Martin Gurri is a former CIA analyst whose book, the Revolt of the Republic, has put together the best explanation I’ve heard yet for how and why social media has changed politics everywhere in the world. His theory links together the color revolutions, Brexit and *both* the Trump and Obama presidencies. To me most political discourse is unprod ...…

This episode is an update from last year's check in with Judah Cohen, Director of Seasonal Forecasting at AER, a Verisk Company and a Research Affiliate at MIT. We talk about the winter of 2019 including the incredible cold snap that hit the continental US, other anomalous weather patterns (very cold arctic!) and how all these systems interact. ...…

My guests for this episode are Ted Tafaro, Founder and CEO of Exceptional Risk Advisors and his partner Chris Lack. Exceptional Risk Advisors writes insurance policies covering complex human capital risks for highly successful individuals such as Entertainers, Athletes, Corporate Executives and other Professionals. My opening question is about ...…

Agnes Callard is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and her specialties are in ethics and ancient philosophy. Agnes recently wrote a book called Aspiration which tackles an intuitively clear concept, that we aspire to learn new things and to value them. The thing with philosophy is that it seeks to apply order to our ...…

Every manager wants the dynamism of an entrepreneurial spirit in their company. The benefits of empowering highly skilled people are enormous and there is a long list of organizations that do this well and these are some of the most successful companies on earth. But it isn't easy because risks can be very real and very scary. Listen to this cl ...…

While my interview guests are getting settled in I occasionally ask them to read out some of the actuarial code of conduct and we discuss it. I'm assembling those clips into some content for my paid actuarial continuing education channel which all actuaries you should check out (and get those CE credits before year-end!). When I did this with T ...…

My second interview, with Jonathan Beach, is easily (easily) the most underappreciated show I've done. JB is one of the most influential people in my professional life. We don't all get to record the semi-mythical stories that form our intellectual style and professional value system. I do! This is one of the stories I tell to just about everyo ...…

Today we have the return of Steve Mildenhall where Steve and I talk blockchain! Steve suggested the idea to me a few months ago and that sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole exploring this technology. In this episode Steve and I talk about what the blockchain is from both a technical and strategic perspective. It covers insurance but we go wider ...…

This episode features Terri Vaughan, professor of actuarial science at Drake University and CEO of the NAIC during the Great Recession. We can call this the Not Unreasonable 10-year retrospective on the financial crisis. I first came across Terri's work as an actuarial student and been fascinated ever since by her case for state regulation and ...…

This is a special interview for me because Tyler Cowen has been an enormous intellectual and moral influence on me over the last ten years or so. I'm not alone. Tyler blogs with Alex Tabarrok at marginalrevolution.com, which is usually ranked as the top economics blog and Tyler as one of the most influential economists of the day. Tyler's books ...…

This episode is about diving deep into a comparison between stock market arbitrageurs and specialty insurance underwriters. The idea for the show came from the guest, Rich Derr, an actuary at Nationwide Insurance Company's specialty division and I love nothing more than falling down a well with someone comparing financial and insurance markets. ...…

In this clip from my conversation with Barbara Chabbaga, Barbara talks about being in trapped in a storage closet for hours while terrorists massacred mall shoppers outside the door. She was sure she'd die but didn't and describes what it was like coming home to her infant daughter and what decisions her newfound resolve drove her to.…

How are we supposed to think about Machine Learning? How are businesses going to change? This week I interview Joshua Gans, Professor of Strategic Management at the Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto and the Chief Economist at the University's Creative Destruction Lab. Joshua is the co-author, along with Ajay Agarwal and Avi ...…

Today I'm kicking off a new series tentatively called the Not Unreasonable Book club to be co-hosted with Steve Mildenhall (who is running for the board of the Casualty Actuarial Society, so vote for him!). Steve is an assistant professor at St John's University's school of risk management and former head of Analytics at Aon Re. Steve's an all- ...…

Rob Johnson returns to the Not Unreasonable Podcast for a deep dive into the financial results of the Lloyd's market. Rob almost always has a contrarian view of insurance company results. Usually when an insurer is lamenting their results they're much better than they seem. And when they're pumping up their performance, that's a warning sign! R ...…

My guest this week is Joe Petrelli, the founder and CEO of Demotech, a rating agency based in Columbus, Ohio. This interview was a particular delight for me, folks, because I've finally found a real example of classic Clay Christensen Disruption in Insurance. Demotech has been quietly disrupting what he calls "the legacy rating agencies" for de ...…

Todd has had the following jobs: political campaigner, investment banker, hedge fund trader, hedge fund portfolio manager, private equity investor, reinsurance company CEO, insurance company CEO and stay at home dad. I've known Todd for many years and have always admired his level-headed attitude towards complicated problems and what otherwise ...…

It was harder than it looks now in retrospect!

My guest this week is Bill Jenkins. Bill is a technology specialist in the insurance industry. I like to joke that the customer satisfaction rate for insurer systems is 0. But does that need to be the case? I've finally had the chance to ask these questions of an out and out expert. Bill has headed up internal technology projects at insurers, h ...…

Barbara Chabbaga is an insurance product consultant in Kenya. She trained as an actuary in Canada before returning to Nairobi and working for a carrier there. After surviving a terrorist attack she quit her job and founded a consulting company, AB Consultants, to work on microsinurance product development. Barbara wrestles with the same problem ...…

Recently I've gotten to know today's guest, John Shettle, and all along I've been trying to figure out how to just hook up the cables and suck as much information out of him as I could. But how do you ask someone: hey can I just pepper you with the most challenging questions I can think of in insurance for an hour or so.. you know, for fun? I'l ...…

I sometimes think of insurance as a morality game. The problem of assessing and pricing risks is so hard that we fall back on human concepts of fairness and relationships to guide our actions. Think about the oldest of old school underwriters. They build relationships. They fight claims swindlers and predators to the death. They're unscrupulous ...…

Marc Grandisson recently became CEO of Arch Capital Group. Ever wonder what he was like as a young man? Well find out in this re-air of a clip from my episode with Paul Ingrey on how Marc joined Arch.

