F1 driving can’t be that difficult, right? Why are those guys in those little highlighter color Hot Wheels-esque cars paid millions of dollars to go zoom, zoom, zoom in circles? Isn’t it just driving? I have a driver’s license, so why couldn’t I theoretically become an F1 driver? Similarly, writing well can’t be that difficult, especially now with AI, right?

Isn’t writing just putting words together in a row? I have a language facility, as do you as a reader, so why can’t anyone theoretically write well? When everyone thinks they can write now that we’re in the AI copy-paste thought leadership this, slop that era, what is good writing? What is the value of it? Is good writing cheap nowadays?

Writing well and F1 driving are the same thing to me - to ask if good writing is cheap means to ask what it means to be a good driver. Asking if good writing is cheap to me is sort of like saying, well, driving can’t be difficult ultimately, you get the hang of it, so F1 can’t be that difficult, can it?

A regular driver and an F1 driver are both driving as actions, but they’re performing completely different activities. They are driving, yes, as they are participating in entirely different worlds with different skillsets and different reasons for different means, but it seems easier to group them under the same umbrella because from the outside looking at it, well, aren’t they just doing the same thing? Zoom, zoom, zoom, right, with driving?

Of course not, they are absolutely not doing the same thing, in fact they are radically different modes of operating, but most people have never seen the gap between who they are driving a car and who they could be as an F1 driver because most people have never been on the other side of the track inside a highlighter colored tiny toy like car, sitting on the driver’s seat helmet weighing heavy with hands gripping the wheel before they face the possibility of their existence ending in a televised crash. Zoom, zoom, zoom, you’re dead.

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What that gap actually looks like when you put a number on it is something like this: typically, an F1 driver starts learning in early childhood (i.e. between the ages of 4-8), and like any elite sport, it must be financed to the tune of tens of thousands a year on equipment and travel and coaching before the kid can do long division.

By the time they reach Formula 2, which is the last waiting room before F1, the family or sponsor group has by some estimates usually spent somewhere between hundreds of thousands if not millions getting them to the door. Now, within the sport? There are twenty-two seats in Formula 1. That means there’s twenty-two in the entire world. Like in investment banking hiring, the F1 pipeline eliminates virtually everyone who enters it, and the ones who wash out at Formula 3 are still more talented at driving than virtually every person who has ever touched a steering wheel, including you, me, and everyone we know. Yet none of this is visible when you watch the race. You just see the corner. You see a car brake. You see a car turn and accelerate. You think you understand what you’re looking at because you also brake and turn and accelerate on your way to the grocery store. You do not understand what you are looking at. The gap between what an F1 driver is doing and what you are doing when you drive is so large it is functionally invisible to anyone who hasn’t been told it exists.

Now, I think it’s fair to say that there’s some people who legitimately think their daily commute and Max Verstappen’s equivalent of a commute on a Sunday afternoon going around in circles are points on the same continuum. If you think this is a ridiculous proposition, consider that a YouGov poll of 1,732 British adults found that one in eight men think they could score a point off Serena Williams. Another 14% weren’t sure while only 3% of women thought the same. People genuinely believe they are operating on the same continuum as the best in the world, and they are not even close. One of them is transportation and the other is the most expensive, physically brutal, cognitively saturated life or death in a flashbang moment performance in professional sports, and the only thing they share is that both involve vehicles. Of course, you could also die while driving, but you get my point, right?

Writing has that same gap between what people think they can do and what they actually do. Similarly, the function of actual good writing, writing that deserves the word, is thinking in public. It takes raw material, which is reading and research and experience and domain knowledge and the specific texture of a life that was actually lived, and it processes that material through a specific mind into something that did not exist before. When I say writing well through thinking like this and processing it, I mean no, you shouldn’t be approaching writing with something like ‘can’t I just plug something into an LLM and copy paste that out?’ Yet a lot of people think this, they produce this, they assault our eyes with it, so they think this is good writing just like the delusion of thinking I can be an F1 driver because I can drive according to my driver’s license. So consider the ways driving and writing seem similar as abilities most people have some grasp of to some extent to some means, but what about doing it par excellence? Hmmm?

If you want to dig deeper at the question, consider the premise. What do you value? What do you find cheap? And how do you tell the difference? I think the key here is to consider the role of process. Initially I would have said curiosity was the way forward into thinking about value, but this is not sufficient. That’s because when Maurizio and I first spoke, he left me with a powerful metaphor to consider as he mentioned the Italian word discernere, and then connected this concept of curiosity in the process of thinking by using the analogy of sifting flour. Curiosity is part of what feeds and composes the flour, and then you put everything through a fine mesh and what comes through is usable.

You accumulate widely, you follow rabbit holes, you keep sixty tabs open like a person who has lost control of their browser and possibly their relationship to time (me, my goodness). But curiosity as an action alone is not enough. Discernment is the activity that builds on the action to do the filtering. It’s the moment where you sit with everything to figure out what actually holds, matters, is relevant, and necessary versus what was just noise that felt interesting at 2am. This is where the thinking happens that differentiates, in my view, the start of good writing. Discernment is also what F1 drivers do at five to six Gs through the corner, which is to say it’s the cognitive version of taking a turn at a speed that would kill most people, except they’ve been doing it since they were a child so their body knows something yours doesn’t because yours never had to learn. That’s the same, drumroll please, with writing well. Discernment, discernment, discernment, it’s the new location, location, location in the cognitive real estate section of our brains, I guess.

Don’t even get me started on the topic of taste in the role of discernment as that is a whole other beast. But yes ciao grazie duh, the part that costs cognitive resources, effort, all the words we can use to simply say brain power, well, it isn’t cheap. And AI skips it entirely. It pattern-matches without curiosity, it produces without discernment, and it outputs text that looks like writing the way a commuter and an F1 driver both look like they’re just doing the same action of driving when the reality is their activity is completely different.

So if the thinking is what costs, and AI doesn’t do the thinking, then what AI actually replaced was never writing. It was the assembly of words for an aim in content production, and confounding these two things is how you end up believing that writing is cheap when what is actually cheap is formatting other people’s ideas into an expected structure and calling it work. A peer-reviewed study published in Management Science found that automation-prone freelance jobs dropped 21% within eight months of ChatGPT’s launch while a separate study using actual firm-level spending data from Ramp’s expense management platform found that more than half the businesses paying for freelancers in 2022 stopped entirely by 2025. For every dollar they cut from freelancers, they spent three cents on AI. The speed and totality of that replacement is itself the proof. If this work had required original thought, it could not have been automated this quickly. You cannot automate what you cannot formalize, and you can only formalize what was already formulaic.

But the collapse of assembly was only half of what happened, because the market for thinking didn’t collapse alongside it, and instead it grew. The evidence for the distinction between good writing and assembly, I believe, is in the market itself, since it’s signaling something that neither doomers nor the naive are grasping. More than fifty authors earn over a million dollars a year through subscriptions on Substack alone, the New York Times added 1.4 million digital subscribers in 2025 and posted record revenue of $2.825 billion while the Financial Times hit a record 1.4 million subscribers with revenue topping half a billion pounds. If AI had made good writing cheap, all of these numbers would be falling, right?

Yet they are rising, and it is their thinking, their voice, their production of writing as thought that people pay for which serves as proof that words have the power to move people. Good writing isn’t cheap because it does things that AI cannot (at least) quite yet capture, and this is where it gets genuinely weird, because the irony, in my view, is that as hysteria over the value of writing proliferates as AI slop content is equally profligate, it turns out that we don’t trust AI-generated content. How funny it is then to see that a Raptive study of 3,000 U.S. adults found that when people suspect content is AI-generated, their trust drops by nearly 50%. This held true even when the content was actually human-written. The perception of it being AI-generated alone was enough to drive people away. Zoom, zoom, zoom quickly becomes disdain when @ pangramlabs asking is this slop.

By the way, roughly half of new web articles/content posing as articles is now AI-generated. That feeling you may have of everything getting lower quality? Yes, it is real, it is nonsensical, and it is everywhere. Speaking of nonsensical, just to recap so far: we began with the question of if good writing is cheap, we explored the possibility that we don’t think writing is valuable now that AI can generate it, but we’re surrounded by slop and the moment we think something is AI-generated slop, we don’t trust it, and also, by the way, we’re not accurate at detecting slop. Make it make sense!

The paradox is that people cannot actually tell the difference but they don’t trust it when they think it is, as a Stanford study found that humans distinguish AI from human text at roughly coin-flip accuracy. So what we actually have is a market that is paying a premium for something it cannot verify, which is the belief that someone on the other side of these words actually lived a life and had the thought and put their name on it knowing full well that people with agendas would come for them. That is what the market is paying for. Not quality in any technical sense but belief in thought, in production, in voice, in prowess, in the belief that the words you’re reading right now haven’t been hammered out by Claude or GPT or Gemini or (god forbid) Grok, or really any of the multitude of other options. Pattern recognition by AI is not thinking, which is just as true as the fact that the market does not reward merely thinking. The market rewards visible thinking. Nowadays, visibility is a function at the intersection of distribution, timing, nerve, sheer luck, and whatever parts of an algorithm seem to be triggered that day depending on the stability of Nikita Bier’s employment prospects.

But let’s be fair, because even if you sift the flour, the system that distributes your writing does not care about any of it. Remember the metaphor of sifting flour? The algorithm does not sift flour, it sifts engagement, which is why it pushes slop via all the generic generalized garbage that you’re likely feeling like you’re often reading. The thing we all depend on to find good writing is running on the exact opposite incentive structure from what makes writing good in the first place, and nobody is going to fix this for you because the people who could fix it are the same people who benefit from you not understanding the gap. I don’t have solutions for that right now and I don’t think anyone else does (to my knowledge).

And this brings me to one more thing that Maurizio and I spoke about that has been on my mind. Powerful people have an incentive to make you believe writing is cheap. Consider how some CEOs who over-hired during 2020 and 2021 need a story for the layoffs and they have two options. Option one is admitting they miscalculated, that they hired based on a growth curve that was obviously unsustainable, that they did not see the correction coming because they were too busy being congratulated for scaling and that this is how you fix it under an umbrella of a response. On the other hand, option two is saying they are embracing cutting-edge AI and unfortunately this magnificent technology means they need fewer people because their role can be automated. Consider which story protects their board seat, which story gets a positive headline in Bloomberg, and which story leads to a stock price bump. Then go watch some F1 racing and think about what goes into it.

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Disclosure: Definitely not military, financial, or legal advice or allegations, just vibes. Contact me at ani@anibruna.com

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In Part 1, published on the anniversary of Julius Caesar’s death, I explained why I want an archenemy, why you should break up with your girlfriend to a rhetorical gentleman reader, and how modern billionaire beefs are vendetta infrastructure projects hearkening back to the ancient Romans, except now there’s an unprecedented technological component. If you haven’t read it, go back and do so on X so I can get some sweet, sweet Elonbucks (I don’t actually, but that’s another story), or just trust me bro when I say that billionaire beefs are actually infrastructure projects and the Romans figured this out first.

As for the rhetorical gentleman reader in question, I haven’t theoretically snooped on their social media in ages, which means this invisible man has effectively been delisted from my attention, and if you know anything about proscription by now, you know that being removed from a blacklist entirely is somehow worse than being on it. At least the enemies of ancient Rome knew they mattered.

A quick reminder as it’s been 2 weeks since the first post: proscription was the Roman word for when hatred becomes procedure through authorized decrees. It’s animosity conjured into administrative measures, vendetta deployed like software as a service, except instead of business to business, it is person to person.

My thesis is that when a grudge goes from personal to professional, it becomes scalable and materializes into infrastructure. As you can see, spending time in the Bay area has impacted me, so it’s time to build, and we’ll start with Sulla who especially enjoyed building…blacklists.

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Cyberpunk 2077 but make it Proscription 82BC

The TLDR Marvel villain origin story of Lucius Cornelius Sulla is that he had his military command stolen by a political rival named Marius through backroom political maneuvers involving legal decrees.

Sulla’s response to fight fire with fire involved being the first Roman general in the Republic’s history to march into Rome with his own army and weaponize legal decrees. I believe nowadays we’d call him a disruptor or contrarian thesis holder, but that’s how Sulla elevated merely being a hater into an actual system through posted lists and legal cover in the proscription system. That’s right - blacklists exist because of vindictiveness elevated into a formal government program.

Italian bureaucrats everywhere, raise a toast to Sulla, your patron saint of administration who made himself a roaring success after being personally betrayed by the political establishment. He decided if they were going to make murder political, he was going to make it administrative. Icon behavior

Much like how I declared myself Dark Empress of fintwit, Sulla made himself dictator once he achieved the ancient equivalent of a viral wave over Rome, and then he figured out how to turn political revenge into administrative procedure. That may be one of the single most dangerous things anyone has ever done with a grudge especially considering homeowners associations were not even a thing yet.

