BTC237: Bitcoin & the Insurance Industry w/ Garrett Johnston (Bitcoin Podcast)
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You're listening to TIP. Hey, everyone. Welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast. On this week's show, I have Garrett Johnston joining me to talk about one of the most overlooked corners of Bitcoin's adoption, and that's the insurance industry. Garrett has worked in some of the largest insurance brokerages in the world and brings a unique perspective on why Bitcoin isn't just a speculative asset.

but a risk management tool the entire industry needs to understand. We talk about solvency rules, admitted versus non-admitted assets, why most digital asset policies are still missing the mark, and how Bitcoin could play a central role in transforming legacy balance sheets. All right. So with all that said, let's jump right into the interview with Mr. Gaird Johnston. Gaird Johnston

Celebrating 10 years, you are listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pysh.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the show. I'm here with Garrett. Man, I'm excited to have this conversation because I get to go back into some of my Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett roots as we're covering some of this. So welcome to the show, Garrett. Great to be here, Preston. Hey, so you're in insurance. And for me, when I'm looking at Bitcoin and I'm looking at the entire insurance industry, I've been holding my head like this for years, for a very long time, because I

I can see how much capital is just sitting in the wings. And because of how the bond market has performed for four decades, I just think so many people in insurance have just been lulled to sleep and they're totally missing this massive future decade, maybe multi-decade trend that they really got to wake up and understand in order to protect themselves, protect the people that they're insuring. And it, of course, comes back to Bitcoin.

and there's nobody better to have this conversation than you. So give people a background on yourself, Garrett, and why you're the right guy to have this conversation. Garrett Johnston : Yeah. So Garrett Johnston, I am basically a 25-year insurance guy. I started out really on the underwriting side. So in the commercial insurance world, you have two buckets. You have the insurance carriers, so that came from the Lloyds of London to the AIGs of the world. You have

you have insurance brokers who kind of similar to getting your mortgage, a loan broker goes out and shops and structures the deal for you. And those brokers interact with the clients. So I started out really as a traditional financial institutions underwriter at one of the large US carriers, ended up running one of the offices on the West Coast for them and their FI practice. And then recently, I joined a firm called Marsh, which Marsh is the largest insurance broker globally. I kind of

for people who are not familiar with insurance, think of them as like the BlackRock of the insurance broker world. Pretty much every Fortune 1000 company, there's a relationship we have with them. So the spread and the reach that I get to have in my position is very broad brushed and very wide cast net. From a personal standpoint, I was a traditional insurance guy, did that personally, really went down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, 2019, 2020 COVID really got me that

conviction, had my kind of moment of truth from like, maybe I should get out of insurance once that Bitcoin conviction really hit in. And I wrestled with that for a little bit and then ultimately decided at the end of the day, Bitcoin needs all of us with our various backgrounds, right? So there's a number of people out there on the podcast circuit with great backgrounds that are not Bitcoin native that are

doing what they have brought in their experience. So that's really where I settled out. I'm a father too. So when I think of like the long-term game, your time preference changes as you get into Bitcoin, I can do a lot more for Bitcoin as an industry.

staying in my very kind of traditional fiat minded ecosystem of insurance. But what can I do to be a bridge builder, a developer? And that was in 2020. And to your point, insurance is notoriously slow. It's notoriously careful because they do ultimately need to be careful because they are the backstop. I first started in the industry in 1999. So my first market event was the dot com

bust, build up and bust. So I would say the crypto winter we went through a few years back to me felt very similar leading up to and coming down of the dot-com bust. And then obviously, recently, everything started to shift, right? So administrative headwinds, prior administration to administrative tailwinds.

And now the floodgates are kind of opening or the resistance dominoes are all falling apart. So I really play at that intersection between there are all these builders out there that as they scale are going to need to start thinking a little bit more corporately and risks get bigger, the targets on their back get bigger.

how do you use insurance as part of your risk matrix? Because at the end of the day, insurance is just a tool. It's not a catch-all solution. I tell most clients that are scaling, risk is coming at you whether you insured or not. It's not a function of you can't make risk go away. You can just choose how to deal with this. You can accept it on your own balance sheet. You can offload it to a third party's balance sheet. That in essence is what insurance is. In

And that's kind of where I sit today. So kind of that intersection within a very, very large corporation that does insurance. We also have sister companies that are some of the largest investment consultants to pension funds and sovereign wealth funds. So there's a very interesting orange pilling kind of dynamic there.

within that avenue. And then we have a consulting firm that is essentially like a McKinsey style, less about insurance, more about corporate strategy. So that's where I sit today. Preston Pysh : That's perfect. What I want to do for the audience is just kind of help them understand why Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway, they were, Geico was their company. When you look at the engine of Berkshire and how they were able to just amass so much by

buying power through the decades. At the heart of that was this idea of investing the float of the insurance company. And when you look at Geico and you look at the size of this quote unquote float, so like for people listening, what is the float? These are unearned premiums. So when you take out an insurance policy and you say, I need a thousand dollar policy for X, Y, and Z, you put that thousand dollars on deposit and

And Warren would take this money inside of Geico and he would invest this. And you can invest it in very specific things that aren't super risky. But based on the environmental setup, the US treasury market being sky high with yields and those yields kept going down for years, he could take that. He could take those premiums. He could actually buy long dated US bonds because they fit a very specific terminology that was quote unquote safe.

and it was through this period of time leading up to COVID, you can make a ton of money with just the changing interest rates with owning long-dated US treasuries through their bonds through this period of time. And you do this for 40 years and interest rates keep going down, you can see how he's taking all this capital that's set aside for potential payouts, and he's just making a ton of money on the change in the market price of those bonds. So,

So that was the environment, that was the flywheel or the main engine of Berkshire Hathaway for all these years. And now all of a sudden, things have changed. The math is a little bit different. The environmental setup is, and anybody who wants to question this, they can go look at Silicon Valley Bank and they were sitting on a bunch of long dated bonds and they blew up. And the reason why is because interest rates are coming up.

