Creating Lasting Momentum in Insurtech

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[00:00:04.72] REID HOLZWORTH: Welcome to The Insurance Technology Podcast. I'm your host, Reid Holzworth. Joining me today is Michael and Peter from Momentum. Welcome, guys. Thanks for being here.

[00:00:12.28] MICHAEL LEBOR: Good to be here man. It feels like I've been here forever.

[00:00:14.46] REID HOLZWORTH: [LAUGHS]

[00:00:17.96] Right? So here we are at Insurtech Insights New York. What do you guys think of the event? My first time.

[00:00:26.36] PETER GERMANOV: My first time too. I like it. I'm a little bit-- it's not what I expected because I was kind of comparing it to ITC Vegas, I guess. And it's slightly different. But, I mean, it's a very useful event. We've already seen a whole bunch of people we work with.

[00:00:43.10] REID HOLZWORTH: I kind of like how they have the booths here, and they have the sessions around it. It's kind of smart. It's better for the vendors, you know? Because people are kind of cruising around all the time.

[00:00:51.50] PETER GERMANOV: It's easy to get in and listen to something, even if you can't get the seat.

[00:00:55.40] REID HOLZWORTH: Exactly.

[00:00:56.12] MICHAEL LEBOR: But-- and I like what they do with the personal headphones. But there is something to be said about being in a quiet, private room where the speaker can actually broadcast and be heard. Personally, my ADD is off the charts. I can't sit at these sessions. I can't. I just, you know-- very often, there's a lot of people that have something interesting and new and novel to say. More often than not, that's not the case.

[00:01:20.55] REID HOLZWORTH: So we've known each other for a while. Let's let the audience get to know you guys a little bit. So, Michael, how about we'll start with you. Where'd you grow up?

[00:01:27.43] MICHAEL LEBOR: I grew up not too far from where we are right now, 10 minutes south of JFK here in New York. I don't know if this is something to be proud of or not proud of, but I've never lived anywhere but the tiny, little village where I live now. My grandfather was the rabbi of that little community in the 1960s. And we're like one of those Hallmark movies where you have four or five generations. So I've never lived anywhere but this little town of Lawrence, which is right here.

[00:01:57.11] PETER GERMANOV: You call it a village?

[00:01:58.35] MICHAEL LEBOR: It's the Incorporated Village of Lawrence.

[00:01:59.93] PETER GERMANOV: It's funny.

[00:02:00.37] MICHAEL LEBOR: It's a little village.

[00:02:00.89] PETER GERMANOV: It's in the middle of New York, but it's called a village.

[00:02:02.75] MICHAEL LEBOR: Well, it's not New York City. It's out in the burbs. It's on Long Island. Long Island, as we say it. Digital marketer, did that for many, many years, had an agency, got super lucky and fortunate and blessed that-- I'm not going to get into the whole story now. But I woke up one morning. I had an agency. I bumped into a buddy of mine who was a senior exec at AmTrust and started chatting. Two days later, I found myself to be the CMO of AmTrust.

[00:02:33.51] Besides my family, on a professional level, it was one of the greatest blessings of my life, maybe, until I met Peter. And I wake up-- I never would have gotten to HR. I never would have gotten the job. But it's not what you know. It's who you know.

[00:02:46.05] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, totally.

[00:02:46.69] MICHAEL LEBOR: And I got to spend five years at a carrier and speaking to thousands of agents and learning how the sausage is made from the carrier side. And that's where we first met, and we were actually going to buy TechCarary for, you know-- I was pushing for a Salesforce instance.

[00:03:02.90] And I love digital insurance. I love everything about it. I love my job. I love getting to meet these people. And we're in this transformative time. And I feel like it's been transformative for a while. And I think there's a lot happening and-- went out on my own, saw-- had this vision of connecting the dots and how to empower agents and how to really provide big boy tech to the independent agent, how to level the playing field. That was really my vision.

[00:03:31.86] And I went out on my own. It was very, very hard. Very hard. And I was fortunate enough to meet Peter. And we had very similar vision. We were doing a lot of the same stuff. But Peter-- it was 13 years, and he'll tell you his story-- but had this base of 1,300, 1,400 agencies that were using his AMS and living on the glass.

[00:03:52.68] And agents, as you know, do not want to log into multiple portals and have multiple passwords and platforms. They want to do it on their AMS. And we combined our visions. And he allowed me to become a partner at the firm. And we're growing. We're doing some really great stuff, executing in our very shared vision. And made a bunch of acquisitions.

[00:04:15.20] PETER GERMANOV: It was Michael, in a nutshell-- the question was about, where did you grow up?

[00:04:19.57] MICHAEL LEBOR: There you go.

[00:04:20.11] PETER GERMANOV: We had a whole--

[00:04:20.69] MICHAEL LEBOR: There you go.

[00:04:21.23] PETER GERMANOV: --life story.

[00:04:21.83] REID HOLZWORTH: Have you met this guy?

[00:04:22.63] MICHAEL LEBOR: There you go. There you go.

[00:04:24.11] [LAUGHTER]

[00:04:25.97] I wasn't going to announce it, but it's true. It's true. I own it. I own it. It's true.

[00:04:31.13] PETER GERMANOV: At Zoom meetings, we try to do-- top his occupying the Zoom meeting for at most 75%.

[00:04:39.09] MICHAEL LEBOR: So on Firefly's, I'm trending at about 74. I'm trending at about 74% talk time.

[00:04:43.99] PETER GERMANOV: Which, by the way, is a good thing, because I don't like talking about that. Are you done, Michael?

[00:04:49.21] MICHAEL LEBOR: Where did I grow up? I don't even remember.

[00:04:50.75] PETER GERMANOV: Some village, some village in Long Island.

[00:04:53.17] REID HOLZWORTH: Long Island.

[00:04:54.15] PETER GERMANOV: I think you had a sheep and, like, you know, like--

[00:04:56.73] MICHAEL LEBOR: I just wanted to keep the conversation away from Communist Bulgaria.

[00:04:59.20] [LAUGHTER]

[00:05:01.37] PETER GERMANOV: It's a good segue. That's where I grew up.

[00:05:04.73] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, yeah, how about you, Peter?

[00:05:05.87] PETER GERMANOV: Communist Bulgaria. And yeah-- in a town, actually, the second largest town, the oldest continuously occupied settlement in all of Europe.

[00:05:21.85] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, wow.

[00:05:22.19] PETER GERMANOV: 26 centuries of continuously recorded people habitation there. So we have all kinds of ruins and things like that. So it was an interesting place, but it was in Eastern Europe. So yeah, I-- are we moving on to the next--

[00:05:38.23] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, no, tell us your story. Yeah, tell us. How'd you get into it?

[00:05:41.59] MICHAEL LEBOR: I anticipated the question.

[00:05:46.13] REID HOLZWORTH: You want to sit over here? I'll sit over there.

[00:05:47.46] [LAUGHTER]

[00:05:48.61] MICHAEL LEBOR: It's killing me, man. It's killing me.

[00:05:52.48] REID HOLZWORTH: No, yeah, so-- OK, so you grew up there. How did you get to the States? Tell us, how'd you get into insurance? I actually don't know that story, actually. How did Now Certs come about? I don't actually know the story.

[00:06:02.12] PETER GERMANOV: Oh, really?

[00:06:02.64] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, yeah, I don't.

[00:06:03.48] PETER GERMANOV: You're kidding me? You may be the only one because that's the one story we tell everybody, and that's how we get them. But long story short, the opportunity presented for a scholarship to go and study in Canada. There's this system of colleges, United World Colleges. It's like a high school thing where they get people from 100 different countries in the world to live together for two years for, like, peace. It's like a UN type of project.

[00:06:29.98] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:06:30.96] PETER GERMANOV: So somehow that scholarship was offered to my high school, and there was, like, a competition for it. And long story short, I ended up winning one of them. So I ended up to the place in-- the college in town, Lester B Pearson, United World College, spent two years there. Amazing time. Really met people from all over the world.

[00:06:52.11] And from there, I came to apply to colleges in the United States. I went to New England to school and got used to the American way of living. I love this country, and I decided I wasn't going back. And it wasn't necessarily economical. It's really I like the people, the culture, everything about what America stands for.

[00:07:15.89] And I stayed. I graduated, got a job. My first job was definitely not in insurance, so if you want to go into insurance. Out of college, I got a couple of gigs as a developer, as a programmer. So I was an economist by trade, by training. I have a degree in economics and political science. But there were no jobs when I graduated from college. It was a recession in '93, recession.

[00:07:43.47] But everybody was hiring developers, and I've always had an interest in programming. That was one of my hobbies from back home. It was my first job in Bulgaria, working for the Army, of all people.

[00:07:57.23] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, wow.

[00:07:58.03] PETER GERMANOV: Doing something that nobody knew, some kind of secret thing. But they gave us access to computers to play games. And that's why, in exchange of that, we would write some code for them. But then we'd get five hours a day to play games on IBM machines.

[00:08:09.97] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, wow.

[00:08:10.57] PETER GERMANOV: And that's how I got into IT.

[00:08:12.21] REID HOLZWORTH: That's pretty cool.

[00:08:12.31] PETER GERMANOV: Yeah, it was different. But-- so I went to-- the NASDAQ was my first real job. Five years I spent there building their trading system.

[00:08:23.53] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, no kidding.

[00:08:24.17] PETER GERMANOV: Like, a whole-- they built everything to a new level of trading systems. It was a great experience because high transaction volumes. Obviously, the NASDAQ market started to change. And then, after that, I got my MBA from NYU, because I actually wanted to go back to what I was studying, which is economics and investing.

[00:08:48.54] I then became a portfolio manager for one of the investment banks in New York and got into investing, and that was probably, I would say, one of the most interesting things I've done, kind of learning about the world of investment. And we were trading billions of dollars a day.

