John Loeber 🎢

New Podcast! Natural disasters make the Insurance Commissioner California's most important office after Governor. But insurance is broken in California. Homeowners can't get decent coverage. Why? And how do we fix it? I interviewed Patrick Wolff for answers.

@MagisFuturum @ddayen Best candidate is Patrick Wolff

@ddayen So who is the best candidate, maybe Stacy Korsgaden?

An important race affecting affordability for millions is totally off the radar. Jane Kim, candidate for California insurance commissioner, is pitching a single payer program for disaster insurance, to align insurance with homeowners. prospect.org/2026/05/14/jan…

@AlecStapp @cafreiman Almost like a pod shop/PM model for parts of the economy, instead of parts of a fund

Subtle but deep point here: Capitalism is driven more by the entry/exit of small central planners than it is by markets & prices.

Some thoughts... why does the first amendment matter so much in this context? The reasons why the Internet is broadly American are partially technological (first mover) and therefore cultural, but also political. By contrast, imagine if the Internet had been a European invention. You can see that vision in the EU's policy approaches to the internet today: choked by questions of liability and legal constraints on speech. Today, European government officials initiate selective enforcement of the law against what people post online. The chilling effects of this are significant, such that the European internet economy today is minuscule relative to its peers. It's well-possible that an Internet built under those constraints could've been killed in the cradle, or if not that, would not become large/open enough to produce the training data required for AI, and so forth. (You might consider the European or Chinese visions of the Internet as counterexamples -- different but still existent, but importantly, they're also forced into their positions by the American Internet as a competing force. A world without an American Internet might be one with none at all.)

One of the biggest impacts of the First Amendment is that it has led to a free and open Internet. What's very interesting to me about this is that it shows the lifetime impact of a policy: sometimes the really significant consequences come 200 years after instantiation.

Acknowledged, and that's a significant bearish factor right now, but not a showstopper IMO. Bitcoiners have been talking about moving to post-quantum signature schemes for over a decade. Building consensus on the exact path forward is the tricky part, but that's navigable. (And time will force the community's hand on choosing a way forward.)

@johnloeber There is the quantum problem for BTC

Interestingly, people are both: (1) recognizing that we'll have a few years of real cybersecurity problems, to the extent that some bank accounts will go poof (2) asking what will be scarce in an AGI economy And yet, nobody's connecting the dots that this is bullish for bitcoin

Back when people sent each other letters, that was a very different communication style from messaging today. Not just because of length and cadence, but because each letter constituted something like a small, completed artwork unto itself. A mini essay. There's a creative act in drafting and finishing something. Instant messages are never finished but part of an endless flow of exchange.

Voiding the secondary market makes OpenAI and Anthropic stock even more thinly traded and gives even more control over valuation to them. It's probably a smart move for the big labs in service of their next fundraises. This manufactures even more of a squeeze for the equity, though it also (ironically) creates more demand for totally off-the-cap-table synthetic solutions. It is a small tragedy that main street is unable to get exposure here -- or when they do, it'll be in a degenerate market. It's hard not to second-guess regulation like Dodd-Frank or Sarbanes-Oxley: meant to stick it to bad actors, but ended up choking the public out of the opportunities of their lifetimes. Tough.

One thing nobody prepares you for is that professional success means that you dedicate an enormous amount of headspace to things you do not care at all about. It becomes a memory burden. I know so much about taxes. Corporate and personal, US and EU. I wish I didn't. I know so much about corporate law. Endless regulatory nuances in insurance. And at some point you realize that this is actually in zero-sum competition with stuff that you do care about. You can only remember so much. Did I trade off priceless childhood memories for memorizing a bunch of details about Android Development or Biden-Era Crypto Regulation? I sure hope not.

what a terrific privilege it is to fly. for nearly all of mankind it was a dream, impossible, something of the gods. a hundred years ago — practically yesterday — we did it with nothing but our wits, and now we get to see things previously unimaginable

@jfwfreo glasses of the sun. what part of my tweet did you not understand

@johnloeber What about sunglasses, what does that compound noun turn into?

You can instantly level up your conversational sophistication and mystery by replacing every XY compound noun with “Y of X” cheeseboard -> board of cheeses bridesmaid -> maid of the bride backpack -> pack of the back if you do it consistently, you’ll drive your friends crazy

@PradyuPrasad (almost there!)

@johnloeber wait what? link???

April 29: I write that we’ll see previously-infeasible rewrites of software, because AI makes it both possible and necessary (increasingly adversarial cybersecurity environment), and that big labs would be smart to get ahead on this May 9: Anthropic fully rewrites Bunjs in Rust

@lumpenspace If you do it too much, you may be committed to a, uh, how do you say, institution of the mental

it does sound like a salad of words if you’re distracted, and works also as a simple joke of dad, although if your partner of conversation wises up he might accuse you of differing from syndrome of down

@eastsidedav est-ce que vous avez le, uhhm, burger du ham?

@johnloeber This is just how French works

extremely fitting

@verymidengineer your username of “very mid engineer” says all that needs to be said

@johnloeber what an incredibly tone deaf thing to say in a market so cutthroat an interview is like 1-10 applications at best 1-100 for some folks. If you can solve the interview you can solve the job, its very rare people can just slot in its always a learning curve

On interviewing: Candidates, please don't prepare too much. Come as you are. When the company has a realistic understanding of you, they will be able to best slot you in on the team. If you overprepare, you might end up with a role that's not the best fit for you. And conversely, as a candidate you want to know and be fully confident in the fact that the company bringing you on understands your capabilities -- strengths and weaknesses and all. (If you even slightly suffer from impostor syndrome, then this is really important for your well-being!) You should be slightly well-prepared, of course. Read up on the company, understand it, brush up on your relevant skills. But getting hired should be a consequence of a lifetime of good preparation, not last-minute cramming.

@Ross_Warren9 Thank you, and your comment is spot-on. Toward the end — it doesn’t even require Silicon Valley to fix insurance, just slightly smarter regulation for the free market to do its work.

Great listen! California's fire insurance market is easily solvable. The FAIR plan just shouldn't exist, the policyholders are subsidizing entities with higher risk for claimants underpaying for their risk. The surplus market exists for a reason. The solution should be to drastically increase the number of insurers to operate in California. We had a hard market in cyber and now 20+ new companies alone have entered our market and rates have fallen while coverage expanded. The frequency of claims did not dip, but the severity did - which appears to be more of a result of lack of encryption events with severe negative outcomes. John knows firsthand how an underwriting shift likely contributed to this outcome. To improve claims outcomes reinforce claims adjuster independent for homeowners claims and make it easy to file a bad faith claim without a lawsuit to the Insurance Commissioner. The idea it takes >30 days to file a rate plan for any state is abysmal. All rates and forms should be default approved after 30 days if the state cannot meet that deadline. I am sure Silicon Valley can fix fire insurance in California.

New Podcast! Natural disasters make the Insurance Commissioner California's most important office after Governor. But insurance is broken in California. Homeowners can't get decent coverage. Why? And how do we fix it? I interviewed Patrick Wolff for answers.

@curious_vii thank you!

@johnloeber looks great btw!