SPEAKER_00: okay it's been a year since brian armstrong's incredibly controversial blog post coinbase is a mission focused company today a year after he did that incredible incredibly bold mission statement that we will not talk about social issues at coinbase and he took all the arrows well now he is taking the hornet's nest into the end zone and he is spiking the ball wow i mean it is a charge tweet storm and then nat manning from kettle is with us to talk about how his startup is using machine learning to figure out where the next fires are going to be in california's crazy insane fire zones in california and all these homes burning we go deep into extreme weather we go deep into

SPEAKER_01: protecting homes and should people be allowed to rebuild in a fire zone you're going to find out

SPEAKER_03: on this amazing episode stick with us this week in startups is brought to you by in brokers startup insurance program helps startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle save up to 20 off traditional insurance today at imbroker.com twist while you're there get an extra 10 off using offer code twist linkedin marketing to redeem a 100 linkedin ad credit and launch your first campaign go to linkedin.com this week in startups and zendesk qualifying startups can join the zendesk for startups program and get six free months of zendesk products you'll also get access to an exclusive community of startups for advice and connections visit zendesk.com

SPEAKER_00: slash twist today to get started okay it has been one year since coinbase ceo brian armstrong wrote his controversial blog post and tweet storm coinbase is a mission focused company and today he updated uh what's happened in the year since in a 13 tweet thread uh also during this time period coinbase went

SPEAKER_09: public in april and is no longer an eight billion dollar company no it's worth 49 billion dollars um here's the most important tweets from the thread which you can read on your own um one you know it's a number of sorts of thread on twitter so i'll include the numbers the first tweet it's been about

SPEAKER_00: a year since my mission focused blog post it wasn't easy to go through at that time but looking back

SPEAKER_09: it turned out to be one of the most positive changes i've made at coinbase and i'd recommend it to others okay this is incredibly bold that he's coming out and uh basically he's not kicking the hive you know the beehive right now he just grabbed the beehive he ran into the end zone and he spiked the beehive and now this people have forgotten about this whole controversy he literally is bringing it back up brian armstrong say what you will is fearless and a great leader and whether you disagree with him or agree with him fearless is definitely um the number one descriptor of what he's doing number two we have a much more aligned company now where we can focus on getting work done toward a

SPEAKER_00: mission and it has allowed us to hire some of the best talent from organizations where employees are fed up with politics infighting and distraction so if you remember his basically his manifesto was we're going to work at work there will be no more discussion at work about political issues and this

SPEAKER_09: was an incredibly challenging thing to do at the time because he did it during black lives matter and he did specifically about people talking about police violence uh george floyd etc so to decide on social media as a large technology company and tech companies are hated right now that he is going to say no more discussion of black lives matter or israel palestine or any issue was really really um how do i say this like uh i mean it was um you know he was uh kicking the hive and uh he got stung a lot people

SPEAKER_00: were very very very very upset and um this um was people said this would be the death of coinbase that

SPEAKER_09: they would never be able to get great talent uh and my position on this was for every person who doesn't want to go work there i think there's going to be 10 who do because my perception is we hear from the people who care very much about political social uh woke uh ideological wealth disparity israel palestine whoever's really into those things um those causes me on human rights

SPEAKER_00: people would say i'm annoying i mean many people have told me to stop talking about human rights issues and that i'm annoying and they don't want to hear it from me but i will keep talking about human rights issues because it's something i'm passionate about you know um to say you can't talk about these things

SPEAKER_09: at work yes it gets rid of the vocal people but for every vocal person on twitter or social media or you know in the press or on tv or in podcasts i would say there's 20 people who do not want to talk about these issues just like if you go to your i don't know holiday meal with all of your family and the extended family's there and you got 50 or 75 people in your house and it's a big giant party

SPEAKER_00: and there's like five people who want to talk about politics and the rest of the people just want to hang out play softball drink a couple beers and have a good time and and and gorge themselves on turkey or

SPEAKER_09: whatever you know you have at your family gatherings um those five people can ruin it for the other 70 right you've been there people start talking about you know whatever george bush versus the clintons or trump versus biden it just turns into chaos and they ruin it for everybody else and and that's basically what he found more people now are coming to work at coinbase because they agree that work is for work and that politics and social issues you should do on your own time and and to brian's um

SPEAKER_00: further defense here um he was very clear listen it's not that you can't talk about these things on your own time it's not that these things aren't important it's that we want everybody in the company 100 focused on our mission which is something in the wheelhouse of making people financially literate and independent and so we can do more good in the world by staying focused on our mission and there might be other companies with the mission that you're passionate about whether that's the israeli-palestinian conflict the uyghurs in china black lives matter wealth disparity go work at a company that's focused on that that's not what this company is focused on and it's important for every company to be focused on something just like rick warren said in the purpose-driven church the premise of that book was a church needs to have a purpose there needs to be one thing that your church is really good at and that you're focused on so that people know what to do when they're there and they have a sense of mission um you'll see that here we took our slack and we said the slack is now for one purpose organizing meetups for this week in startups and once we

SPEAKER_09: said hey that's the mission of the slack not for marketing your products and services uh everybody sort of got a line the people who were there to market left and the people who were there to do the meetups um became supercharged so let's continue with the story uh it's very important i

SPEAKER_00: think for every organization to have a clearly defined purpose and not drift from that tweet number three in the storm uh one of the biggest concerns and this is brian armstrong one of the biggest concerns around our stance was that it would impact our diversity numbers since my post we've grown our headcount about 110 percent uh so that means they doubled while our diversity numbers have remained the same or even improved on some metrics so there's a key uh people did say no black people will ever work no people of color will ever work women are not going to work at coinbase and obviously that has not been the case which would be directionally correct if you believe the fact

SPEAKER_09: or if you come to it with the premise that the overwhelming majority of people 90 percent 95 percent do not want politics do not want social issues at work i think anybody would actually

SPEAKER_00: say that if you talk to 10 people nine would say they don't want to have this be a focus at work but they wouldn't say it on twitter so therefore we're getting a warped perception of the world and if you're on twitter you get a very warped or any social media you get a warped perception of the world on instagram you think everybody's then looks great with their shirt off in a bikini whatever and that everybody's constantly on a global vacation yoloing it out