Today's guest is Gabe Glynn, co-founder and CEO of MakuSafe and host of the Advanced Manufacturing Podcast. Gabe's company is a technology startup designing wearable sensors to dramatically improve workplace safety in manufacturing. We cover a lot of ground in our conversation, including the culture of manufacturing, why unemployment is so low ...…

This show's guest is Bryan Caplan, Professor of Economics at George Mason Unviersity and his latest book is *The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money*. In this book Bryan makes the point that if we evaluated school based on what we are saying it does, teach us useful skills, it fails. So, argues the book ...…

Today's guest is Jim Weiss, the director of analytic solutions for ISO. ISO houses perhaps the richest insurance data repository on the planet and among Jim's responsibilities is building models that don't use it! I joke.. Actually, Jim is exploring new frontiers of modeling for insurance purposes. This episode works very well in conjunction wi ...…

This week's guest, Cathy O'Neil, wrote a book called Weapons of Math Destruction, which explores how pervasive predictive modeling is becoming and also how bad models influence, sometimes direct, big decisions. Bad in this case means models that are, to the trained eye, laughably inappropriate for their task. Take for example teacher testing, w ...…

Ever wondered what the polar vortex is and why it can get so cold in the winter? Judah Cohen is among the few who has been able to predict these things has an answer. Judah is director of seasonal forecasting at AER, a verisk business, and a visiting scientist at the civil and engineering department at MIT. Judah has observed, like many of us, ...…

For reinsurance people, this interview is electric. Paul Ingrey founded three of the most successful reinsurance companies of the last 40 years: Prudential Re (Everest Re), F&G Re (10% of staff became CEOs) and Arch Re (as we know it today). Thousands of people in the industry can trace their employment back to Paul's unique mix of discipline a ...…

Paul Ingrey, founder of Pru Re (Everest Re), F&G Re (10% of staff became CEOs) and Arch Re (as we know it today) sat down with me recently. I can't wait to get this content out so I'll be experimenting with releasing clips as I edit the show. Feedback to @davecwright on twitter, linkedin or notunreasonablepodcast@gmail.com.…

Judah Cohen of AER is a winter weather expert and each year develops a forecast using his own methods that the meteorological mainstream ignores.. But the things is, you see, it works. Check out this 4 minute clip from our forthcoming conversation

Paul Ingrey, founder of Pru Re (Everest Re), F&G Re (10% of staff became CEOs) and Arch Re (as we know it today) sat down with me recently. I can't wait to get this content out so I'll be experimenting with releasing clips as I edit the show. Feedback to @davecwright on twitter, linkedin or notunreasonablepodcast@gmail.com.…

This episode is an experiment. Actuaries need to attest to having done 30 hours a year of continuing education and three of those need to be in what we call "professionalism" which can loosely be thought of as ethics for actuaries. Satisfying these is often boring work so I thought I'd try to make it interesting. In this conversation with Don M ...…

Joe Taranto is one of the most successful reinsurance executives in the last 40 years. He has turned around and taken public two reinsurers who even today are very prominent and successful companies: Transatlantic Reinsurance Company and Everest Re, the latter of which he spent 20 years leading as CEO and 10xing the firm over that period. Joe s ...…

How is Hank Greenberg Misunderstood?

Long ago Robin thought he had uncovered some ways to make the world a better place. He expected disagreement. Instead he got indifference. How could that be? This led Robin to becoming an economist and, eventually, an answer: we aren't motivated the way we say we are or think we should be. There are hidden motives and Robin's new book, The Elep ...…

This episode features Michel de Lecq Marguerie. Michel, a most English sounding fellow with a most french sounding name was my first boss in reinsurance. Michel is a classically trained musician and like any good performer Michel loves high pressure situations. This made him a natural entrepreneur and he credits that path to unlocking his own s ...…

Hey folks, today we are zooming out to the big picture. We talk a lot about technological trends (software eating the world, bitcoin, AI) but *organizational* trends aren't given their due. And organizations are evolving, partly (maybe mostly) due to technology but this line of thinking also is also distinct. One example is a recent book called ...…

This episode features Ted Blanch. Ted to me is one of the greatest leaders the reinsurance industry has ever seen and one of the most underrated leaders of any industry in any era. Ted ran the firm EW Blanch, taking over at about 50 employees and growing it into a billion dollar company by the mid-90s. That alone puts Ted among the most success ...…

[technical note: there is some garbled audio from time to time (especially around minute 55) because, well, Bart is calling in from a boat. Not the greatest connection. I've decided to leave it intact because you can still mostly make out what's going on. Apologies for this. Thanks for listening] Bart Hedges is an actuary, former teenaged entre ...…

Don Mango is one of the most important thinkers in insurance. He has published numerous papers and helped, in my mind, the rest of us figure out what on earth to do with all the computational advances of the last 20 years. In this episode we talk about that as well as how publishing research changed his life; what his relative strength is among ...…

Jonathan is founder of Beach and the best salesman I've ever met. His style was an enormous influence on me personally and on the culture of my firm as a whole. I wanted to do this interview to help explore what our culture is and what its most prominent practitioner can achieve with integrity, self-awareness, openness and honesty. In this inte ...…

Rob has been an important mentor to me through most of my career here at Beach. I wanted to take an opportunity to record some of my favourite stories of his and the key lessons he's taught me. This interview covers: The beginnings of Rob's career and the dawn of the P&C actuary in Australia; The paper he wrote in 1980, which to me really gets ...…