When you're sitting on bonds with a lot of duration, guess what? The price goes down and those are major impacts. So now if you're an insurance company, now you understand why this conversation that we're about to have is so vital for people in the insurance industry to fully grasp because if interest rates are on a trend change, a multi-decade trend change...

And you're sitting on long duration debt like you have for 40 years straight because you made a bunch of money doing that with all this float. Maybe...

there's an issue. Maybe we have to rethink the quote unquote risk of sitting on that type of asset. So Garrett, did I simplify that or explain it in a way that you think is appropriately characterized there? What am I missing? Yeah, I'll add some color around it to put it more kind of in the insurance camp. So again, to your point, insurance in many ways is just all of us from an auto insurance perspective, we're paying in our premiums each month. But in

but none of us are collecting claims each month. So you're putting money in, you have to hold on to it, hopefully invest it, make some kind of return for those payouts down the road. So for all of kind of the macro people in Bitcoin who definitely tend to be macro, but

focus. Duration exists within portfolios of insurance capital. Depending on the product you have, the duration changes. So very rough frame out, if we just keep auto insurance as a good example, the physical damage, so like a fender bender, that's short duration, right? As soon as I rear-end Preston on the freeway, we know that we got to go get our car fixed if it's a fixed cost.

But if I injure Preston's neck and it may result in back surgery 10 years down the road, that would be the longer duration

piece of it. There's a whole spectrum of duration, right? There's property insurance, there's reinsurance, which reinsures the insurers, there's cat bonds. So there's stuff where the duration is, carriers need to keep pretty much cash-like and be ready to pay. And then there's super long duration, like life insurance is a perfect example. So like some of the firms that are doing Bitcoin denominated life insurance, they're using that duration aspect

and coupling it with Bitcoin. So back to how the insurance community, in my chair, I'm constantly having discussions with clients and carriers on this intersection of inflation and risk. And so you have, we take casualty heavy, so like automobile liability, workers comp stuff where the duration is usually four plus years long because

between when the event occurs and sometimes the payout develops on the backend. So that's kind of your float, that's your duration. So the halving cycle. Exactly. So very oversimplifying it, but if you're investing mostly in bonds, let's just call it a 4% yield and inflation, let's just say is running at seven, you're melting away 3%.

per year. The other dynamic that carriers also have to layer over that is this term they refer to as social inflation. And that is this concept that jury verdicts are getting more and more dislocated from reality. So the art of most insurance companies is they have to take the million dollars they get in from various people's premium and hope that there's enough of that million dollars with inflation, et cetera, that in five years' time, they've

earned a return up to say 110 million, a payout dollar equivalent purchasing power of those claims.

These runaway jury verdicts have been a problem for five plus, 10 plus years in the system where an actuary inside an insurance company, that's the person who has to map out dollars today versus payouts tomorrow. And how do you bridge that divide of enough money in the bank to pay the claims? Those people really struggle with, well, how do you do that when you pencil out a back injury claim at a million dollars if it goes to jury trial, but the jury rewards 150 million?

And that is the reality that these insurers live in. So the severity within the duration is what the social inflation piece is. Now carriers have to deal with, let's just call it 7% top-line nominal inflation plus social inflation. So they really got to perform, call it 15% year-over-year returns to even keep up with that. If they don't, then their only choice is they pass the premiums down to the clients.

So, it's all connected from a standpoint of insurance rates go up in many, many ways driven by top line nominal inflation, but then the social inflation aspect

around it as well. Most of these companies are in cash and cash-like equivalents, so treasuries and short-term securities. They need Bitcoin. At the end of the day, they need Bitcoin. When you look at some of those charts of they need to make sure they have cash on hand to pay claims, but they've got to create that yield to keep pace with just this melting ice cube of inflation and social inflation.

If you go to a lot of companies, they might have a 10% allocation. It's mostly cash and treasuries, but they might have a 10% allocation to say alternative risks. That could be hedge funds, private equity.

reach, et cetera. Preston Pysh : Garrett, before you go forward, I think it's really important to just pause because somebody that hears you say they need Bitcoin, they might not necessarily be able to really piece together why you're saying that at that moment. I suspect, and I want you to say whether I'm on target here, but when you're looking at the growth rate of your expenses, of what you're paying out,

and the rate of that. And then you're looking at the printing that's happening with the M2 growth rate. And then you're looking at where you guys can put capital and what the return profile is across the board. It's all underneath of the growth rate of your expenses that you guys are realizing and seeing, and also just the money printing that you're seeing. And so you're saying there's nowhere we can take these premiums.

without blowing out our prices and losing all of our customers to competitors that aren't adjusting their prices higher. And that's a whole nother important talking point in insurance is if you keep your rates low, you're going to retain customers, but they don't realize that the real risk is that the premiums might not be there for the cost of the claims into the future because they're not going to be realized for call it five years or more.