Sulla published names on whitened tablets in the Roman Forum and if your name was on the tablet, my guy, ya cooked, because anyone could kill you legally, your property was forfeit, and your sons and grandsons were stripped of civil rights. Per Plutarch, Sulla offered roughly 33 years of wages and the bounty was open to anyone, even for example a slave killing his own master. One wonders if this may have inspired the writers of the original Gladiator film.

Three lists came from this and totaled roughly 520 names, with the people on them ranging from senators, equites (the Roman business class below senators), and wealthy landowners. Up to 4,700 people died, massive amounts of property got redistributed to Sulla’s allies, and the Roman political class permanently lost its sense of safety. Borat would call this a great success because the system worked exactly as designed, but that is also the problem. Like absolute power, vendetta infrastructure always corrupts absolutely the moment someone figures out how to use it for something other than its stated purpose.

That someone was a man named Chrysogonus, Sulla’s freed slave, who I think of as the earliest example of a type of operator, and goodness, he would have crushed it in VC, I just know it.

The operator is the person who doesn’t make the list but understands the machinery well enough to exploit it. Chrysogonus figured out the arbitrage opportunity in proscription as a service: if you could add a name to the blacklist (effectively a kill list), you could buy that person’s property for next to nothing at the rigged auction afterward, because nobody would dare bid against you. So he had a man named Sextus Roscius illegally entered on the proscription list after the proscriptions had supposedly ended, and then bought his estate, valued at 6,000,000 sesterces, for 2,000. I don’t know what the contemporary equivalent of that is and I’m not going to look it up because I’m tired, sorry, but big numbers, ooooh. The list was designed for political enemies and it became a real estate tool because the infrastructure didn’t care about intent. Zillow but make it ancient Rome. If you were someone with a nice house, watch out because if your name got onto that list, everything was going to fall apart.

The blacklist evolved with history, for example in the 1500 years after Sulla how they continued in Italy with the Medici family. They understood that in a commercial republic, credit is control and denying someone money is the equivalent of a baseball bat to the knees. Across five cities, they coordinated quietly, rejecting to extend credit to enemies in a manner the Bay Area calls “stealth mode.” There was no formal procedure so the people targeted by the Medici found out when they needed a loan but couldn’t get one. You can’t sit with us but make it you can’t bank with us.

The Pazzi conspiracy was the turning point when in 1478, the rival Florentine banking family tried to assassinate Lorenzo de’ Medici and his brother Giuliano during Easter mass in a cathedral. They killed Giuliano but Lorenzo survived, and the Medici went scorched earth as they erased the name entirely. Anyone named Pazzi had to change it, buildings were renamed, coats of arms were changed, the whole dramatic 15th century shebang of it all as Netflix would dramatize it, you get the picture. 548 years later, incidentally, Pazzi is also the name of a wonderful pizza restaurant in Amsterdam.

Billionaire beefs that are actually infrastructure

Wealthy people building private systems imposing consequences absolutely did not stop with the Medicis, of course. The evolution of blacklists speaks to the multifaceted nature of them and how they’re wielded, which contemporary billionaire beefs continue to show us in various forms and functions. A selection of them for your enjoyment like a wine and cheese pairing but for spite in one’s heart:

Palmer Luckey was forced out of Facebook in 2017 after donating $9,000 to a pro-Trump political group three years after selling his company Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion. The donation and its social repercussions set Luckey on a trajectory that sees him now running Anduril and things like China personally sanctioning him. As of writing, Anduril is raising $4 billion at a $60 billion valuation. The man who was proscribed from Silicon Valley for a $9,000 donation now runs a company that tracks things in space, is building an autonomous weapons factory, and is opening up a bank (Erebor Bank) that just received a U.S. national bank charter. Erebor appears to be on track in part to provide banking services to businesses that have previously been denied financial access. It’s an interesting arc if you consider the facets of his story given that Luckey is building a parallel system where the blacklist doesn’t apply.

I’ll briefly note that there’s a racketeering lawsuit going on between Elon Musk against OpenAI heading to a jury trial April 27 with up to $134 billion in claimed damages. Litigation itself can be weaponized as vendetta infrastructure with discovery rules.

Some of you may have seen another beef in the form of short seller Michael Burry, who disclosed $912 million in notional put options against Palantir, and Alex Karp, the CEO. Karp called him “batshit crazy” on CNBC, Burry responded with a Substack manifesto (I respect the medium, obviously) and a metric he calls the “B/S Ratio,” which stands for Billionaire-to-Sales Ratio. Why blacklist when you can short sell is a philosophical inquiry I just thought of as I was writing this for which I feel very smrt. But yes, short selling could be a type of vendetta infrastructure that speaks the language of markets. You don’t put someone on a list. You put a price on their decline. That’s so fetch but make it institutional.

Then there’s Kalshi and Polymarket, two prediction market platforms fighting over who gets classified as “regulated,” and this is the part I find analytically the most interesting, that modern vendetta is often a fight over classification. Whoever controls the codes controls the consequences. Regulated or unregulated, sanctioned or unsanctioned, vendetta infrastructure is itself still in the purview of a higher bureaucratic power of some sort (until it isn’t, as witnessed by those who fly so high, they are above the rules now, to paraphrase a quote from Aunt Polly in the TV series Peaky Blinders).

All this said, perhaps the cleanest proscription of 2026 so far is that Texas billionaire Robert Marling donated $675,000 to oust Rep. Dan Crenshaw. This was all reportedly over a mask ordinance at a conservative youth summit originally. Consider how Sulla needed to march on Rome twice, the Medici built a banking network over generations, and Marling needed a wire transfer and a Tuesday afternoon to end someone’s political career through funding a rival.

X money gonna give it to ya, the algorithm as agony, and that girlfriend of yours you haven’t broken up with yet

On March 10, Musk confirmed that X Money enters public access in April. Remember how the Medicis did their thing coordinating across cities and banks? This is that turned into a product launch of sorts. Consider that via X, Musk is building the social graph, content platform, AI layer, and payment rails into one system. This means he controls over 500 million users, the distribution, the AI that recommends to them on the app, and starting soon, he controls the money in and between them. Elon has previously said “When I say payments, I actually mean someone’s entire financial life.“ Elon, if you’re reading this, I promise I’ll stop going to therapy when I get my book deal and student loans paid off.

Being banned from X already costs you your audience, but one wonders how the modern black list and the art of tweaking it may evolve. Chrysogonus manipulated lists to buy real estate but in 2026, I’m not quite sure he’d bother. I suspect that he’d understand a designation in one system propagates through vendor relationships, payment networks, procurement databases, and reputational intermediaries before any appeals, and somehow he’d end up at a seized sanctioned goods type of sale buying back a yacht or two for some Russian oligarchs.

I find the X Money thing most interesting to reflect on lately because it seems to reinforce the new iterations of ancient structures we’ve grappled with to mixed results. Consider how proscription systems in history were binary with someone either being on the list or off the list. You were wanted either dead or alive, you’d never work in this town again if you were blacklisted, things were pretty cut and dry, but the 2026 version doesn’t seem to have lines to draw. Instead it has types of slopes where you disappear in a sort of algorithmic agony.

Your content gets throttled, not banned, but throttled. It’s seemingly indefinitely. Your loan interest rate goes up, not denied, but adjusted and fixed. Your job application goes to the bottom of the pile, not rejected, but deprioritized and floating. You’re not on a list, you’re on a curve, and you can never prove it because there’s no plank with your name on it in the Forum. There’s just an algorithmic score you’ll never see attached to a profile you didn’t know existed in a system you can’t access to file an appeal that has no process.

I think nowadays a person blacklisted just notices that things stop working. Doors don’t open, purchases don’t go through, applications disappear, error pages are abundant, views on social media are throttled if not pushed into the shadows, and nobody ever officially tells them why because no such mechanism exists. An algorithm as blacklist doesn’t have emissaries to let you know you’ve been blacklisted by being shadowbanned or cast into the virtual back of the line.

Speaking of being cast to the end, I should be upfront. When I say break up with your girlfriend, when I write about a rhetorical gentleman reader, I should be upfront here that I was just A/B testing Ariana Grande lyrics as a rhetorical device so there is no girlfriend for anyone to break up with. Sorry not sorry if you fell for it, but we love to hate and to be haters, it’s the lowest hanging fruit, it’s controversial sounding, it means nothing, it’s rhetoric and goodness, it works.

But do you notice the really interesting thing? Getting specific about what to do and how to do it and why it matters - that’s raising the stakes, which is exactly what Sulla did with the art of the blacklist. That’s what proscription stood for: naming the thing to be eradicated and the rewards for it.

And from experience? It’d be more like break up with your secret boyfriend if we’re being honest and part 3 if I were to ever write it (I’m not, it’s going into that book once Elon pays me off).

Disclosure: Definitely not military, financial, or legal advice or allegations, just vibes. Contact me at ani@anibruna.com

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In the introduction post for this essay series idea, I named what I’m calling the American financial kill chain which is the unprecedented sequence where the Treasury Secretary of the United States, Scott Bessent, went on TV and described engineering the collapse of Iran’s economy as followed by military operations weeks later.

It’s the first time in history an American administration is openly admitting to the bank-to-bombing pipeline, and the reason I want to walk through this phenomenon is not only because it is unprecedented (you’re going to see that word a lot in this essay, sorry not sorry). It’s also because most coverage of what happened to Iran either treats the financial phase and the military phase as separate stories or flattens the financial phase under a single banner of “sanctions”. The truth is, neither framing captures what actually happened that is unique to each culture’s context via how an American administration publicly admitted to a sequenced financial and military operation to target another state and how Iran’s shadow banking system is unique to its history and statehood to begin with.

There is no Iran without shadow banking, and the American financial-kill chain as a mechanism exploited something most Western analysts don’t understand about how money moves inside Iran and its shadow banking system which I wrote about in detail before the bombs dropped. If you are interested in specific details about what that shadow banking system is, read the post about it. I’ve been told some of you want me to keep it snappier so that’s what you guys get for being ungrateful, I guess.

But I digress - for now, I want to detail *what* the American financial kill-chain and how it develops in five phases. The first is sanctions targeting financial settlement to cut off dollar inflows, which means going after not just oil exports but the exact point where foreign currency becomes usable inside the economy, until there are no dollars left for anyone to move. The second is what happens when dollar liquidity disappears and rotten banks that were only technically solvent lose their cushion and collapse which results in a cascade of consequences. The third is the domino effect where the central bank prints money to cover the rotten banks’ losses which itself leads to currency collapse meaning purchasing power is destroyed and thus people take to the streets to protest when there’s nothing left of their deposits or livelihood anymore. The fourth phase is military strikes that follow and the fifth is the feedback loop, where every other country watching starts running the math on how fast they can build around the dollar system. The fifth phase is also playing out right now in the Strait of Hormuz, which I’ll get to later.

These are unprecedented times in every regard, aren’t they? You thought you last heard that phrase years ago, but nah, 2026 is the horror movie sequel to 2020 where the cameras never stop rolling because now everyone’s into a situation room type of set-up with multiple monitors.

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Settling scores: causing something and weaponizing it are not the same thing

Speaking of being on camera, Bessent described the first three phases of the American financial kill-chain on TV under oath when mentioning sanctions as a tool along with financial settlement, this then leading to a dollar liquidity crisis, and all of it spurring a currency collapse driving people to protest (though definitely not using the framing of it as an American financial kill-chain, those words are mine exclusively (trademark emoji here).

That’s why I want to be precise about something because precision matters when you’re writing that it is unprecedented for how a government openly executed and admitted to a sequenced financial-to-military operation, and I am arguing exactly that, so let me be precise.

Ayandeh Bank’s collapse was not caused by American sanctions. Ayandeh Bank’s collapse was caused by decades of regime-linked self-dealing, the bank’s founder who lent his own bank’s deposits to his own real estate projects, and a central bank that knew about it for years and did nothing. The documents proving the rot go back to 2022, as the parliament knew, the judiciary knew, my aunts knew, as Leonard Cohen sang, everybody knows, well…everybody knew. That included the seven million people who lost access to their money, their deposits, all this while the parliament speaker called it a success. This is what governance looks like in the Islamic Republic, as everyone acknowledges it as a matter of fact and life that corruption runs deep through the core of every system there.

A bank this rotten should have collapsed years ago but it didn’t, because in Iran’s shadow banking system, there were still enough dollars moving through the sarraf networks and the Iraqi channels and the Dubai intermediaries to keep the lie liquid. If you are still wondering what any of this means, seriously, go read my post explaining it all.

The dollars moving through various channels were the cushion, and Bessent’s Treasury killed it by targeting financial settlement, so when Ayandeh finally went down on October 23rd 2025, there were no dollars left anywhere to absorb the shock. For those of you who are not finance bros (probably for the better), financial settlement is the moment when a transaction actually clears. You sell oil, someone pays you, but the money isn’t yours until it settles, until the dollars actually land in an account you can use. Every previous sanctions regime went after the oil itself, the tankers, the exports, the buyers. Previous administrations took occasional shots at the settlement layer, but Bessent made it the entire strategy by focusing on where payment becomes usable money inside Iran. You can sell all the oil you want but if the dollars can’t settle, you sold it for nothing. If it don’t make dollars, it doesn’t make sense (nor, evidently, settle in this case).

