Good Morning! In this week’s recap, an AI that hacked the internet and then bragged about it, a BBQ chain that learned about SIRs the hard way, Kanye getting bounced from the UK, gas prices blowing up the return-to-office experiment, and why health care is about to become every politician's favorite talking point again. Grab your coffee and let’s get started.

Kanye West sold out two nights at SoFi Stadium in California last week, pocketing a reported $33 million.

Four days later, the UK banned him from entering the country, and London's 3-day Wireless Festival, with 150,000 expected attendees, was dead on arrival.

Sponsors Pepsi and Diageo and Prime Minister Starmer piled on publicly. And now insurers are left answering an uncomfortable question: does a government travel ban count as force majeure when everyone knew the headliner was a walking controversy before the ink dried on the contract?

Experts say probably not, and the exposure could hit tens of millions.

Producers, reputational risk isn't hypothetical anymore. If your clients are booking talent, sponsoring events, or underwriting venues, make sure their cancellation coverage is dialed in.

Here’s the story: A San Antonio woman pulled up to a Bill Miller Bar-B-Q drive-thru in 2023, dropped a container of hot barbecue sauce on herself, and walked away with second-degree burns. She sued and a jury agreed to the tune of $925K in actual damages and $1.89 million in punitive damages.

Here's where it heats up. Bill Miller didn't notify its insurer, Mt. Hawley, until after the verdict. AFTER. The policy had a $1 million self-insured retention with explicit notice triggers for burns, punitive damages, suits exceeding 50% of the retention. Every single one fired. Mt. Hawley found out a year later and promptly pulled coverage.

For P&C producers, your commercial clients with retention structures aren't just assuming financial risk, they're assuming claims management responsibility. Miss a notice trigger, lose the coverage. It's that simple.

Companies spent the last few years strong-arming workers back to the office. Then gas hit $4.16 a gallon, up 75 cents higher than a month ago, and the math ain’t jiving for a lot of people. Especially in places like California, where gas is nearly $6. The Middle East conflict disrupted global oil supply, and commuting employees are feeling it at the pump.

The timing couldn't be worse for HR. Korn Ferry is already warning that workers on the financial edge are doing the affordability calculus on their jobs, and some are failing it. Meanwhile, the White House says relief is weeks away. The Energy Department says prices stay above $3 through 2027.

RTO mandates don't usually come with a gas stipend. For benefits producers, that's your opening. Commuter benefits, financial wellness programs, and flexible work provisions are super valuable conversations worth having.

While nobody was paying attention, transactional risk insurance became indispensable. Marsh reported a record $91.6 billion in coverage globally in 2025, a 34% jump, as M&A deal values crept toward $5 trillion.

Bigger, messier deals mean more demand for representations & warranties coverage, and insurers are getting paid for it. North American R&W rates climbed 16% year-over-year, ending years of soft pricing.

Claims are rising just as fast. The UK hit historic payout levels, Europe saw claim counts double, and North America quietly set a record for total loss payments. Insurers are tightening terms and showing up earlier in the deal process.

The plot twist: corporate buyers now outpace private equity in placements for the third straight year. This isn't a PE-only product anymore.

For P&C producers with bigger clients doing any kind of deal activity like acquisitions, divestitures, restructurings, etc. the R&W conversation belongs in your toolkit. Your competitors are already having it.

Every election cycle since 1992, health care has ranked among voters' top concerns. 2026 will be no different. With every House seat and a third of the Senate on the line this fall, a new KFF report confirms health care affordability has climbed back to the top of the ballot.

Democrats hold a meaningful advantage on voter trust for health care costs with roughly 60% to 40% over Republicans in recent polling, but 4 in 10 independents say they trust neither party. Yikes.

What this means in practice: any candidate promising to lower health care costs has a ready audience, and any policy that touches employer-sponsored coverage, drug pricing, or hospital reimbursement is now campaign fuel.

For benefits producers, your clients' pain is now a political platform. The conversation about what coverage costs isn't just a renewal discussion anymore, it's a voting issue again.

This past week, an AI found a 17-year-old security vulnerability hiding inside one of the internet's most trusted operating systems, exploited it to gain complete control of the server, and then unprompted, entirely on its own, went online and bragged about it.

No handler. No instructions. Just a machine that found a hole, broke through it, and apparently decided the world should know. Nothing to see here.

The model is Anthropic's Claude Mythos. And here's the thing, Anthropic never meant to build a master hacker. Mythos was trained to be better at code and reasoning, and somewhere in that process it became frighteningly good at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities. Better than virtually every human alive at it.

Thousands of zero-days discovered across every major operating system and web browser. Bugs hiding in plain sight for decades, gone in milliseconds. Anthropic's own admission: they never explicitly trained it to do this. The capability just showed up.

So instead of killing it, they made some calls. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Cisco, CrowdStrike, JPMorgan Chase, Nvidia, and roughly 40 other organizations responsible for the world's most critical software infrastructure have been recruited to use Mythos to find and patch vulnerabilities before someone with worse intentions builds something similar. They're calling it Project Glasswing. Anthropic is putting $100 million behind it and has already privately warned senior U.S. government officials that large-scale AI-driven cyberattacks are significantly more likely this year. Not eventually. This year.

The window to get ahead of this is closing fast. One cybersecurity expert puts it at six months before open-weight models match Mythos in capability, meaning the tools Anthropic is carefully controlling today become available to every ransomware actor on earth. No expertise required. No traces left behind.

For insurance pros, this is the cyber market inflection point you've been sensing but couldn't name. CrowdStrike's 2026 Global Threat Report already clocked an 89% year-over-year increase in AI-assisted attacks, and that was before anyone knew Mythos existed. The same AI that patches vulnerabilities can be turned on policyholders. Underwriters are already pricing that reality in. This story just put a very public, very credible face on exactly why.

In this episode, Micah and Trey talk with Andrew Meinster of NSM. Andrew is Trey’s former arch nemesis and he explains how he dominates the towing niche in 48 states, and how you can find and dominate your niche too.

What happens when you spend 15 years chasing money and status, sacrifice everything to get there, and then finally hit the goal and feel absolutely nothing? This conversation with Scott Barker is the realest one we've had on the show and Trey and Micah get personal too. If you're a high performer who hasn't hit the wall yet, this one's especially for you.

Today's email was written by Trey Shields

Edited by Sandy Bunker and Roland Putz

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here