What is a life without risk? From going outside to eating our lunch, we take dozens of risks every day without stopping to consider them, let alone attempt to quantify them.

In this week’s podcast, we are joined by Jerry Smith, Head of Advisory at the risk analysis company, CHC Global. Jerry helps us to unpack how the insurance market operates, the idea of malicious versus benign risk, and why high impact and low probability events are difficult to insure. We also discuss how data might be used to present and examine risk in new ways.

A few things we mentioned in this podcast:

• CHC Global
• Pool Re

For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email [email protected]

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights and also with our special guest Jerry Smith of CHC Global and this week we're discussing ensuring against a nuclear war. Nick, Jerry looks familiar to me but can you introduce Jerry to us and our audience please? Yeah well attentive listeners

will remember Jerry from the podcast we did about the global terrorism database. I've known Jerry for a few years now and when we get together we always end up talking about interesting things but his professional job is head of advisory at CHC Global and he deals with malicious risks and I thought this was an interesting enough topic but particularly this question of the insurance market for malicious risks which from what I understand from speaking to Jerry is kind of weird and interesting and there are some things which is very difficult to get insurance for and I think it'd be interesting to talk about why. I'm interested to hear what malicious risks

are. Before we do, Jerry beyond what Nick has said can you paint a picture for us of yourself, what's your background, where have you come from, what's your story? Yeah well thanks very much for

having me on the podcast again it's a real pleasure to be with you guys. So yeah Jerry Smith from CHC Global. I have a background in the military and then I was in at DSTL for a while at Porton Down working with the government science side of life and then I was in the United Nations for a while as a weapons inspector. So my background's been for the last 30 odd years is managing and dealing with malicious risks in all their kind of forms. I can give you a quick breakdown of what malicious risks, my definition of it is, is basically it's bad people doing bad things. Okay. And the challenge of that is that it's people are intelligent, those adversaries that we face are intelligent, they can adapt to changing circumstances which means it's a real challenge to try and understand what their threat is, what their capability is and their intentions and how that manifests itself into a risk that can harm us. Can you give us a couple of examples of what we might be talking about? So when we're talking about an adversary we're talking about a bad person and generally the extreme level which is what we deal with at CHC Global is around terrorism and non-state actors. As far as capability is concerned you know terrorist organizations or the the larger ones have the greatest capability, they have access to finances, to brains and all that sort of thing to actually be able to develop some kind of capability to actually do a bad thing whether it's a bomb or an attack and the intent, they want to do it, they want to put forward their political, religious or ideological extremism and that's they've considered violence or the threat of violence to be the medium that which they

conduct that. Okay so some high level examples, high profile stuff might be things like 9-11 for example

that would be about the highest profile thing. Absolutely yeah I mean that is if you look into kind of well the effect that that happened both in kind of financial consequences which is where the insurance industry is particularly interested but also in you know sadly in the loss of life as well which is it's very much out there as the outlier. Okay great or not

great in a way but Nick, Peter over to you guys. Yeah so I suppose my question so it would be

interesting to know if terrorism was like say burglary where you can just get insurance for that and it's fine then you know no problem right so you can as more or less mitigate what that loss might be if you can get insurance for a terrorist attack but from what I understand it's not that straightforward. The market for terrorism insurance is kind of unusual. It is it

is and it's essentially around to data and it's about understanding the patterns and the quantity of data that you have in the past so in terms of burglary I mean burglary is malicious in so far that somebody's doing something bad to somebody else but in some ways it's not kind of personalised and it's not as if necessarily that the burglar is going to do any more harm than actually acquire the goods that he wants to nick off you and take away with you and then you know probably sell or take for his financial gain. When you get into terrorism you're dealing with individuals and groups that have something more than that. I mean terrorists might still conduct burglary to acquire funds but that we're talking about sort of the definition of terrorism and we had did a whole podcast around definitions before but essentially you're talking about you know individuals who have an extreme political ideological or religious driver which means it's not necessarily financial so it's pushing more than that and that means that their their intent to do something particularly bad is much much greater. The good side is it the frequency is a lot lot lower but with the lower frequency means less data to actually look at analyse and consider. And does that mean that

people don't don't or don't feel comfortable kind of pricing the risk is that is that why it might be worth actually just sort of saying how an insurance contract might work because we can't assume necessarily that listeners would understand that but how what does an insurance contract against a terrorist attack sort of look like? And also as a part of that would this

always go through Lloyds or does it some kind go direct through the companies or but yeah anyway

