Risky Science Podcast

Episode

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  Insurance Isn't Just Transferring Risk Anymore 05.08.2026 53mnt

  Private credit didn't just find a new source of capital—it may have changed the role of life insurance itself. Andrew Granato and Pranjal Yadav explain why insurance regulation, guaranty funds and opaque private assets could become increasingly important to financial stability.
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  Can Big Tech Become The Next Insurance Company? 29.07.2026 42mnt

  For years, the biggest competitive battles in insurance have been between insurers. Underwriting. Pricing. Capital management.But artificial intelligence may be changing the rules.What if the next major competitor doesn't come from another insurance company at all? What if it comes from the technology sector?As AI becomes better at predicting losses, preventing claims, and influencing behavior, the question isn't simply whether insurers will use AI. It's who ultimately owns the data, the customer relationship, and the economics of managing risk.Today's guest is Alex Chan, an economist working as an Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School, whose recent research explores how artificial intelligence could fundamentally change the economics of risk. Subscribe to Risk Market News https://www.riskmarketnews.com/
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  Private Capital, Public Flood: Risky Science Live 24.07.2026 55mnt

  Listen to the full replay of the latest Risky Science Live "Private Capital, Public Flood: Risky Science Live". The panel examines what a larger private flood market actually requires: the modeling sophistication to price the peril credibly, and the underwriting and capital structures to carry it. Flood has long been the catastrophe risk the private market avoided, deterred by sparse data, correlated losses, and a federal backstop that absorbed the tail. Subscribe to Risk Market News
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  Jane Kim and California's Insurance "Hostage Situation" 22.07.2026 32mnt

  Jane Kim just finished first in the race to become California's next insurance commissioner. She's a former San Francisco supervisor and worked for Bernie Sanders. And where Allen wants to draw private capital back into the market, Kim wants to build a public one: a nonprofit disaster insurer, funded by premiums the state would claw back and reinvest, plus a single catastrophe model built by California itself.So this is the same problem — an unaffordable, retreating wildfire market — seen through two completely different lenses. Allen's answer is a better-run private system. Kim's answer is a public alternative to it.
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  The Price Is the Forecast 15.07.2026 36mnt

  Weather derivatives have struggled with liquidity for 25 years. Jim Huang thinks prediction markets can finally fix that — but only if the contracts are built around events people actually watch.In this return conversation with Risk Market News, the former CME product strategist and founder of Climate Hedge explains his pivot to WeatherBook, a weather-focused prediction market platform. Huang breaks down why China consolidated all weather index development into the Guangzhou Futures Exchange — pushing any weather futures launch to late 2027 or beyond — and why that regulatory reset opened a window for an event-driven alternative.Register for Risky Science Live
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  Risk Doesn't Disappear, It Gets Allocated 08.07.2026 39mnt

  In this week’s episode we are digging into California's insurance market — and specifically, into the fight over who actually owns wildfire risk. Is it the insurers pulling back from high-risk areas? The utilities whose equipment sparks some of these fires? Or the ratepayers and taxpayers left holding the bag when the bill comes due?To help sort through it, I sat down with California State Senator Ben Allen, who's running for Insurance Commissioner. We got into reinsurance costs, catastrophe models, the FAIR Plan, capital requirements — and where the state's private-market approach diverges from the public alternative his opponent is proposing.
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  Venezuela, The Built Environment And Lessons of a Catastrophic Earthquake 01.07.2026 38mnt

  This week we focus on the tragic catastrophe in Venezuela, where powerful earthquakes tore along the San Sebastián fault and devastated Caracas. As a result, buildings collapsed, the airport shut down, and the death toll climbed.And a fragile country recently facing its own political upheaval was left asking how this could happen on a fault everyone knew was dangerous.My guest is Ziggy Lubkowski, earthquake engineer and Arup's global seismic expert. Arup is a global engineering and design consultancy, and Ziggy has spent nearly forty years studying the built environment—why some buildings stand and others fall—from Indonesia to Turkey to California.We talk about what really drives the damage, why early loss estimates swing by billions, and the one earthquake-risk investment that pays back six to one.Subscribe to Risk Market News
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  Sticky Liabilities, Illiquid Assets and the Private Credit Perception Gap 24.06.2026 29mnt