SPEAKER_09: and if you're on twitter you think everybody is obsessed with social justice and virtue signaling and you get the idea and on facebook you think everybody just had three babies it's just each of those social networks has a certain leaning and twitter can give you a deranged view of the world number five uh what was amazing was the contrast between the news following my post and the reaction

SPEAKER_00: from employees and people who spoke to me in private while the media reports were mostly negative and it even spawned some retaliatory and intellectually dishonest hit pieces uh the reaction from both employees and people i spoke to in private was overwhelmingly positive yeah that's directionally

SPEAKER_09: correct i think people are scared to talk about this in public on episode i think nine of all in we talked about this issue and i talked about it here on the podcast and i think uniformly we were in favor of this uh sax friedberg and myself and even uh chamath who is a person of color he didn't think that the

SPEAKER_00: blog post was written very well um it was a little bit rambling which it was long um he thought they

SPEAKER_09: should look at everything through the lens of their mission and he could have said it more deftly

SPEAKER_18: um and sax and freeberg thought yeah in their experience people don't want to come to work to talk about

SPEAKER_00: politics uh they want to do that on their own time and uh my position was at the time and still remains a lot of this exact is exacerbated because people aren't actually talking to each other they're chatting with each other if you're chatting there's no empathy you're doing this in a slack room it takes over the entire organization more so during a pandemic because everybody lives in slack

SPEAKER_09: your company manifests itself in slack as opposed to a real world location what's going to happen all of a sudden you see 78 messages in the random folder everybody rushes over there oh why there's 78 messages oh and it's seven people out of 700 fighting about the israeli-palestinian conflict or uyghurs in china or black lives matter or police violence and then people are like hey you know maybe

SPEAKER_00: his point of view is good or oh hey i kind of love this and then it just takes over and now the entire company instead of working on the mission is spending 90 of their emotional energy and 20 of their actual time in those rooms and it is exhausting it's i mean you ever been in like a twitter feed or

SPEAKER_09: an i message thread when people are going at it about politics or religion or abortion or gun control

SPEAKER_00: it might only take you know 30 minutes of your day to deal with that but it might emotionally and spiritually and energy wise take half of your energy from the day and it could put people in a mood where they want to quit the company or they feel hurt and you know how it is when you feel hurt or when you feel misunderstood or you feel attacked you ever have that where you feel attacked or misunderstood and you know for two or three days you're thinking about it now put that on the entire company you're

SPEAKER_18: basically making the entire company feel those feelings if you don't have business insurance you

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SPEAKER_00: okay let's go back to this amazing program um seven you know back to brian armchair street in fact i would say it was probably the most positive reaction i've gotten for any change i've made in the history of the company which is saying something how could something be so negative in the press or turn out to be incredibly positive with every stakeholder i can answer that for you um the press is broken up into four buckets i'll explain that in a moment but essentially one of those buckets is um two of those

SPEAKER_09: buckets are particularly enamored with any kind of a fight because it drives page views it drives likes and it drives subscribers so i can tell you the reason why it's so positive inside your company and the press is so negative is because not all the press is using your story brian um in order to get page views the two buckets that are are the content farming group so content farming group would probably be a large portion of buzzfeed but not all because they have also some really great investigative journalists but you know the folks who are just trying to you know huffington post buzzfeed you know doing

SPEAKER_00: link baiting stuff they're going to do content farming on this story and spin it however would whatever their spin will be determined by what will get them the most clicks and they actually test this by using facebook and they'll test five different headlines for the story which everyone gets the most

SPEAKER_09: clicks gets the most reaction gets the uh headline and they'll do that and they have separate writers to write the headlines who are good at writing controversial headlines they get you to click those content optimizing folks do not care about the truth they care about the clicks obviously if it's controversial um and they don't care if it's the truth they care if it gets clicks that's one bucket

SPEAKER_00: the next bucket is the virtue signaling press or the agenda driven press the advocacy driven press and advocacy press has always existed but it's it's very much in fashion now uh and it is becoming a

SPEAKER_09: larger and larger percentage of writers so if you look at the new york times they're hiring writers specifically who are anti-tech and who want to hold tech accountable literally the new york times has

SPEAKER_00: predetermined that tech is guilty and is making hiring decisions based on who is the most anti-tech let that sink in the new york times the paper of record is hiring the most anti-tech uh journalists they can find and they're explicitly saying we're hiring journalists because they have a proven track record in being anti-tech and holding tech accountable and we need to do that um the most cynical view of that would be the biology take which is they see technology companies as their adversary like facebook

SPEAKER_09: and google are taking all their money uh and their attention and therefore they are attacking them and using their journalistic firepower to attack and um that feels uh pretty smarmy but i don't think that's exactly accurate so the other two pieces of the press and buckets would be the direct to consume you know the subjects going direct like myself and all in and you know ceos who have big followings on twitter or andreason horowitz you know failed content attempts that they copied from my playbook and they just did poorly and they don't get any attention for um and then finally there's the old school press you know kara swisher uh cade metz you know just the old school press who just want to tell the stories as accurately as they can and uh remember i interviewed cade on episode 1187 and his talk

SPEAKER_00: was his he talked with me about that slate star codex article um i asked him who wrote the headline

SPEAKER_09: and for the article silicon valley safe space and he was you know he kind of indicated that he did it in collaboration he didn't want to throw the person under the bus but you you could kind of infer that he would have preferred he wrote it uh but basically it was an editor and you know the the headline really

SPEAKER_00: didn't match his article which then leads to you know this whole sort of feeling of animosity between the tech world and press and listen tech has because of facebook and other bad behavior tech does need to be held accountable and we've seen great moments in investigative journalism about tech companies whether it's john carrie rue old school journalists with theranos or the wall street journal with the facebook paper so you can't paint the press with one brush it really is four specific buckets and there's the content bucket just content optimization they're ruthless ruthless horrible people who just

SPEAKER_09: want to get clicks they don't care about the truth uh then you have the advocacy which you know say what you will about them but they are advocating for their position some of them are explicit about it like fox news and msnbc uh other ones are kind of not as explicit about like the new york times who are kind of saying that they're the paper of record while they're actually they've picked aside basically uh and consumers are hashing that out so anyway enough on that um let's keep going back to brian's tweet storm nine the biggest lesson i took away from the whole ordeal is