[00:09:09.10] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, yeah, totally.

[00:09:10.18] PETER GERMANOV: Lots of derivatives, high volume, all quant based. So there's a lot of using high tech at the time, analyzing data, tick data, which is something very difficult. This is 20 years ago. From there, at one point, I finally decided, OK, that was enough. It was interesting, but is that what I really want to do when I grow up?

[00:09:31.74] At some point, it was kind of pushing money around, and it wasn't-- I didn't see creating anything useful. I wasn't interacting with a lot of people, didn't feel like I was doing something with my life. Now I'm talking a lot.

[00:09:44.85] REID HOLZWORTH: This is good. This is good. We want to hear from you.

[00:09:47.21] PETER GERMANOV: I decided I was done with the investment banking world, with my hedge fund management days. And I quit, and I decided I was going to move out West. So I used to go skiing, snowboarding, biking, moved to Colorado, and I fell in love with that part of the country. And I always knew that someday I wanted to move there, so that's what I did.

[00:10:09.81] I sold my house here. I used to live in New York, obviously. I sold my house in Connecticut. I moved to Salt Lake City with my wife. And that big decision, we had a kid. So I decided I didn't want to raise my kid in New York City necessarily. Nothing wrong with that, but it just wasn't my cup of tea.

[00:10:27.13] So I ended up in Salt Lake City. Loved it, ran it for a while, made sure my family loved the place. And we did. And to this day, I was in Salt Lake City, and I started insurance as an agent because a friend of mine from Salt Lake City borrowed 50k to start an agency, and they didn't-- they weren't able to repay me. And I gave them another 50k. And at the third investment, I said, OK, I have to see what's going on.

[00:10:54.05] So they were very good agents, but they were horrible at managing the agency. And I had a little bit of MBA background and running a few small businesses. So that's how I got involved in insurance. And then I got my licenses, and then we built our first system. You ask about how Now Certs came about.

[00:11:12.75] So we shopped around. We got to try a few of the unknown names, some you work for, and they were too big for us at the time, too complicated. And we went to post an ad in the local university, Technical College, and got two kids who were graduating to build us a very simple system. It had to be web based. They had to do certificates, billing, and web based because we traveled a lot, and be able to integrate with phone system and a couple of other small things at the time. This was like 2009-10 at that time.

[00:11:47.25] And we called it Now Certs because we were mostly doing commercial trucking. And the biggest feature was self-serve certificates for all of our clients, because this happened at the time that load boards became web based. So the truckers were getting all of their boards booked online, and they had to present a certificate within 15 minutes or they lose the load.

[00:12:11.46] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, yeah.

[00:12:12.56] PETER GERMANOV: That's it. That's the story. And now you can talk for the rest.

[00:12:14.90] MICHAEL LEBOR: And fast forward, he told the guy-- two people were using it, told the guy, and fast forward, we have 1,600 agencies using our tech stack every day. We're the database source of truth, growing. Agents spend 90% of their day on our tech stack. I mean, you know the game. Got 10 billion in premium. Our agents find that's just what we know through download, right?

[00:12:40.66] PETER GERMANOV: Right, yeah, basically, yeah.

[00:12:42.07] MICHAEL LEBOR: It doesn't include any of the DNS stuff.

[00:12:44.43] REID HOLZWORTH: Wow. That's awesome. Did you have trouble selling to agencies initially because you owned an agency?

[00:12:51.33] PETER GERMANOV: Well, you know, it's funny. We didn't-- so hold back a little.

[00:12:55.77] REID HOLZWORTH: Well, you were at an agency, I guess.

[00:12:56.93] PETER GERMANOV: No, no. So, no, we were running the agency and running our system, and we had no intention of getting into the software business. As a matter of fact, one of my bosses at Deutsche Bank had started a couple of software companies, security, and he said, Peter, a word of advice, don't ever get into software.

[00:13:15.57] So I didn't listen. And it's amazing. Don't ever get into software. And I hate insurance. And I ended up in insurance-- software for insurance, which is--

[00:13:26.03] MICHAEL LEBOR: Well, it's a double negative. So we balance each other out.

[00:13:29.73] PETER GERMANOV: We balance each other, but-- so we were giving the system away. We weren't planning on doing anything. And after we gave away to about 50 to 100 agents, we decided, well, why don't we make a business out of it, right? Because at that point, we're giving it away for free. But there's maintenance, and we have to hire additional developers and then the servers. So we had to start charging.

[00:13:51.21] So it wasn't until 2015, some two years later, that we decided we were going to charge for it and actually took our first paying client, and I think we charged them like $100 for the whole year or something.

[00:14:01.55] REID HOLZWORTH: Wow.

[00:14:01.83] PETER GERMANOV: But we wanted to prove a point. And at that point, I realized the conflict of interest. So--

[00:14:08.91] MICHAEL LEBOR: To your point, it's an issue.

[00:14:11.01] PETER GERMANOV: Yeah, we divested. We sold the book of business and decided that was going to be our main--

[00:14:15.13] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, I ran into that pretty early on. Agents don't like that.

[00:14:19.65] PETER GERMANOV: Are you an agent?

[00:14:20.57] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah. Oh, my story-- technically, your story is exactly the same. We built that solution for our agency, 100%. Because what we wanted didn't exist. So we built it.

[00:14:29.53] PETER GERMANOV: That's how most things happen, really.

[00:14:31.31] REID HOLZWORTH: Exactly. I think so, and I think that that's very true, still, in our industry. I think that, all the competitors in this space, that's where they'll come from. I think it's really hard to just go and just build something from scratch and then bring it to market. This naturally occurred, and you were building something that really worked for you, and you were giving it away. And you're like, oh, wait, I can have a business here. That's similar story.

[00:14:51.60] PETER GERMANOV: I think the trigger for me was when people started asking for personal lines. I'm like, I don't know anything about personal lines.

[00:14:57.12] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, that's funny. Yeah.

[00:14:57.46] PETER GERMANOV: So at that point, we're going to have to start charging people if we're going to add personal lines functionality to the system.

[00:15:04.22] REID HOLZWORTH: That's awesome. Yeah, I didn't realize that. That makes a ton of sense. Yeah. So rock and roll. And so Now Certs is now Momentum. So you're at AmTrust. I guess I can say that.

[00:15:16.48] MICHAEL LEBOR: Yeah, I am.

[00:15:17.66] REID HOLZWORTH: You're at AmTrust.

[00:15:18.48] MICHAEL LEBOR: They're my favorite people.

[00:15:19.40] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah. And then insurance gig. And you did a lot-- I always loved your thing, connecting the dots. I like that. I like that. It was cool slogan.

[00:15:28.22] MICHAEL LEBOR: And it's finally coming together.

[00:15:30.48] REID HOLZWORTH: So now you're connecting the dots, and now--

[00:15:32.64] MICHAEL LEBOR: We've connected the dots.

[00:15:33.30] REID HOLZWORTH: We've partnered up. You guys are crushing it, growing like mad. And then you just made an announcement.

[00:15:41.57] MICHAEL LEBOR: Today, yeah.

[00:15:42.25] REID HOLZWORTH: Today. Acquisition, I guess, of Trusted Choice.

[00:15:45.75] MICHAEL LEBOR: Yes, trustedchoice.com.

[00:15:47.17] REID HOLZWORTH: Dot com.

[00:15:47.97] MICHAEL LEBOR: Yes. I was instructed to be very, very specific about

[00:15:51.01] REID HOLZWORTH: Trustedchoice.com.

[00:15:51.67] MICHAEL LEBOR: Trustedchoice.com. Yes.

[00:15:53.33] REID HOLZWORTH: Chip is a good friend of mine. Chip's been on the podcast before. It's pretty cool. Same thing with Adam coming over team, too. You guys are--

[00:16:02.73] MICHAEL LEBOR: We're putting together--

[00:16:04.03] REID HOLZWORTH: You're putting some good pieces together here.

[00:16:06.99] PETER GERMANOV: So if I can explain why, maybe. It's funny. I've seen the pendulum in the industry swing from having an AMS a decade plus ago, and then people started using CRMs, and then they added a ticketing system. And they added-- at one point, I think we counted, the average midsize agency had 10 to 12 applications that they were using that didn't necessarily talk to each other.

[00:16:35.97] So it was becoming popular to use different tools. Rightly so. Because an AMS is not meant to really run pipelines for new business and leads, management, and so forth. And people were happy to just have something. And then we started integrating, and that's how we made our name. We were, I would say, probably one of the pioneers in opening the system with an API completely free, retried. But now, in the last three or four years, I'm seeing this fatigue of having so many screens and so many logins.

[00:17:09.99] REID HOLZWORTH: Consolidate it, yeah.

[00:17:10.65] PETER GERMANOV: And people kept asking us-- our clients. And that's the beauty of not having a client base that's solid, because you get to hear what they want. It always should be the first thing you do before you develop anything. They kept starting to want the opposite. I don't want to log in 10 different systems. Why can't we do this in Now Certs or Momentum?

[00:17:28.13] And we decided, you know what, we will still integrate. We're still open to anybody who wants to integrate in our ecosystem. But there are certain core services that an agency does. We've identified five or six areas that we would provide an integrated one-glass solution. And that basically is-- what do people want? People want leads. That's where Trusted Choice comes in.

[00:17:52.90] MICHAEL LEBOR: That's number one. Survey says, Family Feud--

[00:17:55.54] PETER GERMANOV: They want leads.

[00:17:55.84] MICHAEL LEBOR: Number one, get me leads. That's what agents want.

[00:17:58.70] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, which is amazing.

[00:17:59.46] PETER GERMANOV: They have to be able to manage those leads. So they want a CRM. So we have a bunch of integrated CRMs, and we have our own CRM product.

