--:-- Ryan Hanley: Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. I have an absolutely tremendous episode for you, a conversation that I thoroughly enjoyed. Someone who I'm probably going to be introducing you to. You probably haven't heard the name Wade Eyerly. You probably haven't heard that name, but I think you're going to know about Wade as we go the next couple of years.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: He's got a company, a new model for an insurance product that he's kind of invented out of thin air, and it's absolutely tremendous. It's Degree Insurance Company. You can go to Degree Insurance. Just Google Degree Insurance Company. You're going to find what Wade is doing. Now, Degree is basically insuring your college education. That's what it's doing. And I'm not going to give away the lead here. The idea that you can conceptually see where an insurance product fits in the market and manifest it is absolutely tremendous. It's amazing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: When you hear about people and you talk to them and you see the way they think, it's inspiring, no doubt. Kind of like the conversation we had with Jonathan Libby a few weeks back. Just creating insurance products in places that they didn't exist before. Absolutely tremendous. I think you're going to love this conversation. Wade's a super guy and I just loved it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: But before we get there, I want to give a quick shout out to the people who make this podcast possible. Today's leading sponsor is Coterie Insurance. Guys, we are writing a lot of business with Coterie because small business is what we do. And Coterie does small business the right way. It's fast, it's easy, it's convenient, good products. We're writing a lot of media companies, a lot of professionals. Because what I like about Coterie is they have easy add-ons for the PL. It's very easy to attach the professional liability onto the GL and property. And now you're getting someone who maybe would otherwise not pay a full-blown standalone professional liability policy. They're paying for that professional liability policy or willing to pay for it as a package with their GL and their property.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Love what Coterie is doing and just couldn't be happier to have them as a sponsor because we're writing business with them and I love pushing companies that are working with agents and doing it in the right way. So Coterie, check them out. Go to C-O-T-E-R-I-E, Coterieinsurance.com. Go to C-O-T-E-R-I-E, Coterieinsurance.com today. Get appointed. Start writing business with them. We're doing it all the time. Wrote a policy today, actually.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: All right. Other company I want to give a shout out to is Donna. Arius Analytics and Donna are making power moves. They're bringing data to the fingertips of independent agencies. And if you're looking to get a better feel for what your data can do for you, check out Donna for Agents. Just Google Donna for Agents, the name Donna for Agents. You're going to see what they're up to. Get the demo. I'm not saying that the product is right for you today. It might not be, but it's another one of those tools like Tarmica two years ago. If you guys remember, I was saying, just go get the demo. I'm not telling you to buy it. It might not be right for your agency, but know what it does. See the demo, see what it does, see what data can do for your agency. And then when you're ready, then you know what it is. It's there.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So go get the demo, know what Donna's all about. And then if you're ready to make a move on data and push forward, well, I can't speak tonight, then you know the product to buy and that is Donna for Agents. We use it to find customers who potentially are leaving. That's how we use it. It gives us our sentiment score and we use that in real time to get a feel for maybe someone's emailed us a couple times or maybe they had an issue with the COI that we didn't realize. And we're getting that out in the frequency of emails and contacts. And it's all really, really good stuff. Big fan of Donna. Big fan of the people that are making Donna possible, which is a big part of why I choose the tools I choose to use.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: All right. So guys, with that, let's get on to Wade Eyerly and learn about Degree Insurance. You're going to love this one, guys. You're absolutely going to love it. Here we go.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Wade. Hey, how are you?
--:-- Wade Eyerly: Good. How are you?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Good. Do you hear an echo or are you good?
--:-- Wade Eyerly: No. You're coming through loud and clear, my man.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Good. I'm in a phone booth I haven't recorded from before. I'm getting an echo, but it's just a weird space.
--:-- Wade Eyerly: Whatever kind of phones you got there, iPhone technology must be doing its job.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: All right, well, how are you?
--:-- Wade Eyerly: I'm good. It's nice to meet you. Anyone that Wes recommends over is always interesting to talk to.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Well, it's funny. I've only gotten to know Wes in the last couple months around a little sort of Silicon Slopes insurance startup guys meet up. And at the end of the meeting, he was like, "Hey, I got a guy I want you to talk to. I think you guys are going to hit it off." And that's essentially all the context I have for jumping on a podcast.
--:-- Wade Eyerly: Yeah. So Wes and I have been buddies for a while. It's funny, we met each other just kind of similarly. I've been in the insurance space for like 16 years now, he's been in it for 15. I don't think either one of us would classify in any regard as the traditional insurance mentality. I don't even think he knows really the standard, even what insurance is. I've probably bucked every standard methodology for how insurance is done. We just ran into each other and became fast buddies. I like the way he thinks about things. I also think he's crazy as shit, so it works out really well.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: He's just a super likable guy. You meet him and you root for him immediately, which is a great skill set to have.
--:-- Wade Eyerly: Yeah, yeah. He's self-deprecating and also incredibly intelligent. This is the case for every industry, I just happen to operate in the insurance industry, but I gravitate towards people, whether I agree with them or not, who are willing to take a different approach to the way things have always been done, but still have a respect for why they are done that way or how we got here. To me, I think that is the key element when I'm looking at someone who's bringing a new idea into our space. Do they have a respect for why it's being done this way today? Not that it doesn't need to be changed or reinvented or innovated, that's a different point, but do they at least have a respect for why 450 years later we still do it that way? If they do, then I'm like, "Oh, maybe there's a shot. This person will actually make an impact." If they don't, I just become a little weary, I guess.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, makes total sense. Tell me more about where you're based.