I don't know if that's related or not. I'll quickly cover off the Lloyds one first so Lloyds is a market it's not a it's not an insurance company yeah Lloyds is just like it's the equivalent of your of your town or your village market okay and where it is is all the insurance companies wrong all the insurance companies who are registered with Lloyds they go through so Lloyds is essentially a market what it does do is it provides quality and consistency and reliability so people know that if they're buying through a Lloyds underwriter they are they've got these sort of additional guarantees that they're dealing with a quality product and an assurance that for example that there is a mechanism for the process to ensure you're getting quality. There are other insurance companies that choose not to to operate through Lloyds and there are either standalone markets or similar sort of arrangements so that brokers who are the who are the individuals who are acting on behalf of the the insured the people that want to to make that risk or to to to get somebody else to own their risk and they pay money for it that's essentially what insurance is all about.

So I guess when I go in there the equivalent of my fruit and veg in the market yeah is I have let's say a thing that says right you give me a million pounds if someone if I get if I'm a victim of a terrorist attack and I'll pay you fifty thousand pounds a year and that's is that what that's that goes that's is the thing I'm selling and that fifty thousand pounds that will go up or down

presumably but through a broker as well but anyway well it for firstly it's it it certainly for terrorism it's through a broker so we're talking about risks here because so the insurance value chain is something we could spend a lot of time on but essentially the brokers are broadly are between the um between the insured the people that have the risk and the underwriters and the brokers job and this is actually written within the financial conduct authorities rules and regulations is jobs is to represent the insured okay so they're going out those to those markets to find the best the best product the one that is most appropriate for the requirement now as far as the insured's concerned they have this risk which has a value now one of the first things they do is they may need to help to understand how much that value is so how much do they want to insure because obviously the bigger amount of money that they want as a payout the more premium you're going to be paying yeah generally so it's about understanding that risk and essentially as I said it's for them to pay somebody to take that problem away from yeah so so I so let's say

I might look at my buildings and the value of my business which might get lost and add it all together and come up with some figure like a billion pounds so I go in and I say I want I want a billion pounds if if a bomb goes off in my building and then the broker goes and finds someone who will put a price on that and say okay well I'll pay you a billion pounds if this happens but you know you have to pay me a hundred thousand pounds a year or a thousand pounds a year or a million pounds a year depending on how risky it is is that right absolutely yes that is more or

less it that's more or less it the key thing there is that the underwriter is doing an awful lot of maths to make sure that he believes that essentially the the that's a good uh risk to take on sorry you

look like you were going to carry on there but um because what I want to say I can't remember what your question was because I know you went to my question first have we got onto that but also I want to make sure we bring in Peter yeah once you've answered that bit Jerry so I've got one

one last one last question so yeah you did have a question didn't you and then yeah yeah question I answered yours and I can't remember yeah what was yours so well I I guess it comes down to this like why why can't you get insurance against like things like a war or or can you though yeah can you so you can get limits of what I can get insurance on so you can buy a war risk um now the

key thing about an insurance organization underwriters of course clearly they they are potentially looking at a whole range of risks and they want to underwrite those and they want to to take that risk off their off their clients and they're paid money for that but the issue is is it's all around a term sometimes used as a called accumulation so if you have an event that impacts a whole range of clients and each of them have insured for let's say a million pounds um you might well find out actually you're on the hook not for one client with one million pounds but in fact a dozen clients for that one million pounds even though it's just the one risk so

you don't you don't just have a war against uh against me it would also be all of the people who live nearby exactly unusual to have a ward where they just picked on one guy yeah yeah so

so you have um so what you have is this idea that you can you know you you can spread your risks so far but something like a war which one would imagine is a kind of I wouldn't say universal but it would it's going to affect the whole country or a whole region then suddenly your all your risks are accumulated into one thing so if you're insuring property in London for example um and London is getting hit by lots and lots of bombs over a regular period of time you can imagine that very soon the insurance company's going to run out of money and it's going to go bust and