[00:18:06.24] REID HOLZWORTH: By the way, I'll just say, for the audience, trustedchoice.com has struggled for many years, not struggled as a business, but struggled getting agencies to effectively go after those leads efficiently as they come in because they weren't tech enabled enough. Or maybe some of them weren't even that motivated. And so that's why-- this is, like, that's such a great marriage.

[00:18:29.45] MICHAEL LEBOR: It's amazing. We're going-- we'll put a pin in that for one second. But to your point, it's amazing. And as we were going through due diligence and looking at the conversion rates, Trusted Choice, the quality of their leads is really better. I know Chip likes to say referrals.

[00:18:44.39] REID HOLZWORTH: That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right.

[00:18:47.41] MICHAEL LEBOR: I don't know who's going to win that battle. Like, you know, war of attrition. Either I'm going to get him to say leads or he's going to get me to say referrals. But the leads that come in are really of incredible quality, more so--

[00:18:58.67] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, they're really good.

[00:18:59.55] MICHAEL LEBOR: Because there's a stigma to leads, and there are people that resell them. Their leads are super quality. But I was blown away at how many people pay money, buy leads, and don't call.

[00:19:10.09] REID HOLZWORTH: They don't. They just sit there. it's insane.

[00:19:11.67] MICHAEL LEBOR: It boggles my mind.

[00:19:12.61] REID HOLZWORTH: I know. I've sat with Chip on this exact-- it's insane. Like, so many, so much money wasted and so much time. It just-- nobody calls. And the thing that for Trusted Choice was it kind of sucks for their brand because the consumer goes there, and they're like-- and it's literally a human that's like, I want an insurance quote. It's not like I signed up--

[00:19:33.55] MICHAEL LEBOR: And I want it-- I want it now.

[00:19:35.29] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, exactly.

[00:19:35.75] MICHAEL LEBOR: I want it now.

[00:19:36.57] REID HOLZWORTH: And then they get nothing. And so--

[00:19:38.89] PETER GERMANOV: So that's one of the first things we'll probably change. And I know they have a backstop agency that's supposed to take care of these things. But, still, there's a time lag. That lead doesn't go back into the circulation or referral.

[00:19:49.99] MICHAEL LEBOR: We're making some-- and this is something that-- without getting into too much detail, because I could say all the things that I want to edit about our business. But as we're new to the trust, you know-- but Trusted Choice being part of this nonprofit consortium, they have very strict regulations and ways that they had to serve the agencies. And I think, now that they're part of our mandate, we're a lot more flexible of what can be done and how to work with the leads. We're investing very heavily into AI. I know everybody's talking about it. But AI could enrich the quality of those leads.

[00:20:32.72] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, yeah.

[00:20:33.04] MICHAEL LEBOR: And now imagine lead comes in. We're giving you the system in which to manage it, which doesn't exist. We could rate the lead before-- before the agent even calls the customer, we have an indicative quote. I mean--

[00:20:44.36] PETER GERMANOV: We work with IDP risk appetite Ask Kodiak.

[00:20:47.18] REID HOLZWORTH: Yep, Ask Kodiak.

[00:20:47.86] PETER GERMANOV: So we can qualify that lead to add more value to it.

[00:20:50.54] REID HOLZWORTH: 100%.

[00:20:51.44] MICHAEL LEBOR: So now think about-- you talk about connecting the dots. We've got the lead. We've got the CRM. We've got the quote. One of the biggest challenges that they have that they're so excited about, which we were kind of leveraging your brand and your superpowers, they never know if it bounced. They just lobbed it over the fence, and they were hoping there would be some reporting now because we're the database source of truth and we have access to the download data. For the first time, Trusted Choice has buying visibility.

[00:21:20.72] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, yeah.

[00:21:22.20] PETER GERMANOV: Even if they don't bind to the radar, we can tell when the--

[00:21:24.93] [INTERPOSING VOICES]

[00:21:27.11] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, and we have the system of record.

[00:21:29.09] PETER GERMANOV: Exactly.

[00:21:29.77] REID HOLZWORTH: 100%, yeah. That's really cool.

[00:21:31.91] MICHAEL LEBOR: Yeah, so full A to Z visibility, it's never existed in the industry before.

[00:21:36.35] REID HOLZWORTH: And trustedchoice.com was founded by the carriers, really, initially, and brokers for this to solve that. And so this is one of the things that they could never get. What is the value of this? What's actually happening? And now you're going to see it. You know it.

[00:21:51.81] MICHAEL LEBOR: I know Chip's excited about actually being able to go back to the carriers and say, look what we actually can deliver.

[00:21:58.83] REID HOLZWORTH: Totally.

[00:21:59.33] MICHAEL LEBOR: Because carriers do want to help their agents. They do want to--

[00:22:02.21] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, absolutely.

[00:22:02.49] MICHAEL LEBOR: I personally think the biggest opportunity in this whole horse trading of leads and referrals-- yes, it's great when an agent has a shingle. It's great when they have a website. It's great when a backstop lead comes. But I think the biggest will be the carrier-to-carrier trading. When I worked at AmTrust, they wrote x billions in premium.

[00:22:25.09] And then I remember talking to some of the senior leadership. What did you decline last year? It was billions. So we want to-- part of this acquisition is we want to empower the agents to stop saying no. Oh, yeah, I do homeowners, and a customer asks about work comp. You don't have to say no anymore. Oh, I could take that. Maybe I could sell the lead or give it to this peer-to-peer exchange. And I've got a guy for that. We could help you out.

[00:22:53.09] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah. Yeah. The exchange thing is one that many have tried to tackle over the years, but you could do it. The reason why those exchanges have always failed is because you didn't have all the players on the tech side that were willing to play.

[00:23:05.83] MICHAEL LEBOR: I think we've--

[00:23:06.61] REID HOLZWORTH: You guys own a stack.

[00:23:07.59] MICHAEL LEBOR: Yeah, we own a stack. We're the database source of truth. We are the automation center. We are the CRM. We've got connectivity diagrams.

[00:23:14.75] PETER GERMANOV: I have a profile of the agency. I know what markets they like, what SIC codes, what rating codes they use. So we can even match them much better with the agent.

[00:23:25.24] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, it's like the-- yeah, right. For the lead itself, it's like, who's the best agent for this lead?

[00:23:30.00] PETER GERMANOV: Exactly, exactly.

[00:23:30.68] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, that's pretty cool.

[00:23:31.50] MICHAEL LEBOR: So our-- and I'll be super clear. What I'm about to describe is theoretical. We haven't done it yet. But if you think about the realtor.com-type model, if I want to buy a home in Beverly Hills, one guy owns that zip code. They haven't sold it to multiple people.

[00:23:52.50] So if I want to buy or sell in that zip code, I got to go through that one guy. And what we're looking to build as part of the Trusted Choice acquisition is when somebody calls an agent and they say, OK, I'm working on a comp policy, but now I want to bop, he's-- well, I don't do bop. You can call my guy John. He's going to handle it. And because we're governing it, he's not going to go try to remarket. He's not going to go try to steal that at the renewal. This guy is approved. This guy's been trained. He's been vetted. A real peer-to-peer exchange.

[00:24:28.59] REID HOLZWORTH: That's awesome.

[00:24:29.69] MICHAEL LEBOR: That's part of the vision.

[00:24:30.79] REID HOLZWORTH: That is really cool. Yeah.

[00:24:33.79] PETER GERMANOV: And we also provide markets. So we're building the radar. We're using IDP again. And it's one thing to get a lead. But if you don't have the right markets, maybe that's why nobody's calling them.

[00:24:45.41] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, totally.

[00:24:46.01] PETER GERMANOV: I bought a lead, and I realized I cannot even place it any place. So now we're giving people access to a whole lot markets, 40 plus, commercial and personal lines. And if they cannot get appointed--

[00:25:00.17] [INTERPOSING VOICES]

[00:25:01.27] MICHAEL LEBOR: We own a wholesale.

[00:25:01.99] PETER GERMANOV: --network.

[00:25:02.53] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, yeah.

[00:25:03.37] PETER GERMANOV: And again, we're not competing. We're not looking to get into that game. We just-- if an agent is just small and has a lead that's a good fit for employers, but they don't have the appointment, we do. Come write into our code.

[00:25:18.53] REID HOLZWORTH: You guys have a wholesaler?

[00:25:19.69] MICHAEL LEBOR: We actually acquire two, yeah.

[00:25:21.43] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, that's right, from-- yeah.

[00:25:24.33] MICHAEL LEBOR: Yeah, let's keep that--

[00:25:26.19] [INTERPOSING VOICES]

[00:25:26.79] REID HOLZWORTH: Yes, I know. OK, I know what you're talking about. Yeah, I forgot about that one.

[00:25:29.81] MICHAEL LEBOR: One we bought from Appulate, which we could mention, one we'll-- what's the Harry Potter-- he who shall remain nameless.

[00:25:37.21] PETER GERMANOV: We also we have our own.

[00:25:38.83] MICHAEL LEBOR: Yeah, yeah. So because of the fact that--

[00:25:42.19] REID HOLZWORTH: I didn't-- yeah, I forget that. That's amazing. That's really awesome.

[00:25:45.09] MICHAEL LEBOR: And it's to Peter's point, where--

[00:25:46.83] PETER GERMANOV: I want to be very clear, though. We're not trying to build a huge wholesale operation.

[00:25:51.49] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, no, it's not traditional markets. I'm with you.

[00:25:53.13] [INTERPOSING VOICES]

[00:25:53.87] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, to help the agents, the market.

[00:25:55.27] MICHAEL LEBOR: And to the point that Peter mentioned earlier and he glossed over it where he said, we're completely open, we build tech, and whomever built something that we build, and if they think they could build it better than we can, God bless you. Come integrate because our agents will benefit.

[00:26:10.73] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, totally.

