Risky Science Podcast

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...

In this episode of the Risky Science Podcast we are joined by Danie Retil, co-founder of Exona Labs, a startup building AI risk modeling and quantification tools. 

For decades, insurers, reinsurers and energy companies have relied on models, parametrics, and traditional hedges to manage hurricane and weather exposure. But what if markets could continuously price those risks — in real time — and let anyone transfer or hedge them instantly? In this episode I’m joined by Dr. Patrick Brown, Head of Climate Analytics Interactive Brokers  to talk about modeling th...

In this episode of the podcast, we speak with geopolitical risk expert Samuel Wilkin of Willis Towers Watson about why political risk is moving from a background concern to a front-line business problem. Sam breaks down the rise of “gray zone” attacks in the space between war and peace—from covert sabotage to infrastructure disruption—and explains why these threats are so difficult to model and in...

In our first episode of the New Year we are focusing on cyber risk in 2026, a peril that looks increasingly systemic, yet remains poorly understood when it comes to how losses actually materialize. Over the past decade, cyber risk modeling has matured rapidly. But as cloud concentration deepens, dependencies multiply, and “near miss” events become more frequent, a central question remains unresolv...

In the last episode of Risky Science, we examined skepticism around climate-conditioned catastrophe models with Roger Pielke Jr.—questioning how much weight long-range climate assumptions should carry in near-term insurance and capital decisions. Today’s discussion is a direct counterpoint. My guest is Dave Jones, former California Insurance Commissioner and now director of the Climate Risk Initia...

Register for the January 8 Risky Science Podcast Live In this episode, I’m joined by Roger Pielke Jr., a researcher known for his work on the use—and misuse—of models in risk and policy decisions. Pielke is a polarizing figure in climate research, particularly for his views on how climate change should—and should not—be incorporated into catastrophe models used for annual insurance and reinsurance...

Register here for the January 8 Risky Science Podcast Live This week on the Risky Science Podcast, I’m joined by Dr. Phillip Mulder of the University of Wisconsin, co-author of a newly released research paper examining how these insurance pressures are influencing who buys, who moves, and who can no longer afford to stay. The research has drawn significant attention, including coverage in The New...