So this is a major issue that you're looking at from a systemic standpoint across the board for the entire industry. And you're saying, I'm looking at these rates of expenses and it's far exceeding anything we can take the capital and plug it into that's going to at least sustain or grow with that expense blowout. Is that properly characterized?

Yes. Yeah. And I'll frame it another way. It's not uncommon for a large client that we're going into renewal, and renewals are usually 12-month policies, so each year you're having this discussion. If you assume that their exposure is completely static, oftentimes the carriers are like, well, we're starting at plus 5%, plus 10% rate increase just to account for social inflation and top-line inflation. Forget your risk profile, forget losses. This is just

the starting point. Then have you had losses? Have you not had losses? We can adjust from there, but that's where the inflation dynamic is really problematic. And this social risk that you're talking about is not like a linear step. It's accelerating, I'm assuming, as far as the cost going up? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, for the most part, it is super lumpy, right? And

It's jurisdictional, right? So certain states, there's a reason for anybody that's moved across state lines, right? That oftentimes your homeowners and your auto insurance, even though you as a driver have not changed, change quite a bit, right? So you've got jurisdictional risks. So there are maybe five states out there that are kind of the outliers of if you go to a jury trial in those states and you're an insurance carrier, chances of you getting it lit up with a pretty large settlement.

is hot. And others are a little more friendly that way. So they have to bake that all into the pie. And at the end of the day, they're not going to get there with treasuries. They're not going to get there with bonds. They've got to kind of juice those returns, but they're in a catch-22 because the stock and trade of any insurance company is solvency. We're there for the long run. We're boring by design so that we are there when

stuff goes bad. And that's where, again, I think there's this massive learning gap between the Bitcoin community and the insurance community, and where a Bitcoin treasury strategy can make a material difference in particularly the longer your duration, the better. And as we all know in Bitcoin space over a rolling four-year period, nothing outperforms Bitcoin.

I'll say this directionally, you might have tighter numbers, Preston, but 98% cash, 2% Bitcoin over duration outperforms the S&P. That might be a little bit plus or minus a percentage, but... It's close. Yeah. It's close. In the past four years, I think it's underperformed slightly, but it's close. It's close.

And I think the thing that's really alarming to somebody that's never heard that before, I'm just going to restate it. 2% Bitcoin, 98% cash, and you're in the ballpark of S&P 500 performance over any four-year holding period. And go run the numbers. Again, in the last four years, it's slightly underperformed that with 2% Bitcoin and 98% cash, but you're close.

And I guess this gets to your point of, I think what you're saying is you don't need a lot of Bitcoin sitting there in the float or even, I don't even think you're necessarily saying that it has to be the float. It could just be the retained earnings of earned premiums to

to make the company healthy enough in the long term that they have some type of exposure to Bitcoin. I think that's probably a much more conservative way to frame it. But I'm curious, do you think it should actually be in the float or is this retained earnings that we're talking about? Honestly, I think it should be in both. When I think about it, where the insurance community needs to have kind of the dot connecting on where Bitcoin plays in is this kind of, it's a little dated, but it's still what I run into all the time is Bitcoin's too volatile. Right.

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All right, back to the show. Can I just say, the irony of that statement in insurance for me is just beyond hilarious because you talk about how volatile and lumpy events are happening for somebody. And you would think that this would just be so obvious to anybody in insurance that it managed risk by position size.

The truth of it is, I think the reality is, and I find this on all sorts of large institutional clients, not necessarily insurance company, not necessarily Bitcoin, but they've been doing it for 30 years the same way. And so you get this kind of ossification of your mental model, right? And you're unwilling to, and you hear crypto.

And you still have maybe FTX dose in the background telling you that this is rat poison, etc. And that's where like for me, I think it's just, you just need to put those aside and just look at the math. And what I always tell people like this is not Wall Street math. This is like second grade numerator, denominator math.

And when you look at it and just let the math do the talking, as you well know, it is beyond compelling. Then there's all these wrinkles and layers to the information divide. So if you're an insurance company and you're already, let's say, 95% treasuries and long-dated bonds, and maybe you try to juice those returns with, let's just say, private equity. Well, what are the average terms of a private equity, right? It's usually like it's

A minimum four-year lockup. Super illiquid. There's all sorts of fees. It's very volatile, but it's also very, very illiquid. And then that gets me over to the regulatory realities of where insurance and you sit there and you're like, "Okay, we can do better as an industry if we think through the map." So, again, if you're back to the regulators, the regulators rightly so are...

their ultimate goal from an insurance regulatory standpoint is to make sure we have sound, safe, stable and liquid insurance companies because they're protecting the public good. We should all support that. That's a good thing. We should lean into that. But then again, back to that second grade math, when you look at some of the definitions, those will get into a little bit of accounting

into the weeds, but most public companies are on generally accepted accounting principles of GAAP. That's not how the insurance companies work. Insurance companies are on a statutory financial basis, which means basically the NAIC, which is a government entity, they determine what statutory financial rules. They count as the gap of the insurance world. And what's interesting in there is from a solvency calculation standpoint, you have admitted and non-admitted assets.