[00:26:11.39] MICHAEL LEBOR: So, we, Peter-- the name of our company was Now Certs. We excelled at COIs. We partnered with cert official. They claim they felt they could do certain things better. Here's our API. Our agents will benefit. Same with wholesale. If Acrisure wants to come integrate with us, great. Our agents will benefit.

[00:26:31.32] But agents were coming. They were signing up for our rater, because we had the pipes with direct appointments. Then 85% of our agents said, not appointed. I don't have a login to these carriers. What do I do? So we said, you know what, we'll give you a wholesale access, and--

[00:26:48.42] REID HOLZWORTH: That's some awesome. There is nobody in the AMS space that's doing that. Right? There's nobody that I know of.

[00:26:54.68] PETER GERMANOV: I'm always amazed that the two names that are not actually doing it. I've always wondered if there's some kind of-- I'm not sure why they're not doing it.

[00:27:03.04] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah.

[00:27:04.10] PETER GERMANOV: It makes sense that-- you know, I mean--

[00:27:06.42] MICHAEL LEBOR: At least we think it does. We think it makes sense. It's what agents want. So we want to be the agency everything, agency in a box solution. You can use all of our modules, but you don't have to. I think that's one of the things that makes us unique, where use as little or as much as you want.

[00:27:22.37] PETER GERMANOV: And again, the writer was built to make it easy for agents where the data is in the AMS, all the leads already been processed. Do one click. 80% to 90% of the submission form is prefilled. So all they have to do is click Send, verify a few things. And to that point-- I'm going to use one of your phrases--

[00:27:42.47] MICHAEL LEBOR: Go for it.

[00:27:42.73] PETER GERMANOV: What is it called, a wholesaler of wholesalers?

[00:27:44.57] MICHAEL LEBOR: The aggregator of aggregators.

[00:27:45.83] PETER GERMANOV: Yeah, so we don't care where the pipes come from. Again, this is not trying to build a book, what-- the commission. So we integrate with-- and we mentioned that. We integrate with Semsee. So we work with IDP. We get some carriers for them. It's not all risk.

[00:28:01.21] MICHAEL LEBOR: CoverForce.

[00:28:02.17] PETER GERMANOV: CoverForce is providing the pipes. We work with Herald.

[00:28:05.33] [INTERPOSING VOICES]

[00:28:05.77] MICHAEL LEBOR: ISU. But we just--

[00:28:06.89] PETER GERMANOV: But the point is that--

[00:28:07.45] MICHAEL LEBOR: --signed a very significant partnership with ISU, access to their market. We don't care. We just want to-- like the Plinko with the ball falling. We just want the ball-- the little thing to fall where the customer wants it to fall. We will provide the connectivity to connect the dots. That's our mandate.

[00:28:24.27] PETER GERMANOV: And if admitted market doesn't fit, we can send it to Semsee, and they can find an unlimited market for them. So the traditional way, we make it easy, too. We do some tech to fulfill the application using the browser and stuff like that. So the idea is to make it easy for agents to do what they do with the least amount of busywork.

[00:28:44.21] REID HOLZWORTH: And that's a lot going on.

[00:28:45.67] MICHAEL LEBOR: Yeah, too much.

[00:28:46.49] REID HOLZWORTH: You've got a lot going on.

[00:28:47.09] MICHAEL LEBOR: And that was before AI came along, and like, oh crap, we got to invest in that now too.

[00:28:50.99] REID HOLZWORTH: It's like, yeah, what are you going to do there? Yeah, yeah. Wow, wow. What's next? I mean, that's a lot. I mean, there's a lot going on. But if you look at the product and the stack and things, what are some of the things that you want to focus on in the next couple of years?

[00:29:04.47] MICHAEL LEBOR: So I'm curious to know, if we each wrote down our answers, if we would say the same thing.

[00:29:08.25] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh.

[00:29:09.02] MICHAEL LEBOR: If we turn this into a game show. AI. Where are now, that's this big, broad, homogeneous thing. Our whole kind of mandate is, how do we empower the independent agent? And with some exception, but if you take our agency plans of 1,600 agents, they don't have the resources to investigate, research, build LLMs, build their regs, go tinker with NA to N.

[00:29:39.08] So we are trying to be that entity for them. We want to be the place. And a big thing that we're doing is-- you and I both know, nobody-- am I allowed to curse here? Nobody fucking wants to switch their AMS. It's the task of last resort. We all know that.

[00:29:55.62] So part of what we're building is this platform-- name to be determined, working title, but let's call it the AMP AI hub-- where you don't need to switch an AMS to come access our tech, to access our CRM, to access our rater. And a huge part of that is our AI suite, which, as the database source of truth, whether you're using our AMS or not, we are building the chatbots. We are building the AI agents that could do these little micro tasks, whether it's issue the COI or answer your reception call or call a prospect, call a lead, and turn a cold lead into a warm lead.

[00:30:33.23] So what's next is we've got a lot of things that we got to get our foundation, just continue to reinforce that. But we want to be the place where agents come to you and say-- maybe Brown and Brown doesn't need us, and they're investing tens of millions. But the average 5 to 10 person agency, we want to be the place where they could come to access the AI to run their agency better.

[00:30:58.15] PETER GERMANOV: Yeah. I have a fatigue of talking about AI. I know AI is like the big thing. I actually stopped calling it AI. I call it MLM. But Michael knows this. What was it, early spring-- no, it was early this year. I basically have five development teams, probably 100 IT engineers between everybody. And I literally made a decision. I rarely get suckered into a trend or a technology. I'm very pessimistic about new trends.

[00:31:28.51] But I'm sold on the promise, on the promise-- I'll be very clear-- of LLMs in AI in general. I can see-- it's way beyond what we saw in the '80s with the world wide web install. I mean, this thing is amazing.

[00:31:44.21] So I push half of our development effort away from traditional current platforms into learning AI, figuring out what's available, what we can do, how to get it done, and staying basically ahead of the curve. And April 1, we had a little project we called the hackathon. But on April 1, we released--

[00:32:07.02] MICHAEL LEBOR: It almost started off as an April Fools joke, where you're going--

[00:32:12.48] PETER GERMANOV: So, basically, we said this thing, like, sometimes in January, said, OK, let's see what we can learn, and let's set some goals, and let's see what we can launch by April 1. Just basically to take this big-- at this point, kind of big ship. 100 developers is a big ship, a lot of cats to herd-- and see if we can make a turn towards this new trajectory that's coming. Whether we like it or not, it's coming. So we might as well get in front of it.

[00:32:38.28] And in April 1-- April 1 was a joke. We said we were releasing something. In April 2, we actually launched the actual thing. So there's a whole bunch of tools and experimental, like the usual stuff. You can get a deck page from an email. It will scan it. It will populate the AMS or the lead, the CRM with the contact. It will create the policy, the billing.

[00:33:02.68] And it's still experimental. It's working amazingly well, by the way. So that's what's coming. But in terms of-- again, I don't want to speak about technology because I keep reminding all of our people, whether they're the developers or the service people, that we're in the business of helping people. Technology just happens to be the enabler.

[00:33:23.93] And one thing that's coming is an agent should do what an agent does best and probably what AI will not be able to do for hopefully ever. And that's that soft-- I hate to use the term "soft skill--" the interpersonal skill to go and talk to their clients and sell them insurance and make sure that their insurance needs are met. Especially in the business, they're complicated. It's not that simple. Anything else--

[00:33:53.47] MICHAEL LEBOR: There's a lot of inefficiency. And we'll be done by the end of the day. It's very rare that you get to sit and talk to-- there are three of us sitting around a table who owned an AMS. There is a ton of inefficiency. And I think now-- remember, when COVID came, there was nobody using Zoom. And all of a sudden, it was this accelerant that now-- I remember, when was at the carrier, it happened. All of a sudden, we had 10,000 employees on Teams within three days.

[00:34:22.65] And now everybody was doing Zoom calls. You couldn't get anybody on a Zoom call now. I think AI is going to be this accelerant, again, for the adoption of some of these technologies, which, again, will help the human. I always quote Jensen Wang, the CEO of NVIDIA. "AI is not going to replace humans, but humans that use AI will replace humans that do not use AI." That's kind of our approach.

[00:34:45.39] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, totally.

[00:34:46.61] PETER GERMANOV: Like, nobody should be doing back office work-- uploading documents, sending certificates, and issuing invoices. So that would be all very quickly outsourced to AI. And then you can have the agency devote resources to growing the book and becoming more efficient, more profitable.

[00:35:04.26] So I think that's where we're going-- help the agent to just do the one thing they do best and they love doing, really, if you think about this. And all that busy work and back office will be performed some sort of an AI.

[00:35:17.56] MICHAEL LEBOR: Nobody got into this business to do supplementals.

[00:35:19.72] PETER GERMANOV: Exactly, exactly.

[00:35:20.24] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, right? Totally, totally. Do you guys use I personally? Personal things?

[00:35:24.94] MICHAEL LEBOR: I do. I do.

[00:35:26.36] PETER GERMANOV: I compete with AI every email. I play this game, trying to compose the best email to show AI cannot improve on it. I'm yet to win a single email. Every single time, no matter how-- English is my second language, but, I mean, I think I'm pretty educated. So when I write an email and I think this is the best possible way to structure this email and I click Polish, every single time, the AI comes up with something, some improvement. So, yeah.

[00:35:56.18] MICHAEL LEBOR: I'm eager to hear, what do you use it for?

[00:35:58.51] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, lots of things. Like, the other day I used it. I used ChatGPT. I do a ton of landscaping. I'm really into landscaping. And I'm building this-- it's pretty complex, but it's a bog filter for one of my ponds. It's like a pond above a big pond. And the water flows up under it into gravel. And then it's planted with all these plants, preferably flowers. And then the roots of the plants eat the nutrients in the water and then clears the water really, really nicely.