What the sanctions did was to bleed out the power of money in Iran. The sanctions ensured that Iran’s formal corrupted banking system could not be propped up by its shadow banking regime this time, as no dollar liquidity would be left to absorb the impact. And that, folks, is the difference between causing something and weaponizing it.

If there was a book about this, the title would be something like ‘How to turn a domestic banking failure into a systemic currency crisis into a political crisis into a military target’ though I’m not sure Dale Carnegie would be a fan. This is definitely not making friends or influencing people in the way he advocated.

Peace sells, but who’s buying? - the cost of war as of writing today

It has been 19 days since February 28th with the first strikes and bombs and bombs striking Iran, though it all feels like years feeling like decades and decades feeling like years or whatever that Lenin quote is about time passing. It’s been 19 days is my point.

As of writing on March 18th going into the 19th:

• Amnesty International confirmed that a US Tomahawk missile hit an Iranian primary school in Minab, killing at least 170 people.

• Of those 170 people killed, 160 of them were those schoolgirls. They were children.

As of March 19th:

• At least 1,444 people have been killed and 18,551 injured in Iran according to Iran’s Ministry of Health.

• An estimated 4,800 members of Iran’s military forces have been killed according to the Hengaw Organization for Human Rights.

• 15 civilians are dead in Israel with over 3,600 injured.

• The war has spread to Lebanon where more than 700,000 people have been displaced.

• Thirteen American service members are dead with about 200 wounded.

• Israel is systematically assassinating Iranian leadership. Earlier today, Israel struck South Pars, the world’s largest natural gas field, with US coordination, disabling most of Iran’s gas production and halting the flow of gas from Iran to Iraq.

• Trump posted on Truth Social tonight that the United States “knew nothing” about the South Pars strike, then threatened to “massively blow up” the same field himself if Iran keeps hitting Qatar.

• In turn, Iran retaliated by hitting Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG complex with missile while Qatar expelled Iran’s military and security attachés from the country.

Do you also need a flow chart or some type of graphic to keep up with all these main characters? I do.

The IRGC issued an evacuation order warning Gulf energy facilities are now “direct and legitimate targets” and that attacks will not cease “until their complete destruction.” Over 3,000 projectiles have been fired at GCC countries, more than half targeting the UAE. Iran is also escalating from airstrikes to naval attacks as a ship was struck by a projectile off the UAE coast near the Strait of Hormuz late tonight, bringing the total to more than 20 ships hit since this war began. The Gulf economies are suffering their worst damage since the 1990-91 Gulf War.

Despite all of this, suspected Iranian tankers were still loading oil at Kharg Island this week, days after Trump ordered strikes on the export hub. That means kill chain’s target is still technically operating.

Oil surged past $110 after the strikes on energy infrastructure and the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed. While the US is dropping 5,000-pound bunker busters on Iranian missile sites along the Strait, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt went on Fox News today and said “We don’t need the Strait of Hormuz for our energy here at home.”

Despite all of this, the top US counterterrorism official, Joe Kent, resigned, saying “we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby” and that Iran is “not a threat.” In his first interview since resigning, on Tucker Carlson, Kent said there was “no intelligence” that Iran was planning any imminent attack, that Israel had pulled the US into the conflict, and that Rubio’s justification was circular: the “imminent threat” was that Iran would retaliate if attacked, not that Iran was going to attack unprovoked. The FBI is now investigating him for alleged classified leaks. Senator Murphy said after a classified briefing that the war’s actual goals do not include destroying Iran’s nuclear program or regime change. Iran’s Foreign Minister called the whole thing “Operation Epic Mistake, a misadventure engineered by Israel and paid for by ordinary Americans.”

As all of this is happening, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent issued a 30-day sanctions waiver on Russian oil last week to “promote stability in global energy markets.” The architect of the dollar weapon against Iran is now easing dollar pressure on Russia.

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Disclosure: Definitely not military, financial, or legal advice or allegations, just vibes. Contact me at ani@anibruna.com

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Now, I don’t know about you, reader, but admittedly, I’ve always wondered what it’d be like to have an adversary, a rival, an enemy, an enemigo, someone who I feel nothing but enmity towards, someone who makes me feel a visceral hatred unlike any other, someone who fuels me to win.

Think about what the work of enemies has produced. Mozart and Salieri. Biggie and Tupac. Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. Kanye and linear thought. Bill Ackman and sensibility. Bugs Bunny and the Mouse. John McEnroe and everyone. The list of enemies goes on and on, but me and who?

I want an archenemy because I think it would make me better in the way that what you despise in someone else is usually the thing you haven’t dealt with in yourself, and having a person who embodies that standing across from you, winning sometimes or threatening your win, forces you to actually deal with it. An archenemy is the most honest mirror you’ll ever have because a professional hater has absolutely nothing to lose. Does that mean they’ll be honest? No, but they won’t be gentle and growth is never really gentle, is it? And an archenemy is someone on your level or far beyond it. Someone punching down isn’t an archenemy in the sense of being a true hater, just like someone with a grudge isn’t always an archenemy in waiting.

An enemy, however, is different from a grudge, and the distinction between the two is how professional haters occur. This essay series is all about professional haters given the billionaire beefs it documents (eventually).

Consider how Captain Ahab built an entire voyage around a whale that didn’t know he existed. Devastating! Consider how the Phantom of the Opera had architectural genius, engineering talent, and unlimited resources but used all of it to sit in the dark under Paris and be angry (which, fair, there are truly no happy French people in Paris ever, even with all that vacation time, food, sexual openness, etc). Consider how Wile E. Coyote has spent what must be millions in ACME products on something that is simply running. A grudge is a feeling, it can become more, but an enemy is a flesh and blood who hates you or something about you, which elevates feeling with force to conjure its capabilities into chaos.

You know what happened on the Ides of March but in case you didn’t, spoiler alert, 60 Roman senators walked into the Senate with knives because one man had too much power and not one of them had the nerve to do it alone. This was the vendetta infrastructure of its time because it transcended grudge and grievance. Proscriptio was the Roman term for the formal blacklisting of enemies, a system that led to purges, exile, and death. Much like 23 stab wounds, or when you find out I’m with another man because you fumbled, vendetta infrastructure is what I’m going to call everything proscriptio stands for nowadays.

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I like the Latin term, but what I’m describing in these essays is animosity turned into administration. Imagine vendetta, deployed like software as a service. Proscription as a service is here, considering how a grudge goes from being personal to becoming professional because it is scalable, and professional hating is where that archenemy stuff begins, in my opinion. Most of the time, grudge holders tend to escalate when they should be compounding. The really effective ones, the ones who actually change the landscape, are the people who build infrastructure and systems.

This all occurred to me sometime right before the New Year when Palmer Luckey replied to a joke I made about needing a Game of Thrones chart to track all the billionaire beef and said he’s “been thinking of paying someone to make an app called Blacklist that does exactly this, along with some interesting features that would make imposing consequences for bad actors much more practical.”

While I disagree with Luckey on most things, credit where credit is due, of all the billionaires running their mouths on social media, he’s the one I can see eye to eye with sometimes when it comes to the crusade for justice against someone who has wronged him (it’s some chud named Jason). Besides, when’s the last time you heard a white person say “imposing consequences for bad actors” and mean it with the vehemence meant by an ethnic parent gesturing towards, if not already holding, the looming chancla that metes justice?

Most people who build these systems don’t announce them. They quietly construct it and let people find out they’re on a list when their lives stop working. This is not that, it’s a public exchange, and proscriptio is deniable in a way that personal physical revenge or public revenge never is. If you stab someone, that is physical and visceral, but if someone’s name appears on a compliance flag and their bank account closes and their vendor contracts terminate and their career stalls, who did that? Which person? There’s no hand. No knife. No evidence. No alibi. Just algo, yes, yes, y’all.

It’s not because billionaires are petty, lord, everyone’s petty. It’s because when a billionaire gets petty nowadays, the pettiness generates a public ledger and infrastructure that the rest of us have to live and operate around. Let me explain, Luckey’s floated around blacklist app, cool, don’t blacklist me, don’t @ me, we’re good, but imagine getting shadowbanned on X by the algo or whatever and then not having access to your bank account? That does material harm.

So yes, billionaires. They’re just like us. And by that I mean, god, no amount of money is ever enough. Is it to stop the human, all too human need to get revenge? You’d think they’d check out, go buy a few islands, chill, spend the rest of their lives at peace finding new and interesting things to do enabled by the fact that their level of material security in life is so vast that it’s at a point of abstraction, it cannot be comprehended, it is just a figure. And yet the man worth three billion and the man worth eight hundred billion are both still up at night thinking about who wronged them. It haunts them to the point they want to make it structural.

Two thousand years later, modern billionaires are beefing like the ancients in the late Roman Republic except instead of knives they’ve got technology, lawsuits, sanctions lists, short positions, super PACs, payment platforms, social media platforms, drones, spaceships, hedge funds, banks, and a plethora of other things that belabors the point if I list it all out. The personalities are not the focus, but the infrastructure the personalities are building is, because professional hating in our modern day and age is proscriptio 2.0.

And I thought about it, and I kept thinking about it, and then I did what I always do when a topic stays on my mind, which is trace it back as far as it goes. All roads lead to Rome, 82 BC, and a man named Sulla who figured out how to turn a grudge into a government program. But that’s Part 2, and you’re not ready for Sulla yet, though he’d agree: break up with your girlfriend.

While you figure that out, in Part 2, I’m going to tell you about Sulla and how he invented the formal blacklist, about the Medici and how they turned banking into a weapon, about what Palmer Luckey and Elon Musk and others are building right now that would have made both Sulla and the Medici sick with envy, about a Texas billionaire who ended a congressman’s career reportedly over a mask, and more.

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Peace... Peace sells...

Peace... Peace sells...” — Megadeth, “Peace Sells... but Who’s Buying?” (1986)

We live in unprecedented times, in case you forgot from the pandemic, but when I say unprecedented, I mean read these next few words very carefully because you and I are witnessing in real time how the United States of America has just pioneered an unprecedented new chapter of modern warfare that I am calling the financial kill chain.

Never before in history has an American governmental official admitted openly to the public engineering step-by-step a dollar shortage to collapse another country’s currency that has led to people protesting.

This was not a leak, not a classified briefing surfaced by an investigation decades after the fact, but a public embrace of military doctrine through financial mechanisms that has previously chiefly fueled fodder for academic careers, conspiratorial Reddit posts, and the high brow version of both which is the same thinking stamped with a think tank’s seal of approval.

In early February, Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary of the United States, sat smiling in front of cameras at Davos, and then under oath before the Senate Banking Committee, and explained in sequence how America broke Iran’s financial system through financial mechanisms, watched its currency collapse, watched its banks die, watched its bazaars shut down, and watched its streets fill with people who could no longer afford bread though the part we all watched involved seeing the body bags of protestors killed by their government. Bessent called it “economic statecraft, no shots fired” though twenty-three days after his Senate testimony, on February 28th, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury which killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, his daughter, a grandchild, the IRGC Commander-in-Chief, and the Chief of the General Staff,.

This type of public admission by a senior American official has never happened before, and the thing I’m certain of is that the United States has executed a sequenced financial-to-military kill chain and documented it in public. The thing I’m uncertain of at this moment is whether pulling this trigger has started a feedback loop that undermines the very dollar system the financial phase was designed to protect.

That’s what this series is building toward, but I think first we have to understand how the weapon was built. Part 1 here is the essay introduction to a brief mini-series where I’ll trace the financial kill chain phase by phase, and to do this properly, I want to introduce the context setting-up the series in this post.

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1. What is a kill chain? Not a derivative of Hot Topic

For those not familiar with a kill chain, it is not a store for mall goths, but military doctrine also known as the F2T2EA model to find, fix, track, target, engage, and assess. This is the sequence a military follows to destroy a target and an ethnic mother uses to track her children’s life movements. Every defense analyst, like every first generation American, knows it.

These are sequential phases that culminate in destruction or whatever the kill chain’s heart desires, but my point here is that this is unprecedented in that this kill chain logic from military doctrine now applies to financial warfare. It is a documented operational reality right in front of you in publicly available Senate testimony and Davos interviews and Treasury press releases. This is no longer the stuff lurking in the shadows, alleged and unconfirmed, and none of these elements are new on their own. Of course dollar weaponization has precedent, of course sanctions preceding military action has precedent, of course economic destabilization as regime change strategy has decades of precedent.

What has zero precedent is these three things happening simultaneously and admitted to as the integration of military financial doctrine, which is what we are witnessing.

The financial kill chain sequencing for Iran was deliberate and it was designed like dominos falling.