--:-- Wade Eyerly: I'm based in upstate New York, just outside of the Albany area. I was born and raised here.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Like Saratoga or where?
--:-- Wade Eyerly: Just south of Saratoga. Actually, it's a town called Watervliet. We're right across the river from Troy. I can be from my house with my first bet in hand at the finish line rail in about 23 minutes.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I lived the last five years in New Canaan, Connecticut. We'd like to take our kids up to Saratoga and out to the Finger Lakes and up to Vermont and just hang out in the Adirondacks.
--:-- Wade Eyerly: What brought you to Utah?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: We moved out a year... well, two weeks before COVID hit. My in-laws live out here. My father-in-law just retired from a university here. It was a chance to raise kids by grandparents. You can give your kids a lot of things, that's one not everybody can. And we had that chance, so we did. Frankly, Utah was just built for kids. We're camping in Southern Utah and hiking in Northern Utah, out on lakes and fishing. Social distancing here was so wildly different than it was in a suburb of New York City that I almost felt guilty for my friends. We randomly moved two weeks before COVID hit. It's not like it was a design thing, we just got real lucky, or blessed depending on your worldview. It's been awesome.
--:-- Wade Eyerly: I agree with the grandparents thing. I don't particularly care for New York state for a whole bunch of reasons. It's just not me, it's not the way that I view the world, although this is a decent place for kids. But I have three sets of grandparents within 15 minutes of my house, so I ain't going anywhere. I grew up with my entire family from South Buffalo. My dad got a job when my mom was pregnant with me and moved our little unit out to Albany. So I grew up on an island, no grandparents around, no family around. Now, being able for my kids to have cousins and all that stuff right here... this will not be forever for me living up here because I love other parts of the country, and Utah is one of those places. But I'm never leaving until that family unit isn't necessary anymore.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Well, first off, you can come to Utah and we'll adopt you. We'll make you family. We'll give you what you need. Utah has been really incredible that way. I grew up in Kansas City. My dad moved out there, we didn't have family around. My wife's family, you see this when you get married, she just grew up differently. She had a super close relationship with grandparents on both sides. They have a family reunion. Her grandpa was a cattle rancher and they all go to the ranch twice a year, every year. She's closer to her second cousins than I am to my youngest sibling. We're 16 years apart, so I'm like a weird old uncle.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: We moved back to Utah and one of her second cousins lives around the corner. I didn't know. I saw this one walking a dog, we're looking to get a new dog, I'm asking her about it. My wife comes out and goes, "Madeline, hey!" It was the most random thing in the world. She's like, "Oh yeah, I see her at the ranch twice a year." So being by family is a real treat. I have a big family, I was lucky that way, but now we're a diaspora. I got a sister in Luxembourg and another one in Fresno and everything in between.
--:-- Wade Eyerly: That's a pretty diverse diaspora.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. We're all over the place. I'm one of eight kids, big Mormon family. So we're all over the place, but not from Utah. All the other Mormons that I know, when they moved to Utah, the cultural thing is you make fun of it because you never go make friends. You just have so much family that you never need anybody else. Well, that wasn't our case. We moved out and we swore we wouldn't be that family that moves to Utah and only sees their family. And then two weeks after we got here, the government's like, "Yea verily, you can only see your family." So it's been interesting, but it's great for raising kids.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I didn't have my... I yawned right as I got on this. I realized I was up all night in the ER with my 11-year-old. He broke his arm tackling football yesterday. But it's the thing, he's playing football and they're playing baseball and doing all kinds of stuff that parts of the country still aren't able to do.
--:-- Wade Eyerly: We've been blessed so far that being in upstate, the craziness that goes on like Westchester south and Long Island, we've been able to avoid some of that. Thankfully, we have a few people here who still maintain some semblance of rational thinking.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It's startlingly uncommon.
--:-- Wade Eyerly: It is very. I don't want to get into it. I was meeting up with some good buddies about a technology project. They're probably younger than me, I'm 40, they're probably in their early 30s. They're technology guys, they work for RT Specialty, and we're just working on a project with them. They're coming from Philly, where in the greater Philly area it's bananas. You would think that we're being bombed by a foreign country. They come up here and they're like, "Look how reasonable you are." And I'm just looking around going, "Fucking crazy." I was behind a woman with two masks on that was buying a carton of cigarettes. How is this real life? But it's just funny.
--:-- Wade Eyerly: Like anything else, we'll get through this. I think we'll all have learned a lot about ourselves. Hopefully, the people that actually use this time in a positive way, I think you'll have learned a lot about yourself. I think some people really let themselves go. I think other people really honed in and made themselves better, whatever that means. I know my wife and I have used this time to really get fit and really focus on that and family.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I travel so much. It was a year of no traveling and hanging out with my kids. It was a terrible thing. And we had people we knew who passed from it and whatnot, but it wasn't an awful year in general for our family. I think insurance has an interesting perspective on it because we're in the risk business. Most of this fear is from an irrational understanding of risk tolerance. It's novelty risk. You're more afraid of this than you are driving on the freeway.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I served in Iraq. I did one tour in Iraq. And I was safer in Baghdad than my wife was driving on the freeway around Washington D.C. But nobody wants to acknowledge that or think about that. It's like, "Well, you're taking a new risk, so I'm terrified about it." And I already accepted freeway risk. This is the same thing. You've already accepted the normal flu variant. You've already accepted a hundred other things. This is terrifying because it's new risk, but ultimately it's not particularly worse than other risks we're already accepting.
