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.
15episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Can Big Tech Become The Next Insurance Company?
5d ago00:42:14Tap to summarizeFor 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/
Transcribe →Private Capital, Public Flood: Risky Science Live
1w ago00:55:26Tap to summarizeListen 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
Transcribe →Jane Kim and California's Insurance "Hostage Situation"
2w ago00:32:58Tap to summarizeJane 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.
Transcribe →The Price Is the Forecast
3w ago00:36:51Tap to summarizeWeather 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
Transcribe →Risk Doesn't Disappear, It Gets Allocated
4w 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
Jul 100:38:18Tap 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
Jun 2400:29:05Tap 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
Jun 1701:06:02Tap 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 →