What I’ll call the bank-to-bombing pipeline looks something like this: first sanctions dry up dollar inflows, then dollar shortages kill zombie banks that had been technically liquid, this in turn leads to bank collapses forcing the central bank to print, that printing itself destroys the currency, the currency collapse shuts down the bazaars, and that’s what leads a populace out onto the streets in protest when everything is broken and bread can’t be brought. Every domino was placed with the next one in mind, and if you think that’s a metaphor, Bessent described this exact causal chain on camera and then repeated it under oath. It goes without saying that this financial kill chain pattern was also replicated in an earlier draft in January when U.S. special forces pulled Nicolás Maduro out of Caracas after a decade of escalating sanctions, entity designations, and the targeted financial strangulation of Venezuela’s state-owned oil and gas company.

This financial kill-chain playbook has happened in rapid succession barely two months into 2026, though one wonders if the third time must be a charm and who that may involve.

Photo credit: Album artwork by Ed Repka for Megadeth’s Peace Sells... but Who’s Buying? (Capitol Records, 1986)

2. A history of violence: America’s policy of truth

Every previous instance of American financial warfare preceding military action required decades of declassification to piece together because that’s how this was always supposed to work, because no one says it happened the way it happened as it was happening. Blatantly admitting to it is unprecedented considering the course of history. You do the thing, you deny the thing, you classify the thing, and then historians reconstruct the thing from document dumps thirty years later.

Consider how Nixon told CIA Director Richard Helms to “make the economy scream” in Chile in 1970, and we only know this because the Church Committee surfaced Helms’s handwritten notes five years later, though the full picture took decades of declassification after that. The capital flight engineering, trucker strikes, credit strangulation, all of it covert and denied in real time, like a first generation (or really, any child) lying to its mother about eating the cookies or brushing their teeth. Consider how the CIA’s Cuba destabilization program, the sabotage of sugar exports, the destruction of Havana’s European banking relationships, stayed classified for decades. Consider how Madeleine Albright’s “worth it” on 60 Minutes in 1996 - when Albright was asked whether the deaths of half a million Iraqi children from sanctions had been worth it and she said yes - was a gaffe she spent her career trying to take back.

Bessent is not taking anything back, Bessent is not covert, Bessent is in your face telling you about the American financial kill-chain and I repeat: this is unprecedented.

3. What is the price of peace and what is next? When bombs and banks go hand in hand

Can you put a price on peace? It’s priced into a collapsed currency, 72% food inflation, seven million depositors who woke up one morning to find the signage ripped off their branches, bazaar merchants and crowds of protestors on the streets in the thousands while regime insiders led capital flight through wires of everything they had to Dubai.

Bombs and banks go hand in hand in the financial kill chain, and what comes next is anyone’s guess.

As of this morning, March 2nd, markets opened with oil spiking 13% before settling around 8% up with Brent crude, the global benchmark, pushing toward $80. The Strait of Hormuz is functionally closed as one hundred and fifty tankers are anchored in open water and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is broadcasting on maritime radio that no ship may pass. Iran’s retaliatory strikes have hit Dubai, Doha, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Riyadh for three consecutive days and seem to be targeting the five-star hotels, not the Ibis or Holiday Inn, which is some form of consolation, I guess? Debris from intercepted missiles has damaged the Burj Al Arab and commercial operations at Dubai’s airport, the world’s busiest international hub, have been suspended since Saturday when the strikes began. Iran’s Foreign Minister said the military has partially lost control over its units and analysts saying $100 oil if the Strait stays blocked. The volatility index is up 18%, gold is near $5,400, and my Substack remains free.

I want to remind everyone that a stoned metalhead from southern California asked a prescient question forty years ago that opens up this series: peace sells, but who’s buying?

Scott Bessent can answer that, as he went on television and told you the price and twenty-three days later, a war has been bought with it.

Stay tuned for part 2, where I begin to explore the parts and pieces of the financial kill-chain.

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Disclosure: Definitely not military, financial, or legal advice or allegations, just vibes. Contact me at ani@anibruna.com

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“One day when your end is near

I’ll be laughing at your fear

When you’re gone you’ll be no one

Who’ll be fucking up my fun? No one!” — G.G Allin

Author’s note: This essay was written and substantially completed before the Israeli and American strikes on Tehran began on the night of February 27, 2026 as I was busy dealing with close reading of some speculative fiction earlier this week (see here)

The analysis below describes the collapse of Iran’s informal financial system and the parallel banking infrastructure that kept the country’s economy alive for forty years under sanctions. That system was already long dead before tonight.

What you are watching now, in my view, is the next chapter of what this essay describes. I am publishing it because understanding what broke, and how, matters far more tonight than it did yesterday. Everyone has an Iran take and everyone agrees the women are very attractive, the food is good, the people are kind, blah blah blah — but few of you were born in Tehran and even fewer of you who are writing essays for free instead of being a lawyer or a doctor.

The first rule of Persian fight club is that you don’t talk about Persian fight club.

The second rule is that you insist on paying everyone’s tab while everyone else insists on paying everyone’s tab and everyone figures out ways to get around everyone.

The third rule is that one of your aunts will comment on your appearance, your weight, your life prospects, and the specific way you are failing at something somehow, and you cannot say plainly to auntie “bite it you scum,” because the fourth rule is that everyone at this table will be outraged and the fifth rule is that they will never forgive you and the sixth rule is that you will never be invited back (which was the goal anyways, mashallah, though we are not Arabs).

The seventh rule is that not being invited back is a death sentence because this table is where all the good warm food is along with all the cold and dark long-buried family secrets as lore lurking in pauses, casual comments rallied out of nowhere that render you speechless with the brutal efficiency of communicating something you never wanted to know, say, about your father.

A Persian family dinner is a financial system that runs entirely on performance and so is Iran’s economy, yet the only person who ever truly explained what happens when the performance stops through abhorrent behavior was GG Allin, an American musician, punk, and degenerate who walked on stage already bleeding and made it impossible for anyone to keep pretending it was a performance, which is exactly what the Iranian regime does when it kills its own people, not because it is strong but because killing is the only function it has left, the last spasm of an institution that has nothing behind the uniform except the violence itself.

Sanctions this, sanctions that, you’ve heard all about sanctions in Iran, of course, but do you know how actual financial transactions are done? Well, the bazaari merchant class is Iran’s shadow banking system as they are the levers running it.

In practice, this means their relationships are the credit lines, reputations are collateral, their shops are the branches, and the whole thing ran for 40 years as the actual financial infrastructure of a country, a bandage on the gaping wound of Iran’s formal banks being sanctioned into irrelevance.

Now, just like shadow banking system in Iran based on social cohesion and capital, when Persians fight over the check, it’s called ta’arof and it’s a collective clearing mechanism where guilt is collateral, enforcement is the threat of being socially frozen out, and the ledger lives in everyone’s memory. When your aunt comments on your nose, it’s not small talk, it’s small talk, intel gathering, and an overall social credit check.

When you scale that Persian family dinner from six people to 92 million, the architecture is identical with trust-based credit, reputation as collateral, and social exclusion as the enforcement mechanism for bad actors. This shadow banking system was eaten up from the inside by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps while sanctions degraded it from the outside. The death knell, however, was the rial doubling in 12 months to collapse in December 2025. The regime killing over 6,000 people in response was not just an authoritarian crackdown but reinforcement of the fact that an economy decimated inside and out means that there is nothing left, because you don’t shoot your own depositors if you have any other tool left.

Here’s how I’ll work through Iran’s shadow banking system - first, I’ll introduce what the bank run looked like, then the infrastructure underneath the bazaar which is the financial system of the shadow banking system and its practicalities. Following that, I’ll discuss how this shadow banking economy was decimated from internal and external forces, and how the catalyst which broke it signified a new political reality for the country. Finally, I reflect on why the killing is proof that it’s over for Iran by introducing GG Allin’s work as a parallel to the Iranian government, and what may come next.

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I. A bank run without a building: don’t mess with the peaky Bazaari merchants

What no one appears to have said about the situation in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar in late 2025 is that it was not just a protest, but that it was a bank run too, except the bank didn’t have a building. Thinking about Iran from a Western perspective will not necessarily illuminate systems here because we default to the schemas we know for the cultural blueprints which guide us, and Western analysts covering this story treat the bazaar like a voting bloc (much as an individualistic culture would) whereas I’m going to treat it like a balance sheet (which is what a collectivist cultural slant would). The way credit is measured in Iran is also social, and you cannot forget this.

For forty years the bazaari merchant class has functionally operated as Iran’s parallel banking system When formal banking was sanctioned into irrelevance and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps were busy building their own little extractive kleptocracy, the bazaar kept roughly 92 million people’s economy breathing. How did they do this? Merchants extended credit to each other the way banks issue loans, as they wrote IOUs that circulated like currency. Currency exchange dealers converted rials to dollars and back, connecting Tehran to Dubai to Istanbul the way a bank’s international wire desk connects New York to London or some hedge fund manager on fintwit with his various e-girls throughout the U.S.

When thousands of merchants owe each other money in every direction, trusted intermediaries calculate who actually owed what to whom and then cancel out the overlapping debts so that less cash had to move. That move is called clearing, which every major financial system on earth does, but the bazaar did it without the separated buildings, regulators, or Bloomberg terminals.

The Iranian rial collapsing in December 2025 marked a turn from turbulence to terror on the streets in Tehran in the government’s response to the protests. For context, the rial began 2025 at 817,000 to the dollar and nearly doubled to 1.42 million in December 2025. Food prices were up 72% year-on-year alongside the degradation of the currency in an environment already weakened by the impact of sanctions enforcement on cross-border settlement corridors.

Prior to this, historically, the post-revolution deal between the merchants and the IRGC was simple: bazaari merchants got import licenses, preferential exchange rates, and political access while the clerical establishment got financial support and a loyal commercial class.

The arrangement held for a long time the way a hedge fund manager holds with his various e-girls, the entire aesthetic of the relationship centered around shared dysfunction and emotional turmoil fueled by delusion and hard drugs, which is to say it worked fine until the e-girl decided she wanted your portfolio too, though you signed up to be her secondary option and she’s never going to leave her primary partner. The bazaari merchants always knew they were subordinate to the real power structure and would never attain it because it was not their birthright to such power. Khamenei and the clerical establishment were the primary partners, and the IRGC was never going to choose commerce over power the same way the e-girl is never leaving her primary rich guy for the finance guy bankrolling her lifestyle. The merchants entered the arrangement knowing the terms. They knew they were the side piece, and side pieces don’t get to complain when they get cleaned out by the e-girl’s emotional jihad, whether it be financially, emotionally, or in whatever way that makes some of these hedge fund managers bankrupted excuses of human beings incapable of empathy.

Now, in Iran, through front companies, bonyads, and a breathtaking volume of no-bid contracts, the Guards moved into construction, telecom, energy, import-export, petrochemicals, and basically anything that generates cash. Conservative estimates put Khamenei-linked para-statal institutions at controlling roughly 60% of national wealth. The Mostazafan Foundation alone operates like a Fortune 500 company with the accountability structure of a Telegram chat. For the bazaari merchant class, this meant that they were getting shut out and getting systematically poorer, which in turn meant the financial infrastructure they operated was getting thinner with less capital in the system and shorter maturities. Consequently, this leads to higher counterparty anxiety and worse terms. Imagine what it’s like when merchants who used to extend 60-day terms started demanding 30, then 14.

From the outside, sanctions enforcement was destroying the corridors. The bazaar’s cross-border settlement capacity depends entirely on external nodes, and Dubai is the big one. U.S. Treasury enforcement spent years methodically ripping up every external node the bazaar depended on, which means spreads widen as settlement times lengthen and counterparties become harder to verify. Every OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) designation (from the Specially Designated National list) raises the cost of operating every adjacent node because it’s like a zombie virus as a designation means no U.S. person or institution can transact with you. In turn, spreads widen as settlement times lengthen and counterparties become harder to verify.

II. The infrastructure of Iran’s shadow banking system

A sarraf shop in the Tehran bazaar looks, to a Western journalist parachuting in, like a currency exchange counter, but it is much more than that. Think of your local rhetorical Iranian sarraf as three financial institutions crammed into a space the size of a Manhattan bodega though a Persian cat wearily judging you from a dimly lit corner is not guaranteed. The sarraf is a currency trader, buying and selling rials, dollars, euros, dirhams, and quoting prices that reflect how risky he thinks each transaction is. He’s also a wire transfer service, moving money from Tehran to Dubai to wherever and whenever through a network of partner sarrafs in each city, no SWIFT code required, no bank involved. He’s also a middleman who connects buyers and sellers across borders when the formal banking system won’t touch Iranian money. There’s a term for the sarraf in the world of international banking, since the sarraf’s connecting function is called correspondent banking. What JPMorgan does when it processes a payment between a bank in Germany and a bank in Brazil is what the sarraf does with a phone and a handshake.

In other words, when formal banking channels are sanctioned shut, the sarraf network is the banking channel and the actual infrastructure through which trade happens.

