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 chain, and now founder of Active Food Safety, advising the largest foodservice brands in the country. He's the author of the definitive books on food safety management systems, with a new one coming on food safety business leadership.We talk about what actually happens inside a brand in the first hours of an outbreak, the five inputs a real predictive risk model would need, why CDC's confirmed case counts understate the true number by a factor of 83, how insurers could price food safety the way they price slip-and-fall risk today, and why a public health advisory — not the pathogen — decides whether an outbreak becomes a supplier story or a brand story.Recorded live on September 8, 2026.

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 field wasn't AI at all, but the shift from statistical to physical, dynamical models — and that AI's real value is narrower than the hype suggests. It sits almost entirely in the hazard component, sharpening intensity footprints for frequency perils like severe convective storm and winter storm, where high-resolution atmospheric data is abundant. The vulnerability and financial components remain largely untouched.We also get into why she thinks a $100 billion aggregate loss year isn't as significant as the industry treats it, given that a single Category 5 hurricane into Miami would cause over $200 billion on its own. She explains KCC's daily live events process, which has been ingesting 30 gigabytes of atmospheric data and producing hail and tornado footprints every day since 2018, and why she believes that testing regime is what makes the models credible. She makes a pointed claim about Winter Storm Uri: KCC had the 2021 Arctic air outbreak at a 1-in-75-year return period, while she says other modelers didn't have it inside 10,000 years.Recorded ahead of the Monte Carlo Rendez-Vous, the conversation closes on hyperscale data centers — an emerging exposure where the modeling question is less about the buildings than about the data going into the models, and where Clark reframes tornado risk in a way that cuts against how most CEOs are thinking about it.

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, 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/

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, correlated losses, and a federal backstop that absorbed the tail. Subscribe to Risk Market News

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 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.

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 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

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 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.

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, 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

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 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.