Risky Science Podcast

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...