Sitting alongside the sarraf system: trade credit. A wholesaler in the Grand Bazaar imports electronics from Shenzhen. He does not pay cash upfront but receives goods on rolling credit, issuing a safteh, a written promise to pay a specific amount by a specific date, signed, witnessed, and enforceable through the bazaar’s social network. In the formal financial world, this is called a promissory note, and when large companies issue them to raise short-term cash, they call it commercial paper. When it is issued to me for my student loans used to study finance, I write these essays for free to keep my writing accessible to all audiences but the majority of my audience seems to involve highly paid professionals who consistently read me with 40% on average opening rates at 2-3x a read each, that’s not a promissory note, that’s called a joke. Pledge here to pay off my promissory notes in part.

That safteh written promise however doesn’t just sit in a drawer, but the person holding it can pass it to someone else as payment in the way you’d endorse a check, or he can sell it to someone for cash today at a small discount. Does this sound like something we’d call bonds? Yes, yes it is. This is how the bazaar creates liquidity out of thin air, as at any given moment, the Grand Bazaar contains thousands of these overlapping IOUs circulating between merchants, and if you mapped them, the web of who-owes-whom would look exactly like what Wall Street calls a money market. A money market is just a system where short-term debt trades between participants, and that’s what the bazaar is though it just doesn’t call itself that. The Iranian bazaari merchant class ran the shadow banking system of the country and for forty years it kept 92 million people’s economy alive. Then two forces spent twenty years destroying it from opposite directions and the currency collapsed.

III. The collapse

When the rial began depreciating, FX dealing froze first as the sarrafs can’t quote stable prices when the rate moves double digits in days. Most stopped quoting altogether, and trade credit became unpriceable. As you cannot issue a 30-day safteh in rials if you don’t know what rials will be worth in 30 days, clearing collapsed. When in freefall, netting positions become arguments and trust erodes fast when every settlement feels like a zero sum equation where someone’s getting screwed. Since trust is the only collateral in this system, it cannot function in such conditions.

Cash-in-advance became the only mode, so the entire system reverted to spot transactions which meant that smaller traders most dependent on rolling credit went under first. They are the ones who shut their shops, which is what the world saw on December 28. It was not a political statement but a liquidity crisis in the form of closed shutters.

Then the internet went down and the system split in two as the shutdown that began in early January, with over 100 hours of near-total blackout, was understood globally as censorship but it was also a financial infrastructure attack on the bazaar’s remaining settlement capacity. There are reports of merchants with Starlink terminals maintaining contact with counterparties in Dubai and Istanbul, settling in USDT while the rest of the bazaar operated blind. The Wall Street Journal reported thousands of terminals entering the country with connected merchants who can still access hard-currency settlement rails. Disconnected merchants, however, are trapped in a collapsing rial-denominated environment with no way to clear, price, or settle anything. It’s not a tale of two cities but a tale of bazaars and two economies for the merchants, so the ones who lost everything are the ones on the street. The merchants who managed to keep their satellite connections and stablecoin wallets will be positioned for whatever comes next.

IV. The show

Now I need to talk about the killing, because if I write about financial plumbing and don’t connect it to the people who are dead, I’ve written the wrong essay.

If you don’t know GG Allin, he was unabashedly violent and anti-social on purpose - he would, for example, walk on stage and smash open his own forehead with the microphone before the first song. Or he’d strip naked, defecate on stage, smear it on himself, throw it at the audience, attack anyone within reach, all total chaos, pandemonium, and repulsion instigated on purpose by him for the sake of it.

Most GG Allin shows lasted less than fifteen minutes before someone pulled the plug because it got too extreme for them. It was not the performance of extremeness they were anticipating, even though reports made it clear Allin was very serious about what he did and said and said he’d do.Every venue that booked him already knew what was coming, just like the audience buying tickets and the promoter promoting them knew what was coming. Everyone showed up and pretended the normal rules for performance still applied, that there’s a stage and there are seats and security maintains order and the performer performs, no blood spilling. But GG proved every single time that none of those agreements existed and he didn’t destroy the social contract. GG Allin demonstrated his disregard for the social contract by showing he could impose his violence and will on others by the degeneracy of his antics that was beyond any performance they had preconceived.

Remember I told you in the opening there was a GG Allin theory of political economy?

Remember how in the family dinner, everyone is performing or everyone knows exactly what it costs and refuses to say so? Just like the bazaar operated the informal economy and the regime provided security and took its cut, the performance of that parasitic relationship is gone too. The IRGC ate the balance sheet as foreign sanctions proved a death knell, so the formal banking system went functionally insolvent as credit instruments stopped clearing. Yet everyone kept showing up and performing their roles because the alternative was to stop performing, and stopping the performance at a Persian dinner table or in a Persian economy means the same thing: you don’t get invited back, and not being invited back is a death sentence. So everyone kept pretending just like the venues who booked GG Allin kept pretending the normal rules would apply this time and he wouldn’t wreck havoc.

What follows is security forces firing into crowds of merchants and students and workers, and that is like GG Allin’s unhinged violence on stage but demonstrated through the state as an actor. The unabashed disdain for human life through violence, sordid violence, has resulted in the murder of thousands of people. When you place it in the context of a punk show, to some it sounds obscene. Yet the comparison isn’t disrespectful, in my view, it’s the opposite. Every time an authority uses language that accidentally dignifies the killing with something vague and airy like “the regime deployed security forces”, “authorities escalated their response”, and more? That is the language of institutions that treats massacre like governance, like a fixed decision made by a functioning state weighing options.

The GG Allin framework says there is no pretense, stop dignifying this, and drop the veneer, there is no performance except for the unhinged violence I’m about to commit because I can and in defiance of everything you’d expect it not to be.. Allin never held himself back from his extremities on stage, just like Iran has never held itself back from extremities on and off stage.

What you are watching is not an institution exercising power but imposing its will through killing and causing carnage. The IRGC firing into crowds is not a government putting down unrest, it is a man covered in his own blood in a room where every agreement has already collapsed, doing the only thing he knows how to do because he has no other capacity left, just like GG Allin performing.

Think about how authoritarian crackdowns usually work, as they are political grievances with economic lives attached. The regime cracked down and people eventually went home because they have shops to reopen, credit lines to maintain, and customers to serve. The cost of staying out on the streets has exceeded the cost of going back to work. That calculus is what every authoritarian regime depends on, since it’s not the guns that end protests but it’s the jobs.

This time, there are no jobs to go back to. The settlement system is destroyed and shops aren’t closed as mere political statements. They’re closed because they cannot operate. The merchant who took to the streets on December 28 didn’t choose protest over commerce because there was no more commerce for them anymore to begin with.

At the same time, the regime can’t stabilize the currency because it doesn’t have the reserves. It can’t reopen the corridors because those are controlled by U.S. enforcement actions, just like it can’t extend credit to the bazaar because the formal banking system is itself insolvent. The regime is effectively out of economic tools, which is why it reached for the only tool it has left in the form of violence. The 6,000+ dead are not casualties of a strong state defending itself because a strong state doesn’t behave like a brute animal. The dead are casualties of an empty state performing the only function it has left, as calling what they’re doing a “crackdown” gives it more dignity than it deserves. It’s not a crackdown but a performance and a show delivered in depraved violence.

You cannot shoot a settlement system back into existence. Even if every protester goes home or gets arrested or gets killed, the safteh still won’t clear, the rial still won’t hold value, and the corridors are degraded. The trust that underwrote the shadow Iranian banking system, the entire clearing mechanism, all that trust built over decades of repeated transactions, is gone. You can’t rebuild social-exclusion-based collateral after you’ve massacred the society that created it. The regime is trying to stop a bank run by killing the depositors because it has nothing left.

V. The morning after war: what comes next for Iran’s financial system? Regime change?

I’m not going to predict regime change as that is beyond my scope for this article, but I will say that The informal financial system that kept Iran’s economy alive under sanctions is dead, and it’s not coming back, regardless of what happens to the regime or who is involved.

If the regime survives, the conventional read is “crackdown works, things stabilize” but the mental balance sheet says nope, impossible. The merchant credit system is structurally destroyed as trust is gone, connections and corridors are degraded, and then what? The economy already in shambles could get worse, not stable. That means the next revolt is incoming, because without jobs to go back to, people will continue to protest for a better life.

If the regime falls or negotiates a transition, the conventional read is “sanctions lift, money floods in, Iran opens.” The balance sheet says that’s slower than anyone thinks. There is no bridge infrastructure for Iran, have you been under a rock the past few decades? You’d have to rebuild formal banking, trade finance, insurance, and correspondent relationships from scratch and in sequence. That takes years, and do you know how much Persians like to talk?!

This isn’t an if, because it is a definite: Iran has roughly 12% of the world’s proven oil reserves, 92 million people, a young and educated population, and an industrial base that most sanctioned economies cannot touch. Like my aunts remind me about myself and my career, the gap between what Iran has and what Iran earns is the entire size of the opportunity. Everything is priced for war and ready for it, but nothing is priced for the day after.

Everyone is debating whether the regime falls, but that’s the wrong question. The economy the regime governed is already gone. The bazaar’s financial infrastructure, the parallel banking system that kept Iran’s 90+ million people fed and clothed and trading under four decades of sanctions, has collapsed all the while the regime can survive and it won’t matter. What comes next is a different country regardless of who runs it, and that’s anyone’s guess.

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Contact: ani@anibruna.com

It is June 2029, which means Grand Theft Auto VI has still not been released, Tom Brady has once again decided to un-retire, Sam Altman has announced he believes AGI is six months away for the third year running, and Bill Ackman has announced a new SPAC targeting the vibes economy in a 47-part thread on X. It has also been over three years since a work of speculative fiction dropped on Substack and preceded a selloff that took the Dow down 821 points.

What happened after February 2026 depended on which version of Citrinitas was operating behind the scenes at the time of writing. All three possible imagined pathways were consistent with the …

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Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” sounds a bit off when you modify the lyrics like that, which just goes to show you that words have power, words disclose, and when those words sit on top of a report that moved hyperbolic billions in markets, what edits to it disclose might matter more than what the words originally said.

Since its publication, there have been material changes to the authorship claims on Citrini’s report, and these changes moved the co-author’s identity from a $262 million SEC-registered hedge fund to a friend with an idea. Interesting move considering that two days after publishing, the co-author (and fund’s managing partner) confirmed on Bloomberg Television that his firm held short positions in the companies the report named.

Read that again: the authorship attribution on a report attributed to market-moving was changed after publication, and the co-author is the managing partner of a $262 million SEC-registered hedge fund who confirmed short positions in the companies the report named.

I think this is worth examining, because it sits at the center of the vibe laundering architecture I mapped in Part 1 where the nature of disclosures and lack of transparency around positions sets the methodology for converting credibility into capital without rules around it or the content which it disseminates.

In part 2, I’ll examine who Alap Shah, the co-author of Citrini’s report is, what is and isn’t said about him, and why the changing of words for authorship are relevant. Then, I examine what the law says about all of it. In part 3 coming up after this, I evaluate three possible scenarios for what’s really happening chez Citrini in a work of speculative fiction of my own.

A necessary caveat before I continue (because I can go further, I promise, just like Kendrick): the February 23 selloff followed the Supreme Court striking down Trump’s tariffs along with Trump’s response and Anthropic’s news about modernizing COBOL systems, a two birds with one stone watershed moment rendering remaining difficult Boomer colleague(s) lording their knowledge genuinely unneeded forever (bye!) and, by the way also IBM fell 13%, its worst day since 2000. What I’m saying is the Citrini report was one element of a market that was already nervous, I’m not saying it caused the entire 821-point Dow decline. I am examining the disclosure architecture around one specific input and asking whether the regulatory framework accounts for it, because in vibe laundering, the structures which normally apply don’t and the rules which follow them seem non-existent.

Let me show you what I found.

I. Every breath you take, every edit you make, every move you make, the market’s watching you: changes in authorship for the Citrini report

Recall on Sunday February 22, a Substack email from Citrini Research went out to 100k+ subscribers on a fictional memo from the future titled the 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis, and in the email, the preface identified the collaboration by stating plainly that “CitriniResearch & LOTUS have written this.” The man behind Lotus is attributed co-author Alap Shah, but what was not stated plainly anywhere at all on Citrini’s page is that LOTUS is Lotus Technology Management LP, an SEC-registered investment adviser managing $262 million. Timing wise, Shah, Lotus’ managing partner, filed a 13F with the SEC five days before the publication of the fictional memo showing $180 million in long equity. The Form ADV describes a long/short strategy with dedicated short selling, and two days after the report and the Dow moving 821 points, during an interview, Shah confirmed on Bloomberg Television that the firm held short positions in companies the report named.

That’s why the change in language around Shah and his role has been intriguing, as the version currently on Citrini’s website does not say “CitriniResearch & LOTUS have written this.”

It says “Our friend Alap Shah posed the question, and together we brainstormed the answer.”

