into a team's chat with your CFO, you're going to have to authenticate. I am who you think I am. And that will all be done on blockchain rails and quite positive. It's already happening. There's several companies in that space. And so that's definitely something the FBI's keeping track of. - Yeah, that is the ultimate cross-pollination right there. - Damn. - What is wrong with people? Why can't they just act right? - Yeah, I mean. - When I first saw chat GPT, the first thing I told Kenneth is I said this is going to make scammers so good. - Yeah. - Because even just down to the email, like you get a spam email you know, but they can say this is going to people in Alabama or write it like somebody in Alabama would write it, right? Like there's a thing going around with progressive. Did you guys see that? - No, good. - Where people are going on, because if you go to progressive's website, request an agent, they'll forward that lead to the agent. They're going on there and they're basically saying, hey, I want a quote, but I'd like to talk through Zoom. When you reach out to them, they send you the Zoom link. And when you log in, most people use like Google to log in to Zoom, boom, they've got your email. They like spoofed Zoom. And it got so bad progressive put a bolt in out about it. - I bet travelers wish they had a faster way to get money than their personal lines billing account. - Yeah. - Good Lord. I have no idea what happened over there, but. - Yeah. - You ready to repassal? - Yeah, sure. I guess Garrett, such a pleasure and an honor to see you again. Before we get off this podcast today, Christian, thank you. Nothing more boring in this world than watching paint dry and listening to an insurance podcast unless you're in the industry. You hung in there today and I appreciate it very much. You gonna be back with us tomorrow? - He only went to sleep twice. - Okay. - I'll be back with us tomorrow. - You guys anytime, I love chatting with you. - Oh, happy to do it. - Yes, sir. Guys, as I end every episode, you are listening to the insurance guys podcast. Go make money for your family. Go make money for your wife, for your husband, for your kids college fund, for your parents and in laws out there that are struggling like mine. Go make money for them. Write good business for the agencies that you represent and write good business for the carriers that you represent. Bradley Flowers, I love you. - Thanks, Garrett. - Garrett, you're the best. - Thanks y'all. - Thanks for having me. - Yes, sir. Have a great rest of the day. Guys, you are listening to the insurance guys podcast and we love each one of you. Thank you so much for being a part of our family and we'll see you back here real soon. Take care. - Thanks for listening to the insurance guys podcast. If you need to know more about me or you need to get in touch with Scott, you can always reach me at theinsuranceguyonline.com or email me at
[email protected]. And if you need to get in touch with Mr. Bradley Flowers, go to portalinsurance.com or email him at Bradley at portalinsurance.com. Guys, we love you. Thank you so much for listening to our show and being a part of our family. And we look forward to seeing you again next week on the next episode of the insurance guys podcast. Take care.
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