[00:36:24.65] And so, anyway, so I got on to a wholesaler. I have a full-time landscaper who just works for me all the time. He's got a business license. So I got a wholesale place, and they gave me a spreadsheet that had about, I don't even know, 3,000 plants on it, all different pot sizes, different prices, all these different things.

[00:36:43.97] And so I just took the damn spreadsheet, and I'm like, here, ChatGPT, look at this spreadsheet and tell me, of these, which one should I order? Here are the dimensions of the pond. It's 47 feet by 15 feet-- based on the gallon size and what they are. So it literally went through, and it found the best ones for exactly what I'm doing. It knows what I'm doing-- for filtering the water and whatever.

[00:37:08.85] And it picked all the plants. It went through the whole spreadsheet and then basically built a sales order for me just to send in to the wholesaler. That is something a landscape architect would take days.

[00:37:19.47] MICHAEL LEBOR: And charge you a fortune.

[00:37:20.97] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh my god, crazy. Yeah, and crazy. So it's like stuff like that. And it's like-- I'm like-- I was just thinking-- just for the fun of it, I'm like, can you, like-- I didn't do it. I was thinking about it. Can you put this in a presentation? Like I'm going to go give it to somebody and sell a deal. You know what I mean? Like, here's a proposal.

[00:37:34.89] MICHAEL LEBOR: I had a flood in my house. I use it all the time for everything. I'm obsessed with it. My friends don't even want to talk to me because all I do is say-- is like, you got to use this AI, this AI. It's like I've become one dimensional.

[00:37:44.19] But I had a flood in my house. I did some construction. I didn't go to the local village and get the right permits. They found out about it. They issued a stop work order. I had a whole back and forth. And I ended up using AI to petition the state to get the variances I needed. I said, I live here. What are the zoning codes? What are-- and I went to the village. I said-- and they were very cooperative. But they said, well, now that you have this from the state, we could endorse it. And AI helped me navigate this city hall filing process. It's--

[00:38:14.94] PETER GERMANOV: A small example from today.

[00:38:16.94] MICHAEL LEBOR: Yeah, Craig, our guy who runs our managed services.

[00:38:19.35] PETER GERMANOV: He took a picture of the list of attendees, of the companies, the exhibitors.

[00:38:24.36] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, yeah.

[00:38:24.72] PETER GERMANOV: And basically asked, I think, Gemini with Google, but basically asked--

[00:38:29.90] REID HOLZWORTH: By the way, I hear-- I haven't used Gemini, but everybody says Gemini is better than ChatGPT.

[00:38:33.62] PETER GERMANOV: Eh.

[00:38:34.50] REID HOLZWORTH: OK, I don't know.

[00:38:35.16] PETER GERMANOV: Yeah.

[00:38:35.78] REID HOLZWORTH: I've heard that.

[00:38:36.94] MICHAEL LEBOR: I would almost call it like a restaurant. It's like, which restaurant is better? Well, if I want to go get a burger, I'm going to go to Five Guys, and I want to--

[00:38:42.22] PETER GERMANOV: For work, we do that pretty much the same. OK, I mean, deep research and stuff, they will start to deviate. Coding.

[00:38:47.94] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:38:48.46] MICHAEL LEBOR: Have you seen the Google share screen thing?

[00:38:50.40] REID HOLZWORTH: Uh-uh.

[00:38:51.18] MICHAEL LEBOR: Remind me when we're done, like, do not pass Go. You have to see-- where you could share your screen with Gemini, and it could see what you're doing and guide you in real time. And any software that you don't know how to use, you log onto Notion and say, I need to do this. And you basically-- just like as I could screen share with a Zoom attendee, I could screen share with Gemini.

[00:39:10.86] REID HOLZWORTH: Jesus.

[00:39:11.50] MICHAEL LEBOR: It's--

[00:39:12.63] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, yeah.

[00:39:13.97] MICHAEL LEBOR: Which coming back to insurance, that's our vision. We want to be able to kill the left nav. We want to kill the top nav. Tell me what you--

[00:39:22.93] [INTERPOSING VOICES]

[00:39:24.13] MICHAEL LEBOR: Back to a Seinfeld reference. Remember when Kramer is like Moviefone? Just tell me the name of the movie you want to see. Just tell me, what do you want to do? We'll do it for you. I want to do a supplement. OK.

[00:39:34.41] PETER GERMANOV: I mean, we do have a 3.0 interface to our platform that is-- you can either type or speak, just to a GPT-type screen. We have multiple agents behind it that will do whatever you want. But so it's getting very-- and you can talk to it, as I say. It's very getting very interesting.

[00:39:52.67] And then there's also the browser agents. So there's no API to accomplish something. The browser agent will figure out the browser page, where to click, what data to put in, stuff like that. So it literally--

[00:40:05.13] MICHAEL LEBOR: Ivans needs to think about that a little bit. Right? Data, which used to be very governed and very protective and very proprietary, is becoming non-protected and non-proprietary.

[00:40:15.47] PETER GERMANOV: Well, I've been thinking a lot about that. What would be the value if enterprise remained? It will be access to data. But, again-- speaking of AI, this is very important, I think. A lot of people are going like a little mindless about the security and the privacy of the data. And I think guardrails need to be--

[00:40:34.21] MICHAEL LEBOR: So this is one of the things that Peter and I always productively debate and argue. But without mentioning names, there are certain companies out there, not Ivans, but that help get carrier data, non-download type, non-policy type stuff. And they would go-- when the only way to get it was through an API, that was something that very few people could do.

[00:40:58.80] But then, all of a sudden, people would use RPA. And, OK, if I could take the agency's login and go to that site and start scraping data, that became more accessible. Now, with these AI-based browsers-- literally there's a browser that you could go into any site, pull the data--

[00:41:16.00] PETER GERMANOV: The browser agents, yeah.

[00:41:17.44] MICHAEL LEBOR: It's, again, a little bit of Wild West. You have data governance issues. But I think some really smart people could go and just say, hey, let me go scrape these sites and be able to log in. And whether-- all SaaS companies have to have these existential conversations. All of us.

[00:41:37.14] PETER GERMANOV: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:41:38.34] MICHAEL LEBOR: I mean, I think we're lucky in that typically our community tends to be a little bit slower to adopt. But, I think, in our tenured lifetime, we'll be able to see it through.

[00:41:48.85] REID HOLZWORTH: I could see it. Yeah, I could see it.

[00:41:50.81] PETER GERMANOV: But to finish that example of what Craig did, he scanned the list of exhibitors and basically asked the question, Which one should we meet? type deal, Who is complementary to us?

[00:42:01.39] MICHAEL LEBOR: It gave him a prioritized list, because it knows what he wants to do.

[00:42:04.57] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, yeah.

[00:42:04.97] PETER GERMANOV: We told him what we were trying to accomplish at a conference. He knows our business. It was unbelievable. And that's the big challenge. And that's kind of what I've talked to Michael about these few times when we discussed what we're doing and how we do certain things. The biggest challenge for me is to start thinking in this new paradigm.

[00:42:24.56] REID HOLZWORTH: Right, totally.

[00:42:26.59] MICHAEL LEBOR: He completely-- without geeking out, he completely re-architected our database structure. If you think about complex SQL databases--

[00:42:34.43] PETER GERMANOV: Based on something you guys provided. If you think what-- the main conduit of storage of data in insurance is the LT/XML, the same thing. So why do we need to shove this in all kinds of other databases and layers and layers and layers of regurgitation that introduce errors, lose data?

[00:42:54.51] So we are literally going back to the very basics-- XML because XML is a perfect medium for LLMs. It's text to figure out-- LLM, they love working with data. Like, it's unstructured but structured. So it could be any kind of XML.

[00:43:10.95] And you don't have to go through layers and layers and layers of very expensive infrastructure, maintenance and all that stuff. And it's working really well. And then the best thing is you don't have to think about the applications two years from now, because the AI can get it from the source, and it can apply it any which way you want-- analytics, in the AMS for quoting, whatever. So--

[00:43:35.23] MICHAEL LEBOR: Got a lot going on.

[00:43:36.87] PETER GERMANOV: And I love the fact that today I got a complaint from my QAs. Rob sent me at least five or six, last night, certifications, which I have to-- I don't know if you know what that means, but the push you guys have done to get more and more carriers on the Ivans platform is amazing. So this is definitely something the industry needs-- adoption of--

[00:43:59.88] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, yeah.

[00:44:01.22] PETER GERMANOV: I'm not even going to ask for JSON, but the fact that more and more carriers use the central transmitter of data so we can access that so the agencies don't have to type everything manually, AI or not, right? I know you guys help them get on the platform. You help them--

[00:44:21.26] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, yeah.

[00:44:21.46] PETER GERMANOV: And then--

[00:44:21.82] REID HOLZWORTH: We've almost doubled in carriers over the last five years, like, insane.

[00:44:25.64] PETER GERMANOV: And I remember, before you got there, I never got this request. Now it's like-- so I had to hire more QAs to deal just with the Ivans certification. So, I mean, it's a great development. If there's one thing the industry needs, it's that to accelerate.

[00:44:39.38] MICHAEL LEBOR: What's next for you guys?

[00:44:41.42] REID HOLZWORTH: A lot of that. On the download side, we're actually working right now and we're putting-- we're doing a lot of work around the cleanliness of the data that comes over the pipe from the carriers, and we're going to start to, for lack of a better term, hold their feet to the fire on some of this, because, although we have tons and tons of data flowing through our pipes, some carriers did their own implementations, and it doesn't map quite right as it should. And so we want to really get that down to a really good standard.

[00:45:09.99] Because what we do-- people may not know this, but all of that data from 700 plus carriers to 38,000 agencies, it all comes into Ivans. And then we actually structure it. So it comes blue, yellow, purple, green. And we put it all to the Ivans data model. And then-- so everything sits there. Same thing with IDP, everything. So it's all 100% standardized on our side.