While it’s giving a little bit of “babe, they’re just a friend, don’t worry”, there’s more. The same directional shift in language for the pre-face appears in the acknowledgements. The original email sent to Citrini subscribers reads “Our co-author, Alap Shah of LOTUS, contributed the idea for this piece - we wrote this one.” Now, the website shows an edit to just saying “CitriniResearch wrote this party”

I assume this is a typo for “partly” though based on Citrini’s past with selling marijuana, I definitely believe he’d be fun to party with.

• On the left, the original email, on the right, the website version now

Why is this all important? Remember how I said words have power? Substack emails are immutable, meaning the moment you originally hit publish on a post and elect to send it via email, it’s your only chance to send an email. Once the email goes out, you cannot edit it. But the website can be edited after. The version that reached every subscriber, the version they read and acted on before markets opened Monday, identified the collaboration as institutional without a disclosure or mention on Citrini’s website that LOTUS holds short positions on named assets mentioned in the fictional memo they authored. The version that exists now on the public web identifies it as personal.

What is happening here with words in the changes to the preface and acknowledgements appears to be editing that reduces the institutional footprint of the co-authorship, reframes an SEC-registered fund manager’s role from co-author to idea contributor, and all this occurs after the original publication reached subscribers’ inboxes as well as hyperbolic billions in market movements.

• On the left, the original email, on the right, the website version now

In vibe laundering, disclosure and obligation are fluid depending on who does and says what where and when. So why would anyone change the specific wording on that only with relatively few to no other editorial changes in the overall fictional text?

II. The white lotus: who is Alap Shah & what is he saying

On the technical documentation front, Alap Shah is the Chief Investment Officer and Managing Partner of Lotus Technology Management LP, an investment advisory firm registered with the SEC since August 2025. The firm is also registered with the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority. Its CRD number is 335468 on the SEC’s Investment Adviser Public Disclosure database, and per Form ADV Part 2A, LOTUS has been registered with the SEC since August 2025 though having been in business since January 2024. It operates a master-feeder hedge fund structure: Lotus Technology Fund LP (domestic), Lotus Technology Offshore Fund LP (Cayman), and Lotus Technology Master Fund LP (Cayman).

On the professional experience front, Shah’s career runs through Viking Global, Citadel’s equities division, and the founding of Sentieo, an AI research platform acquired by AlphaSense in 2022. He is currently CEO of Littlebird, an AI personal assistant company whose stated business model involves AI agents performing tasks that human intermediaries currently perform, which is the central thesis of the report he co-authored.

Notice how the Citrini report said “Alap Shah of LOTUS” at the bottom? It does not identify Lotus Technology Management LP as an SEC-registered investment adviser managing $262 million. It does not disclose any positions held by the firm in companies named in the report. It does not disclose Shah’s role as CEO of Littlebird, a company whose business model is aligned with the report’s thesis that AI agents will displace human intermediaries.

The most charitable reading is straightforward and I’ll say it clearly: Shah may be one of the most qualified people in the country to write this fictional report given that he built and sold an AI company, runs a hedge fund focused on technology disruption, and is building another AI company. The report may be good analysis from someone who understands the technology better than most. His positions may reflect conviction, not a scheme. All of that can be true. My question is narrower. When an SEC-registered investment adviser co-authors market-moving research on a third-party platform, what are the disclosure obligations, and were they met?

On Shah’s own Substack, published the same day, there is a general directional disclosure,”Because I see this AI-driven displacement as a likely path, my portfolios and companies are positioned for it. If my thesis plays out, my firms will benefit financially.” That post received 289 likes. The Citrini report received 5,477 likes, 1,182 restacks, and was read by sixteen million people. That means Citrini’s report got 19x the distribution and exposure to readers, rendering the disclosure gap between those two platforms at minimum wide.

Lotus’s Form ADV Part 2A does not reference Littlebird, does not reference any arrangement for co-authoring research on third-party platforms, and describes its long/short strategy in generic terms. Shah co-authored a report arguing AI agents will displace human intermediaries. He runs an AI agent company. He runs a hedge fund that holds short positions in the companies being disrupted. Whether or not Littlebird fits into a specific ADV line item, the interconnection between these roles is the kind of conflict that fiduciary duty exists to surface. It’s also the sort of thing that vibe laundering describes happening - you know it when you see it though you can’t exactly place a name on it.

III. Lucky number 13F - what the form shows, cannot show, and how this ties into Shah admitting to holding short positions on television

As mentioned, five days before the Citrini report was published, Lotus filed their form 13F-HR with the SEC This appears to be the firm’s first 13F filing, was signed by Shah as CIO, and it reports 147 long equity positions totaling approximately $180 million in market value.

A 13F reports long equity positions. It does not report short positions. This is not a gap unique to Lotus as it applies to everyone for Form 13F.

The portfolio includes positions in companies the report named, including Uber ($1.50 million), and in companies within sectors the report thematically targeted as vulnerable to AI disruption: MongoDB ($281,000), Cloudflare ($358,000), CrowdStrike ($208,000), Twilio ($700,000), Etsy ($2.24 million), Coinbase ($204,000)

If you do the math, the firm’s Form ADV reports $262 million in regulatory assets under management. The 13F reports approximately $180 million in long equity. The difference, approximately $82 million, represents positions that 13F filings are not designed to capture i.e. in short sales, derivatives, private investments, cash, and non-US securities.

The 13F also shows that Lotus held long positions in Uber and MongoDB as of December 31, 2025, and both companies were named in the report as vulnerable to AI disruption in addition to declining on February 23. This means Lotus lost money on those long positions because of the report its managing partner co-authored. I think it is fair to say a fund running a pure short-and-distort scheme does not hold longs in the companies it is trying to drive down. The long positions are consistent with a fund that holds a genuinely mixed view, going long on the companies it thinks will adapt, short the ones it thinks won’t, and publishing analysis that reflects a thesis rather than a trade.

As of writing, there is no public filing in the United States that reveals which investment manager holds which short position. The rule designed to change this, Rule 13f-2 and Form SHO, has been delayed to January 2028. No manager has ever filed a Form SHO. FINRA collects aggregate short interest data per security, but this shows only total shares shorted, not who is shorting.

The practical consequence of this is that positions most likely to benefit from market-moving bearish research are positions the current disclosure system was not built to reveal.

Keeping this in mind (and I don’t even go into how Shah brings up his thesis in detail in various places), two days after the fictional memo went out and the Dow dropped 821 points, Shah appeared on Bloomberg Television, stating that his firm “certainly had shorts in some of these businesses” and that they “generally have a set of shorts out against businesses that we think are going to be disrupted by AI.” That means Shah confirmed the short positions on television after the market moved. It’s the only reason why the public knows about Lotus’s short positioning, as no filing nor regulation required it. Shah offered this information upon being asked about it.

Shah also stated “I thought there was going to be a small reaction. It was definitely larger than we expected.”

When the interviewer asked directly whether this was “a short seller report guised beautifully in the form of a beautiful fiction,” Shah did not say no. He said “We are constantly sort of turning our book. And we certainly had shorts in some of these businesses.” The question was about the report’s intent, but the answer was about the portfolio’s composition, and this distance between appears in the edits to the attribution of the report in the first section.

The original email named the fund, but now on the website where the report lives, it names a friend. It’s just like how the Bloomberg answer acknowledges the shorts but frames them as routine portfolio management rather than positioned exposure behind a specific publication. Words are power, power is in disclosure, and in both cases, the words used to describe the relationship between the fund and the report narrows after the fact. The edits narrow the authorship as the interview narrows the intent. Now it’s giving “Babe, they’re just a friend - I swear!”

Vibe laundering means none of this is required or planned, of course. It is entirely possible that every edit and every answer reflects nothing more than normal post-publication clarification and honest interviewing to the extent a reporter at Bloomberg views it to be part of their job. The direction of the narrative and its framing is consistent since by the time the public record settles, the fund’s connection to the report is smaller under possible scrutiny than it was when the report first hit inboxes.

Words have power, so consider this. Shah told us in his own words he anticipated market impact from the report. He published it with no per-report position disclosure on the platform where sixteen million people read it. The specific positions were confirmed publicly only after the trading session was over. It was a fictional report that he anticipated market impact from.

I want to be fair about what that means - Shah disclosed directionally on his own Substack on publication day and his short positions on TV. Not everyone would do that, of course, but the question is not whether Shah acted in bad faith. It is whether voluntary after-the-fact disclosure on a different platform satisfies the obligations the SEC has articulated for registered investment advisers, and whether the point of market impact, not the point of television appearance, is where those obligations attach.

I also want to note that at 8:33 AM on February 23, before the market opened, the @lotusaifund Twitter account, the fund’s official account, promoted both Shah’s solo Substack piece and the Citrini collaboration. That means the fund was promoting the research that the author anticipated would have some sort of reaction per Shah’s Bloomberg interview. The disclosure on Shah’s own post (”my portfolios and companies are positioned for it”) existed on his platform, but again, it did not exist on the platform the fund was directing people to read.

V. I am the law: what legal precedents exist about vibe laundering

Say it with me - words are: powerful. Consider how there is a difference between deception, omission, and influence. Legal questions are precise even when answers are not, and to be clear, I am not making legal conclusions. I am describing what the law around markets says and what has happened in the past for situations as precedents.

The strongest precedent is SEC v. Capital Gains Research Bureau from 1963, when the Supreme Court held that an investment adviser’s failure to disclose a personal interest in securities being recommended constituted fraud under the Advisers Act. The Court did not require proof of intent to injure or that clients actually lost money as the existence of the undisclosed conflict was sufficient. It seems that post-publication revision of attribution language on a market-moving report, which shifts from institutional co-authorship to personal friendship, is the kind of evidence this framework may have been designed to evaluate.

Decades later, the SEC’s 2019 Commission Interpretation, Release No. IA-5248, stated that disclosure must be “sufficiently specific so that a client is able to understand the material fact or conflict of interest.” The Commission stated that an adviser that discloses it “may” have a conflict when one actually exists has not provided adequate disclosure. Accordingly, a site-wide Terms of Service page stating team members “may have existing long or short positions” is the definition of disclosing that a conflict “may” exist, but the SEC has said that is not enough.

The most directly analogous enforcement action is In re Anson Funds Management, Release No. 6622, June 2024. In this case, the SEC charged Anson Funds for failing to disclose their collaboration with activist short publishers. The fund described its short strategy in generic terms but did not disclose that it involved working with short publishers, trading around publication, and sharing profits. The SEC found these omissions rendered the fund’s disclosures misleading and the combined penalty was $2.25 million.

Now, besides the fact that this is a speculative work of fiction (while keeping in mind what is known and said about it by its authors), there are important distinctions to these precedents. Anson involved profit-sharing arrangements and advance access to research and there is no public evidence of such arrangements between Lotus and Citrini. The question is not whether Shah deceived anyone (besides, it’s fiction, etc.). The question is instead under what standards the SEC has articulated in the past whether the disclosure was adequate at the point of market impact, and whether co-authoring research on a third-party platform with no disclosure architecture, then revising the attribution language after publication, constitutes an omission of the type the Advisers Act addresses.

Whether the Anson framework applies to a situation where a principal SEC registered fund manager co-authors research for a fictional speculative work on a third-party platform, rather than working with a short publisher in a formal arrangement, is an open question. The SEC has not addressed this specific scenario in any published guidance, enforcement action, or no-action letter I have been able to identify.

I do not have the answer, as I am just identifying what the law says and what happened.

One further note - the publisher exclusion under Lowe v. SEC protects ‘bona fide’ publications containing ‘disinterested commentary.’ Whether a fictional speculative report co-authored by an SEC-registered fund manager holding short positions in the named companies qualifies as ‘disinterested’ is a question the courts have not yet been asked to answer.

It’s a watershed moment for vibe laundering in many ways including coining the term (I want my Urban Dictionary credit, damnit).

Part 3 of the vibe laundering series, which is the speculative memo from the future, comes out soon.

After all, a work of fiction on a Substack and massive financial losses are elements that typically have no business working together (as far as I know). What I am about to describe is not illegal.

