--:-- Ryan Hanley: In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show. Absolutely tremendous, double tremendous episode today with the all-powerful, all-seeing Nigel Walsh, the Managing Director of Insurance at Google. Nigel has been a thought leader in the insurtech space and the insurance industry in general. Living in the UK, he's had the ability to comment on the happenings in our space over both the European and international market for us here in the US. Not international for him, obviously. We're international for him. But as well as the US market, to have him share his experience, his insights into where he sees insurance going.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: In particular, we dissect the difference between digitizing and the digitalization of insurance. There is a clear difference. I'd heard those two terms and even I say in the episode, in some cases I thought they were kind of synonymous or people just use them interchangeably. But as Nigel explains, they're not the same thing. The nuances, the differences are very important in terms of philosophy and the future of our industry. I think this is an absolutely tremendous conversation that you're going to love.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I encourage you to follow Nigel on LinkedIn, also a good Twitter follow, and just have him in your ecosystem. As Google gets more involved in insurance, Nigel is going to have his hands in that game. I think it's important for all of us to understand what's going on with one of the biggest companies in the entire world. Whichever direction Google decides to go, I think it's worthwhile knowing what they're doing and who's behind it. Nigel is a tremendous guy. It was an absolute honor to have him on the show and I'm happy to share him and his expertise with you.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Before we get to Nigel, I want to give a big shout out to Tarmica. Tarmica is making small commercial insurance profitable. I've been telling you this for more than a year. Tarmica, T-A-R-M-I-K-A.com. Tarmica is making small commercial insurance profitable by providing quotes from multiple carriers, from multiple lines of business in real time. These are true API-driven rates as if you were quoting them in the systems of these carriers. There is no one else doing this. There are other quote-unquote commercial lines raiders in the marketplace, but they use weak API connections, oftentimes taken from indications. They're doing a lot of screen scraping. They're asking for your logins. They have limited carrier sets. They have limited product sets. That is not the case with Tarmica. Tarmica has built out true deep API connections with carriers. In some cases, they literally built the API that carriers use. I couldn't be happier for the success that Raghav and his team have had and all the agents who are using the platform to drive their small commercial growth. It's a bedrock. It's a core piece of the success that we've had at Rogue and our future. If you want to tap into that, go to tarmika.com, get a demo today, and learn all about Tarmica.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: All right. With that, let's get on to Nigel Walsh. Mr. Hanley. There he is. What's up, man? How are you?
--:-- Nigel Walsh: I'm good. Good. You have a good long weekend?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: We did. Yeah. Well, I could have done. We had a lot of rain. We had a big baseball tournament, little league tournament. My kid's seven and he's playing in this travel thing. We were pretty pumped up for that because there were teams from Vermont and other states coming in. It's his first tournament where it's like out of town teams. The fact that he's playing a team from another state is a big deal. Then it rained Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. We played half of one game. But it was still fun. The kids have a good time. They don't care whether it's rain or sleet or snow. They just want to get out.
--:-- Nigel Walsh: You're still at that cool age where everything is like that. The team's from Vermont. For me, that would be like the next town over. From where we live, it's maybe 45 minutes. But for him, he's like, "Whoa, there's a team from Vermont here. This is awesome. We're going far away, Dad."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. It's one of those things that's pretty cool. I love it.
--:-- Nigel Walsh: We actually got half term this week as well for the kids. They're out with my wife as we speak. In hindsight, I should have taken time off and gone out and chilled. But typical Nigel, I screwed it up and now I'm sat on Zoom calls. One of these days I'll learn.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: When you figure that out, can you do a white paper and send it to me? Because I'm basically the same way. My wife will say to me, "Hey, it's half term." I won't even think twice unless she says, "Hey, you're booking holiday."