[00:45:30.27] Then we ship it to the individual platforms, agency management systems, whatever they may be, and we spit out different formats, all that said. So really, as we are continuing to get deeper and deeper in the data itself, we're finding that it needs to be cleaner than it is. And some of the stuff isn't even sent. Like, some carriers don't send at all. Like, some--

[00:45:52.23] MICHAEL LEBOR: And you think about, again, the full life cycle. And one of the things we talk about-- and it's on our-- I'll call it our 2027 roadmap-- is, OK, you think about that data. Now, agency goes live with us on AMS day 1. We've migrated them from whatever system they launched. The data is pristine.

[00:46:11.41] 90 days later, the data is crap. One CSR enters it this way. One CSR enters it that way. There's no-- and you think about it as an industry. I know there are standards. But if I went to look at a publicly traded company and I looked at their financial statement, there's gap. There's generally accepted accounting principles.

[00:46:28.17] I know that if KPMG did their audit and they say they did $10 million in EBITDA, I could take that to the bank. But if I'm going to sell my agency-- and again, before we get to the carrier download. But if I want to go sell my agency and I'm telling this large aggregator that I did $10 million in revenue, they have to completely audit it because there's no standard. And there needs to be.

[00:46:50.78] I would love to, over the course of the coming time-- OK, you've created a standard from the carrier on the tail end of the journey, on the feedback loop. But how do we extend that through to the way that agents actually enter the data, the way that they look at the data? I would love to be-- because we're the database source of truth. I would love for somebody to be able to say, I want to buy this agency. We submit the data. You could do due diligence in 10 minutes.

[00:47:15.78] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, yeah. No, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, yeah. And we actually have a tool that could be used for that at Ivans, a book roll tool, where they can take all their data, it's always structured, and basically ship it. And you guys could partner on that, use that tool, literally. You know? And so, yeah, there's a lot. The other thing that we're really working on, a big project we're working on that not a lot of people know we're working on right now at Ivans--

[00:47:40.26] MICHAEL LEBOR: [INAUDIBLE] you are now that we're broadcasting.

[00:47:41.85] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, whatever. I don't really care.

[00:47:43.35] [INTERPOSING VOICES]

[00:47:43.93] REID HOLZWORTH: So we're heavily involved on the document ingestion for mid-market and large commercial. So that's a real problem, because Ivans' our customers' carrier, you know?

[00:47:55.95] MICHAEL LEBOR: [INAUDIBLE] Excel spreadsheets 30, 40 pages.

[00:47:57.51] REID HOLZWORTH: Well, it's just agents are handwriting sticky notes and snail mailing them to carriers. I mean, not really, but they send a carrier a huge email with all these attachments. And so every-- I mean, look, there's probably 30 guys here at this show that are doing this. So AI is really great at saying, here's a document. Let's take the data. Let's structure it.

[00:48:18.37] MICHAEL LEBOR: But they don't have access to the carriers. They don't have your credibility. They don't have your access.

[00:48:22.89] REID HOLZWORTH: That's exactly right.

[00:48:23.79] MICHAEL LEBOR: We can have the best tech. Their tech could be 10 times better than yours.

[00:48:26.29] REID HOLZWORTH: Exactly.

[00:48:26.63] MICHAEL LEBOR: You've got the real estate. You've got the beachhead.

[00:48:28.49] REID HOLZWORTH: So it's like, how can we, one, partner with the agency management system? So to pull the data out so they don't have to send them documents, if you will, first. Second, take those documents and send in, whether they're, like I said, a handwritten accord form or whatever it may be. It's complicated. And this is a thing that will never end. We have a full team dedicated to this. That's all they'll be doing for years and years and years to come.

[00:48:52.39] But yeah. And then it's having the communication from the underwriter back to the agency in real time and a completeness check. So here's my submission. Boom. It's got nine documents. Carrier gets it. The data is now structured. Let's say everything goes well. It's all structured. Instantly they know, because of my appetite, is this something that we want to do? Is this something we--

[00:49:20.11] MICHAEL LEBOR: It can only be through one centralized source. Otherwise--

[00:49:22.35] REID HOLZWORTH: 100%.

[00:49:23.15] MICHAEL LEBOR: --it can't happen.

[00:49:24.23] REID HOLZWORTH: And then also, too, it's saying, oh wait, hey, you submitted these documents. We actually need two more. Or these two that you sent, they're not totally filled out. Here's what we need. It's automatically sending that back to them. Stuff like that, that's what we're working on.

[00:49:38.84] PETER GERMANOV: So we actually have done something like this because we do tracking. It will go even a step further. It will look at the application and say, I see five drivers. Do I have five matching NVRs? It will look inside the NVR and say, is every driver meeting the criteria? Do they have a CDL, more than two years, no DWIs?

[00:50:02.22] It will analyze the actual document and connect them to each other. I see six vehicles or whatever it is. And is their PD attached to vehicles? Does it match the year, make, model? Stuff like that. So not only is the documents and figuring out, Do I have 12 documents? And is the data filled out? But does the data inside the document jive with each other?

[00:50:23.32] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, totally.

[00:50:24.08] PETER GERMANOV: And again, perfect job for LLMs.

[00:50:26.38] [INTERPOSING VOICES]

[00:50:27.50] MICHAEL LEBOR: And I'm sure you've contemplated this, but something like that, once the standard is created and once you've figured it out-- I mean, we all know the Wild West, because everybody talks about rating. Yeah, OK. Small commercial comp, not complicated. Small commercial-- once you get into EMS, I mean, it's the freaking Wild West.

[00:50:44.47] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, yeah.

[00:50:44.75] MICHAEL LEBOR: There's no standard of anything. I assume that's something you guys are thinking about.

[00:50:49.11] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, 100%. Yeah, it started all in admitted. This is not something we're talking about. We have a full dedicated team, project, team, I mean, product team. We acquired Plank not that long ago. So we have-- that brought us 100 Israeli developers, all AI. And so we actually ramped that team. We just hired on a bunch more people for this project specifically.

[00:51:11.32] MICHAEL LEBOR: I am a big fan of...

[00:51:11.93] REID HOLZWORTH: And so-- yeah, a lot. Yeah. Elad. Yeah.

[00:51:15.89] PETER GERMANOV: I've been wondering what you guys-- what the project is with them. One of these days. I don't know how much you can disclose, but I'm very curious to see what they're working on, what's coming down the pipelie.

[00:51:26.15] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, that's what we're working on on the Ivan side. On the applied side, they're working on what's called Book Builder. And what that's doing is it's analyzing the data inside of Epic, and it's saying, OK, is there an opportunity here? Is this properly covered? Hey, we see they have this, but they could have that kind of thing.

[00:51:46.97] PETER GERMANOV: Upsell, cross-sell.

[00:51:48.69] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah. Yep, yep, yep.

[00:51:50.19] PETER GERMANOV: How interesting.

[00:51:50.45] REID HOLZWORTH: Exactly, yeah. But then Plank already has a product in market, which we've done really well with. We just closed a really big deal with a tier 1 carrier on it, which is just the data itself. It's like, here's a business. OK, reads landscaping. Inc. Boom, full dump of everything you can find on that and--

[00:52:09.23] MICHAEL LEBOR: They're not adequately covered on this. They--

[00:52:11.77] REID HOLZWORTH: No, not-- no, just like information about the business itself.

[00:52:15.19] PETER GERMANOV: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. To be able to rate them, basically.

[00:52:16.96] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, exactly.

[00:52:17.75] PETER GERMANOV: Just by the name of the business.

[00:52:19.53] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, one of our carrier customers on that, as an example, they have a bucket for a-- a misclassified bucket. They don't really know how to classify on the glass. They're like, oh, we don't know this is. But they still will rate it. They'll still sell it. And then, after the fact, they got to, like-- all right, what is this thing?

[00:52:38.96] MICHAEL LEBOR: Come back and audit.

[00:52:39.44] REID HOLZWORTH: Exactly. And so--

[00:52:41.16] MICHAEL LEBOR: It's a problem.

[00:52:42.04] REID HOLZWORTH: They bought that product from us to help them with that after the fact.

[00:52:46.30] PETER GERMANOV: Very interesting.

[00:52:47.24] REID HOLZWORTH: So it's pretty cool. But if you think about the whole document ingestion thing, the smart document ingestion, like I said, there's probably 30 companies here.

[00:52:53.50]

[00:52:53.76] [INTERPOSING VOICES]

[00:52:54.82] MICHAEL LEBOR: And a guy called me. He's like, I'm doing this. I'm like, dude, it's a race to the bottom.

[00:52:58.40] REID HOLZWORTH: That's exactly it. So we actually just did RFPs with a bunch of different companies like, hey, can you-- is it really that good, what you have?

[00:53:07.99] MICHAEL LEBOR: Google's, by itself-- just-- Google's, just off the shelf, for free, is--

[00:53:13.88] REID HOLZWORTH: It's awesome. Yeah.

[00:53:15.42] PETER GERMANOV: A lot of these AI companies-- just the wrapper of ChatGPT. Yeah, there's no real add-on value. But I find anything-- not just AI, but it's the adoption, getting agents.

[00:53:29.87] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, agents. [LAUGHS] I'm in the carrier business. That's for you guys. Bless your heart.

[00:53:36.51] MICHAEL LEBOR: I've been there, done that. I'm going to stick with agents. I can't handle 18-month sales cycles.

[00:53:42.15] REID HOLZWORTH: No, fair enough.

[00:53:43.33] MICHAEL LEBOR: I can't handle 18 month sales cycles.

[00:53:44.89] REID HOLZWORTH: It's a different monster. But-- I'm with you. But, man. Agents do adopt.

[00:53:49.21] PETER GERMANOV: Pick your poison.