--:-- Wade Eyerly: I think it's worse than that. I don't even think it's that it's novel. I think it's that it's politicized.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That doesn't help. That's the part that I think really makes this scary. And look, I've had people that I know pass or have things with their heart or their lungs that change. My little brother's on oxygen now. He's in his 30s with six kids under eight and he's pulling around an oxygen tank. It's definitely real. There's no doubt.
--:-- Wade Eyerly: I'm with you. One of the guys this morning said, "If I told you you could walk into a casino and you had a 99.8% chance of winning, but the other 2% chance was you're going to lose all your money, would you walk in and place a bet?" And he's like, "Everybody would." 999,000 out of a million would do it. So whatever, it's all good.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Dude, you've had a pretty wild career. Wes did the same thing for me that he did for you. It was like, "Hey, you gotta talk to these guys, a good guy." So then I was looking through your LinkedIn and I was like, "Holy shit, you've been all over the place." You've started a lot of companies. It's pretty exciting to see your background.
--:-- Wade Eyerly: I need to pull that up and see what it says because there's elements of my background that can't be put there. I've had a random career. I've got career ADD along with regular ADD. Bounced around a little bit, but I think you get a chance to bring experience from all sorts of different places and bring it together. It makes you naturally challenge how we started this. "Why do we do it this way?" "Because we always have." That's never a good answer for me. If I don't understand why, then I'm going to challenge that every time and make sure we're doing it the right way. But if you understand why, then maybe you end up at the same place, but maybe you end up someplace totally different. I get to bring in learnings and best practices from a dozen different places that don't overlap very much with whatever I'm doing today.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So what's Degree all about? I obviously read about it and I've checked out the website and LinkedIn page and everything, but what is this about? This is a pretty wild concept.
--:-- Wade Eyerly: I was an executive at an airline and I'm on the board of a school board in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The largest and the poorest city in Connecticut. We took kids that are two years behind and we get them caught up and on to college. That's the plan, that's what we set out to do. It's a 97% minority school. It's doing, I think, really good work. I'm really proud of it.
--:-- Wade Eyerly: As we're sitting there, the entrepreneur in me on the board wanted to tell the story. How do we alter the life trajectory for these kids? What do we change? I came from a family background that was pretty similar. I was on and off government programs. I didn't know you were supposed to apply to college. I drove to a college in August, the year after I graduated, and asked how to sign up for a dorm. A kind-hearted registrar took pity on me, and it changed my life's trajectory, wildly so.
--:-- Wade Eyerly: So, "How do we tell this story?" That's what we want to be marketing to these families. "Hey, when you send your kids here, their trajectory alters. How does it change?" Come to find out, 80 to 90% of the kids we brought in were going to drop out the first two years of college anyway. We had the wrong goalposts. Getting into college doesn't alter your life's trajectory. Getting out the right way does. It's a subtle but pretty important distinction. Graduating college is the path to the American dream. Going to college is what we usually say, and it's wrong. What we had done was enable these families to take out a lot of debt, which didn't help them if they didn't graduate.
--:-- Wade Eyerly: I couldn't get that thought out of my head. Ultimately, I just said to my wife, "This is the problem I want to go fix." We're lucky enough to be in a place where I can choose what I want to do professionally. So I set out to do that with no idea what the right solution was. I spent a lot of time in data. Ultimately, we were able to build actuarial tables and say, "Okay, this is an insurable risk." If a college degree were a stock in the stock market, it outperforms the market by 2x. It outperforms the S&P 500 by like 2.4 times and is simultaneously the most consistent performer in history. That piece is really important when you're building an insurance product. It works super reliably.
--:-- Wade Eyerly: This is, I think, the least confident generation in American history. They're old enough to remember the Great Recession and the job loss and the fear. Their whole lives, higher ed has said that a degree delivered online should come with an asterisk. And now it's their turn of a once-every-sixth-generation pandemic. Everybody says, "Just go online." And they don't know if it's going to count. Is there going to be an economy when we're done? Is anybody going to hire them? So they don't have the confidence necessary to enroll. Yet we know statistically, the best thing you can do in a down economy is have a degree. In the Great Recession, unemployment goes to 10% nationally, 17% if you're black. 5% is where it peaks if you have a college degree.
--:-- Wade Eyerly: In the pandemic, Raj Chetty at Opportunity Insights at Harvard is talking about a K-shaped recovery. The break point is, if you didn't have a college degree, you got laid off. Worst unemployment crisis since the Great Depression. If you did, you worked from home. Bounced right back. Quite literally, a college degree is its own form of insurance. It protects you from an economic downturn. What we need to do is convince kids that it's worth it. Give them the confidence necessary to do it. Insurance was a great vehicle to do that. Insurance gives you confidence where you can have none, where the statistics are right, but the confidence is wrong.