--:-- Nigel Walsh: I had this conversation with my wife a few years ago when I was traveling a lot. I said, "Just be super specific with what you want me to do. My decisions are not based on me not wanting to be around. Just understand that maybe it's guy brain, maybe it's just my brain. I'm locked in on something. Until you say, 'Why don't we take a long weekend?' I'm just going to keep operating like this is the direction I'm pointed in."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Honestly, I said to Emma, my wife, "I'll just work no matter what." I've switched my hours. This morning, it's 20 past one UK time. I've been out to boot camp and all that sort of good stuff. I've just been painting the garage floor. That's how exciting it gets. I do my mornings of my own these days and my evenings I'm working Google hours in North America. But it's beautiful here. It's currently 24 degrees. What is that in Fahrenheit? I don't know. We'll call it 75, 80. It's heaven.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: 75 to 80 is pretty much as good a temperature as you can get. It's 75 here right now. Perfect. There we go. You just say heaven and I go, "24 equals 75." That's the conversion.
--:-- Nigel Walsh: Tomorrow, actually this afternoon, is going to be 26 and 27. It gets better.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Not bad. What are we doing today? We do a podcast. Just a quick podcast. I think the insurance world wants to know now that you've taken your talents to Google, as LeBron would say. I think the insurance world just wants to know what the heck is going on. I'm interested in your take on where the industry is headed. We're in such an interesting place. There's so much happening. I feel like the industry is starting to work together. We hit that 2015 to 2017 period where it was like, "These guys are blowing up, these disruptors," and it was very tumultuous, at least here in the States. Everyone was pitting against each other. There was a lot of land grabbing and chest thumping. I feel like we've gotten past that to a certain extent. Now everyone's pointed in mostly the same direction. Everyone's figuring out where they fit. There are going to be people that win and people that fall behind. Do you see that from where you're sitting? What are the macro trends you see?
--:-- Nigel Walsh: It is exciting. You saw the news this morning, right? WeFox at $3 billion, bought by Many at $2 billion, and we, Joe, at $1 billion. There are loads of folks raising money and going after things. The "disruptors are dead" type conversation feels a little bit out of date now.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yes. These guys are going after things in a really big way. It seems to me, and this may be something for the listeners of this show, who are primarily people in different functions inside the independent insurance agency space in North America, that these companies that were using the term disruption, they're kind of doing the same things they've always done. They're just not attacking the traditional space anymore, but they're still moving fast and forward. They're building new products, more integrations, speed and automation. We're getting into the podcast. Isn't this the debate between digitization and digitalization? I would love to know the difference between those two things. I've heard that and I've read some of the articles, but I don't know that I have my brain wrapped around it enough to say I know the defining difference.
--:-- Nigel Walsh: You know it in a heartbeat. You just haven't heard it in a way that makes sense to you. It's easy. Digitization is taking what we're doing today. It's replacing your fax machine with an email web form. That's digitization. Digitalization is asking, "Why are we asking these questions in the first place?" It's nothing more than that. I feel the agency world, and this is where you and I will probably disagree, is going through digitization to make ourselves more efficient but remain relevant. The folks that are disrupting it are asking us why we need these in the first place.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yes, I wholly agree. This is one of the things I've been trying to get more people on the show to talk about. Thank you for that description. Now I clearly have it in my mind. In some cases, I've heard the two words used ubiquitously, and that's obviously a mistake. That clears it up for me. I do think you're right. I see this in a lot of my peers. People are like, "What CRM should I have?" That's just digitization. Instead of keeping papers on their desk, they're keeping the same information in their computer now. Then I talk to someone like Fenris Digital, or the guy from Branch Insurance, or Kyle Nagasuki from Clear Cover, and they are completely different conversations. The idea of even coming down as low as "what CRM are we using" is remedial stuff. But the flip side is digitization is not bad. It just might not be a long-term thing. It might not last past the next 10, 15, 20 years.
--:-- Nigel Walsh: I completely agree. This is a lot of the stuff that's going on in my own agency. I launched with the mission of being a digitalizing agency, the agency that only asked the five questions, not the 50 questions in a web form. But to get there, I had to digitize first. In order to get the contracts, to get off the ground, to make the initial revenue necessary to start putting business on the books, I basically had to digitize the traditional model. Is that true for everyone going forward? Can we stop that going forward?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think it depends on how much of the business the founder wants to own. It depends on how much money you need at the start. If I was flush enough at the beginning, and I don't mean having a couple hundred thousand, I mean having real cash in the bank to start from scratch, we would have started digital to begin with, not digitized. Being that we were a classic startup model and I bootstrapped this thing for the first 12 months, there was no digital option for me. I had to take a traditional agency model and digitize. Now what I'm doing is synchronously taking the processes from the digitized agency and building a digital agency alongside it that will overtake it. Then I'll put the digitized agency away and just be a digital agency. But to do that, I had to operate these first 15 to 18 months as more of a digitized traditional agency. Does that make sense?