[00:53:49.97] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, pick your poison. Exactly right.

[00:53:51.65] PETER GERMANOV: Like I said, the industry and-- yeah, it's--

[00:53:55.05] REID HOLZWORTH: But we feel if we can perfect that, if you will, on the smart document ingestion, it'll become a standard. Like, why wouldn't you use AI?

[00:54:02.29] MICHAEL LEBOR: And we're happy to-- what's that movie-- Wyatt Earp, "I'm your huckleberry?" We'll be your huckleberry. Listen, it's good to be part of the Epic family, too. But if you want another independent--

[00:54:16.51] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, 100% No, we're building a full interface, so it allows other systems to connect into it and embed this stuff in your system. So the big one is the communication. I've talked to so many agencies and big agencies, and what do they really want, and what will get them to write more business with these carriers?

[00:54:33.53] And just having that open line of communication that's in a system, like pizza tracker-- it's an underwriting. It's been submitted, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, underwriter back and forth.

[00:54:42.67] MICHAEL LEBOR: And the underwriter back and forth, the underwriter back and forth. Yeah.

[00:54:45.43] REID HOLZWORTH: So if Mary is out of town for whatever reason or out of the office, Jeff can step in and, OK, I know exactly where this is. Everything's there, start to track it, audit it. There's a lot of cool stuff.

[00:54:56.35] MICHAEL LEBOR: And back to our model, with the hub and spoke-- because you go to 100 carriers. They have hundreds vendors and 100 different underwriting workbenches.

[00:55:04.89] REID HOLZWORTH: Exactly.

[00:55:05.39] MICHAEL LEBOR: And so it has to be this standard that we can take that communication. The communication flows through us, you, in this one data standard, because one of the things that we do-- we have this thing. We call it out web link? What do we call it?

[00:55:22.47] PETER GERMANOV: Quote link.

[00:55:23.38] MICHAEL LEBOR: Our quote link. There's data that's missing. What do I need to do now? I need to pick up the phone, go call the guy. No. We're sending out a link. Click this. Here are the six things that are dynamic, bespoke to you, the insured, that we're missing in order to get you your quote. Part of that process. The underwriting workbench comes in. I'm missing the six pieces of data, send it to us, because the agent doesn't want the carrier now contacting the insurer for the missing info. So how do we pick up--

[00:55:54.18] REID HOLZWORTH: That's exactly it.

[00:55:54.86] MICHAEL LEBOR: --what you put down. We're in.

[00:55:58.46] PETER GERMANOV: The one thing that I like what you guys have done and I want to see more of it is the tool that standardizes the supplemental questions from six different carriers into-- they all have 20 questions each but 80% overlap. But it's stated somewhat differently. But it's the same question, essentially. So agents hate that because it's--

[00:56:23.59] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, yeah, it's a huge pain in the ass.

[00:56:24.51] PETER GERMANOV: It's 20, 30 minutes--

[00:56:25.51] MICHAEL LEBOR: Someone's got to open source that. And just--

[00:56:27.33] [INTERPOSING VOICES]

[00:56:28.37] REID HOLZWORTH: That's what IDP is.

[00:56:29.45] MICHAEL LEBOR: Yeah, that's what IDP is.

[00:56:31.15] REID HOLZWORTH: Honestly, it's funny. I'm going to rant a little bit on this. I don't know why other people don't use IDP. Like, why go build all that shit yourself? It doesn't make sense. And we give it away. Like, we don't care. It's not like a revenue opportunity for us in that way. And so I don't know. But it is doing that. I mean, it just saves so much work, overall.

[00:56:48.81] So a couple questions. Both of you can answer each one, whatever. If you could fix anything in the insurance industry today, what would it be?

[00:56:57.92] MICHAEL LEBOR: You go first.

[00:56:59.13] PETER GERMANOV: I think we talked about that. It's more carriers to adopt-- go to Ivans and basically make their data available that way. So yeah, automations can flow into any management system, so people don't have to type.

[00:57:14.85] REID HOLZWORTH: Just connectivity. Data connectivity.

[00:57:16.87] PETER GERMANOV: It's exactly what it is. I would also love to see-- it took a long time for XML to become the standard from an L3, the difficulty of working-- JSON-- I know it's not that much different than XML, but there is a difference. And that's the modern way of communicating between systems. So maybe putting a JSON layer on top of the XML would be good. Those are my wishes, really.

[00:57:44.29] MICHAEL LEBOR: The answer, from my perspective, is something that we're working on, is connecting the dots, taking those 14 systems and giving the agents a way to not have to leave those 14 systems, but to have one seamless platform. So you're asking the question. I think we're putting our money where our mouth is. That's the problem that we want to fix, and I think we're fixing it.

[00:58:09.41] REID HOLZWORTH: If you could give any advice to entrepreneurs getting into the insurance technology space, what would you say?

[00:58:16.69] MICHAEL LEBOR: So it's interesting-- and I remember being one of these guys, so it's like-- my son's yearbook quote was, "A minute depends on which side of the bathroom door you're sitting on." Everything is relative. And I remember being one of those digital guys that didn't know jack shit about insurance and making all these suggestions. And there is this massive need to know the industry. It's just one of those things, like, you need to know how agents work, and you need to know how carriers work.

[00:58:47.06] So I have two sons that are of working age, and I'm advising them strongly to go into this business. I love this business. This is going to come out awful, but I know a lot of not smart people that own boats. There's a lot of money-- you watch Arrested Development?

[00:59:06.02] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah.

[00:59:06.16] MICHAEL LEBOR: There's money in the banana stand. There's money in owning an agency. It's an amazing business. And I think besides prostitution, it's the longest standing industry. And it's been around for a long time. There's a reason why there's a lot of Super Bowl commercials for insurance companies, a lot of money here.

[00:59:23.57] But now is this amazing time. We're having this renaissance of being able to leverage technology. And if you could leverage technology to be part of this business of risk and transference of risk, I highly recommend it. But just because you sold your company for $100 million to whatever high-tech company it was, not in the insurance industry--

[00:59:48.45] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah. It doesn't make--

[00:59:49.23] MICHAEL LEBOR: --it doesn't make you smart. It a great equalizer here.

[00:59:53.51] PETER GERMANOV: I second that. You really need to do something that you are an expert in. You have to understand the space. My second advice-- and that would probably be my first advice-- would be, basically, the one mistake we all-- nobody cares about your tech. Nobody cares how sexy it is. Ask people what they want. Solve a problem that--

[01:00:13.51] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, I like that.

[01:00:14.19] PETER GERMANOV: --people-- something simple that you can solve for the person, because people-- engineers-- they go in. They get funded. They go for the sexiest technology, and nobody asked for it. Nobody cares. So nobody cares about your tech. Solve the real problem.

[01:00:28.95] REID HOLZWORTH: So true. So many companies-- even now, you see them-- they're just like, we have the-- [GIBBERISH]. But I don't need all that.

[01:00:38.03] PETER GERMANOV: Listen, I do it daily. We design some new feature, and then I find out that people don't really want it to work that way. So we call somebody, and they say, no, just do it this way. We'll use it. OK, it makes sense.

[01:00:53.31] REID HOLZWORTH: All right, a couple completely off-topic questions, and then we'll wrap it up. If you had unlimited time, what would you do?

[01:01:05.19] MICHAEL LEBOR: Unlimited time.

[01:01:06.61] PETER GERMANOV: My turn. We take turns. I use the cliche I love traveling. And being busy and so forth has literally limited my ability to travel, so that would be one thing. But something more interesting, even-- I moved from New York City to Utah because I love the desert. You ever been to Red Rock Desert?

[01:01:27.72] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, yeah.

[01:01:28.32] PETER GERMANOV: And spend days by yourself. You can camp out there. We never see another soul. You don't hear planes. I mean, it's amazing. So if I had unlimited time, I'd probably spend a lot more days in the desert, maybe even by myself, yeah thinking about-- away from technology, away from screens.

[01:01:49.16] MICHAEL LEBOR: Away from me.

[01:01:50.30] PETER GERMANOV: Yeah, I didn't want to say anything.

[01:01:54.66] MICHAEL LEBOR: It's true. It's true.

[01:01:56.04] PETER GERMANOV: So those are my two things that I long for. I always wish I did more of those two things.

[01:02:00.64] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah. How about you, Michael?

[01:02:02.42] MICHAEL LEBOR: I'm very two-dimensional, and you break it up into two buckets. I love my job. I love what I do. Spend a lot of time working on technology. I'm fascinated by AI. I have so many little things I want to do. I'm obsessed with my grandkids. I got two young girls. I got two young grandkids, and I can't-- I can't get enough of them.

[01:02:23.89] And I just-- I love learning. I have so many different hobbies and interests, and I get into things, and I'll soak them up, and then I'll spit them out, and I'll never do it or touch it again. I just want to keep learning.

[01:02:36.01] PETER GERMANOV: I always have a stack of books this big he gives me, like EOS this and KPIs this. And I'd love to read them. So someday when I go in the desert, I'll bring a big stack.

[01:02:48.69] MICHAEL LEBOR: He wants to buy a donkey farm. That's his exit plan.

[01:02:50.91] PETER GERMANOV: Actually, yes.

[01:02:51.64] MICHAEL LEBOR: He wants to have a donkey farm in Puerto Rico.

[01:02:54.21] REID HOLZWORTH: A what?

[01:02:54.87] PETER GERMANOV: Not Puerto Rico, necessarily.

[01:02:57.01] MICHAEL LEBOR: He wants a donkey farm.

[01:02:58.93] PETER GERMANOV: They're amazing animals. You like dogs?

[01:03:01.33] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah.

[01:03:02.09] PETER GERMANOV: These are like dogs on-- much better than dogs. They're intelligent. They're more loyal. They're amazing animals. Someday.