SPEAKER_00: that if you believe something is the right path it's worth speaking about even if it's controversial

SPEAKER_09: my take on this is uh number one uh people should be allowed to talk about whatever they want uh they should have whatever positions they want and um the founders of a company should decide if they want to

SPEAKER_00: have a company that embraces that debate or having debates at all or the founders of the company can decide they want to have no debates in my small company i love having debates i can handle it it's

SPEAKER_09: never gotten out of control i am a strong presence within the company i've hired and had a you know great i think i've done a great job building the specific culture that i want um and if people don't fit into that culture they're not going to stay here now these are under 20 person companies inside.com and launch so it's a lot easier for me to do that once a company gets big you know you start to lose that ability to for me to have a personal touch with each employee each team member so i think that this is going to be the future of companies and if you want to work at a company that has a specific mission pick that you know if the new york times position is tech is bad or largely bad and we need to hold them accountable well they're great then people who want to take that position go there if other journalists want to say i'm going to try to find the truth and i'm not going to come to it with a predetermined position then i will go work for the economist or financial times or you know whatever other publication is trying to you know just be uh objective right yeah

SPEAKER_00: so you can pick where you want to go if you're an advocate you can go work for msnbc or fox or jacobin is that how you pronounce it jacobin um anyway i i i love love listening to jacobin you know writers

SPEAKER_09: uh i love motherboard and vice writers i love to understand their positions i don't agree with them um but i love that those publications exist and i can take their then there's like the kids from uh jacobin and whatnot do like this machine kills i listen to that podcast and they they pick good stories i mean they're completely uninformed in their positions because they're so anti-tech or so

SPEAKER_00: anti-capitalism that they have this crazy blind spot but i like hearing their wacky positions because um they do alert you to how some people think about the world and that's good i like to be more informed and they pick good topics right they find things uh that are on the margins uh really interesting in fact the way i was alerted to the amazon driver controversy was jacobin jacobin whatever the socialist magazine is uh and this machine kills they they alerted me to this article about drivers being

SPEAKER_09: upset about being under uh cameras to watch their uh driving ability and uh you know so kudos on you know really finding the edge cases or the bubbling up stories uh does any public company have a more dynamic founder with the authority than coinbases does right now is a question that has come up here uh in my notes from our audience and so yeah i would say you know tesla uh brian armstrong uh maybe jack uh at twitter and square i'm trying to think of iconoclastic leaders who do not care about what other people

SPEAKER_29: think about them and are brave uh benioff michael dell uh jeff lawson is from twilio is pretty outspoken

SPEAKER_00: too yeah um and he takes the other side of this right so uh they're out there um it's kind of hard to be very uh candid when you're a public company because you're responsible for the share price and the shareholders and the stakeholders so you don't want to be too cavalier but i think brian has absolutely walked the line here and i think this is part of the uh reaction to perhaps the hysterical

SPEAKER_09: or extreme culture we've been in whether it's the trump um trolling or the historical left and socialists i think the world is rejecting those two groups of people and saying let's get to let's get back to some more moderate uh way to have discourse and i'm very proud of all in um because i feel like being the creator of that podcast and bringing all those guys together um has been my way of saying hey let's see if we could have a reasonable discussion and it's why on that podcast you don't hear me giving my takes that much i consider myself the point guard or the uh conductor of a great conversation so i've been really trying to you know develop a new muscle for myself which is can i be the greatest

SPEAKER_00: moderator of hard conversations and keep the conversations moving keep the conversations fun uh get a couple of laughs in and then maybe ask basic questions on behalf of the audience so some people like jay kyle is really stupid he's asking stupid questions on all in and i'm like when i ask a question that's very basic to a bestie do you think it's because i don't know the answer really or do you think i might be asking that very basic question for the benefit of the guest or the bestie and the audience so when i ask something very basic like i asked biology like well when you say that the blockchain is better for truth and it's immutable and that's the strength what if somebody puts your social security number on it or a lie how is that mitigated now i know the answers i've researched that i've discussed it a hundred times with very qualified people in the truth business and fact checking business and also in crypto i'm asking that question to start a dialogue so for people who are not understanding why he has very basic questions on this podcast or the other it's called the job of the moderator the interviewer so um hats off to brian armstrong uh i think he has set the new standard i think every company is going to take this position even the woke companies are going to start taking this position which is going to be if you want to talk about it with your

SPEAKER_09: employees do it on your time um here's the mission of the company stay focused on the mission and i think they're going to take my advice which is delete the random channel on your slack immediately it should not be there by default in a business setting it only gives people this outlet and pressure cooker to put stuff that's going to cause suffering down the line and misunderstanding no political discourse no social discourse on the slack channels if you want to do that do it in person do it on a zoom call and you'll get a much different result all right that's my take and i hope you enjoyed it if you have comments come to this week in startups.com slack and you can talk about it in our slack channel or you can uh interact with us on twitter all right question that came in if you're a retail investor and you see an iconoclastic outspoken uh very um mission driven founder like brian armstrong does that make you more likely to buy the stock or less likely of course it makes you more likely uh unless their position is absolutely deranged and sociopathic which i'm trying to think of an example here maybe be nicola uh or one of those companies where you have like a certain amount of confidence that is

SPEAKER_00: unearned um sure yeah that might that might be a sell signal but i think uniformly founder authority in a in a publicly traded company is magical i don't think that you know tesla as an example could

SPEAKER_09: have done something like the cyber truck if elon wasn't the ceo you can only make a bold choice

SPEAKER_00: like that if you're the founder i think apple can't make bold choices anymore because steve jobs isn't there to say you know what we're doing this we're going to build a car or you know what we're going to buy this company the founder authority is absolutely critical for bold decisions the reason why facebook was able to buy whatsapp and instagram was because zuckerberg had control of that uh board

SPEAKER_09: he had all the voting power he informed the board he was doing it that's how the story goes on those two acquisitions any other company that was going to acquire those companies would have had a dialogue and research and consultants you know uh debate it with you know jack was and evan and whatever dick costello were going to buy uh instagram as an example at twitter the reason they weren't able to buy it was because they had to have a discussion about it and zuck just took kevin's session for a walk explained why this was a great idea um and put the number down and the same thing with whatsapp founders so