--:-- Nigel Walsh: It does. Don't forget, I don't think digitization on its own is a bad thing. I wonder about digitalization being that you can only move through the network at the speed of the slowest thing. If we create a fully digitalized agency that customers aren't ready for, then we still fail. Which is why digitization also works.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yes. If I'm being completely honest, I will never get rid of the digitized agency. It will be a piece of the larger puzzle. The first two words I wrote down when I started thinking about Rogue were "human optimized." I wish there was a cooler way of saying that idea because it doesn't roll off the tongue super nice. But the idea is I want to take the best aspects of digital and marry them to the best aspects of traditional. In that sweet spot, for as long as I need to be in business, that will be the holy grail of producing. I'm a distributor. I'm not manufacturing insurance. I'm distributing insurance. As a distributor, that will be the sweet spot where I'll be able to serve the largest market while still having a really solid flow at the least cost. That's my personal opinion. That's why I'm starting to build up the digital side because I have the digitized side. If I need to do pen and paper stuff, if I need to do anything that's standard agency, I can completely do that today. The digital side, because there is an entire market that wants that, is the side we're building right now.
--:-- Nigel Walsh: But you as an individual agent can't move a market or educate the entire market. We're back down to education. Whose role is it to educate? Will your eight-year-old buy insurance the same way that you and I do? If they do, we've royally screwed up.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I don't think one company can do it. I don't think Rogue is alone in what we're doing. I don't want to say we are the leading edge of the sword, but along with a group of other players, some of which are more well-capitalized today, some of which are growing alongside us, I feel like there is a group of industry professionals who are telling this story. There are people saying some things and they're wholly right, but they haven't earned the respect of people in order for anyone to listen. I think eventually they will, but they haven't yet. I think we need people who have spent time in the space to start saying these types of things. We'll see an even larger and quicker adoption. That's my opinion.
--:-- Nigel Walsh: Or is it just a case that we need people to start doing these things before we get anywhere? We can say it all we like. We've been saying things about InsurTech for the last five years. But it's only when you see WeFox's $3 billion valuation. It's only when you see Lemonade and Root and Metro Mile and all these guys not talking about it, but just doing it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think unfortunately there is an entire generation of insurance professionals that can't wait to see all the companies you just named fail. I think that is unfortunate because they still have voice in play in the space. I'm speaking almost specifically to North America because I just don't know your market as well. Here, I think that holds things back. I also know that if you live in Tennessee and run an independent insurance agency, you could make more money than you could ever need in your life with pen and paper today. That's exactly back to the point about digitization. Sometimes good is good enough. It doesn't need to be bleeding edge or leading edge. You just need to make sure that you can pay your claims, you can service your customers, you can do the right thing.
--:-- Nigel Walsh: It also depends on what your mission is. If your mission is personal income, kids go to college, spouse has a seven series in the driveway, we got a second house in Florida. If that's what you're trying to do, which is an amazing mission, don't get me wrong, I'll sign up for that today if I could. If that's what you're trying to do, then it honestly doesn't matter. Just figure out where you are in the world, who you're trying to serve, and deliver those products. You'll be completely successful. That's the brilliance of our industry.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So is it never mind "human optimized"? Is it more along the lines of "insurance for the next generation"? Because then you go, how do you serve each of the participants or constituents along the way? How do I serve your kids and my kids that are seven, eleven, eight? What are they going to buy? How are they going to buy it? How are they going to think about home ownership or car ownership? How are they going to think about setting up their own business? In the UK, for example, I was chatting to someone earlier who said more businesses have been started in the last 12 months than the prior 12 months. Even during a pandemic, people become more innovative and are out there taking risks, using government support to start businesses. If you're a first-time business owner, how do you know what insurance you need and what you don't need? Where do you go to trust it?