then nobody gets paid out so it's a bit it'll be a bit like a horse race where there's a chance that all the horses might win at once and you'll have to pay out for all of them sort of thing that's

that's an analogy I'll run with okay um let's bring in Peter so so Jerry is it does it come down just to a lack of information then because terrorist attacks are relatively infrequent compared to say car accidents or burglaries um it's you have less information so you can do less accurate modeling so you can you you the underwriter is less able to accurately predict

the risk of certain types of events pretty much so I mean I think you can split that into two things firstly you've got you're absolutely right the frequency of events is relatively low um and therefore just you know from a kind of statistical point of view an actuarial point of view trying to establish what a pattern might look like is is a challenge um secondly is around the fact and this is the malicious piece is that you've got actors generally who are rational now they might be not rationing up in our minds but if they're rational in in how they go about wanting to achieve their aims however irrational those aims might be to us then they can they can observe they can modify they can conduct reconnaissances they can change their minds to the extent where they can attempt uh one method of attack that fails somehow or is intercepted so they go for a second one so you've got that kind of shifting target so trying to and then trying to understand in the future what those factors might be that change their direction and can change the direction pretty quickly so the classic uh example is is the attack in Barcelona that happened a few years ago where the terrorists originally were going to manufacture these improvised explosive devices now as it turned out they had an accident in manufacturing that enterprise explosive the house they were renting blew up it killed a couple of their their comrades so the individuals that were left then decided to do um that uh a vehicle attack and then a knifing attack down the ramblers so you can see how they changed now that change was no no rational predetermination their plan was to make bombs that fails and within a day less than a day they're doing another type of attack

now how you predict that could be a real challenge yeah but i mean aside so the there's a sort of intelligent nature behind these attacks which make them inherently complicated like the the the model to model these kind of attacks would have more variables than say a burglary you could you could say um well so i i had a thought uh that this is not just the amount of information but the kind of type of information that you've got right so we've kind of systematized for want of a better word burglaries and car accidents because they they're relatively low impact and there's lots of them so we can sort of categorize them as sort of like driver's fault external fact you know we've got like cat simple category system for them all and there's lots of them so we can park lots of examples in each different category and i guess they're kind of relatively cheap as well and they're relatively yeah the impact is small yeah um but with i i figured like there's something about the nature of infrequent things that are high impact that are make them slightly make them different so beyond the intelligent nature behind them but so the the the attack there's a knifing attack in london and things where where and then miraculously the guy sort of warding the fellow off with a big um tusk of a of a normal task yeah the the the there's kind of like there's something really fascinating about the human stories around these incidents not only of the of the people the assailants but also of the people around you know the victims but also the you know the the police that intervene and everything else it's fascinating it's really interesting so i there's like there's a nature the information seems to be different so you get you might you might read the paper say oh there's a car accident on the a3 there's a there's burglary in cambridge or whatever that's all you'd kind of that's about the that's about as deep as it gets the information you don't hear about the backstory of the burglar or the whatever else but you do when it's a terrorist incident you hear about all the stories and we put monuments up and things so there's like it's like it's sort of i'm wondering if there's a function there's something going on in the actor's brain where it goes well i've got all this information this seems like a much more complicated problem than perhaps it actually is if we just dealt with it purely statistically and in a very kind of broad-brush categorical kind of way actually it would be simpler to to to predict you know if we just sort of treated it uh with you know pure instance maybe if we draw parallels between a terrorist attack and something other malicious like maybe a burglary or a large-scale kind of criminal activity maybe we could just model it more simply and come up with good models that would allow us as insurance brokers to make money or provide us provide services to two people i'm just i'm just maybe what's the question so are we getting is the nature of the information we get about terrorist attacks kind of confusing us and preventing us from the noise yeah well i think

the question is is the insurance market a bit irrationally afraid yeah of these risks because they think there's something weird about them i mean look jerry what paul rey that's you it'd be quite interesting to explain what that is but also like why why that had to be invented because um you know my my i i suppose like peter my instinct is well there's no such thing as a horse that's unbackable there's just a horse that's there at the wrong price and it's like look if this horse is you know an unknown quantity well that's fine there've been unknown horses before we sort of know what we're doing so why did we have to set up the this pool rething and