SPEAKER_01: you you do want to look for founder authority you do want to look for bold empowered founders with a point of view so uh yeah that's my answer to your question before we get into the ad i just want

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SPEAKER_06: back to this amazing episode okay everybody we all know that severe weather conditions global warming

SPEAKER_09: whichever you prefer uh and we'll keep this from getting too political is wreaking havoc uh on the world and

SPEAKER_00: having homes insured is becoming a key vector in dealing with extreme weather we have people who

SPEAKER_01: are buying houses all over tahoe they had a huge boom during the covid and sadly uh the wildfires here in northern california started up again creating absolute chaos we have people in louisiana and florida

SPEAKER_29: dealing with floods and there must be uh ways to ensure these products and keep people safe at the

SPEAKER_09: same time while um really dealing with this issue in a big picture uh which means probably fire uh materials uh fire retarded materials and buildings building houses on stilts all kinds of uh new building

SPEAKER_01: materials and of course addressing climate change by sequestering carbon building more nuclear reactors working on the hail mary of fusion reactors which is getting there could be in the next decade or two

SPEAKER_09: we uh stop talking about energy as an issue and start moving on to the next issue with me today to discuss his startup kettle uh which is a reinsurance company that uses data data and models to create better

SPEAKER_01: priced policies for forest fires specifically is nat manning welcome to the program nat thanks for

SPEAKER_64: having me nat how many people are living in fire zones today how many homes are at risk every year

SPEAKER_77: here in america so there are there are two ways to go about this so there are about 14 million

SPEAKER_79: structures in california okay last year was uh the third worst year in history um for fires in 2020 uh and about four million acres burned down out of about a hundred million uh across the state so about four percent four percent of the state of the forest land in our state not the state's total land

SPEAKER_85: mass but the forest of this actually no the whole state is about a hundred and change um so about four

SPEAKER_79: percent of the total acres of the state burned down but there's there's more to it so it seems like it

SPEAKER_00: it is it is a big number that is a no wait a second that seems like a ginormous number what was it 20 years ago what would we typically see in a fire season okay so that's the that's the right question

SPEAKER_92: so there are two answers to that so 20 years ago we're looking at a couple percent less than a percent

SPEAKER_77: but a hundred years ago 150 100 years ago through kind of prehistoric ages that number was actually

SPEAKER_79: like seven to ten ah um and so we you know showed up in as you know uh in in our in culture as humans we and we even started building everywhere and we said hey we're going to suppress these fires i don't want them to burn things down it makes sense right right a lot of different stuff goes into this but essentially um it is very healthy for fires to burn but the difference is now you've got these huge

SPEAKER_77: fires uh that are that are going everywhere uh and are getting totally out of control whereas before that seven to eleven percent is actually many many many smaller fires burning smaller amounts and then

SPEAKER_79: going out and they don't get that dangerous and they don't get that uh that destructive and so while the number was bigger the type of fire um and the destruction of that fire uh was was different uh

SPEAKER_09: so that's worth pausing on for a second you have um a quantity and a qualitative change occurring at the same time which as a as a as a a man of statistics uh i'm assuming running an insurance company and tried

SPEAKER_00: to assess risk um it's very hard to have a discussion with this in a very politicized environment because you could pick different statistics here the seven to ten percent statistic the one percent or less statistic from 20 years ago and the four percent now and play all kinds of games with that that's right but what is even harder to have a reasonable conversation with about is that qualitatively what you're saying is the fires today are much more intense localized and bigger as opposed to spread out in little pockets that's right did am i accurate in understanding your um assessment of the situation

SPEAKER_79: that's exactly right um so you know give you a couple other numbers to put that in context right like back to a hundred plus years ago you know we didn't have humans running around putting out fires so there's actually there's actually about 10 000 fires a year in california um

SPEAKER_77: um 14 of them last year caused 99 of the damage ah so we actually put most of the fires out right and then what happens is you have one to ten that get totally out of control and create these mega fire situations whereas before you know a large portion of those 10 000 um would kind of burn and then burn

SPEAKER_79: themselves out and naturally stop because they'd hit a stream the forests you know had or uh were better

SPEAKER_29: managed um by by maybe the wind died down i mean it does seem like wind is am i correct as a neophyte in

Chamath Palihapitiya: this area that these high winds seem to determine the intensity of these they're a huge factor uh yeah

SPEAKER_109: yeah they're they're a huge factor um and and then the other one um you know there are two parts to

SPEAKER_79: this there's the reality you can't deny that that there's less rain than there used to be the seasons longer and it's hotter than it used to be okay you know i don't we don't need to get into

SPEAKER_109: why that is and are you about it's just true um yes the fact is it's hotter yes and it's drier and

SPEAKER_09: if it's hotter and drier that creates more kindling exactly creates fuel which is fuel and from my boy scout it is you know we learned pretty clearly the small amount the smaller these fibers the smaller the twigs you would start with small dry things and then build up to bigger logs it's not that we have bigger logs everywhere it's that we got a bunch of this small debris everywhere which is just absolutely

SPEAKER_00: perfect for starting these fires up so we're basically creating massive massive amounts of kindling which led to this uh cavalier uh statement uh by uh one of our former elected officials that we need to rate things up more like norway or other places which seemed cavalier and silly but also seemed to ring true that keeping some of this kindling and cleaning up you know the uh underbelly the the uh the ground under trees would help because we know that that is factually correct is it factually correct that if we swept up i mean it's a stupid way to say it but if there was more d what do you call the act of

SPEAKER_100: taking the kindling out or or waking up is there a term in the industry for that and is that actually a

SPEAKER_117: viable thing it is uh it's called forest spinning uh and then the other thing is uh controlled burns um

SPEAKER_118: and that's exactly right i mean like so like the weather that's one factor of it there are things we could have and hopefully possibly could have done decades ago or we'll continue to do now you

SPEAKER_79: meant you know energy and fusion like these things long term will help uh you know change and then these weather patterns and and hopefully kind of bring some stasis back that's going to take a while and in the meantime you've got forest management and you've got uh what do you do with the fuel that's there today and and what you can do is forest thinning uh and and controlled burns which are both proven methods uh it just takes a i mean we're not gonna give the long and short is we should put a lot of

