Podcast
Risky Science Podcast
Hosted by Risk Market News · EN
The Risky Science Podcast features conversations with scientists, insurers, investors, portfolio managers, and others about the evolving science of predicting and modeling risk across both natural and man-made perils.
11episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Risk Doesn't Disappear, It Gets Allocated
4d ago00:39:25Tap to summarizeIn 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.
Transcribe →Venezuela, The Built Environment And Lessons of a Catastrophic Earthquake
2w ago00:38:18Tap to summarizeThis 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
Transcribe →Sticky Liabilities, Illiquid Assets and the Private Credit Perception Gap
3w ago00:29:05Tap to summarizeA 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.
Transcribe →2026 Hurricane Season: Risk, Markets, Models
4w ago01:06:02Tap to summarizeThis 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.
Transcribe →Ebola, Statistics, and What Pandemic Science Can Teach Markets
May 2700:54:43Tap to summarizeThe 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
Transcribe →Wildfire's Garbage-In Problem With Brian Bastian
May 2000:25:00Tap to summarizeCalifornia’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
Transcribe →Modeling Every Risk for Every Client with Willis' Ben Fidlow
May 1300:25:13Tap to summarizeBen 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
Transcribe →The Wrong Model for the Wrong Job With Roy Wright
May 600:24:33Tap to summarizeIn 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.
Transcribe →The LA Fires and the Risk Market Value Chain With Joy Chen
Apr 2800:42:48Tap to summarizeThe 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
Transcribe →How Catastrophe Models Work and Where They Fall Short With Anil Vasagiri
Apr 2200:27:49Tap to summarizeThis 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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