how does it work okay so before you answer jerry uh just summarize where we are at the moment as far as i can see what we've said so far um is that um these high impact but low frequency um risks are difficult to measure because of lack of a data and it's and so it's not like ensuring your car where there's plenty of data right so far i think that's all we've said unless i'm wrong okay and so i i don't know what the pool rething is so i'm interested i know i'm interested to hear about that but the other thing i'm interested to hear about is us three are just kind of thinking about this or talking about this a little bit at the moment clearly jerry knows this better than we do but surely in a market like lloyd's or or the wider market um they've got teams of analysts who think about this stuff all the time and they've got their special risks you say they might know more than they might hear on the side you know i mean i guess they would just chuck in like okay this is gonna be like a hurricane and like and and assess in that kind of way but surely the market if it's functioning properly we'll we'll we'll we'll figure it out a little bit more they don't have the data um but you know they themselves are risking a lot of money this

the insurers as well i suppose to call it just to sort of summarize my question is it's like partly are they irrational but are they trying to make their models too complicated could we make it

could we have a simpler model lots of stuff there jerry um especially i mean i don't know what the

thing is um paul um peter had a question there jerry go for it okay so in terms of um the the differences and potential complexities around terrorism and those malicious risks um the insurance sector recognizes those frequent low impact events attritional losses and they that's part of their raison d'etre uh despite what you might think uh i mean insurance companies want to pay out you know you you are actually don't have a particularly good business model if you're the insurance company that's known to not pay out you won't be having many clients within a couple of years and you'll go out so insurance companies and it's all about a ratio okay they've just got to make a bit more that comes in than goes out so that they can operate as an organization okay and that's servicing the customers and again if customers um uh lose out and and are not paid out appropriately they will go elsewhere um and and and so it's about longevity with in terms of insurance for terrorism which again is kind of the proxy for the most extreme of malicious risks without taking into account war which would bring us into a whole new level and uh and and and cyber is for another whole podcast because cyber brings a whole bunch of other risks and issues in there around attribution and all sorts of things but in terms of those infrequent high impact risks firstly there's not very many of them but secondly if they occur like the 9-11 if the U.S. government had not bailed out the insurance sector the whole of the insurance sector in the U.S. would have collapsed right now that would have then meant nobody gets cover and then the second and third order um order uh implications of that are business doesn't have confidence to operate in the United States business flight bang okay so you need to have that kind of insurer of last resort which essentially is the government or the taxpayer well and ultimately the taxpayer yeah absolutely no they're two rights our money um now Paul Ree you mentioned Paul Ree insurance company um they were set up in the early 90s essentially as a result of the IRA one of the big IRA bombs that happened in London and the reason was that before that terrorism insurance was essentially part of property insurance so you'd have all the sort of perils of you know the wind wind storm in the UK whatever bad that was and terrorism would be in there then the IRA turn up with some big vehicle bombs in London on the mainland and insurance companies just say okay we're not going to provide terrorism cover anymore now again that kind of potential loss of confidence and the fact is that big businesses wouldn't operate in London the government looked at that and said okay we need a system that means that it will give confidence to the underwriters that if a loss is is catastrophic it won't mean the end of the company and so Paul Ree was set up by an act of parliament with a definition of terrorism a definition not necessarily there's not there's no one UK definition by the way it's a definition which is in the act and essentially what that meant was that that the companies that went into that scheme and you weren't obliged to do it you became part of that scheme was that some of the premium that your the insured paid to you for you to underwrite that risk some of that premium went to Paul Ree and Paul Ree banked it and the idea was was that you had and a mechanism of levels was was organized so that there were essentially limits so if it was a relatively low loss the insurance company would cover it but when it got above a certain level then the money then the money above that level was then being paid out by Paul Ree and essentially this is his idea you're insuring the insurance company. So how often does it get dipped into do you if we know that or not? So no it is I mean it's all on the Paul Ree website and you're now going to put me on the spot there they've paid out a few hundred million I think

since the 90s but that pot has filled up. Yeah they're literally building up a pot of cash. Absolutely yeah and it's about it's about seven seven or eight billion quid now. So that'll cover a 9-1-1? No it wouldn't no. Oh okay but but it would cover what half? Well four and a half 9-1-1. So here we go here we go is around