SPEAKER_124: people to work doing that and it would help in california how many people would we need to then the

SPEAKER_09: forests to take the four percent of the state being on uh fire to say two percent or is it even

SPEAKER_126: possible through thinning and control burns to do that uh i'm not even for a no specific number of

SPEAKER_127: people yeah like if we had a ballpark are we talking about thousands of people full-time tens of thousands

SPEAKER_129: i think it's tens of thousands and but i have seen some analysis from a numbers point of view so i saw

SPEAKER_77: um uh 10 billion as a number that we should start spending annually to do this the other thing to know though so there's part of this is what's it's california's responsibility 60 of the land in california is owned by the federal government wow so the other problem is that you've got land and

SPEAKER_79: forest that are owned by local communities you got land and forest that's owned by the state and you've

SPEAKER_92: got land and forest that's owned by the federal government and all you know all of those require different political actions um the federal government is also very busy i would say so if

SPEAKER_09: the federal government is busy and they own land here they're kind of like an out-of-state resident that turns over every four to eight years they're not on the ground would this not be an interesting

SPEAKER_00: moment to think and listen i'm a capitalist who thinks about uh economics and you are as well um would

SPEAKER_09: it not be time to rethink their ownership of that land and stewardship of it and say hey maybe the federal government can own it but we're going to give a hundred year lease on this section of it to

SPEAKER_00: the federal government and say hey this should be developed in some way that creates revenue that would then result in this being cleared so if the if we created a park or we rented out part of it or we

SPEAKER_09: develop part of it with homes i know people are anti-development in the state generally speaking

SPEAKER_00: but if there was some way to create a revenue stream for that plot of land whether it was through tourism or homes or something um it could even be bike trails whatever there's some way to

SPEAKER_64: create revenue stream create some revenue from it have the local folks manage it then there would

SPEAKER_08: be some ownership therefore somebody would actually be responsible for doing the thinning and it would

SPEAKER_118: be an expense on their pnl that's certainly um yeah certainly possible and and you know one of the answers to that was you know the the the park national park solution in california like go back like

SPEAKER_92: that's what yosemite is right like it's a revenue generating amazing resource that that is you know federally

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SPEAKER_00: the best customer experiences at zendesk.com twist yosemite must be massively profitable because you can't get a tent you can't get in so they're sold out and they could just keep raising the rates so why not make your sim why not add five yosemites make the prices even more expensive and then use it to then

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SPEAKER_139: that there is a who's going to pay for it kind of moment going on here and finger pointing is that

SPEAKER_77: correct as well that is but i'm so i'm going to transition so one of the other solutions yeah so

SPEAKER_79: government for sure but the other one and one of the reasons why i i love insurance is that the incentives all become aligned right so if i run an insurance company that's you know just writing insurance against wildfire like i do um now it is entirely in my interest to invest any profits i have into mitigation um and so like one of the things with us as an insurance company is we make all of our insights uh we make all of our insights available uh for free to anyone that's working in mitigation whether that's government whether that's uh folks doing controlled burns and forest thinning we say hey we'll tell you exactly everything we know uh because if you can go out there and use that to do a better job doing defensible space do a better job forest inning then great that reduces our risk right and who knows long term like maybe we're we get growing big enough like uh like the old berkshire hathaway flywheel right like we can start taking that uh yeah so let's

SPEAKER_09: let's describe what kettle does here you're trying to use big data to predict where these fires are going

SPEAKER_29: to be and then do better insurance for individuals for the state for who uh so we we operate at the

SPEAKER_92: reinsurance level uh explain that what that is to people who don't know happily um reinsurance uh is

SPEAKER_79: insurance for insurance companies and so before your eyes all glaze over um what that what that essentially means right is like uh it's insurance companies cover anything that could go wrong with your house say you you have home insurance your roof leaks your you get robbed they pay all these these things what they aren't set up financially to manage and what they go buy insurance for are uh when a fire comes through and wipes out 500 homes at once they buy an insurance policy the same

SPEAKER_77: way that you have an insurance policy you're like okay i fixed my you know i'll call an electrician when there's a small thing and over here but then when it's a big thing i'm going to call my insurance company they do the same thing uh and so what reinsurance is is is really the business of insuring against catastrophes got it which are being exacerbated by climate change there's been a 3x increase in

SPEAKER_146: billion dollar uh events in the last decade in america so if i were to reflect that back to you

SPEAKER_09: the correct way to think about this is i'm an insurance company i've done my job i've got everybody to buy their insurance right now i'm looking at it going holy cow this group of people the subset of people i sold it to are in a high risk zone if some you know once in a hundred year flood comes or once in a hundred year fire comes i'm insolvent right i have not done my actuary tables or i don't know what you would call that act in insurance of predicting for the worst case scenario but said another way these insurance companies are not designed to withstand the worst case scenario are

SPEAKER_77: they that that's right and they will and they're not designed like from that's the plan right and so

SPEAKER_79: the regulators say hey you need to offload this tail risk or or sell or buy reinsurance essentially for um for that one in a hundred year event and then uh and then they go to the reinsurance world and do just

SPEAKER_29: that uh as you've studied this what data sources seem to be the best predictors of where these fires will

SPEAKER_09: happen next because my understanding is of these 10 000 fires that occur some number of them are dip starting fires you know at a campground or doing something really stupid in other words you know arson or accidental fires i don't know what percentage that equals but it does seem like we keep getting stories of like hey by the way that fire was caused by this person yeah um so tell us if that is actually true or it's just uh it's so memorable when it does happen that we overestimate it and then how on earth could you predict something that's occurring by an accidental person creating

SPEAKER_01: a fire or at worst an arsonist doing this for some deranged sociopathic reason yeah so we we run two

SPEAKER_118: models one is uh the ignition model trying to predict where fires will start and then okay the second is a

SPEAKER_79: spread model trying to understand how fires spread and uh the two most important data sources into that are geospatial data um essentially satellite imagery uh and what's incredible over the last 30 years right is we now uh have 30 years of incredible satellite data from nasa and then increasingly from private companies putting it up it's uh it's a cool time to be alive um and then the second is weather data so same thing uh noah has been collecting weather data for years making it available and those two things