--:-- Nigel Walsh: You just answered a really smart way of saying, "How do I educate people?" Do you know what I was doing this weekend? I was painting my garage floor. Do you know where I went to ask the question about how to do it the right way? I went straight to YouTube. YouTube is my default learning channel. I jumped in there and said, "Here's what you do. Here's how you prep it before you paint it." That was it. I learned about the anti-inflammatory diet. I lost 20 pounds and changed my entire life, including my mental clarity. I took one this morning. Jordan Peterson. I've watched all his biblical series three times. I learned about cryptocurrency on YouTube. I could list all these things that are literally core pieces of who I am today. It's all YouTube. My kids can barely navigate a phone, but if I get them to YouTube, they can find anything for me. My kids will sit there watching other kids playing Minecraft. I don't get it. I don't get why they sit there watching the games, but they love it and they learn.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: [Mid-episode message] What's up guys? Sorry to take you away from the episode. As you know, we do not run ads on this show. In exchange for that, I need your help. If you're loving this episode, if you enjoy this podcast, whether you're watching on YouTube or listening on your favorite podcast platform, I would love for you to subscribe, share, comment if you're on YouTube, leave a rating review if you're on Spotify or Apple iTunes. This helps the show grow. It helps me bring more guests in. We have a tremendous lineup of people coming in, men and women who've done incredible things, sharing their stories around peak performance, leadership, growth, sales, the things that are going to help you grow as a person and grow your business. They all check out comments, ratings, reviews. They check out all this information before they come on. As I reach out to more and more people and want to bring them in and share their stories with you, I need your help. Share the show. Subscribe if you're not subscribed. Leave a comment about the show because I read all the comments. If you're on Apple or Spotify, leave a rating review of this show. I love you for listening to this show and I hope you enjoy listening as much as I do creating the show for you. All right, I'm out of here. Peace. Let's get back to the episode.
--:-- Nigel Walsh: This is a conversation I have with my seven-year-old. I'm doing a little work yesterday. I could hear him because he got his phone time. We're pretty restrictive, but we definitely try to be good about the phone. We're like all parents. We lose frustration at the point that screen time becomes whatever else. I said, "Okay, man, you can have a half hour phone time." He's doing his phone. I'm banging away on some work. I hear this thing about Minecraft. There's this guy and he's cackling. He's talking about all these things and the screen's moving around. I come over and I'm like, "Hey man, what are you watching?" I knew it was G-rated. I had the settings set up. I'm watching this going, "Do you understand what he's saying?" He's speaking English, but not English that I understand. It is a whole brand new language. Then you can jump into things like Mr. Beast. It's a world I should know more about and I'm getting to grips with it.
--:-- Nigel Walsh: On my induction to Google, I learned some really cool things. It was all delivered remotely because I'm still remote given the pandemic. Things like, "Did you know that half the photographs that we receive are upside down? Why is that? Because we're left-handed or right-handed." I'm assuming you didn't know that because you're right-handed.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: No, I had no idea.
--:-- Nigel Walsh: If you're like that and taking pictures, it's fine. If you're on the other hand and you're doing it the way around, all of a sudden insurance carriers or any organization is receiving photographs that appear to be upside down, but actually you're not. Imagine if you are left-handed or ambidextrous and you're submitting something the wrong way or perceived wrong way. There are so many good examples that I sat through and watched. Many of them are many years old, but just great examples of businesses that have started up and then accelerated through the pandemic. It's a phenomenal channel and goes back to our point about how do we go and get people to educate things or educate on certain topics. I'm not sure you've probably seen the same in the States where people go, "Where do you get financial advice?" They look at things like Facebook or TikTok. The amount of people that go onto the local village group and go, "Anyone recommend anyone to help me with a mortgage?" They recommend personal recommendations or people posting their personal situation onto Facebook and saying, "What should I do in this scenario?" I'm sitting there going, "You need to speak to a financial advisor. You shouldn't be answered by the local village person that probably isn't qualified to give you financial advice."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: If they're on Facebook at this moment, probably not the person that should be giving you financial advice.