--:-- Wade Eyerly: It's a shared risk pool. You spread that so that if higher ed is the roulette wheel where nine out of 10 spaces pay off, the right advice to give somebody you love is to borrow 10 times their net worth, make a single investment, and then hope. Spin the wheel. In the event that it doesn't work, what do you do? If you're wealthy, you spin again. You borrow more money, you spin again. Graduate enrollment spikes in a down economy. If you're not, if you're a first-gen American, first-gen student, underrepresented minority, otherwise poor, Pell-eligible like I was, you often just have to go to work. You anchor your market rate at a low point. The economy rebounds and your career doesn't. You go back to a 2% annual wage increase or whatever.
--:-- Wade Eyerly: What we did was just spread that risk across everybody where it works to fill in the gaps where it didn't. It should do the same thing that homeowners insurance does for homeownership. The fastest way to build wealth in America for the last 150 years is homeownership. You borrow 10 times your net worth, you make a single investment with it, and then you hope that the market performs well. It works really, really well. But you couldn't do that if you were worried that your asset would burn down. Nobody's upset. The one guy they've known in 30 years who had to rebuild their home for a fire got to rebuild. Because we have insurance, we've enabled all of that wealth creation, all that risk-taking as possible.
--:-- Wade Eyerly: In higher ed, it's been such a reliable bet. We've never needed it. We haven't done it. But now we do need it. We finance it to such a degree that you set a family back for a generation. It takes 21 years on average to pay back loans. So if it doesn't work for you, on average we know it's going to work, but the risk is still individualized. If it doesn't work for you, that family is a generation behind. We can just fix that with insurance. It's so easy. That's what we did. We built the actuarial tables. We've now got a certificate of authority in eight different states. We got Oklahoma's this morning. We're rolling out a new product, but it's a little different than a lot of insurance conversations I have because it's like inventing life insurance. This whole category, this product didn't exist before. And we're rolling that out.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I was a first generation college student. My junior year... I grew up in a house that everyone in my community referred to as the crack house. Thankfully, we did not smoke crack in the house, but it certainly looked like what you would think a crack house looked like on the outside. It wasn't nice. My mom was a secretary. My stepdad was a laborer. We got by. I did all right in school. I was blessed with enough intelligence that I could look at the world and go, "My only way out of here is..." I was good at sports, but I certainly wasn't becoming a professional athlete. My only way out of a shitty town of 900 people in the middle of upstate New York was to go to college.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I said to my mom, "I want to go to college." Her response was, "Oh, that's nice." It never even crossed her mind that I would do that. I had to figure out how to fill the forms myself. So I go to college. I end up getting some scholarships for baseball and some scholarships for being poor from the University of Rochester. Great school. After the first year, the head coach of the baseball team goes to another job. Scholarship goes away. I cannot afford full rate at the University of Rochester at $33,000 a year or whatever. It's over for me. Let's go. I'm painting houses and waiting tables.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Even thinking about it makes me a little emotional. I had this great year. I played on the baseball team, part of a fraternity, I was part of the All-Campus Judicial Committee, which was this student body adjudicating. If you didn't want to go before the dean, you could go before this panel of your peers. It was a big deal. I'm fully ingrained in this community. And here I am back in upstate Albany, by myself, all my friends gone. My next path was probably in the gutter, swinging a hammer, drinking 30 beers a night. That's where I'm going.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Sometimes you're just blessed. You have no other way to say it. Someone that was on that judicial committee found out that I wasn't coming back and why I wasn't coming back. They called the dean of the school, who has since passed away. Rest in peace, this guy saved my life. This dean got me that scholarship back. I went back to school the second semester. I'm sitting here listening to you say this, going, if this existed, I would have went back to the University of Rochester, potentially with this kind of insurance. I'm not exactly sure how it works, but I'm thinking to myself, here's a potential use case that I would have had in my life. Because it just poof. I felt like I had hit the jackpot. I was out. I was on the path to never having to go back to this shitty little town again, where people said the criminals didn't steal from our town, they lived in our town. That was the big joke. And then it was just gone like that. Thankfully, a whole series of crazy phone calls were like, "I'm on the phone with the dean of the college." How does that ever happen?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And he hears my story and says, "Well, just pack your bags because you're coming back." And it was like wild. It's just wild to think. And that changed my life. I mean, I'm one of those kids who, if it wasn't for college, you know, who knows where I'd be.
--:-- [Host interjection]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What's up guys. Sorry to take you away from the episode, but as you know, we do not run ads on this show. And 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 you're 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, et cetera. 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. But they all check out comments, ratings, reviews. They check out all this information before they come on. So 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. And I'd love for you to leave a comment about the show because I read all the comments. Or 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 it. 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.
--:-- [End of host interjection]
--:-- Wade Eyerly: Totally. I couldn't relate more. I got a scholarship. I was a terrible student. I was like 17 when I went to college, barely turned 17. It was the summer. I was 16, turned 17, and joined the fraternity. And I had two great social years. Then I left and served the church mission in Moscow for two years when I was 19, came back at 21 and was grown up and matured. But the first two years, I didn't know you were supposed to go to college. I got there and I didn't know how to handle myself, how to succeed, what I was doing. But a lot of the same things—joined the fraternity, was on Interfraternity Council and student government, did a bunch of stuff. Then I went to Moscow, grew up a little bit. Post-Soviet Russia will teach you a lot about life decisions you want to be making.