what does a catastrophic look like so it's back to this idea that when you're looking at terrorism from a from a low impact high frequency those attritional losses they've got that covered and that's kind of baked in the more the larger the losses they become less frequent then you're starting to potentially have to dip into into the pot and the beauty of the Paul Ree scheme is that that is re-reinsured by the government so that if the it's a it's about seven eight billion quid plus actually they buy some insurance themselves so basically if you breach the the 10 billion pound barrier you then go to the government and the government has said we will cover

yeah beyond 10 billion. But presumably and presumably like I would you would know that because I would have an insurance contract that said this is how much I get or other insurance contracts which are you know unlimited or is it always is it? Well no so when you're doing that

underwriting you can't so one of the key fundamentals around insurance is you can't have betterment so you can't say I've got a five thousand pound car I'm going to insure it for 10 grand so if I smash it up I'll get 10 grand you can't do that you you so the insurance companies are well within their rights to look and look at the asset that you are wanting to insure and make sure that you can't take advantage of that you know because it's not free money it's coming from somewhere. Stupid question why is it called pool re? So pool as in you're pooling

your risk. Oh pool not pool. No no no pool as in swimming pool. I was gonna say otherwise pool would be a pretty pretty sort of world upon his shoulders guy going around. Maybe he was the MP that kind of. No no

there's also a flood re for example and a nuclear re so do the same thing. Oh nuclear re that sounds

funny is that nuclear accidents or is it nuclear wars? Nuclear accidents. Because if there's a nuclear war I guess there's probably not going to be much insurance company left to pay out. Nick Nick Nick before you do.

Okay so just to say we're kind of about two-thirds of the way through okay whenever we've got a special guest like Jerry we really need to make sure we make the most of having them so my sort of challenge to you two is this right it's time to really get to it your most important questions let's get to the heart of it what's what's burning in you and I think I probably want to go to Peter

first if you've got something if not we'll go to Nick. Well I suppose Jerry let's start let's start building some products here what what are the big uninsured currently uninsured or uninsurable things that we could start more as Aleph Insights we could start modeling and start developing

insurance products on. Yeah and before you answer that and sorry I keep doing this guys and sorry Jerry but I presume where CHC Global fits in on this is you provide a consultancy service to the underwriters maybe others that helps fill in that sort of lack of data that they have and maybe that sort of fits more or less with with Peter's question have I got that more or less right?

Kind of we provide both in technical information yeah but also we have a brokerage as well so we actually would go out and do so we we're on that as well we sit on the nexus of being essentially if you remember the four t's from what you can do with risk you can treat it you can transfer it you can tolerate you we can terminate it what we're doing is that we advisory side which is where I fit in is around treatment and giving advice on how you might treat a risk how you might lower it yourself and then we can also then put it over to our broker colleagues who then can go out to the market and try and find how you how a client can transfer their risks.

Okay and so yeah on to Peter's question what should Aleph be doing? Aleph Insights insurance

department wants to start making insurance products what what what are the risks that we we think that we could model but aren't currently being fully fully fully explored by the market?

Well that's a fascinating question for to ask me on a podcast because you know if I seriously thought that I'd probably be having conversations with you in quiet around this one yeah but look don't give away the crown jewels yeah we're talking about uninsurable risk so actually you know things like war are in are insurable um but again you can imagine that the premiums are pretty high and it's not as if you necessarily take a kind of a universal thing so companies may well take war risk coverage out particularly things like vessels um but also um you know if you're if you're actually operating in a um in a war-like environment. So just a question about

that so so if I yeah if I had a I don't know an oil tank or something in it and it's going through a war zone yeah um is it am I allowed to not insure it against against a war type uh or an act

of war or but you know or you would have to face your owners and shareholders right they would be why didn't you get this so you know life is all about risk right and you you guys know that as much as anybody so it in that case the risk ownership is with with the owners of the vessel because you haven't shifted it yeah yeah but also the owners of the oil that you're

transporting for example and they do get in trouble quite routinely when the captain's not been qualified or there's not been enough crew and something goes wrong and the insurance says you're not covered because you've you've not been operating within the parameters that we've given