--:-- Nigel Walsh: It's just balancing all those things out. I do think content is the other way to look at it. The last time you bought a new car, it comes with a huge chunky manual. Whoever opens the manual and reads the manual to a car? I don't know that anyone ever has. The only time I've ever looked for it was when I had to find how to change the oil or flip open some sort of thing to get water in somewhere, or I couldn't find the fuse. Outside that, we don't do it. Everything's straight to the dash or straight to the phone. You want to learn something these days? It literally is straight to YouTube. How do we get insurance to be that cool?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I have the perfect example for this. I got a flat tire on the side of the highway. I have a Ford F-150. I never changed the flat on this particular vehicle before. I get out of the car. I've changed flats. I'm from the woods. I'm relatively handy. This is a task that I can perform. I'm like, "Okay, no big deal. 20 minutes. We're back on the road." I cannot find the jack. I'm under the car. Cars are zipping by 70 miles an hour. I can't find it under the truck. I'm going, "I don't have a jack." I can see the tire. I can literally see the tire. Finally, I pull a string in the back of the car and this whole seat pops out and there's a jack. I'm like, "This is amazing. Okay. We're good." I cannot figure how to get the tire off the car. We're now an hour into this project. What I could have solved in two seconds: I go "Ford F-150 remove tire" into YouTube. One minute and 30 second video shows me exactly how to do it. If I had just used my brain like I would for any other project, I would have been out of there in 20 minutes. Instead it was an hour and a half. I didn't go to the manual. I didn't even think to look in the manual. I forgot it was even there. As soon as the problem got to the point where I could not figure it out, I just went to YouTube. The answer was the first answer. It was a minute and 30 seconds. My problem was solved and on I went. I'm with you.
--:-- Nigel Walsh: The next question, therefore, is at what point do we rely on this too much and then not work out what we can and can't do?
--:-- Nigel Walsh: But I think this is the battle that we're currently in over authority, trust, and built-in content creators. We're in a second generation. My background is content marketing. Any success I've had in business is because I think everything through the filter of telling the story, telling the narrative, picturing what people actually want and see.
--:-- So I look through that lens. Right now, we're in the second or maybe even the third generation of content creators—people whose entire lives are based around educating. You need to be very careful with that. That's where I come back to: we need more people who've earned the right to have an opinion. I know a lot of people listening may hate that term, "earn the right," because we're at a point in society where everyone should just be able to say whatever they want regardless of what they've done. But I feel like to have true authority, you have to have earned some validation of your thoughts and your skills.
--:-- The more people cycle out of doing into teaching—who've already done the thing—the better. You see this with someone like Paul Graham. If Paul Graham tweets something, you think, "That's probably true." Probably true. He's done it. Now he mostly just creates content. He still advises, but he's not really doing startups anymore. He is a treasure because when he has an opinion on a topic, you trust it. I think in the insurance industry, we haven't gotten to that yet.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's back to brands that you trust. Let's assume that you and I are both 21 years old. We go back to our 8 and 12 year olds. Will the brands they trust be different from the brands that we trust?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: But they're dumb because they're 21. They're going to make a whole bunch of mistakes, just like we did when we were 21. They're going to learn how to validate who to trust and who not to trust. Then when they get to be in their late 20s, 30s, and 40s, they'll have a really solid filter on how to pick people they should trust and people they shouldn't trust.
--:-- Nigel Walsh: Yeah, and I think that grows over time. You earn it over time. You earn that respect, that insight, how people understand, learn, and deal with logic. You build up that narrative to say, "Actually, if my business is in these things, I'd like to know these are the things I need, these are the nice-to-haves, and these are the must-haves." That would be a really cool way of presenting it.
--:-- I think the other side of this is brands who have earned it—not content creators or educators, but brands. In some cases, these will be companies that are still growing today. There'll be a day when a Clearcover or a Hippo or some of these really smart, innovative companies... If I were Hippo and I was in home insurance, I would have a whole module inside of Minecraft somewhere where you're building places and you can insure them. That's the way my brain goes. I would want every eight-year-old insuring with some sort of diamond force field, whatever my kid was talking about in his Minecraft thing with Hippo.