--:-- I came back and I was like, "Alright, I kind of knew what I wanted to do for a career, or thought I did." I knew that I needed a 3.0 cumulative to get a government job in the federal government, and I thought I wanted to work at State Farm or something. I had a 2.57 and two and a half years' worth of credits, so I had to get like a 3.96 the rest of the way. I graduated with like a 3.0. My last two years, I finally just did the work, showed up to class. But I didn't really have anybody that could show me the way. I loved my experience as a Theta Chi, but those guys were the ones I was learning from, and they weren't always making the best decisions either at the time.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It's funny, man. Why Moscow? What was Moscow like? I have a very good buddy who did his mission in Chile, and maybe Argentina as well. We've talked about his mission so many times and how that changed his life. I'm always interested because—and this is going to sound like a broad sweeping stroke, but in all sincerity—I find Mormons who actually did their mission to be some of the most straightforward, caring, empathetic people you'll meet. I know that's a broad stroke, but I do find it to be the case.
--:-- Wade Eyerly: I think you find a spectrum. There's a bell curve of anybody anywhere. There's always some bad seeds. But it is a formative experience. It's disciplined and rigorous. You're up at 6:30, out the door by 9:30, home by 9:30, and in bed by 10:30. There's a lot of structure. You don't watch TV. You don't go on dates. You call home on Mother's Day and Christmas, and otherwise you write a handwritten letter once a week—now it's an email. There's no failure to launch if you go on a mission. You have to figure out how to live, how to do your laundry, how to make food. It's very hard to come home and then just move back into your mom's basement and let her take care of everything.
--:-- You don't pick where you go. You tell the church you're willing to serve, and then you get called. It's a cultural moment. It's like my Jewish friends who have a bar mitzvah—now you're a man. There's this element of, you go on your mission, you come back, and you're eligible now. When you get your call, every high school girlfriend and all my friends growing up are in the room. We open the mission call together. It's a big moment because you don't know where you're going, and you don't pick.
--:-- I left in 1998, six years after the Soviet Union fell, and learned Russian and moved to Moscow. That was the world capital of atheism. They had institutionalized it for 70 years. For missionaries who serve in Chile, Chile has the second highest population of Mormons in the world—about 5%. The highest concentration outside of Pacific islands like Samoa and Tonga. When you go there and have a conversation with someone, you're really sharing what Christ did for you and how that helped you. It's additive to what people already know about the Savior. In Moscow, it was, "Here's who Jesus is," because of institutionalized atheism. Everybody knew Christianity because their grandma was a Christian, but nobody could be religious and get a job. The party controlled everything. Anybody aspirational just didn't go to church.
--:-- It was cool because you spend all day every day caring about other people. You have no concern for yourself. Your base needs are met—food in an apartment—and otherwise your job is to leave your apartment in the morning, figure out how to help people, and come back at night.
--:-- I remember we met this guy who had just been released from prison. Russian prison—not a great experience, I'm sure. We were walking down the street. You recognize missionaries with the name tags and white shirts and ties. We were always talking to random people, sharing a message, brightening your day, whatever it is. He said, "Can you help me with something? I gotta quit smoking. Everybody in prison smokes. It's gonna kill me. I need to quit." We said, "Okay. Mormons are good at not smoking. We don't smoke, we don't drink, we don't have coffee. We're happy to help." I said, "Alright, when is it hardest for you?" "When I first wake up in the morning and when I go to bed." We were at that dude's apartment at six or seven o'clock in the morning, and we were at that dude's apartment at 9:30 at night, just distracting him, reading some scriptures, maybe singing some songs, whatever we could do so he wouldn't think about it.
--:-- If you spend two years walking around trying to help people as your full-time gig, you learn to love those people. You learn to care about them. You learn what's important to you. It's not an aspirational experience. You're not trying to get a promotion. The rest of your life, the career, all that stuff is there. You're just very centered where you're at. I think that gives you a real base of genuine confidence in who you are—that you're a child of a heavenly parent. You know that you are God's son or daughter. There's some real genuine confidence in knowing that about yourself that I think gives strength to do things that other people might think are risky, or to center you when you're dating and figuring out what you want in life. That's a long answer, but I think that's part of it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think it's a great answer. I was talking to a couple buddies again, and I'm interested in your take on this because at some point in your journey, as you mentioned very early, you then do a tour in Iraq. I'm interested in that. I look at my own kids. I think about my own life, my time in college. I had a very similar thing. I was an engineering major and switched to be a math major just because I wanted to graduate on time. I'm staring at a 2.1 in engineering going, "I'm not going to make it." I switched and ended up getting to a 2.93, I think, is what I graduated with. Same kind of deal—had to crank the last year and a half.
--:-- So much of our lives is spent—and this goes for work too, and we'll get back to Degree Insurance, I know we're off the path, but this is interesting—on what do people think about this? What do people think about the decision I'm making? How is this going to impact the way these people view me or interact with me? Am I going to be invited to this club or whatever? I have a high respect for a lot of the people like Israelis that I meet. I love their ethic, their mentality, very pragmatic view of the world. Some of that comes from where they live, some from the service that they have to do as part of coming up. I think we're missing that service component of our lives today. It used to be through the church, but secularism is destroying our society in many ways. The service component—I'm listening to you talk about that, and I'm thinking, those two years allowed you to actually figure out who the hell you are. You think about how many existential crises so many people seem to be having every day right now. Knowing you for 36 minutes, you seem to have a pretty good feel for who you are, at least for the most part, as much as anyone can. I'm assuming that time to be able to figure that out played a large role.