and absolutely and this is the thing I mean we talked about one thing about betterment with insurance and making sure you know you can't improve your situation by taking out insurance but there are other things around the the the policy guidelines so what they call the wording and so what you're trying to do is put um limits left and right and it's not to reduce you know the chance of of of the of the company paying out money but it's about just putting boundaries on what are the risk defining clearly what are the risks that are being covered because if you don't define them then it can be any risk and then you get into it risk policies are kind

of a two-way street it's about being it being there as a last resort to pay out when something goes wrong but also as a mechanism for ensuring or encouraging good practice so a shipping insurer will will say well we we think that this code of conduct is the best way to operate ships so we'll put that in our policy to encourage ships you know newcomers to the market to up their game a bit and be just generally better and less risky and and that's exactly again we'll bring

it back to motor insurance that's exactly why you get things like the NCAT racings for car vehicle survivability that was a bunch of insurance companies getting together for an organization to to to collectively reduce risks and therefore firstly it's beneficial to the public but secondly it actually the whole market doesn't have to pay out so much because those risks are being

markets more predictable less turbulent so more people more people can operate yeah i guess this

reminds me of so it just reminds me of this issue of moral hazard which is uh you know well termed that i encountered in philosophy which is about um you know that well and actually in economics where um you know if you might incentivize people if there's something that incentivizes people to um well i would say misbehave but you know behave more riskily then um you know then that that obviously is a big issue in insurance so for example you i don't think you can get insurance for for example failing a test or you can't get insurance for your business um making a loss and things like that because it's if you had that insurance you would then be incentivized to

actually yeah absolutely yeah yeah so so and there's lots of there's very similar ones like that i mean broadly there are two uninsurable types of risk there's ones where which a certainty is going to happen so you're trying to get life life assurance for if somebody who's got a terminal disease i mean i know we've all got we're all terminal yeah but but you know you're talking about in the term of of the cover might be so trying to be to ensure somebody who's uh who's got a terminal disease you can't get but uh or inevitability but isn't that i mean presumably

that's just because the price would be so high no one will pay it well it ends up being a one one

doesn't it yeah because it you know ultimately it's inevitable and therefore there's no element of risk there the other thing that you can't ensure is for things like um you know for breaking the law you can't ensure for yourself back to the moral hazard thing you can't ensure yourself of not you know going to prison for example um interesting is that where is that

the market we need to invade we need to disrupt the market well it's a bad badly behaved ceo no if we said i said yeah if you go to prison we'll give you a million pounds reassuringly

reassuringly all of this falls under the financial conduct authority on the prudential conduct authority so actually the uk again is a kind of bastion of insurance and bear in mind huge amounts of global insurance goes through london and part of that is the assurances that companies get that if you're fca regulated like chg global is is you're actually buying that uh you're being assured that by using companies that fall under that that that is the kind of

quality mark yeah um and you think that our new insurance product might not achieve that

well you may well have to we can always operate overseas you'll have to operate

yeah no problem turks and cacos is quite nice okay um shortly i just want to move on to something slightly lighter but before we do nick is there any sort of big question you still would like to ask jerry um or indeed jerry if there's anything that's you know you're thinking

of that you'd like to talk about but the only thing i just thought i mentioned um just almost quite a simple point but why people might be thinking well why if something's infrequent why does that make it harder to uh price but i just i think you know thinking about that even i can answer that but well if you think about the distinction between the one in a 50 year risk yeah one in 100 years yeah right they're really not going to look very different in terms of how often they happen it's going to be very hard to tell them apart isn't it give them even give the time examples again well one every 50 years versus one every 100 years like yeah if you imagine over 100 year period it'd be very hard to tell those two risks apart you know i wonder if we think so the point about the point is that one is

actually worth twice as much you know as a risk but i wonder if we you and me think that but some analyst um who's listening to this right now is going no i definitely don't think that and i've got loads of information about that um any question for jerry well no i mean i think we've covered lots of interesting things there right so this is a bit we come to a fun question i don't have a fun question um because also i would have asked you previously and i i confess i can't remember the question i always ask i guess what would you be doing if you weren't doing this um but i must have asked that so i can't ask that again um although what would you do i can't remember i think he was he said something did you say physicist or something no i'm absolutely not

