Risky Science Podcast

his summer's record cyclosporiasis outbreak did something unusual: it took money out of companies that had nothing to do with it. Five food companies cut or constrained guidance over the outbreak. None of them served the contaminated product. Hal King has worked every side of that problem — CDC outbreak investigator, architect of an enterprise food safety management program at a major national cha...

Karen Clark, founder and CEO of Karen Clark & Company, returns to Risky Science to discuss KCC's new white paper on artificial intelligence in catastrophe models — where AI genuinely improves the science, and where the industry is overstating what it can do. Clark built the first commercial catastrophe model in the 1980s. In this conversation she argues that the biggest step change in the fiel...

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.

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,...

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, correla...

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 Calif...

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 bre...

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 Senato...

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...

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 gro...

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.

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 rei...

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 serie...

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 extra...

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.

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, an...

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...

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 trad...

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

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.

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.

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.

Chris Lafakis and his team did the first analysis to combine Moody's catastrophe modeling infrastructure with a full macroeconomic model. The results are eye opening. This is a preview of the Risky Science Podcast Member Edtion. To get access to the full episode sign up to become a free member of Risk Market News .

Dr. Ben Collier, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his fellow researchers published a recent paper that uses twenty years of Florida data to trace a direct line from cat model revisions to the premiums homeowners actually pay. The finding? A one-dollar increase in modeled expected loss translates to roughly five dollars in higher premiums. That multiplier — and what's driving...

A conversation with Daniel Schwarcz, professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, where he teaches insurance law, contract law, tort law, and financial regulation and his academic work sits at the intersection of AI governance and insurance regulation. (00:00) - Introduction (00:17) - Guest background: From P&C attorney to insurance law professor (02:13) - AI in insurance today: back-o...