So I'm oversimplifying it for ease, but in its core, the definition of an admitted asset is what is used to calculate your solvency ratio, which gives you, that is your stock and trade, your credit rating with the state insurance commissioners and insurance is regulated at the state level, not the federal levels.

There's another whack-a-mole discussion within that. But again, back to private equity and Bitcoin being too risky, Google the definition of what is an admitted asset from a statutory capital surplus standpoint. It needs to be not volatile. It needs to be highly liquid. It needs to be of a certain size. Those are kind of the three pillars. So the irony, again, with Bitcoin is, so you're telling me as a current regulatory framework that

that you can buy 10% allocation into XYZ private equity firm, lock your cash up illiquid for four plus years, right? And you put other stuff on treasuries, which again is the, we all know the risk-free rate, but

but you have counterparty. It's not risk-free, but they're fine with that. But if you were to take that same 95% cash, 5% Bitcoin, Bitcoin's considered a non-admitted asset currently. So that's one thing from a regulatory, if I had my regulatory wand in this space, I would ask

at the regulatory level that we need to incorporate digital assets within the framework of admitted, non-admitted assets. And this is what the NAIC you're saying? NAIC determines the rules on the definition, but then each state insurance commissioner actually determines what the carriers can do. And they're the ones that kind of review solvency. So again, like a 24/7 asset that is two

$2 trillion in liquidity that you can panic sell on a Friday night or Saturday morning, as Taylor likes to say, you cannot do that with private equity, right? The liquidity and volatility, Bitcoin is volatile, right? On itself, denominated in dollars. But when you bake it into the pie, and you've done some good work on this too, you show like the Sharpe ratios improve, the actual volatility of a portfolio, not 100% Bitcoin, but just doing a

single-digit to low double-digit allocation actually improves safety and soundness at the balance sheet level. And that is just completely lost on the insurance community right now. There's a handful of markets outside the US that, whether it's London, whether it's Bermuda, but you're 98% of the insurance community, Bitcoin's too volatile. And that's a message I want to work on over the next several years.

Garrett, this is the thing that I would think would just really blow anybody's mind in the insurance industry is looking at MicroStrategy as an example. He started doing a Bitcoin strategy in 2020. Here we are five years later. He's outperformed NVIDIA with his underlying common stocks performance. But this is what really blows the mind. He had about 500 million of investable marketable securities. He was saying it was just cash, which was probably just when US Treasuries...

but he took that 500 million. And today, I think it's close to 55 billion in five years. And here's the real point that I think is lost, okay? Twofold. First,

The company's probably only made $300 to $400 million in that timeframe. So help me understand how you go from a company that has a liquid treasury on the balance sheet of $500 million to $55 billion, and you only made $400 million throughout that period of time. That's the first point. The second point that I would say is it's all liquid. This $55 billion isn't like it's locked up in commercial real estate. This is...

super liquid, he could sell it Saturday morning anytime he wants and super high quantities of volume of what he could sell on the snap of a finger to come up with, "Oh, I need a billion? Oh, here, I can get that on a Saturday morning," kind of thing, which is crazy. And I just think that's lost, completely lost on the market as to what that means.

The third thing I would say is the financial health. So somebody would be looking at this and be like, "Oh yeah, well he's super levered and his company's health has deteriorated because he did all this." But here's the thing you really need to look into. His financial health ratios, debt to equity, all of these things, I'm pretty sure they've all improved. Coverage ratio, you name it. Just come up with whatever financial health ratio you want to look at.

coverage ratio, acid tests, like all of it. And go look at his balance sheet. And I think if you look at 2020 to 2025, it's improved on every one of these metrics. So you have to ask yourself, if you're in insurance and you're all about reducing risk, adding liquidity, growing your retained earnings so that you can prepare for a rainy day, you would think that this would be just wrecking people's worlds. Because what I just described

should make no sense to anybody, which is your signal to dig deeper and try to understand what in the world is happening over there. Part of what I love about when you plug Bitcoin into just about anything, it's typically often a win-win.

Usually you don't find a lot of losers in the bargain of Bitcoin. So you take- Let's go back to auto. That's just it. I can't name any, right? To your point, I can't name any lose-win scenarios. And just to kind of demonstrate your point, people would be like, oh, well, let's look at his convertible debt holders. They probably got ripped off. Or let's look at his preferred stock holders. They're probably getting ripped off. And the

And the answer is no. They're the best performing convertible debt issuance since he's done them. It's the best preferred stock issuance as far as yield to the health ratios of the business, because that's how you have to look at it, that you can find on the market. And so to your point, it's a win-win for everybody participating on both sides of it.

So I'm sorry to interrupt you, but it's such an important point. I think part of what's interesting to watch the MicroStrategy story from an insurance capital perspective is things like the convertibles and the preferred stock, because back to that admitted, not admitted. If you're an insurance company today holding spot Bitcoin, you can technically do it, but it's going to be considered a not admitted asset.

you're gonna have to post additional collateral. So like it's economically not viable, but you can buy a convertible bond

and that's allowed, right? You could even buy MSTR if you wanted to. And again, Saylor's out there saying his goal is MSTR should be a 1.5x Bitcoin. So he's trying to 1.5x the volatility of spot Bitcoin. Spot Bitcoin should be allowed in my mind into the insurance capital structure. One, because forget doing Bitcoin denominated insurance, because we'll get to that in a second. If