bright enough for anything like that i'm afraid um and yeah so what would you do i i have no idea the comment i made last time was that i i trained as a mining engineer uh you made a gag about mines yeah um that hilarious cog hill wit brilliant yeah it's good actually what was it just remind me just because i was in bob disposal includes landmine clearance and i went and did mining

engineering yeah yeah okay um different mine anyway i remember something that someone said to me once is oh god i just couldn't be is a guy who worked on the analyst analyst team and he said i could never be an underwriter i don't know how those guys sleep at night okay um because they're the guys are making and the girls making the decisions in their four poster beds yeah they're very well paid you know but they're sort of taking on big risks for their companies potentially but also potentially making lots of money for them as well my question is this what keeps you awake at night what do you because you seem quite a solid stoic kind of guy jerry what what what do you worry about what risks personally do you worry about so for me the risks

that i worry about the ones are the ones that we're not usually worried about um years ago when i worked in humanitarian demining the number of of of my guys and girls that were hurt because of landmines was relatively few the number of them that got hurt because of car accidents was a lot higher in terms of fatalities and bad injuries and it's that idea that you're particularly focused on a risk you're dealing with a risk such as you know a mine field or in it and you know you're absolutely on your game you're very very conscious and you may well take breaks and and you're very you know very much considering all the actions that you might take and then at the end of the day you're relaxed you've done your job you get in the vehicle it's a thing that you've done 10 000 times before and you lose concentration and it goes and and so actually the bizarrely yeah the risks i'm worried about are the benign ones the ones you the way you just take your eye

off the ball yeah yeah well i've heard that apparently most injuries uh hill climbing happen on the way down because people by that time they think they've done the hard bit and

slack off but similar thing i guess it's that sort of um road accident thing as well majority of within a mile of your house or whatever when people on automatic pilot sort of thing and it's that

everyday sort of thing yeah well don't i mean don't people most you know most accidents most fatal accidents that are in your own house right yeah i think but i think that's right yeah so actually the thing that should keep jerry awake at night is his stares great menace but we already know

that he does worry about them we know that that's why he lives in a bungalow um it was that what is it we'll get rid of the the tea get rid of you know terminate the risk or whatever that's right no no more baths well we've asked we've asked actually i should have done this the other way around we've asked jerry i should have asked you guys what you worry about what are your what do you i should have done you first then go jerry but let's go to you guys uh peter what do you worry about um i can kick it i can go in if you want yeah go on i think boringly you know i worry like any middle-aged man with kids i worry about two things essentially which is are my kids and my wife all right you know are they okay are they healthy and um i do worry about my wife as well when she goes off driving as well it's partly because the way she drives but it's partly because of how dangerous driving is um and of course my health you know i i do worry about my health and it's sort of you know i've got a bit of a pain in my throat at the moment well that surely that's could it be i'm sure it is you know it's the big one yeah so i i do worry about that but you know i i you know i should maybe i should worry about that but not just worry about it but take the appropriate steps you know so yeah i suppose i i'm a bit of a kind of fingers in

the ears uh guy when it comes to uh i i guess i just don't want to think about that so i the things i worry about is you know discovering that my flies are undone so social awkwardness i think that's much worse yeah much worse than your entire family dying is mortifying yeah yeah peter i

suppose well it's not witty but i suppose i worry about i'm not sure what i should be worrying about ah the things you don't worry i've got a sort of meta worry it's like okay so i worry about i worry about my health you know and then and then my ability to provide for my family and all the kind of normal things but i don't know to what degree i should be worrying about these things which one i should worry about the most and indeed what are the things that i'm not

worrying about that i should be perhaps jerry can get you insurance against something you haven't thought of yes yes a thing happening i haven't thought of pay out a million pounds that's the

rumsfeld policy exactly exactly exactly um okay um anything else no that's great i think we're good all right all right we'll stop there uh thanks as always for listening to the cognitive engineering podcast i'm fraser mcgrew we've been here with peter coghill and nick hare of aleph insights and of course we've been here with our special guest jerry smith of chc global thank you so much uh for coming here and educating us i feel and give us an insight into your world that was that was wonderful thank you so much thanks as always for listening until next time goodbye