On Sunday, February 22, Citrini Research published a piece called “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis” on Substack. It is a fictional work billing itself as a memo from June 2028 that uses a legal architecture it charitably refers to as speculative fiction while meriting none of the literary prowess that earns the label. Charting the devastation that happens when AI works too well, the Citrini memo tells us unemployment is staggering, the S&P is down 38%, and that the authors seemingly write like large language models themselves (or is it the other way around?). The work also names some companies specifically by ticker. It went out on Sunday night and by Monday the article had sixteen million views on X. By market close the selloff had spread well beyond companies named in the report. Chaos. Sheer chaos. Dramatics, etc. DoorDash fell approximately 6.6%. American Express down roughly 7%. KKR down approximately 9%. Blackstone down 8%. CrowdStrike, which the report did not name, fell roughly 10%. MongoDB, also unnamed, dropped approximately 11%. The Dow fell 821 points. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF hit a new 52-week low. And Citrini, who I need to send a fruit basket to as thanks, blocked me on Twitter because of my critiques of the writing itself. So yeah, a lot happened, and then it got even more fun as Michael Burry waltzed entered the chat and shared the report on X stating “And you think I’m bearish.“

We love to see it (do we?) when the Big Short guy is signal-boosting a Substack post about AI killing the economy. Bloomberg, Fortune, TechCrunch, CNN, CNBC, and at least twelve other outlets ran coverage by end of day. Won’t someone think of the children of the future, or at least the burrito taxis feeding them since no one knows how to cook or doesn’t feel like it? Even DoorDash co-founder Andy Fang responded on X, saying “We definitely believe agentic commerce will be transformative to the industry. The ground is shifting underneath our feet.“

Read that again, folks - a named CEO whose stock dropped nearly 7% felt compelled to respond publicly to a Substack post framed as fiction. When I ask won’t someone think of the children, I really should be asking - won’t someone think of the burrito taxis? Apparently no one is.

Of course, the piece contains a disclaimer doing extraordinary work stating that “What follows is a scenario, not a prediction” and in the acknowledgements “Thanks to Sam Koppelman of Hunterbrook for his help with proofreading.”

I want to name something. Influence that moves markets without triggering the legal definitions of manipulation. Information that isn’t nonpublic and isn’t false but becomes significant through the channels it passes through. The slow accumulation of legitimacy around a position until it becomes what reasonable people think. I’m calling it vibe laundering because I saw it somewhere once and it stuck with me, plus I just want to name a damn movement and my other effort is in getting people to call Alex Karp surveillance daddy. Vibe laundering is how influence passes through enough reputable channels that it comes out clean, so it’s like money laundering but for narrative. It is the arbitrage of converting content to credibility to capital conducted in plain sight.

The first rule of vibe laundering is that you don’t talk about vibe laundering, so what I’m going to do in this 1st article is explore how it happens in the case of Citrini by showing how corporate structures with a capital raise that would normally trigger disclosure obligations can be structured to avoid every single one of them, then how disclosure of positions gets paywalled so the public sees the market impact but not the exposure behind it. In part 2, I’ll show finally how all of this sits in a legal architecture that was built for a world where the people moving markets had to tell you what they were holding.

I. What you see is what you get (hypothetically): the role of disclosures and Citrini Research (the Substack), Citrinitas Capital (the business entity), and what’s in between

Citrini, née Van Geelen, is a former Los Angeles paramedic and regrettably like the author a graduate of UCLA, after which he left medical school (read: dropped out) to pursue entrepreneurship by launching a holistic healthcare venture in 2013 that was acquired by a PE firm in 2018. By 2023, he started Citrini Research on Substack and he has over 100,000+ followers on X and subscribers on Substack, making him the number one finance writer on the platform. Citrini has appeared on many media outlets many times saying many things, but since it’s late and I’m tired and I have many more interesting things to say, tldr, he’s well-known, has no actual proper finance background (just like moi) and somehow made it from the middle class bottom to Substack paid tier. Which is what brings us to what happened after the fictional June 2028 memo was published and the market sell-offs occurred (hey, could be due to tariffs, eh?).

Here’s what none of the seventeen outlets that covered the sell-off mentioned, however, or failed to for some reason, which is that Van Geelen is not just a Substack writer. He is also the managing principal of an entity that raised $5.05 million from accredited investors two months before publishing a piece of speculative fiction that moved billions in market capitalization. Let me back up for a moment to explain what the two branches of Citrini’s business interests are.

1. Citrini’s consumer-facing Substack is the paywall entity of Citrini Research where he shares the Citrini index model portfolio. This is the Substack where users need to pay upwards of 499 dollars a year to receive posts.

2. Citrini’s business interests are in an entity known as Citrinitas Capital Management Inc. a Delaware corporation formed in 2023 with offices at 515 Madison Avenue, 14B, New York, NY 10022. It does business as both “Citrini Research” and “Citrindex.” Three SEC EDGAR records exist for it, and under CIK 2089797, two Form D filings show under Regulation D, Rule 506(b) with one in October 2025 and one in December 2025. The third record is for a small position Van Geelen’s entity holds in with RoboStrategy, Inc., a closed-end fund investing in private robotics and embodied AI companies.

Though Citrinitas Capital was formed in 2023, it was only in October and December of last year that new filings appear on EDGAR. On October 21, 2025, the new filing is for $1,000,000 reported sold with one investor. The security type is listed as “Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE).” The filing lists two related persons with James Van Geelen as executive officer and director and Nicholas Reece as executive officer.

On December 2, 2025, the amended filing is for $5,050,000 total reported sold with five investors. It is still a 506(b) and SAFE set-up with zero sales commissions and zero proceeds paid to named executive officers.

Interestingly, on January 26, 2026, twenty-seven days before the speculative fiction was published, a Form N-2 registration statement was filed for RoboStrategy, Inc., a closed-end fund investing in private robotics and embodied AI companies. The fund holds positions in Figure AI, Apptronik, and six other venture-stage robotics companies. It is managed by Mechanism Capital with total assets of $147.5 million. Listed among the selling stockholders offering shares for resale is Citrinitas Capital Management Inc. with 50,000 shares (about 0.25% of total shares outstanding).

That means Van Geelen’s entity invested in a robotics fund holding humanoid robot companies, then published a speculative scenario in which AI and automation cause mass unemployment and economic collapse. The fund bets on the companies building the robots while Citrini’s memo back to the future in June 2028 - a work of speculative fiction - bets on the terror of what those robots do to the economy that they cravenly crater. Both positions can be true simultaneously and both can also make money simultaneously, from different directions, on the same thesis, since that’s what hedging is, right?

Yet as far as I’ve found, this position is not disclosed in any subscriber-facing material nor is it mentioned in the February 22 work of speculative fiction. It is on a public SEC filing that nobody has connected to Citrini Research because nobody has looked, apparently? I hope I’m wrong, and I definitely need more coffee.

The fund’s adviser (FP Strategies LLC) is a registered investment adviser in Puerto Rico that charges a 2.5% management fee on gross assets and holds positions in private companies like Figure AI and Apptronik. It was organized in May 2025 with operations starting in September 2025, and is trying to go public via direct listing in 2026.

Now, I think it’s worth pointing out that SAFEs are how startups raise capital. It is not how a hedge fund raises capital (correct me if I’m wrong, please). A pooled investment fund/hedge fund would file form D with “pooled investment fund interests” checked, but Citrinitas filed with “Other: SAFE.” The most conservative reading is that the capital was raised into the management company itself as corporate financing, not as a fund vehicle, but it’s just a reading, not the reality, I cannot be sure and neither can anyone else unless they have more information. At $5.05 million, none of the standard institutional disclosure triggers apply.

That means there is no 13F obligation, form ADV on the Investment Adviser Public Disclosure database nor FINRA broker-dealer registration required.The corporate structure of Citrinitas Capital sits well below every disclosure threshold that would typically apply to someone in a position whose publications move billions in market cap. But these are not normal times since the pandemic era new normal really wasn’t kidding around about it.

On the citricap.com mainpage, the website describes the entity as “an asset management and investment research firm focused on capturing momentum in thematic equity while utilizing shorter term derivatives strategies to protect against drawdowns.” The website’s access is restricted to accredited investors who are presumably sophisticated people.

On the Citrindex model portfolio, which Van Geelen markets as tracking “Citrini Research’s core portfolio with live updates on positions,” the legal terms say performance data is “hypothetical and presented for illustrative purposes only” and “does not represent the performance of any actual account or investment.”

On Fortune’s website, a report shows Citrini claims 200%+ returns on his “real-world investment portfolio” though the terms of Citrini’s website say the performance is hypothetical. Both are published, so it sounds like the tension between the real and the hypothetical are a tension that sits in the open like a tritone nobody wants to name but we’re all hearing.

Eventually it may become pleasant, one supposes, if this dissonance pays off? Buh bum buh bum buh bum. But with disclosures seemingly more opaque than clear, one wonders - how to launder vibes through impact? Positions, naturally.

II. Vh1’s behind the music, but make it behind the Citrini Research paywall

Examining the positions put behind a paywall costing hundreds of dollars a year is a point of entry into understanding vibe laundering from content to capital conversion through credibility. On Substack, the Citrindex model portfolio includes a basket called .AISHORTS: AI Standalone Short Basket. In late January 2025, Van Geelen made the AI basket approximately 50% short SMH. On Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast he publicly discussed shorting Blue Owl and private credit companies. Blue Owl dropped 3.3% on February 23. The report named Blackstone, KKR, and Apollo. They dropped 6 to 9%.

The model portfolio as of February 24 shows net exposure of 98.9% long. None of the companies named in the report are individually shorted. The Citrindex lost approximately 0.4% on February 23. The subscriber-facing product lost money on the day the report moved (hyperbolically) billions.

These are facts that cut against a trading-profit narrative, which is a good thing. But this is what those facts do not answer. There is no legal requirement that the model portfolio and whatever Citrinitas Capital Management is doing with its investor capital be identical. The model portfolio is what subscribers to the Substack see, whereas what happens inside the corporation is not publicly visible. The corporate structure does not require it to be. Whether Citrinitas held positions that benefited from the February 23 selloff is a question that cannot be answered from public sources to the best of my knowledge. If I am wrong, let me know please, and I will correct/update this accordingly.

The February 22 report contains no per-report position disclosure, and the site-wide terms contain only a blanket statement that team members “may have existing long or short positions.” To be clear, this is not the same thing as per-report disclosure. What happens when there’s free distribution of market-moving research through speculative fiction, but paywalled disclosure of positions? And taken a step further still, behind the paywall, there’s a corporation with no window at all? The vibes, they are a launderin’.

III. Is this real life, or is this just fantasy, caught in a landslide where hedge funds proof-read materials before publishing

Sam Koppelman co-founded Hunterbrook, a company that owns both a newsroom (Hunterbrook Media) and a hedge fund (Hunterbrook Capital). Their standard operating procedure is per-article position disclosure, which materializes in the form of disclosures on Hunterbrook piece I can find opens with a variation of something like “Based on Hunterbrook Media’s reporting, Hunterbrook Capital is short $XYZABC at the time of publication.” It is clear, consistent, and prominent.

The Citrini-Hunterbrook relationship is not new. In July 2025, they jointly published a report on Teradyne’s robotic arms deal with Amazon, and when it was published on Hunterbrook’s platform, the disclosure plainly at the top declared long Teradyne. The stock rose 6.3% that day.

Now look at February 22 with the speculative fiction of the June 2028 back to the future memo - it was published on Citrini’s Substack and Koppelman’s involvement was characterized as “proofreading.” There was no Hunterbrook Media article published because why would they publish it there? There is nothing to disclose, no position, just a speculative work of fiction involving financial markets.

The different disclosure architecture for trades and team-playing is interesting to ponder here. They are the same players with the same impact as influencers but the gap between the hypothetical and the real is also the gap between who publishes what and where. In theory, couldn’t Hunterbrook have also published it on their platform? I’m not sure of that, but it would be interesting to find out. Also intirguing would be whether Hunterbrook Capital held positions in any of those stocks in the speculative work of fiction published on Citrini’s Substack over the weekend. Has anyone asked or know?

My point here is that if there’s a real trade, like Teradyne, then the collaboration is published on Hunterbrook’s platform with disclosure at time of publication. Yet the hypothetical speculative work of fiction - which is a collaboration due to their involvement and proofreading yadda yadda - well, it was published on Citrini’s platform. Named stocks moved 3-11%. But there was no disclosure at publication. This also raises another question - Koppelman had advanced access to a written work of speculative fiction that named specific real stocks and subsequently made an impact that moved real (hyperbolic) billions. No public disclosure exists that answers whether Hunterbrook Capital held positions in any of those stocks. No journalist has asked. Prove me wrong here folks, because like I said, vibe laundering has to do with not talking about vibe laundering, but making it happen through an architecture of opacity in disclosures and positions.

Now: is any of this not kosher?

IV. Is any of this illegal? Nah, bruh. The Hamas Hospital Principle

Is vibe laundering legal, illegal, halal?

In a galaxy far, far away, local internet celebrity Roon recently posted on X/Twitter about what is called the “hamas hospital principle.“ Summed up, this was about how bad actors hide weapons wherever the sacred cows are. It works because nobody suspects the hospital, and that’s where the rot starts where you don’t see it. That’s how institutions which get coded as evil get scrutinized and watched precisely because everyone assumes they are the compromised ones when the reality is different.

Now consider how hedge funds file 13Fs while independent Substacks file nothing but copy and taxes for income for the 13 people on the website who make actual money, and then you have things like Fortune or the mass media, and Fortune is not required to file anything, except for better copy, one hopes. Fortune and other mass media, of course, boost credibility, so the credibility is the point and the cover just like Roon described.