If you're just a traditional fund manager or you're managing the portfolio risk of these insurance companies, and all you care about is trying to outpace inflation and these loss development factors, which is the actuarial kind of metric you plug in of a dollar today needs to be $1.25, $1.50, depending on the duration, how do you get there? You're slipping away just being in treasury. So Coin just gives you that, the beauty of it, it gives you that juice to get...

the actuarial models to come down, the insurance company makes more money. And then guess what? You and I going out to renew our auto insurance, if you're doing it right, if your loss triangles and everything are greatering against Bitcoin, even at, let's just say, a 2% to 5% allocation, it provides stability for auto insurance rates, which again, what I love about that is it helps the

the person making 20,000 a year, almost more on a percentage of discretionary income than the person making 150 or 250 or a Wall Street guy. So that to me is what I love. It rises all tides. It makes companies more profitable and then they can pass those savings down to- Preston Pysh : And guess what does that turn into? If you're an executive with one of these big insurance companies, what does that actually turn into? You being able to offer better prices.

more customers. Hello? They're like, wake up, you going out. And I don't even think they have to do anything to bowl to the numbers that we were talking about earlier. The bar is crazy low. One thing I will, as somebody who's been in this business for 25 plus years, when you sit down and talk to most insurance executives, at the end of the day, they're targeting, they're trying to make a consistent

10% to 12% return on investment. If they can do that over time, they're generally happy, their shareholders are happy, their board's happy.

they are not trying to price gouge typically. You always have your fringe cases, but the vast majority of players are trying to be fair. But you're in this really lumpy dysfunctional system with a unit of account that is just completely running away from you with the printing of money. They are at a strategic disadvantage, right? So at what point do you get on the life raft? And again, 1% to 2% to start. The more I think you just see those numbers play out, the conviction will grow and you

Everybody went at that point. And we are still so incredibly early. And then when you get into the insurance space, it's crazy how early we still are. I wanted to touch on Bitcoin denominated insurance real quick. Oh, okay. Yeah. Let's cover that. Go ahead. So the reality is there have been some markets, most of them outside the US currently, that are starting to do Bitcoin denominated insurance policies.

I am not a believer that we need to just go full bore, 100% Bitcoin denominated insurance, because at the end of the day, an insurance transaction, you want to match your liabilities with your assets to your liabilities from a risk exposure of a building to the denominated policy. So a Bitcoin miner to me is a very good use case of the duality of these products. So if you take a large Bitcoin miner and they just get one of their facilities gets taken

taken out. There's going to be an element of the insurance piece where they need to rebuild. They're going to probably want to pay the contractor in fiat or the contractor is going to require fiat. So there are elements of even for, say, a Bitcoin miner, they are going to prefer a US dollar denominated insurance to match...

let's say the reconstruction of the building. But then the other part is what happens if it takes a year for that facility to come back up and they go a year without mining Bitcoin, right? And let's just say that they're averaging 50 Bitcoin a month, right? So all of a sudden you've got a pretty substantial number. Well, if you have that denominated in US dollars and Bitcoin rips up, then your protection is cratering against the underlying asset, right? So there should be in my mind,

and that's called business interruption insurance in the insurance world. The business interruption piece, I think, is more appropriately denominated in Bitcoin because you're essentially taking the exchange rate risk off the table of USD to Bitcoin. Similar dynamics in custody. If you're insuring Bitcoin,

a US denominated, whether you're buying 100 million or 500 million or a billion of US denominated insurance, when Bitcoin doubles, well, your insurance stack just basically got cut in half from asset liability matching. So that to me is future state, but we need to be building it now to be ready for those types of policies down the road. Robert Leonard Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. Robert Leonard Trust isn't just earned, it's demanded. Whether you're a startup founder navigating your first audit,

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That's shopify.com slash WSB. All right, back to the show. In short, if you have a Bitcoin liability that's uncovered…

prepare to be wrecked, right? Prepare to be wrecked. And there's companies that have gone out there and had Bitcoin liabilities and didn't cover them and just thought that, well, this is going to be fine. And they realized that there's no better way to destroy yourself than to think that that's possible. The irony for me is if you just invert that idea and you put Bitcoin as assets on your balance sheet, it should have the exact opposite effect you would think. Preston Pysh :

And that's exactly what we're seeing with our micro-strategies. So you can arbitrage to deposit it. That's right. Right? Because right now, a USD-denominated insurance company is going to be... One of the problems is the exchange rate risk of Bitcoin, of how volatile it is. How do you peg your policy limit to appropriately encapsulate the risk when the underlying asset is so incredibly volatile? Well, yeah, do that in Bitcoin and it takes it out.

I started out in the bank underwriting world. So I would be the guy that would sit at a Silicon Valley bank and be like, okay, what are your controls? What are your risks? And to have coverage for crime or theft of funds, I would set the terms and pricing for stuff like that. One thing, and this is kind of maybe an ask to the Bitcoin community as there's part of what I want to get out there is just that building together of there's a lot that

I think TradFi has learned over the years from an insurance and risk management standpoint that Bitcoin builders and Bitcoin treasury companies can learn from. But on the flip side, there are a lot of risk vectors at the traditional insurance side that in some ways the technology of Bitcoin can mitigate.