SPEAKER_77: can give you a lot uh and then we're writing machine learning models right that are looking at what's happening right and they so you're exactly right like there are all these different factors that are when they align in the wrong direction they become one of those 14 fires right and so

SPEAKER_79: you think about it it's what we've talked about right okay uh well first off a lot of fires start right along uh a road right and you look at the satellite images looking at this gray pixelated straight line and it doesn't know but the model is like oh it fires consistently start next to these things why because there's electricity lines there people throw trash out of the windows like cigarettes etc um now most of the time that fire goes out because it's pretty you know good chance the fire uh station can get to it but if you have something happen and you have the winds blowing

SPEAKER_77: at 98 miles an hour you know to the east and then you have many miles of dried out trees with no access to them uh suddenly the model's going wow this looks exactly like all those other fires that turned that was 14 fires last year that turned into really bad events versus one that happens and it's right

SPEAKER_79: next to a walmart parking lot and they go oh that fire started but then it you know it went out pretty quickly because it ran into this big fire break uh is how the models like looking at it right and so silent imagery and and weather data is is really the main two uh that make a tremendous difference now six of

SPEAKER_01: seven of the top largest wildfires ever measured in california were in the last 13 months yeah so it is

SPEAKER_00: getting much worse and i think saying much worse or dramatically worse would probably be an

SPEAKER_64: understatement of what we've just witnessed in california is it going to get much worse and

SPEAKER_09: dramatically worse than this already dramatically worst year based on the information that you've learned from satellites etc in other words um should we be terrified right now because it felt terrifying the last two years here as a bay area resident i'm nowhere near the fire zone but watching three weeks of not being able to leave your house during a pandemic because the air turned orange in the bay area um just made me and many other people think we need to have an escape plan not for fire in the bay area um thankfully it's harder for the fire to get here um so developed but we need to have

SPEAKER_167: an escape plan to get out of the smoke yeah is it going to get dramatically worse and how bad was this

SPEAKER_118: year am i overreacting okay these are the right questions so as i mentioned earlier 14 million

SPEAKER_79: structures in this last year was third worst year in history actually one of the recent history like one of the worst from acres burned we said four percent right four million but actually only 11 460 strict structures burned down and that's really you know that's terrible like that's 11 000 families and businesses that uh lost but again out of 14 million so okay while it feels like the whole state is burning down actually less than 0.1 percent is actually burning down a year right of structures

SPEAKER_00: if we look at structures so this is why statistics and metrics and having a thoughtful conversation of this is important so while six of the seven largest flyer fires ever measured will last 13 months

SPEAKER_97: um the campfire was much more destructive that one that 2018 one in napa area that's right we lost

SPEAKER_79: exactly oh did we lose 20 000 in that was 20 000 in those two yeah in that year and 20 000 the year before actually as well so those were the two worst from structures even though half as many acres burned

SPEAKER_25: down in that year right it just got the it got an area where people were living yes should people

SPEAKER_97: be allowed in your estimation as somebody who has skin in the game in a massive way should people be allowed to build or rebuild homes i should say in places where we've had dramatic fire activity yes or no

SPEAKER_00: it should be highly discouraged okay how do you practically get people who are unable to build homes because of the nimby red tape of uh california to not take the opportunity to rebuild a home where they're legally allowed to rebuild it and there are no homes available we're in a massive housing crisis you have to think that if we weren't in such a housing crisis and didn't live in such a goddamn nimby state that people would not feel the need to rebuild in these zones because they would be allowed to

SPEAKER_167: build in other places does the nimby and ism and red tape of the state exacerbate the problem

SPEAKER_109: people should be able to build in places where there are good jobs and uh low risk of climate change

SPEAKER_09: got it that would be a good thing yeah so you're being diplomatic the the fact is we're not allowed

SPEAKER_00: to build in the places that are safe and if you if you're at home burned down in the campfire fire because you had that as a previous lot my understanding i could be wrong someone will fact check me if i am producers hopefully um you could just rebuild on that there is because it was your home and you have insurance and you're entitled to that lot so it is a lot easier to rebuild in the fire zone

SPEAKER_97: than it is to rebuild in a non-fire zone in california that's true and one of the things that's

SPEAKER_118: happening um oh i will say one of the things that does happen because it's financial is that they you do have a a system where people are are losing their home insurance so a lot of those folks might be able to rebuild but this has changed in the last couple of years they might not be able to get insurance

SPEAKER_77: for that home anymore um and that honestly is maybe a good thing if it's in a really high risk area right yeah you know like what it depends exactly you know once a place is burned it also means it's not going to burn for a little while but it things grow back like we won't get into but like eucalyptus for instance is not in uh natural to the state it grows extremely fast and it explodes right whereas redwoods um they store moisture and actually are made to uh withstand fires so there's just some that's a long-term solution but uh you know if i could wave a magic wand i'd put a lot of redwoods back and get rid of those eucalyptus uh the you know so but what's happening right so those people can't rebuild and they are well they can't get insurance maybe so they maybe they decide not to rebuild there maybe maybe they can and they do but there's such panic in the insurance world that now a lot of people can't get their insurance home insurance who actually aren't in that risky of an

SPEAKER_79: area like i'm in the bay area right i'm up uh in the hills in the east bay um and i and i lost my insurance i got dropped this year because of wildfire you know great irony right and so what does that

SPEAKER_53: mean practically for you you basically are responsible if that house burns down i was able to get additional

SPEAKER_77: insurance i obviously know some people um but uh but in that interim yeah yeah well actually what i would have had to do is i would have had to go to the fair plan uh which is the government-sponsored

SPEAKER_79: like high catastrophe plan um and they're they're required to to provide insurance um but it's a not

SPEAKER_92: a good policy right it's like you get health insurance when you already have cancer um god so it's very it pays very little and it's capped yeah it pays little it costs a lot you know there's uh it's not an

SPEAKER_77: ideal structure but you also they're basically saying you're not insurable here the thing that's happening right as i talked about earlier that that 0.1 percent of the state actually burns down is that tons of people are getting kicked onto the fair plan who who really aren't in that risky of an