--:-- Wade Eyerly: Well, there's another interesting thing. You mentioned Israelis, many of whom I admire as well. My wife lived in Israel a couple times growing up, and we've been able to go a couple of times with our kids. How do I put this? Walking around with white shirts and ties, wearing a name tag for two years—you're never the cool guy. That layer is like, you're a dork for two years. You learn to be comfortable in your own skin rather than being externally validated, because there's no show you can put on. You can't be cool as a missionary.
--:-- If you look at other religious folks all around the world—my father-in-law was a religion professor. He talks about a concept of religious envy. He says you can learn a lot about how to practice your faith by watching other people practice theirs. If you're a Sikh and you wear a headdress everywhere, you can't hide that you're a Sikh. It's the first thing anyone knows about you before you've ever opened your mouth, before they've said a word to you. They know you're a Sikh. So how does wearing your religion that way change how you behave and who you are? Because you represent now not just yourself and your family, but this entire faith. What do you learn from Hasidic Jews getting themselves into a trance-like state at the Wailing Wall? What does that teach you about how you are going to live your faith? Missionary service does similar things. You're willing to be not cool.
--:-- If you can give up—and I'm going to project here a little bit, but our circumstances aren't too dissimilar—I know how to be poor. I know I can get by, which enables me to take some risks, because I was poor but also relatively happy. I had a happy childhood. I played with neighborhood kids. The house behind us gets busted for meth, three cop cars on their lawn. You don't know as a kid. The comparisons are all very small. It's inside your elementary school, not global stuff. You can be poor and happy, and that realization is empowering as a risk-taking entrepreneur, because the worst-case scenario is you still get to be happy. There's a lot of power that comes from genuinely understanding that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think in your faith journey and other parts of your life and in the world, as soon as you can get over needing to be cool or validated by your peers for what you have, how you wear things, what you look like, how good you are at sports—whatever that thing is that you're getting external validation from—as soon as you can get past that and just get to be comfortable in your own skin, that's a superpower in the modern world. Being a missionary kind of forces you to get there. Two years of not being cool will break most people of their need to wear the right clothes and say the right thing. It doesn't mean you don't fall back into that, but there's a baseline of "I know who I am." I think that happens for a lot of missionaries.
--:-- Wade Eyerly: I think that's a really good lesson, not just for faith and living our lives, but also for our work and how we present ourselves to the world.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I get people—and if any of them are listening, I don't mean this in a negative way if you've asked me this question—but a lot of people will reach out to me because of the podcast or because of some of the writing. At different times in my career, I've had some reach, we could say. People will say, "How do I become an influencer? I want to become an influencer." And I'm like, the very first way that you become an influencer is to never, ever refer to yourself as an influencer or think about being an influencer.
--:-- One of the misconceptions I think a lot of people have—and I know this in part because I've had the opportunity at different times to talk to people who have substantially more reach than me, real outside the industry, large millions of people audiences—the ones who sustain and do real yeoman's work are the ones who do it because it's their own personal journey. They're trying to learn and grow. If 10 people listened, they would be doing the same exact thing as if millions listened. I think that's a very important part of growing a company like Degree Insurance or some of the things I'm trying to do here at Rogue. A lot of people have asked me, "How come you didn't try to start this agency sooner in your career?" Obviously, I wasn't there. The way that I can sit here and talk to you today, even two or three years ago, I may not have had everything as dialed in. When the opportunity presents itself, if you are in the mental state we've talked about and you're not trying to do something to be cool or to have a place, but because it feels like a problem you need to solve or want to solve, then that opportunity presents itself and you can go get it. It's when you start forcing things that you find yourself in trouble, start making bad decisions, partnering with the wrong people, losing focus on what you're trying to do. All of that can hold you back.
--:-- Wade Eyerly: You sit in the military too, right? Everybody wears a uniform. One of the things that does is strip away a lot of the cool guy stuff and puts everybody on the same place. It lets you grow. Your work product stands out, discipline stands out. I feel the same way about the influencer comment you made and networkers. I get asked a lot about how do you grow a network or be a networker. I have never tried to do any of those things, so I don't have great advice for you other than don't be that guy at a conference handing out business cards, giving everybody finger guns. If you say that you're here to network, I'm immediately not interested. But if you're here because—adult men don't make friends well, especially adult American men. It's just not something we do. You have old friends and otherwise your family. If you just genuinely care about somebody and help them out with something, then you build that sort of group of people who want to be around you. Go build genuine friendships instead of trying to network with everybody under the sun, and you'll just do a lot better.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: One of my favorite conversations I've had on this podcast was with a woman by the name of Sheffy Ben Huda. She and her brother are the founders of Coverager, an insurtech publication. I have a lot of respect for them and the work they do. She's one of my favorite people in the space for the way she views things and attacks them. We disagree on different stuff. We were having a conversation around the good old boy nature of the industry. I mentioned to her that at different times in my career, I felt blessed to sit at tables that I probably shouldn't have been at, listening to old fat white guys tell stories about how they conquered the world. Without actually shaking hands or signing a contract, deals were made and tens of millions of dollars of business would be passed based on these relationships. It was never like, "Hey, we good now?" It was just a conversation was had and things were done. You learned how to navigate in that world.