So I'll just give you a case study on that. When I was a bank underwriter in my early days, the senior guys would always say, look, you've got 20 different insuring clauses on a banker's blanket bond. That's kind of your crime policy that every US bank pretty much has. 80% of all losses come from the very first insuring clause, which is employee dishonesty, right? So it's going to be a guy in your loan department, a guy in your AP department that's siphoning out funds, usually small amounts over time, debt.

20 grand a month, and all of a sudden you do it for 10 years, you've got an uptick claim on your hand. So how do you manage those controls in the banking environment? Well, you have audit procedures. You have some very basic things like make sure everybody in your audit department takes a two-week vacation because they can't cover the tracks if they're out of the office for two weeks. That's an area where Bitcoin has some really unique potential to be far better than what insurance underwriting can do.

So back pre-Bitcoin, as an underwriter, I'd be like, well, what are your audit controls? Are you training your staff? The breakdown, usually you can train your staff, but if the human element is weak, the weak link in the chain is what creates the fraud. So you take some of the cool things that are going on in the Bitcoin development space from custody stuff. So you take whether it's things like time locks. Right?

right? Or these, what I will kind of call a quasi smart contract element of Bitcoin, you can actually completely erase the threat vector of some of the things in traditional, say, bank custody underwriting through a time lock. That's just one example, right? You can remove multi-institutional custody to remove some of the solvency. We need to explain this time lock business for people in the insurance industry that might not be Bitcoiners,

Just give them a real quick rundown on that. Yeah, I'll take a stab at it and you tell me because you're a little more technically minded on that than I am. So, TimeLock is in its most simplest form. You can pre-program and this would be like for the insurance community, they would call this like social engineering where I call up your bank person and try to impersonate you and then I've got your address, I've got your social, et cetera.

If there's a time lock, fraud at the bank, the traditional level is a function of typically speed and volume. The loudest people at customer service are usually the fraudsters. It's not the patient people. So time locks, for example, can slow down the process of a phishing attack, right? Or...

some kind of like wrench attack that even if you did try to do a wrench attack, you've got a time lock, there's nothing you can do with this. So it eliminates some of the checks and balances. And what I love about it, it takes the human element out of it. It's cryptographically sound. So you can't just have a breakdown of the audit manager should have, but didn't. It makes that, so it's better than audit controls in certain frameworks, not everything, but certain ones. And

And that is very much, for the most part, not understood, appreciated at the underwriting level of the reality is a custodian in Bitcoin pays a lot more per million of limit of insurance than a traditional custodian. But I could sit there and argue, well, in many ways, the protections are stronger cryptographically, and we can prove them as such versus... 100%. Let me show you the logs of our training, of our auditude.

So I would just describe it to add to your point. So there's a company called Anchor Watch. They are at the forefront of all this. They're using a thing called Miniscript, which really gives programmability to the custodial solution. And anybody can go out there, use Miniscript and conduct this type of way of managing your custody. Okay. Just to kind of give you an idea, let's say you were the CFO of the company. Let's say I was the COO and the CEO. And for us to move funds out of the company,

out of, let's say there's a billion dollars somewhere. And we set up this wallet that it requires our three key signatures in order to get it out. And it specifies that if you and me went there and tried to do just the two keys, it's not going to work. The vault requires these three specific keys in order to open it. Or you could make the vault two of three. Or you could even say at this specific time in the future, there's

There's going to be a third keyhole that opens up for this particular person or disappears at this particular time into the future. All of these things can be adjusted. And when you think about the controllability of that in a digital vault, that becomes super insanely powerful. And anybody in the world can audit whether the coins are sitting there and who signed to get them out and which key was used to get it out. All of these things are part of the mix.

And for somebody in insurance has never heard some of these things, you can now understand why Garrett is saying that he thinks it's more secure than a traditional physical vault where a key opens it and not necessarily a specific encryptically verifiable key that was assigned to a very specific person to open it. Yeah, exactly. And I think there's so many... Anchor Watch's product is...

a really important kind of step in the right direction. I think things like proof of reserves at River is a really good, because again, that is just better than

As a bank underwriter, what I would do is I would go to the FDIC's website and I would pull up the financial of- That's old. ... Silicon Valley Bank. And I would go and I would analyze the tier one capital ratio and all of these things. But I'm doing it six months in the rear view mirror because it's simply reported financials. And so you have to analyze versus nowadays, you could go on a lot of these digital platforms if they're on the Bitcoin blockchain. And again, you

Like you know exactly where somebody like a river stands 24/7. Like a micro strategy, I think they update their metrics every 15 seconds now, right? So you think of the other world that I spent most of my first part of the career in was directors and officers insurance. So that is when the board of directors, the CEO gets sued for some kind of...

you didn't run the company right. It's usually a shareholder suit or a competitor suit that comes in, but corporate governance is a big, or lack thereof, is a big driver in the D&O world. So as an underwriter in that space, you kind of are always in the room, you're kind of reporting. I would sit between kind of the CFO function and the general counsel function, but pretty much any lawsuit you see from one company to the next,

there's an insurance policy that's picking up those suits against the company or its directors. That's what we call a DNO policy. Again, this is where Bitcoin is. It is so fascinating how quickly it's moving. So at what point are we going to go from free Bitcoin if you did not manage your balance sheet, right? And the micro strategy examples of their outperformance compared to their peers in the mag settle, at what point

does it look like corporate malfeasance or you are not putting shareholder interest first by not adopting Bitcoin treasury strategy? Because the returns are speaking for themselves, right? And we're not there yet, but there will be a time where if you are not