  A year ago, I sat down with Carmi Margalit, Managing Director and the Life Insurance Sector Lead at Standard & Poor’s Annual Insurance Conference to talk about private credit on insurance balance sheets . So when I caught up with him again this year,I figured it was time for a check-in.And here's the thing that struck me: Carmi says not much has actually changed. The allocations have been growing for years. What's changed is everyone watching — the headlines, the regulators, the questions. So a lot of this conversation is about separating the perception from the mechanics.We get into why the redemption gates you've been reading about are a private-credit-fund story and why this is a liquidity question and not an asset-liability question. We also get into issues like the growing role of offshore reinsurance and what it does to transparency. And what's actually on an analyst's radar for mortality and longevity — GLP-1s included.
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  2026 Hurricane Season: Risk, Markets, Models 17.06.2026 1j 6mnt

  This is the audio recording of our June 11 panel on the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season — three people who actually price this risk for a living, in conversation for an hour.The ground they cover: where the cat models miss, how the ILS market is pricing the 2026 season, and how a new prediction-market contract could change what it means to "test" a hurricane model.
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  Ebola, Statistics, and What Pandemic Science Can Teach Markets 27.05.2026 54mnt

  The Democratic Republic of Congo is in the middle of its 17th Ebola outbreak since 1976 and the WHO has declared a public health emergency of international concern. There are no approved vaccines. No approved treatments. Hundreds of suspected cases emerged before the outbreak was even confirmed. And the surveillance infrastructure needed to track it is operating in an active conflict zone.For reinsurers and ILS investors, pandemic risk has always been the peril that's hardest to model, hardest to price, and hardest to transfer. The triggers don't work and the data is noisy.. And the market has largely walked away from the problem since COVID.My guest today has spent his career working on exactly that problem from the science side. Dr. Ben Swallow is a lecturer in statistics at the University of St. Andrews, where he works at the intersection of Bayesian inference, uncertainty quantification, and epidemic modeling. He co-led the uncertainty quantification effort for the Scottish government during COVID. He's worked on Ebola outbreak analysis in West Africa. And he's currently part of the Isaac Newton Institute's program on pandemic preparedness.Subscribe to Risk Market News
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  Wildfire's Garbage-In Problem With Brian Bastian 20.05.2026 25mnt

  California’s homeowners insurance market, backed by privae capital, is still in retreat. The publicly-backed FAIR Plan is financial buckling. And somewhere in the gap between what the cat models capture and what's actually happening on the ground at the property level, there's a mispricing problem that nobody has fully solved yet.In this episode of The Risky Science Podcast that wraps up my series of conversations from ClimateTech Connect in Washington this past April, I talk with Brian Bastian, Head of Product at Green Shield Risk Solutions — the analytics and MGA operation that's betting mitigation-first underwriting is the answer the admitted market can't quite get to yet. Subscribe to Risk Market News
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  Modeling Every Risk for Every Client with Willis' Ben Fidlow 13.05.2026 25mnt

  Ben Fidlow is a Fellow of the Casualty Actuarial Society and leads analytics and risk advisory at Willis. In this episode, he explains how brokerage modeling differs fundamentally from carrier or vendor modeling — it's about what risk means to a specific client, not an aggregate book. He walks through Willis's expanded partnership with Moody's RMS, which lets his team layer their own climate extrapolations on top of current-day model outputs while retaining the ability to explain every step to clients. He also shares where he thinks AI is creating its most immediate value (converting unstructured client data into structured formats at scale), why federal data erosion is a real near-term problem, and what it would take for a direct capital market risk marketplace to eventually disintermediate both insurers and brokers.Subscribe to Risk Market New
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  The Wrong Model for the Wrong Job With Roy Wright 06.05.2026 24mnt

