What are your chances of living through the next 24 hours? This week? This month? This decade? Will your job kill you? Your car kill you? Your spouse kill you? Will your own bad habits kill you? Or will a rogue asteroid just kill us all?


Each time you lay your head on the pillow at night or set your feet on the floor come morning, you bet your life. Exactly what odds do you face 24/7?


You Bet Your Life applies to you, the individual, the analytical approach insurance companies use to calculate risk: actuarial science. The result is a comprehensive, encyclopedic, real world assessment of more than 1,000 of the risks we take every day of our all-too-finite lives, from boarding an airplane to tempting a shark attack by dipping a toe in the ocean.


You Bet Your Life is introduced by an authoritative essay explaining how professional actuaries calculate risk and how less objective entities—in government, finance, science, technology, and religion—apply their own competing calculi of risk and reward.