putting some form of Bitcoin on your treasury as a publicly traded company, you're opening yourself up to lawsuits from shareholders, maybe activist shareholders. Some of these companies that are coming out, they're not being shy about the fact that they're going to look for underperforming companies, flip them and put a treasury strategy into them. So there's elements of kind of activist shareholderism there. And insurance companies are keenly aware of problems of shareholder activism. And when the board is

is not from a fiduciary duty standpoint, not looking after shareholder value, right? The end of the day, shareholder value is the final decision point for a board, public company board member is what is the best interest of the shareholder period. Jared, when I look at where we sit right now, I loved your highlight earlier about, we have a terminology issue with the NAIC and they're a

insurance companies' abilities to invest unearned premiums. But I genuinely don't know this. I would imagine that if it's earned premiums and it's retained earnings at that point, the company can go and invest in as much risk as they want, or I would suspect that's the case. I just don't know. Is that the case?

I believe so. Somebody will probably call us out on that, but I believe that's the case. Yeah. I mean, that seems like that would be the case, but I genuinely just don't know. Okay. So that's, if somebody from the insurance industry is listening to this and they have that type of authority, I guess that's your actionable step today is you take your retained earnings and you start maybe allocating into this in order to just give yourself a larger health buffer. And then I think the longer term approach and strategy is that

we really have to figure out how to get the right people at the NAIC that have the authority to start making these terminology adjustments. And do you know if any of that conversation has started taking place with the current administration or? Yeah, I mean, the,

The nice part is I know that a lot of the insurance components sit under Treasury, and Treasury has been reaching out to several firms, getting their opinion on kind of what that would take. The NIAC stuff is really a Garrett Johnston personal opinion, not necessarily a company I work for. But I do think the nice part is there's a lot of movement there of

every kind of sub-department within Capitol Hill is fairly clearly aligned on, "We may not know what we need to do, but we want to do our best to align with the mandate of Trump," which essentially is make the US the preferred venue for digital assets.

period. So I personally, within the digital asset framework, I'm a Bitcoiner, so I tend to focus on Bitcoin. And I also see the strategic reserves, those are all Bitcoin related. When you see the big movements in the space, most of it is within Bitcoin versus the broader digital

digital assets. So it's like most of these things in government and regulation, it takes time, but it's education. So to me, I think folks like the NAIC or the state level insurance commissioner is like, you're not going to win them on a deep dive into Bitcoin. You've got to take their framework, which is a good framework of like, they want safety and soundness. They want

good solvent carriers that are responsible players out there to the public for the public good. We all want that. I spend a lot of time in my position of reinterpreting the same point, but in different language, depending on the audience I'm talking to. So I'm often talking at the boardroom level of publicly traded companies.

and I talk to them very differently about insurance than I would my insurance counterparts because that's all we do. So, we can go very deep very quick. You have to speak what matters to the board

about insurance. You need to speak to regulators about what they care about. But that's where I feel like we're on the same page, we just don't realize it. The insurance commissioners want safety and soundness. Bitcoin does that. It actually does it better than just about any other asset. How do we help lead the education divide? And there's a lot of like, whether the guy's a DPI or a... There's so many good people in the Bitcoin space that are good at articulating the message. We just got to get them in the same room where...

with the insurance community. Preston Pysh : Don't you think the biggest education stop gap that exists today is that Bitcoin is different than crypto? If you're going to start anywhere with regulators, I think you start right there and explain why. And you seem to agree with this. So give them the why. If one of these people would be listening to the show and they hear us say this, why do you say Bitcoin's different than crypto and everything else?

Fundamentally, Bitcoin is the only one that is completely decentralized, does not have a kind of control group behind it that can change the code.

It also really, again, when you look at all of the talk from the top down, they talk about digital assets broadly, but they really act on Bitcoin. Everything's being acted on in a Bitcoin framework or stablecoins. But again, to me, Bitcoin and stablecoins are kind of intertwined in many ways as far as stablecoins need Bitcoin to kind of

help dollar dominance of that standpoint. But where a key difference is between the two is the issuer, right? When you get into stable coins and you're going to see a pretty substantial push here in the coming year with banks and pushing stable coins and things like that. The

The thing you've got to remember is Bitcoin has no issuer. There's not like I need a tether or a circle or you name it, JP Morgan coin that's behind that, that I have to trust whether they actually got the treasuries backing up the token that they're riding on top of the treasury. And that's the core difference.

And I can see that argument cropping up in the insurance space really quickly, which is, all right, maybe we'll play around with stable coins, but not Bitcoin. But what they're failing to realize is the issuer is still the risk in this equation that they've completely discounted and not even thought about. 100%. And again, like most of the non-Bitcoin crypto assets, they are not a proof of work. So when you look much more broadly, when we look at the...

power transition discussions we have at the national level, energy independence, all of that kind of stuff. The Bitcoin miners getting into the AI, HPC compute. A lot of where I see in my chair too is somebody like Amarsh where I work. We have 30-year guys who've done nothing but oil and gas. We have 30-year guys who've done nothing but data center buildouts. We have