  In this episode of Risky Science, recorded at ClimateTech Connect in April, IBHS CEO Roy Wright breaks down why catastrophe models were never designed to price individual risk, why mitigation only works at the neighborhood level, and why insurance markets start to fail when price signals drift away from underlying risk.
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  The LA Fires and the Risk Market Value Chain With Joy Chen 28.04.2026 42mnt

  The Eaton and Palisades fires are now the most expensive wildfire disaster in U.S. history — and what's happening in Los Angeles right now is a real-time stress test of the entire insurance value chain. From how models priced the risk, to how policies were written and sold, to how claims are being managed on the ground.Joy Chen is a former deputy mayor of Los Angeles with a finance background, and she runs the Every Fire Survivors Network — 10,000-plus Eaton and Palisades survivors. Her group has spent the last year and a half documenting delays, denials, and underpayments among insured survivors. Among the statistics they point to: a $300,000 median gap between expected insurance payouts and actual rebuilding costs, and a recovery pace slower than any previous California wildfire on record — including the Camp Fire.The question is whether these are simply the normal costs and challenges of a large catastrophe, or market signals about model adequacy — and what happens to market confidence, and ultimately to capacity, when the system fails at scale.Subscribe to Risk Market News
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  How Catastrophe Models Work and Where They Fall Short With Anil Vasagiri 22.04.2026 27mnt

  This episode is part of a series of live conversations recorded at Climate Tech Connect 2026 in Washington, D.C.Anil Vasagiri, Head of Risk Data Solutions at Swiss Re is a rare combination of technical depth and commercial perspective to catastrophe risk — he came up through Verisk, where he held senior roles in product management and data strategy, before joining Swiss Re in 2020. Since then, he's led the development of some of the industry's most sophisticated tools for understanding physical risk at the location level, including Swiss Re's acquisition of flood modeling firm Fathom.Subscribe to Risk Market News
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  Why Mixing Catastrophes With Prediction Markets Is More Dangerous Than It Looks With Jamie Pietruska 15.04.2026 48mnt

  The LA wildfires burned more than a hundred thousand acres. They destroyed thousands of homes. And while they were still burning, people were placing bets on them.Not insurers. Not reinsurers. Not catastrophe modelers running exceedance probability curves. Anybody with a crypto wallet and an opinion.That's the world of prediction markets — platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi, where you can trade event contracts on everything from Fed rate decisions to wildfire containment timelines. The industry calls it speculative finance. Critics call it arson betting.My guest today has been thinking about this longer than most. Jamie Pietruska is a historian at Rutgers University whose work traces the long arc of weather gambling — from illegal temperature pools in American cities a century ago to the prediction market dashboards on your phone right now. Her argument is that what looks new is older than we think, and what looks like progress may be a step backward.Dr. Peitruska's Aeon articleSubscribe to Risk Market News
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  AI, Models, and the Limits of Climate Assumptions with Sarah Kapnick 13.04.2026 27mnt

  We sit down with Dr. Sarah Kapnick at Climate Tech Connect in Washington, D.C. in a conversation covers the time-horizon problem at the heart of climate finance, what the PG&E bankruptcy revealed about the gap between credit models and physical risk, and where AI-generated climate insight ends and hallucination begins.Subscribe to Risk Market News
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  Can Models Still Work When Everything Changes at Once? With Christiane Baumeister 01.04.2026 52mnt

  This week  I speak with Dr. Christiane Baumeister, a professor at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses on global oil market dynamics — disentangling the supply and demand forces that drive prices and developing forecasting models that are designed to perform precisely when markets are most volatile.
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  (Preview) China's Growing Risk Data Moat and the US Brain Drain With Hui Su 25.03.2026 5mnt

  A conversation with Dr. Hui Su, a professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and one of the leading researchers working at the intersection of satellite data, artificial intelligence, and extreme weather forecasting. Become a member of Risk Market News for access to the full member episode.
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  Confidence as a Service With Eric Winsberg 18.03.2026 1j

  We speak with  Eric Winsberg: a philosopher of science at Cambridge and the University of South Florida, who has thought hard about what happens when models move from the lab into the world and into policy and markets.