--:-- She said, "I hate that that's still our industry." I pushed back on her. I said, "I think we need more of that, except not just old fat white guys." The idea that there should be some barrier that you have to earn your way into that space—there's a reason why those groups form. Now, I'm all for diversity and meritocracy. I'm a firm believer in meritocracies. I could give a shit what color you are. I do have a swing slant towards Americans. But outside of that, where you come from, who you are, I could give two shits about what religion you are. That part has to change. But the idea that these little groups of people form who trust each other—I think that's a good thing. You should have to earn your way in. You should have to treat me well for a period of time before I'm going to trust that if we do business together, I'm not going to hose you. That's human nature. There's this misbelief by some people, particularly younger people trying to move up, that because they showed up to the party, we should just take them for what it is. I'm like, "Nah, man. You need to get bashed across the rocks a couple of times. You need to have the door slammed in your face a couple of times and learn why that happens." Then when you come back in, you're still going to be that innovative, inventive, energetic person, but everyone will know that you're around for the long haul. That's who people want to do business with. Does that make sense?
--:-- Wade Eyerly: It does. There's an interesting dynamic between trust and regulation. Trust and reputation are earned and take time and are valuable. Regulation is a shortcut for when you need to interact in a space where you can't afford to build trust or don't have that time. When an average homeowner walks in and needs a new policy, they don't know a good agent from a not good agent. The government, or in some cases like with lawyers the Bar Association, will step in and create barriers designed to ensure some believability in what's coming out—some trust. It's a way of building trust in an area where you don't naturally have it. It is always better to be able to build and have that trust.
--:-- A lot of trust comes from shared experience, which can't be shortcutted. That's time. Getting in a room with a bunch of other people who have shared an experience with you does a lot to build that trust. You don't need regulation in a world where we know who the good actors are and who the bad actors are. What's interesting is the balance between allowing people to make mistakes, to trust the wrong person. We do this with dating. Everybody gets to forge their own path and find their own people. You've got buddies who you've seen date the wrong girl. You know it's wrong, everybody knows it's wrong. A year and a half later they break up, and you're like, "Yeah, it was horrible." But you have to let them make that mistake, or they won't be ready when the right person comes along.
--:-- There are just industries and places where you can't do that. I used to run an airline. Guess what? I can't put somebody in the cockpit and be like, "Oh, they'll figure it out. Give them a little time. Let them crash a few." That doesn't work. You've got to have some barrier. But when you put too many barriers and too much structure, one, trust doesn't get built because you never learn to rely on trust. And two, you can impede progress and innovation. I'm always fascinated by innovating in spaces where the trust quotient is shallow because the regulatory quotient is high. We have a lot of regulation—pharmaceuticals, airlines, insurance. There's a ton of regulation because we need these things and we can't afford to build the relationships of trust that need to make it work. So we use regulation to do it. But regulation is a very heavy tool. It's not a soft, nuanced thing. Regulation has a hard time keeping up with the speed of technology, the speed of growth, the speed of change, and the speed of need.
--:-- Insurance is a great example. Fifteen years ago, you didn't need cybersecurity. That wasn't a threat. Now, my friend Josh Steinman—he was on the National Security Council in charge of cybersecurity for the last four years—he just started a company working to secure our industrial systems and controls. Right now, hacking into a dairy plant is probably one of the easier things you can hack into, because the software those things run on is an Excel spreadsheet and a blinky light telling you the milk's good or the milk's not good. Those systems are weak. We've been able to trust for a long time at a certain level—your food systems are regulated, and you're not going to get bad milk out. But the systems we're now relying on have become vulnerable. You didn't need that 15 years ago. Now you've got to roll out new products, build new actuarial tables, understand new sets of risk, and do all that in a regulatory framework and structure built for challenges 100 years ago. We're applying old laws in new ways where they don't always fit and aren't always right.
--:-- What you see are the very best insurance commissioners are those who understand not just the regulation, but the why. Seasoning on your capital can make great sense. "We want you in another state to show that you know how to be an insurance company before you come here." Great premise. Fantastic. So does that clock start the day we're an insurance company there, or the day we pay claims there? When does it start? We had a state tell us, "It starts when you pay claims." I'm like, "Okay. Two years of seasoning we need before we come to your state. You understand that in our product, because we're built differently than auto or whatever else, we're going to sell it to a college. Those students are going to start school today. They're going to go to college for three to six years and graduate and then work for five. Then they're going to make a claim. So you're telling me don't come to your state for a minimum of eight years plus two years of seasoning? So I shouldn't come here for a decade? I want to make sure that you're telling me that's how far behind you want to be."