--:-- Well, what's Hippo? Freaking home insurance. In 10 years from now, when they're looking for homes, or 12 years from now, or their parents are looking for home insurance and the kid says it at the kitchen table, they're learning the concept. And you're validating very early on a brand in their life. That's where my mind goes. Either the creator validates because they've done it and earned that right, or the brand attached to that creator gives that by being the filter. The brand is the filter to the creator.
--:-- There's always going to be cases where this doesn't work, but one side or the other can validate them. A really well-respected creator can validate a brand, or a really well-respected brand can validate a creator. If they're constantly working together, you start to paint a picture of what's actually going on.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You've just given me an idea, and one that's been thought of many times in the past. If Minecraft turned around and said eating your greens, broccoli, and cauliflower was good for you, I'm pretty sure our kids would be eating their greens and cauliflower and broccoli all the time because Minecraft said so. Equally, if you think about things like Second Life or all these virtual worlds, if there were real things in there that you could buy—which there are—what if Minecraft had insurance for the base or house that you set up? My daughter creates houses. My son comes along and destroys them. What if she could buy insurance from a brand for some false currency that sets that brand off in her mind? At what age do you start doing that? Get them at three. Get them early.
--:-- Nigel Walsh: I'm kind of joking about that, but I do think about that scenario you just played. How freaking amazing would the PR alone be? I'm going to use Hippo as an example only because we just got appointed with them. Thank you for that, Hippo people. Let's say Hippo says, "We're launching Brother Insurance." When you build a home in Minecraft, you buy insurance against your brother who we know is going to come in when he logs in and blow your house up. However that's done. I'm just making this up, but that very simple, stupid thing—you could do a whole PR campaign around it. Kids going, "Hey, Ma, can I have 50 cents or 50 credits to insure my Minecraft house against Johnny, who I know when he logs in is going to blow my house up?"
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love it. It starts to teach them the purpose of some of these things. You can't get what you need to do without making sure you protect them.
--:-- Nigel Walsh: Mr. Beast. I just did a quick scan. He's a 23-year-old guy, Jimmy Donaldson. He's got 62.4 million subscribers on his main channel, 99 million combined. He's had 10.7 billion views. Imagine buying access to that sort of audience. "Hey, it's Hippo. It's Root. It's MetroMile. It's Bought By Many. It's whoever." You've got a dog or a pet in one of these worlds, you want to insure it. Where does the best pet insurance come from? You're building your own business on there.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Remember, you and I grew up probably playing Sims or SimCity, all that kind of stuff. You built your own world. How do we manage to insure those things along the way if we needed it against events? What are those events? We go back to education. We go back to the whole thing that frustrates me: we leave school knowing all these things in math, geography, and history, but I can't change a tire on an F-150. Sorry, I can't change an outlet. I've got absolutely no idea what a bank account or compound interest looks like. Why aren't we teaching those things to get us by at a different level going forward?
--:-- I honestly believe this: if all we did in math was teach the four basics—addition, subtraction, multiplication, division—we don't need derivatives or any of that crazy nonsensical stuff. Maybe a little bit of geometry, just a little of the basics. And compound interest. If everyone knew what compound interest was, we would all live very, very different lives. We would be investing in things and nurturing things and watching them grow. Even the simplest, smallest thing—you put $10 a week into something, you buy one less coffee. How much is that? These are simple concepts that would change our entire world.
--:-- Nigel Walsh: I agree with that to some extent. I don't agree with other nonsense because we should learn it all, but we should absolutely learn the practicalities. The best advice I was given personally when I left university was: pay off your debt quickly and start paying into a pension, even if it was a tiny amount. I put in $50 a month when I was 21. It was a big stretch back then. Funny enough, 25 years later, it's worth a little bit of money.