30-year people that have done nothing but like energy credits, carbon credits. Those things are all quickly bleeding into each other. And then there's a corporate governance wrapper if you're public that goes within that, right? And it's all subject to the regulatory framework. So I think where I sit now, when you kind of look at this is not a multi-month, this is a multi-year, if not multi-decade journey, we've got to start at

at the regulatory, get the definitions right. And so there's been so much sea change in a positive way with the new administration on that. It feels like we're going to get there. And then we're seeing it already, right? Just the last couple of weeks, the amount of

gold rush of these companies basically taking the MicroStrategy playbook and creating these Bitcoin treasury plays, that seems to just be accelerating. I mean, where I sit here today, kind of almost middle of May, it is hard to keep pace with the daily announcements of stuff going on between Bitcoin, traditional finance, public company markets. It's just accelerating. Robert Leonard

But they all need insurance, right? So there's a dislocation there that to the extent I can help connect those dots and be a bridge, that's really kind of my fashion there. And you know what? With this much capital, liquid, immediately saleable capital that the strategy has, they can start to underwrite their own risks with $55 billion on their books. What I find fascinating is the game theory of how this plays out over five to 10 years. Because if you look at...

the fairly low end, so call it 20, 29% CAGR on Bitcoin, and you apply that out five, 10 years, like MicroStrategy's balance sheet- It can be astronomical. ... is going to be bigger than Berkshire's. It's going to be bigger than Allianz, which is technically the largest one globally right now. So it'll be fascinating to see where those things play out over time. 100%. I think Bitcoin has to go to 1.1 million and then

strategy's balance sheet, which again, if it's all Bitcoin, highly liquid- 10X from here. ... exceeds the largest insurance company's balance sheet globally.

Yeah. It's wild. Yeah. And one thing I would say, if you're a listener from the insurance industry and some of these ideas we're talking about are brand new and you're like, there's no way. The beauty today is you got AI. You can just go into Grok or you can go to OpenAI and type in anything we're saying here. Look it up for yourself. I highly encourage you to just not believe what we're telling you, but to go to do your own research and troubleshoot any of these ideas.

And you might even want to ask AI what it thinks one of the best performing assets will be in the next 10 years and see what it says about Bitcoin. We'll see what it does. I think you might be surprised with what you find out.

Garrett, if you want to leave anything with people from the insurance industry from this conversation, what's your main takeaway? What is it that you really want to accomplish with this? Yeah. For the people within insurance, I would just really encourage everybody to be just curious and reach out. That is probably the thing that has been most beneficial to me over the last several years.

One, most of my free time I'm listening to some kind of Bitcoin-oriented podcast. And then if I hear something interesting, I will reach out to that person. And I will say, "I just want to talk to you. I want to get to know you. I want to understand where you're coming from. I want to share ideas." And then through that, that is where 90% of my learning comes from is I hear a podcast, I read something on X.

And I reach out to that person, just be like, "I really enjoyed what you said. I thought it very interesting. Can we connect and just share ideas?" And then through that, the learning happens, the connections happen, and the networking happens.

So to the insurance community, there are just a plethora of people like Preston that are just really solid at getting you kind of the macro and kind of just an outside looks in perspective on some of this stuff. And then to the Bitcoin companies, my biggest recommendation, the biggest pitfall I see when I talk to a lot of the builders in this space is...

over-emphasis on the kind of theology that sometimes gets the best of us in the Bitcoin space, that Bitcoin fixes everything. I think Bitcoin fundamentally changes kind of the calculus, but the reality is a lot of the well-worn paths of TradFi insurance risk management need to be incorporated and intersected in the right way. So again, some of those things we talked about as far as underwriting issues being mitigated by the tech,

Let's acknowledge that and let's not waste our time worrying about a threat factor that the tech takes care of. But let's also not ignore the scaling problems and just the reality. So the joke I tell a lot of people is that if I were to come to you, Preston, and I want to be healthy,

And you've got this whole idea of what I should be doing. But if the only thing I want to focus on is doing arm curls every morning, like you're going to sit there and say, well, what about sleep? What about your diet? What about leg strength? It's a lot more than just one thing issue. And I think in the Bitcoin development space, lean on us who've been in kind of the traditional side for a lot. And particularly for somebody like me, who's a Bitcoiner, I'm certainly not interested in...

selling dysfunctional insurance and overly priced products down a Bitcoin or so. I really want to find that right intersection of where everything's building. And to the extent I can introduce you to people within the community, figure out a path forward that might be artly traditional with a different twist on it. That's the part of insurance that I love is working on the new things. It's not the day-to-day insurance per se. It's the building and then figure out risk problems.

I love it. If people are listening and they want to reach out to you, LinkedIn, Twitter, what do you use? Yes, I'm on both. I will say generally insurance folks tend to hang out on LinkedIn and Bitcoin folks hang out on X, but I'm on both. On LinkedIn, I think it's just Garrett Johnston, Garrett O. Johnston. Twitter, it's at Garrett O. J. That is my handle, or it's garrett.johnston at marsh.com, where it is my email. So yeah, would love to connect with anybody and everybody on intersections in those spaces.

We'll have links in the show notes, and I hope you guys reach out to Garrett and get things going. Because I think that this is really important. I think the insurance industry needs this, desperately needs this. I'm sure they're looking at the numbers and saying, where do we put the capital, right? Like based on these expense blowouts that we're looking at and the changes.

I hope people reach out to you, Garrett. And thank you so much. What a fun conversation. And I learned a ton and would love to have more chats like this with you in the future. Sure. Thanks for having me, Preston.

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