SPEAKER_79: area um i and there are some people who absolutely should be and we should not be building there because they're in super high risk areas right like for us you know our underwriting is we don't we don't insure in the top 25 of areas but what's happened is there's been such panic uh in in the insurance

SPEAKER_77: markets that the reinsurers have have pulled out right it's very similar to post 2008 right you had all these people go i i'm not going to write loans anymore no way and then the tech world realized and they came in and they said you know that that there's actually a lot of like i'm happy to write a student loan to someone that graduates from harbor mit like that seems like a good bet

SPEAKER_79: um and then you have companies like sofi be able to move into this space when when everyone sort of panicked and moved back and that's that's essentially where we are today where you say the supply has dried up everyone's like i'm not the supply of reinsurance i'm not going to insure which means the price has spiked and what we come in and do and we say hey we're going to apply apply

SPEAKER_77: a much more analytical machine learning based model to this and be able to bring some stability back to the

SPEAKER_79: market uh and be able to to hopefully you know be able to help people get their their insurance you know shore up them the real estate market of california is the are the insurance uh companies for fire

SPEAKER_09: insurance specifically looking at the foliage around a house today and saying listen you have

SPEAKER_64: italian cypresses those things are matchsticks and you put them like a row of matchsticks around your house because you love tuscany yeah because like i was in tuscany and i was looking at them and my friend said yeah you can't have those in italy you can't have those italian cypress in los angeles

SPEAKER_09: anymore or some places um can't get insurance at your house if you have them you got to cut them down

SPEAKER_198: i don't know if that's true or not but that's what somebody's told me uh it is true yeah um there

SPEAKER_118: so um there are there are two ways two things i would say about this to be a little nuanced one is

SPEAKER_79: totally true and yes there are a lot of uh services and and underwriters now who are looking at that they're like hey you have these italian cypresses you have trees that are hanging right over your roof um this is no longer insurable um and it's called defensible space or home hardening this kind of stuff and

SPEAKER_77: that's that is important work at the same time um the it's looking at it from a really micro point of view and the truth is if you are in the parameter of one of those 14 fires inside it does not make a

SPEAKER_79: difference whether or not you have italian cypresses or not right whether you have a tree that's five feet from your house or 15 feet from your house it what what really matters there is that big picture

SPEAKER_77: macro level weather and geospatial data in the fit in the 10 miles edge of the perimeter of the fire

SPEAKER_79: where these uh these embers are being thrown it makes a huge difference because that ember hits your house and hits that italian cypress bad news the house next door might have gone done through the smart work of closing up their vents not putting italian cypress in and that one's not going to burn down it's going to have enough time for the fire what is the closing of the vents do i've heard that before yeah it's so that embers don't get inside your house uh and burn up you know all those uh old amazon boxes that you have stored in your basement basically um so something as simple as that can change the

SPEAKER_09: fate of one of these fires and structures uh i had this idea that we could take the blankets that people use to put out car fires or things and throw them over a house um i found out that during this wildfire somebody actually wrapped their home in a fire blanket and it worked and they wrapped the biggest redwood tree in the bay area got wrapped with a fire retardant blanket um where are we at with because i've been looking for a startup to fund based on that idea have you seen anybody come up with a bulletproof solution for you know a home not getting put on fire and and how you know for ten thousand dollars per home couldn't we just put blankets around them or have a blanket system that dropped over them or there are all these gels and stuff that people use to put out fires or protect stuff why don't we require or incentivize putting a tank on the top of these homes with the gel when it hits a certain fire temperature instead of just putting on water which obviously gets cut because they're using it to cut fires and they have to fly it in with helicopters and planes because there's so little water pressure you could just drop that goo over the home and keep it from going on fire why are those

SPEAKER_77: things not being deployed or are they uh there's a lot of insight and research going into this you know

SPEAKER_79: another one to add to you is that uh that i saw a startup doing is that uh dry ice actually uh just

SPEAKER_118: sucks up fire like it just it's amazing and so someone's trying to figure out how do i deploy these in

SPEAKER_09: drones and will you introduce me to them don't say their name on the program i don't want anybody to

SPEAKER_209: front run that will you introduce me to them yeah i'll find um we'll make that connection um i am

SPEAKER_09: it's cool so the idea would be if you put the dry ice around a building where you had some sort of dry ice system where you made a wall of dry ice a wall of dry ice like the white wall like the like the book like the ice wall in game of thrones could stop right yeah the the red walkers in this case

SPEAKER_77: the fire in the red exactly wow yeah yeah there's some cool stuff going on there and it's and it's

SPEAKER_79: incredibly important to your point about the other ones you know yes there there are a lot of good mitigation things that could be done from a household perspective the blanket one i love that the wrapping the house and things like that and that's what you can kind of do as a as an individual right and then i just want to like clarify at the same time that forest thinning and uh and controlled burn at a at a statewide level would make a tremendous difference uh and and really because the other thing with that is not only does it say okay now we're no longer there's going to be less fires and there'll be less dramatic fires but as we talked about earlier it actually reduces the smoke right and so as we're saying there's actually the risk of the fire hitting your house is is still you know only point less than 0.1 percent a year burned down however you know as a californian like

SPEAKER_64: that smoke is off um and we had 200 i don't know where it was by you but we had 200 300 particle days

SPEAKER_01: yeah on the peninsula pretty regularly yeah uh and i was just like you know this is and then you look

SPEAKER_09: at poor tahoe you know this incredible jewel of california even the jewel of the united states and you know the the fire is going to hit there eventually right i mean it's just an inevitability

SPEAKER_64: in your mind it's a high probability you have you're you're doing the metrics i mean tell it to a straight chances tahoe gets hit by one of these fires in the next decade certain 50 uh so two two

SPEAKER_118: answers this so it is a high risk area for sure um it is a you know a very high risk area at the same

SPEAKER_79: time what we saw this last year right is that and you see this in knap and sonoma as well um the fires get very close and and what happens is you know we as i said we're actually firefighters are incredible and and we're getting pretty good at this and so we put up just like that final wall like you were talking about the wall of ice like we're putting it in and we're not gonna let south lake tahoe get