[01:03:11.67] MICHAEL LEBOR: I do not want to have a donkey farm. That's not on my bucket list.

[01:03:17.73] REID HOLZWORTH: I could see it.

[01:03:18.45] PETER GERMANOV: In Wisconsin. You should get a couple.

[01:03:19.93] REID HOLZWORTH: I know. I got some land. I know I've been thinking about. I'll get a couple of donkeys.

[01:03:22.85] PETER GERMANOV: If you coyotes or something, they will never have any problem with securing the property.

[01:03:27.79] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I've got big dogs. They run those coyotes off.

[01:03:31.39] MICHAEL LEBOR: Watch. We're going to find out that donkeys are great at cleaning ponds.

[01:03:35.97] REID HOLZWORTH: ChatGPT.

[01:03:36.73] MICHAEL LEBOR: Yes.

[01:03:39.05] PETER GERMANOV: You have dogs.

[01:03:39.97] REID HOLZWORTH: I do.

[01:03:40.47] PETER GERMANOV: What kind?

[01:03:41.21] REID HOLZWORTH: Cane Corsos.

[01:03:42.09] PETER GERMANOV: Really.

[01:03:42.44] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah.

[01:03:43.13] PETER GERMANOV: I love those dogs. Actually, on my donkey farm, that's the front. I'm going to get two Kangals.

[01:03:48.57] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, yeah. No, those people are badass.

[01:03:50.81] PETER GERMANOV: I grew up in that part of the world. Unreal dogs. But Cane Corso's probably my second.

[01:03:56.21] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, they're beautiful dogs. I used to have coyotes. They'll hear them. They crush them. Especially my older one, she literally attacks them. Cane Corsos are gnarly. Yeah.

[01:04:08.64] PETER GERMANOV: I don't know if you noticed, but with all these sheepdogs-- [INAUDIBLE] protecting dogs, it is the bitches that actually kill who they kill. I don't know if you know that.

[01:04:18.80] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, really.

[01:04:19.42] PETER GERMANOV: The males corral them, but it's usually the female--

[01:04:22.23] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, I didn't know that. That's interesting. Yeah, because I have a male and a female. And the male-- he's the muscle. He-- [GROWLS] but she's the one that's getting after it. It's interesting. Yeah. All right. Last--

[01:04:35.72] PETER GERMANOV: What about you? I want to hear, what would you do with unlimited time?

[01:04:38.24] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, man. What would I do with unlimited time? I would spend a lot more time in the water. I'd spend a lot more time in nature. I've been thinking about it. I'd love to be in a place where I'm completely disconnected from the internet, period.

[01:04:52.54] PETER GERMANOV: Let's go.

[01:04:53.28] REID HOLZWORTH: You know what I'm saying? Like it just doesn't exist. It's not part of my life. You know what I mean? No email, no nothing. Nothing. So I go home, and I pick up my hand, and I call people.

[01:05:04.91] MICHAEL LEBOR: So we talk about it all the time, and he's tired of hearing it. But I'm a Sabbath observer. I'm an observant Jewish fellow, and I'm pretty strict about Sabbath. Every seventh day-- every Friday night at sundown, I'm off the grid. I turn off my phone. And it's not seven days a week, but it's-- once every seven days, I get to recharge. I turn it off. I read a book. No internet, no connectivity, no email, no web, no TikTok, unfortunately. But-- yeah, it's a problem of mine.

[01:05:34.49] PETER GERMANOV: Problem is, he tried to get me to do the same thing, just observing that one thing. But Arsenal plays on Saturdays, usually, so there's no way.

[01:05:43.33] MICHAEL LEBOR: And so I just said no email. You could watch Arsenal. Just no email.

[01:05:46.81] REID HOLZWORTH: You can watch TV?

[01:05:47.54] MICHAEL LEBOR: No, no TV. No TV.

[01:05:49.11] PETER GERMANOV: Oh, come on. I'm going to watch Arsenal. I'm not [INAUDIBLE].

[01:05:51.37] MICHAEL LEBOR: So again, I'm not telling you to convert to Judaism. Just pick up the getting off the grid once a week. I remember talking to a woman who I was very close with, and she said, I'm going on a two-week escape, and I'm unplugged, and I recharge. We all go on vacation. Three days later, it's over. But every seven days, you--

[01:06:09.79] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, I like that.

[01:06:12.43] PETER GERMANOV: And people think it's a drag. You can't watch Saturday morning cartoons. It's the greatest thing in the world. It's a forced mental health-- it's amazing.

[01:06:20.55] REID HOLZWORTH: 100%. All right, last question. What's your drink of choice?

[01:06:24.43] PETER GERMANOV: Ooh. [SIGHS] I'm a wine guy.

[01:06:28.77] REID HOLZWORTH: Hmm. I could see it.

[01:06:30.55] PETER GERMANOV: Specifically, I like Bordeaux. I just grew up with-- yeah, I'm not-- I haven't figured out the California wine landscape. It's too many. But give me a good Bordeaux, and it's a celebration.

[01:06:41.09] REID HOLZWORTH: Nice.

[01:06:42.87] MICHAEL LEBOR: What's my drink of choice?

[01:06:45.23] PETER GERMANOV: Coke, yeah?

[01:06:46.47] MICHAEL LEBOR: So I stopped drinking a couple years ago. I lost my privileges. I went streaking in the quad too many times. So when we go out, he's like, why are not drinking?

[01:06:56.89] PETER GERMANOV: He's the most boring date.

[01:06:57.83] MICHAEL LEBOR: I am.

[01:06:58.67] PETER GERMANOV: He does not drink. He does not eat because he is kosher. And there's no-- I don't go--

[01:07:03.12] MICHAEL LEBOR: So tonight, we're going to go to a kosher restaurant, or tomorrow, maybe. He's like, do you not to eat? I go to these guys-- we go to these-- best hamburger in the world, five years in a row, or the best pad Thai ever. And I'm sitting there.

[01:07:16.88] PETER GERMANOV: His willpower, sitting there with five of us, drinking and eating-- I would not be able to last a day in that environment. My favorite drink used to be Coke Zero, not Diet Coke. I used to have five, six a day. Then my wife told me, probably not the best thing. She showed me some research, so.

[01:07:35.58] REID HOLZWORTH: You do Diet Coke, regular Coke?

[01:07:37.70] MICHAEL LEBOR: Diet Coke with lime. It's like Debbie Downer, party-pooper. Guinness 0.0 is pretty amazing. They do a great job. So my drink of choice for years was-- we called it the Jeff. It was Ketel One and Diet Mountain Dew.

[01:07:53.02] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, wow.

[01:07:53.60] MICHAEL LEBOR: Yeah, it was amazing. I used to travel with-- I would go through security, and I would buy Diet Mountain Dew, because they don't sell it everywhere, especially as you went overseas.

[01:08:01.66] REID HOLZWORTH: [LAUGHS] You bring it to the bar?

[01:08:03.37] MICHAEL LEBOR: I did. I did. I used to go to the Westin all the time. They would keep it for me there.

[01:08:08.83] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, that's funny. That's a thing.

[01:08:10.39] MICHAEL LEBOR: Yeah, I had a slushie machine making them. I was hardcore into Ketel One, Diet Mountain Dew. But what's interesting is I can keep booze in my house. I stopped drinking. I turned it off. I can't drink Diet Mountain Dew.

[01:08:22.79] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, interesting.

[01:08:23.79] MICHAEL LEBOR: That's a trigger for me.

[01:08:24.67] REID HOLZWORTH: Really.

[01:08:25.25] MICHAEL LEBOR: I have not had Diet Mountain Dew since I stopped drinking.

[01:08:28.23] REID HOLZWORTH: Oh, interesting.

[01:08:28.61] MICHAEL LEBOR: Yeah, I miss it. There's a reason why alcohol's a $9-trillion-a-year industry. It's awesome. But--

[01:08:34.17] PETER GERMANOV: What about you. What's your--

[01:08:36.01] REID HOLZWORTH: Well, it like, goes in ebbs and flows. Right now, I'm into margaritas. I love margaritas, so I drink a lot of margaritas. So right now, my drink of choice is margarita. Dive bar-- shit dive bars-- I'll do Jack and Coke with a lime, because who can screw that up?

[01:08:54.17] MICHAEL LEBOR: And you don't want a Margarita there.

[01:08:55.65] REID HOLZWORTH: Yeah, I think-- it's not really that good, and whatever. But I'll drink whatever. But really, always, one of my favorites is just a Hendrix dirty Martini, regular olive.

[01:09:06.71] PETER GERMANOV: I got to try that.

[01:09:08.41] REID HOLZWORTH: I love a good--

[01:09:08.99] MICHAEL LEBOR: Where's the best margarita you've ever had?

[01:09:11.81] REID HOLZWORTH: [SIGHS] I cannot answer that question.

[01:09:14.55] PETER GERMANOV: He does not remember, by definition.

[01:09:16.79] REID HOLZWORTH: I do not remember.

[01:09:17.41] MICHAEL LEBOR: That's by definition. If it was that good, you can't remember it.

[01:09:19.83] REID HOLZWORTH: I would have to really think about that. I would have to really think about that. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know.

[01:09:25.17] PETER GERMANOV: If it was that good--

[01:09:26.11] REID HOLZWORTH: They were all good.

[01:09:26.87] [INTERPOSING VOICES]

[01:09:27.25] REID HOLZWORTH: It's like which kid is your favorite, you know?

[01:09:30.09] MICHAEL LEBOR: But we all know we have one. We're not going to admit it, but we all know we have one.

[01:09:34.87] REID HOLZWORTH: No, I'm not going to say that, but yeah, you're kind of right. Well, this was awesome, guys. Thank you for doing this. This was really good. It's a lot of fun.

[01:09:42.95] MICHAEL LEBOR: Likewise, bro.