--:-- They're like, "I mean..." I'm like, "You just passed a regulatory sandbox where you said, 'Hey, innovative insurance companies come here. We'll wave away the regulation so that you can come here and innovate and take chances because we need these sorts of products to move faster.' We didn't apply through the sandbox, but you can wave away the seasoning, which won't teach you anything in the next two years. Do you really want to stay away for ten?" "Well, no." They were able to get their minds around it and come around. But we see that a lot in insurance. We're a very much a trustless industry because we're in the business of risk avoidance. We're in the business of hedging against the worst possible outcomes. By nature, by nurture, both self-selection and what we're trained to do, we avoid risk. We shy away from things that haven't been done before and sort of trust the process, just let it go. What we don't do is move very quickly to address things. You get caught sometimes. If you move quick and bring in a new product no one's seen before, that can come back to bite somebody. Do they learn a lesson and apply it, or are they burned from anything new? All those things come up as you're thinking about how to build new products. Why don't we see a rash of new products? We've seen a rash of new businesses, right?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Moving from physical goods to online service industries. So cybersecurity is the example everyone points to, and then global warming, which is changing the actuarial tables. But that's more of a shift in the math than it is a fundamental difference in the product nature. Cybersecurity is a new product. Ours is a fundamentally new product. I'm of the opinion we should be seeing a lot more new products in all sorts of different industries. But people don't think of it because we're not an industry that's prone to taking risks and to innovating.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. The episode that's coming out this week that we're recording this is actually with a guy by the name of Jonathan Libby. So when this episode comes out, people can go back and listen to that one if they missed it. He runs or founded Steady State Insurance, which is smart DeFi. And looking at some of the things that they're doing in crypto, which is a really interesting space, which I'm super interested in. But what I thought was most interesting about our conversation was not just the crypto piece, which is interesting. A lot of people don't know, but insuring DeFi transactions, once you understand the math behind it, makes a lot of sense.
--:-- What became even more interesting to me was, okay, we're using DeFi as almost a loss leader for what blockchain can do for the insurance industry in terms of creating new insurance products over time and new ways of viewing how we tackle risk and the way that we can spread risk out to smooth out rates, to smooth out opportunities, to finally do away with even some of the loose redlining that still happens, even though we want to pretend like it doesn't. Things like blockchain can really help us massage some of those problems and attack them. And I was like, it's why it makes me so excited. And I know we didn't talk about Degree that much. But obviously, everyone's going to be very interested now that they understand the way that you're tackling this problem. It makes me very excited that there are people like you out there bringing these ideas into our industry, because it's exactly what it needs. A lot of our industry is not broken. It needs innovation and some invention, but a lot of it is not broken. But I agree with you. There are many gaps that we just don't see. They're like black holes looking out into space because we just haven't had someone come in who understands how gravity works in that particular part of the universe.
--:-- Wade Eyerly: You know, one of the challenges is you got to build that actuarial table, right? But I could easily see an executable contract on the blockchain that does parametric insurance, right? Where you're sort of everybody pooling in capital and splitting it and a set of regulations that allows those to exist. And suddenly you can create digital insurance, right? Where there's no manual underwriting, it's an automated process. Do you fit this category? You put the money in shared risk. Here's how you're going to make a claim later. Those parametric, mutual parametric models don't need an actuarial table, which opens it up as a model for where you can innovate. And doing that in executable contracts, building that on ETH or in a DeFi product or whatever, those are real things that could happen. But they're going to happen one at a time and you got to have a champion. You got to have somebody who's willing to say, "I'm going to stick my neck out and try this."
--:-- In an industry where if I just put my nose down and outwork my peers, I can do really well building an amazing agency. Do you know what I mean? The central conflict isn't always attracting the right people. It's risk reward. There's great upside if you're going to build something new, but insurance is such a great industry where if you can put your nose down and hustle, you don't have to be the smartest person out there. If you can put your nose down and hustle, you can do really well in any part of the country with traditional products. Necessity is the mother of invention.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, I agree with you. I want to be respectful of your time, so we'll wrap up here. But I think you just hit on something that a lot of people don't talk about that I'm kind of facing in what I do. Some of our most talented people look at our space and rightly so go, "I could sell seven middle market accounts and never have to worry about money ever again. Why would I do something that could possibly force me to be uncomfortable when if I can just learn how to make a few cold calls, network a little bit, and write a few big large accounts, I'm good. Spouse has got a seven series. I'll have a second house in Florida in a couple of years. I'll be able to golf all the time. Why would I want to go bash my head and take a chance of running into the rocks when this path is tried and true and there's a lot of money still on the money tree?"
--:-- All that being said, it is such an interesting and amazing time to be part of this space. And like I said, I'll say it again, I'm not blowing smoke. I'm very happy that there are people like you out there, Wade. I just appreciate you coming in and sharing so much. Not just about your business — that'll give us a chance to have you back on the show — but just about you and your mindset. I think it's exciting stuff.
--:-- Wade Eyerly: I appreciate you having me. Like you, I think I can talk about insurance all day. I think there are just so many great avenues for growth and great places where you can innovate and great places where you can do really good things. Insurance unlocks other people's ability to take risk, and nothing is going to drive the economy faster, build more wealth, do more things than letting people take responsible risks. Degree Insurance, we're going to let people do that. We're going to take the risk out of higher education and hopefully help a generation that I have taken to referring to as the least confident generation in American history, get them in college and get them through to a place where their financial futures are secure.
--:-- So, yeah, guys, DegreeInsurance.co. There's a white paper you can read. There are all kinds of resources. Go check it out. Get to know what this is because to me, we're going to be hearing a lot more from you, I'm sure. New products in the space are a good thing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I appreciate it, man.
--:-- Wade Eyerly: Hey, thanks for having me.
--:-- [Outro music begins]
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