SPEAKER_77: hit or you look at the fires in knap and some right like they have gotten right next to the 29 like right like they're just come right to the edge and they're they're taking out wine but like the the main the homes we managed to stop them just in time so it's hard to say um is the answer is

SPEAKER_79: you we're gonna have to fight fires all the time in tahoe and uh and and the one in wine country and in south you know in south california too until we can get these bigger fires under control

SPEAKER_77: like i talked about um uh but you know people are are pretty resourceful and incredible and they're

SPEAKER_79: doing a great job of stopping it before it really hits those those major towns but then you have other examples right you have paradise where it doesn't right and every once in a while it it comes

David Friedberg: right through or that big corner santa rosa right that's our it's so hard issue is it's a wind issue

SPEAKER_01: no no no it doesn't matter the bravery or the quantity of these firefighters if that wind is up

SPEAKER_09: they they can't stop the wind nobody it's so hard yeah so here just as we wrap up here uh and thank you for doing the work you're doing and being such a great guest and explaining all this there is um uh fire roads uh very naturally uh stop these fires um we're correct in that yes and that's why they're created and they're highly highly highly effective is my understanding

SPEAKER_01: and they tend to be one or two lanes wide and that's enough for them to be effective

SPEAKER_229: am i correct there makes a big difference yeah yeah i mean again like if it's 90 mile an hour santa

SPEAKER_79: anna wins and the fires kind of it's like it's not going to make a difference but when that's these

SPEAKER_118: are some of the main reasons why you know the vast majority of those 10 000 fires do get put out

SPEAKER_47: before they cause major so i wonder if we we haven't wanted to create more roads

SPEAKER_09: roads through our forest land because we don't want animals to be run over by trucks um and we don't want to spoil it that being said um you know you're going to have a lot of animals dying in these fires uh and a lot less would die if we had more um fire roads built and more access roads

SPEAKER_00: built so should we not go on a major project because i saw people in napa doing this during that

SPEAKER_09: during the last couple years people were just taking their own bulldozers and just driving straight through the forest and just knocking down everything in sight and creating their own fire roads they were not asking permission they were just you know they went rogue if we created you know our appalachian trail as it were or other you know um uh you know uh type of roads we could create

SPEAKER_00: this incredible hiking trail biking trail that could be used by everybody don't put trucks on it just let it be used by humans to travel over a lot of these mountains that are otherwise inaccessible it would

SPEAKER_09: be a win-win and you could you know charge for use of them or make them uh uh in some way like a like a national park you know people want to go take their mountain biking or camp along them it could be extraordinary like we did with the high line in new york so yeah do you think there's this opportunity to make the greatest bike path slash you know uh fire road in the world because the fire roads in

SPEAKER_161: california people use for hiking southern california all the time like the santa monica mountains are

SPEAKER_198: filled with them yeah there are lots of them uh throughout northern california too like they're

SPEAKER_79: they're extremely useful and important uh and the long and short is yes we should have more um in anywhere where there's danger right they're uh they're they're throughout you know the hills in in the east bay of the bay area right and and for a good reason because they're they're they're trying to block anything that might go wrong and all that protected land that's on the other edge of that

SPEAKER_97: hill why don't they why don't we have more of them is there some is it just the expense of it or are there people fighting it because they think it's not good for you know whatever i haven't seen people

SPEAKER_79: fighting it hard um you know uh i actually in my community in in the hills that we actually expanded ours you know the neighborhood just kind of organized and does the work um uh and so they're they're it there's more and more happening uh and you know and fire chiefs are really leading like we're gonna put a break here we're gonna put a break there um you know i think honestly a lot of this is like this is to remind us like pre-2016 it was a different world right we did not have this as much and now uh it's just changed over the last five years and so we're we're playing a little bit of

SPEAKER_64: catch-up yeah and there's no way this is a fluke i mean i think that's one of the things we're gonna

SPEAKER_141: have to just no this is the new reality this is a reality it's not stopping it's gonna get worse

SPEAKER_124: in all likelihood as i said earlier we got to put a lot of money to work you know at a at doing forest

SPEAKER_79: management foresting and things like i wish there was a way to reduce the temperature and and do those things but that's it's not going to happen and so what we need to do is is reduce the fuel load uh and that just takes a lot of concerted effort and work and then protect people and incentivize them not to build in places that uh that are high risk and and and that's the new reality and you've

SPEAKER_01: raised money for your company you didn't get into yc but you did raise money and you've been growing

SPEAKER_09: this business um i'm assuming you're hiring if somebody wanted to work on this like really incredible

SPEAKER_198: project uh we are yeah yeah we're hiring always looking for great great machine learning engineers uh with greater science backgrounds uh infrastructure engineers where can people find out more and track your progress over time yeah our website is our o u r kettle k-e-t-t-l-e dot com uh same handle on

SPEAKER_64: twitter is that because the kettle is uh boiling now and we have to keep an eye on it that's that's right

SPEAKER_79: yeah that's that's one of the ways the other one uh was uh you know there's a there's an old saying like we're all in this kettle of fish together um and it was like you know this is one of the things i love about insurance is like it's it's this system that allows humans to cooperate at this

SPEAKER_77: giant scale right like what we're doing when you pay your premiums even if it's terrible is you're actually putting your money together and saying hey jacal if you get hit by that you know fire this year i got your back i'll throw you a buck beautiful and and and we'll do it's beautiful it's totally beautiful um and uh and it's like you know we we can make this thing work better um and and the reality is the models that are being used uh have been not really updated like this

SPEAKER_79: industry was the the og data scientists like invented data science uh the industry you know the industry 500 years ago of actuarial tables um it hasn't had an update and you know we can now land space craft and have cars drive themselves this this original data science should uh should

SPEAKER_29: get an update absolutely uh is uh are drones playing a role yet in the data that you're using or low

SPEAKER_09: planes imagery capture yeah yeah we're not doing ourselves talking about those oh you use their party services yeah yeah yeah i think those there's also the blimps and stuff like that like project loon and some of those like balloons that are able to get like really good data so i mean it's really interesting we have all these data sources that are looking for people to build machine learning and computer visualization on top of them and you're an example of one of them so it's exactly cool all all right thanks for coming on the pod and we'll see you all next time bye bye