--:-- I just wish... where does that generation go to get that insight or advice? If you want to be a dancer or an actor, you go to dance school or acting school. But the reality is most of us come out of school and become someone in a white-collar job, blue-collar job, whatever it might be. Or if you start your own business, you become an entrepreneur. Where's the business school piece without going to business school? Where's the "these are the 10 things you need to get going"?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I tell you what, the banks did a good job. Some of the banks did a really good job of saying, "Starting your first business, here's what you need: seed capital, protection, space, insurance." And it's just digging into each one of those things one by one. I'd say the more digitized or digital banks have done a good job at that. I still, as much as I appreciate a community bank—and there are a lot of community banks around where I live—I still have to go in and wet-sign 17 forms to set up a bank account. It is freaking bananas. It's just bananas.
--:-- I'm in the worst bank ever right now. The bank I use is awful. I hate every part of it. It won't let me do the things I need to do at the speed I need to do them. It's awful. The idea of changing that bank to another bank is like a day of my life. I literally have to take a day to get all the money out of one bank and into another. I just haven't done it. But I want to pause and go back to your question: where are these people going to be learning from? It's not there.
--:-- Here's what I know for a fact. It's not going to be CNN. It's not going to be Fox News. It's not going to be the New York Post. It's not going to be the New York Times. It's going to be YouTube and TikTok and obscure blogs and Reddit sub-channels and whatever else comes out that we haven't even thought of yet. WhatsApp group channels. That's going to be where they get educated on stuff. I don't have any of those things on my phone. You know where I go for news in the morning? I go to Reddit subreddits and Twitter. That's where I get my news. If it's not happening in those two places, I don't see it.
--:-- Nigel Walsh: But then I also get reminded on a regular basis that we are the exception rather than the rule. I'm a big fan of the Pivot podcast with Kara Swisher and Professor Scott Galloway. I explained to another fellow dad about cryptocurrency and all that sort of stuff. It's amazing: the folks who understand it know it or have a small bit of knowledge or have a huge bit of knowledge. I'm in the camp of having a tiny bit of knowledge, but we're still in the top couple of percent. It's alien to most people. It's still early days for most of those things. Most folks can't get past just the basics. So we need to work out where our audience is and whether we're dealing with the mass or the small niche that's super digitalized.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Back to my point: digitized as in an improved, less broken process. If you didn't have to go wet-sign or whatever else, you'd be happier. You wouldn't bother changing.
--:-- Nigel Walsh: Yeah, I think the balance—and this is the balance I constantly struggle with—is considering where your audience is today. Very few people... I was at a party on Saturday night. It was a charity event. There were a lot of people there that you would think, with the amount of money they had, would be aware of crypto more than they were. This small pocket of four nerds found each other. That's all we talked about for two and a half hours while everyone else drank champagne. I had a Coors Light in my hand, just dissecting Ethereum versus Cardano. My wife's like, "What's wrong with you?"
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So the puck is here today. This is where we are. But how do you balance that versus where it is inevitably going? That's my perspective. I think there's an argument to be made: maybe this particular topic fizzles, or this never becomes as important, or maybe we have a counterculture revert to localization where everyone goes back to barter trading. Who the hell knows? But where I see it going versus today, and how you balance that as a business, is a really big question.
--:-- Nigel Walsh: It almost reminds me of the debate for many years about software companies that used to sell perpetual and then moved to cloud or SaaS-based models. That valley of the shadow of death between the two is a really hard place to manage. If you're a public company, you're managing investor or shareholder expectations on one hand to show perpetual increases while you dip and move to annual recurring revenue. That transition is painful. Most folks have jumped, but going through it is quite painful. I feel like we're in that painful point right now, whether it's ownership of assets or creation of businesses or whatever it might be. But once we're through the other side, the acceleration is going to be through the roof.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I couldn't agree with you more. Nigel, I know you have to go. It is such a pleasure to spend time, man. We could wrap for three more. I actually avoided a bunch of topics because I was like, these are rabbit holes that'll take us hours to get to. I just appreciate it. We had our first conversation like a month or two back, but I've always been an enormous fan. I'm so happy Google absolutely hit a home run by snatching you. Hopefully sometime in the future, we can do this again, or just talk offline so we can just talk shit about everyone and no one can hear us.
--:-- Nigel Walsh: A hundred percent. Likewise, I've always enjoyed the content. Keep creating stuff that makes people easy to understand.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Thanks, man.
--:-- [End of interview. Advertisement begins.]
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