So is any of this illegal? The honest answer is that nobody knows as securities law genuinely lacks an agreed-upon definition of manipulation. A Duke Law Journal article called “Legitimate Yet Manipulative” notes Congress deliberately avoided defining it. Like porn, the SEC has been running on “I know it when I see it” for ninety years. Prosecution happens when the heat gets loud enough, but vibe laundering and the architecture I’m describing is by design something that keeps it way below that volume.

Interestingly, the publisher exemption from the Investment Advisers Act (Lowe v. SEC, 1985) protects publishers who offer “impersonal, disinterested commentary” though the “disinterested” prong becomes a point of consideration possibly when the publisher also runs an investing business, or when a publisher is also the managing principal of a Delaware corporation that raised $5.05 million under Reg D. Crucially, the SEC’s 2015 no-action letter emphasized the test requires commentary not “timed to specific market activity.” I saw crucially because I’m hoping you know what the hell that actually means, because law, like language, can be ambiguous. So legal precedents are helpful to consider, and the most instructive enforcement precedent is Andrew Left from what I’ve found.

In July 2024 the SEC and DOJ charged Left and Citron Capital not for publishing bearish research but for misrepresenting his trading positions. Left told followers to sell while he was buying, which is apparently the line. Left got caught because he lied, but the vibe laundering architecture I’m describing doesn’t require lying, it requires structuring and siloing.

After all, we’re in a brave new world where you can use a Substack instead of a 13F, SAFE as your mechanism instead of a fund, and speculative fiction published instead of research on a platform that normally only publishes research.

What is a collaboration in one play is proofreading in another. The design of vibe laundering and its cumulative effect is a system that produces nearly the same market outcomes as Citron’s impact while sitting outside the enforcement frameworks that caught Left. Also, what is up with these citron/lemon evoking based names, is there no room for other fruits with something like Pampelmousse Partners?

I say all this keeping in mind that 61% of investors under 35 use finfluencer recommendations when making decisions, yet to my knowledge, the SEC has brought zero enforcement actions citing Substack. In 2024, SEC chair Gary Gensler testified that if the SEC stayed flat-funded “our ability to find bad actors is at risk.“

Vibe laundering in plain sight because there’s nothing illicit about it seemingly and the cops are understaffed anyways. Citrini is one example of the conduit nature between credibility and content that converts into capital conversion - there’s far more to it I will explore in part 2. There, I will explore possible pathways and architectures of vibe laundering and its manifestations as they apply from here on out by using a big surprise and guest stars. Stay tuned.

Disclosure: Definitely not financial or legal advice or allegations, just vibes. Contact me at ani@anibruna.com

Obligatory message to like and subscribe for updates or share with everyone if you hated it. Merci

So I did the rewrite anyway.

Some selected blocks from Citrini’s original report side by side with my rewrites as a case study, for the love of the game, and simply because it is fun to challenge oneself and grow to become a better writer. You can have the best research in the world, you can have all of the intel, but substance and style are a never-ending project. Sometimes the sycophantic echoes slow you down in your growth.

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Citrini’s original - Block 1:

This sounds obvious in hindsight, but it really wasn’t at the time (at least to me). The historical disruption model said incumbents resist new technology, they lose share to nimble entrants and die slowly. That’s what happened to Kodak, to Blockbuster, to BlackBerry. What happened in 2026 was different; the incumbents didn’t resist because they couldn’t afford to.

With stocks down 40-60% and boards demanding answers, the AI-threatened companies did the only thing they could. Cut headcount, redeploy the savings into AI tools, use those tools to maintain output with lower costs.

Each company’s individual response was rational. The collective result was catastrophic. Every dollar saved on headcount flowed into AI capability that made the next round of job cuts possible.

Software was only the opening act. What investors missed while they debated whether SaaS multiples had bottomed was that the reflexive loop had already escaped the software sector. The same logic that justified ServiceNow cutting headcount applied to every company with a white-collar cost structure.

My rewrite:

In the past, the historical disruption model, at minimum, afforded resistant incumbents the dignity of a slow death march. Suburban shopping plazas lit up in blue and yellow Blockbuster logos began to quietly shutter one by one. Next door at the plaza, at the same CVS where you used to wait for your photos to develop at the Kodak counter, the yellow signage came down and a bulky red Redbox machine moved in near the entrance. The company that invented the digital camera chose to die rather than use it. People went from waiting in lines at Blockbuster or for photos to develop with bulky BlackBerry phones blinking red lights in their pockets, and then all those lines, all those lights, and all those physical remnants of life disappeared nearly all at once. The touchscreen they called a fad turned out not to be and the cloud arrived.

What happened in 2026, of course, was different, as it took the dignity of a death march and turned it into a death cult due to the velocity of change.

With stocks down 40-60% and boards demanding answers, AI-threatened companies were just following orders. They complied by cutting headcount, deploying savings into AI tools, and using those tools to maintain output at lower cost. Every company’s individual response to aggressively adopting AI was rational in the way a death cult can only be. They drank the Kool-Aid because the Kool-Aid was the only thing left. The collective result, of course, was catastrophic.

Like a snake eating its own tail, every dollar saved on headcount from using AI flowed into further AI capability that made the next round of cuts possible. Software was only the opening act. What investors missed while they debated whether SaaS multiples had bottomed out was that the ouroboros of the reflexive loop had already escaped the software sector.

The same logic that justified ServiceNow cutting headcount applied to every company with a white-collar cost structure, the adage of what nourishes me also destroys me by then already long forgotten.

Citrini’s original - Block 2:

Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on those constraints persisting.

It started out simple enough. Agents removed friction.

Subscriptions and memberships that passively renewed despite months of disuse. Introductory pricing that sneakily doubled after the trial period. Each one was rebranded as a hostage situation that agents could negotiate. The average customer lifetime value, the metric the entire subscription economy was built on, distinctly declined.

Consumer agents began to change how nearly all consumer transactions worked.

Humans don’t really have the time to price-match across five competing platforms before buying a box of protein bars. Machines do.

Travel booking platforms were an early casualty, because they were the simplest. By Q4 2026, our agents could assemble a complete itinerary (flights, hotels, ground transport, loyalty optimization, budget constraints, refunds) faster and cheaper than any platform.

Insurance renewals, where the entire renewal model depended on policyholder inertia, were reformed. Agents that re-shop your coverage annually dismantled the 15-20% of premiums that insurers earned from passive renewals.

Financial advice. Tax prep. Routine legal work. Any category where the service provider’s value proposition was ultimately “I will navigate complexity that you find tedious” was disrupted, as the agents found nothing tedious.

Even places we thought insulated by the value of human relationships proved fragile. Real estate, where buyers had tolerated 5-6% commissions for decades because of information asymmetry between agent and consumer, crumbled once AI agents equipped with MLS access and decades of transaction data could replicate the knowledge base instantly. A sell-side piece from March 2027 titled it “agent on agent violence”. The median buy-side commission in major metros had compressed from 2.5-3% to under 1%, and a growing share of transactions were closing with no human agent on the buy side at all.

We had overestimated the value of “human relationships”. Turns out that a lot of what people called relationships was simply friction with a friendly face.

That was just the start of the disruption for the intermediation layer. Successful companies had spent billions to effectively exploit quirks of consumer behavior and human psychology that didn’t matter anymore.

Machines optimizing for price and fit do not care about your favorite app or the websites you’ve been habitually opening for the last four years, nor feel the pull of a well-designed checkout experience. They don’t get tired and accept the easiest option or default to “I always just order from here”.

That destroyed a particular kind of moat: habitual intermediation.

My rewrite:

Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on those limitations persisting.

Then Silicon Valley spent decades teaching consumers that friction was the enemy eradicated by technology. What followed was a silent societal Stockholm syndrome. Swipe right. One-click buy. Next-day delivery. Cancel anytime. Burrito taxis. We fell in love with the removal of friction while the companies removing it built trillion-dollar extraction layers on the friction that remained. And then they built the thing that actually removed all of it. Friction no longer had meaning.

What took years became months, months became weeks, weeks became days, days became hours. Humans don’t really have the time to price-match across five competing platforms before buying a box of protein bars, but machines do.

Even places we thought insulated by the value of human relationships proved fragile. It turned out that what we called relationships was simply friction with a friendly face, and society began tolerating this polite fiction less and less once agent swarms could handle these things through algorithms rather than aggression.

Agents re-shopped insurance coverage annually, dismantling the 15-20% of premiums that insurers earned from passive renewals. Real estate commissions in major metros compressed from 2.5-3% to under 1%, and a growing share of transactions closed with no human agent on the buy side at all. Any category where the service provider’s value proposition was ultimately “I will navigate complexity that you find tedious” was disrupted, as the agents found nothing tedious.

Companies spent billions learning how to exploit quirks of consumer behavior like the fact that you’re tired, distracted, and habitual. Then the machines showed up, and the machines weren’t tired, distracted, or habitual. Machines weren’t hostages to the Stockholm syndrome of software. Game over. The moat was never the product. The moat was you being too lazy to leave. There is no hostage remaining when the captive audience stops being captive and ripe for the extracting.

Citrini’s original - Block 3:

Permanent capital. The phrase showed up in every earnings call and investor letter meant to reassure. It became a mantra. And like most mantras, nobody paid attention to the finer details. Here’s what it actually meant…

Over the prior decade, the large alternative asset managers had acquired life insurance companies and turned them into funding vehicles. Apollo bought Athene. Brookfield bought American Equity. KKR took Global Atlantic. The logic was elegant: annuity deposits provided a stable, long-duration liability base. The managers invested those deposits into the private credit they originated and got paid twice, earning spread over on the insurance side and management fees on the asset management side. A fee-on-fee perpetual motion machine that worked beautifully under one condition.

The private credit had to be money good.

The losses hit balance sheets built to hold illiquid assets against long-duration obligations. The “permanent capital” that was supposed to make the system resilient was not some abstract pool of patient institutional money and sophisticated investors taking sophisticated risk. It was the savings of American households, “Main Street”, structured as annuities invested in the same PE-backed software and technology paper that was now defaulting. The locked-up capital that couldn’t run was life insurance policyholder money, and the rules are a bit different there.

Compared to the banking system, insurance regulators had been docile - even complacent - but this was the wake-up call. Already uneasy about private credit concentrations at life insurers, they began downgrading the risk-based capital treatment of these assets. That forced the insurers to either raise capital or sell assets, neither of which was possible at attractive terms in a market already seizing up.

My rewrite:

The long con began with what’s called permanent capital. The phrase showed up like a mantra in every earnings call and investment letter meant to reassure, and like most mantras, nobody paid attention to the details.

Over the prior decade, the large alternative asset managers acquired life insurance companies and turned them into funding vehicles. Apollo bought Athene, Brookfield bought American Equity, KKR took Global Atlantic, and the logic was an elegant sleight of hand. Annuity deposits provided a stable long-duration liability base and managers invested those deposits into the private credit they originated and got paid twice accordingly, earning spread on the insurance side and management fees on the asset management side. The same firms dealing the cards were placing the bets and keeping score with a long con that relied on one condition: that the private credit had to be money good.

The losses hit balance sheets built to hold illiquid assets against long-duration obligations. The “permanent capital” that was supposed to make the system resilient was not some abstract pool of patient institutional money and sophisticated investors taking sophisticated risk. It was the savings of American households, “Main Street”, structured as annuities invested in the same PE-backed software and technology paper that was now defaulting. Your mother’s retirement funded a leveraged bet on a customer service platform that AI just made obsolete. She didn’t know, she was never supposed to know, and that was the detail nobody paid attention to. The locked-up capital that couldn’t run was life insurance policyholder money, and the rules are a bit different there.

Compared to the banking system, insurance regulators had been docile, even complacent, but this was the wake-up call. Already uneasy about private credit concentrations at life insurers, they began downgrading the risk-based capital treatment of these assets. That forced the insurers to either raise capital or sell assets, neither of which was possible at attractive terms in a market already seizing up.

What does rewriting Citrini’s 2028 report show us?

I’ll be upfront: I only rewrote three blocks because I have better things to do, such as petting the cat on my lap. The other blocks can consider this a professional courtesy.

The research is his. It's good research. It has good ideas. But finding and having the information is never the hardest part, though it is tedious and requires effort - making someone feel it is. He spent 100 hours writing a piece about the end of the world and even though it isn’t AI, it reads like in parts and structures. At best, you can attempt to advance that AI is calibrating for writing like this. At worst, I’ll let you fill in the blanks. But there’s something far more interesting going on here than a fintwit beef over an opinion on style: what do we consider substance, what is style, and what are our standards for good taste, engagement, and intellectual honesty in the era of AI slop? My rewrites reflect what I think involves a kind of narrative cohesion, cadence, and care for the topic that reflects a through-line between the theme and the narrative of it. That being said, someone reading this could think my writing is garbage, Citrini’s is better, or that Citrini’s writing is garbage, mine’s is better, or that efinancialcareers.com is the best, we are both mid, etc. It isn’t about what is better or best or be best as our First Lady would say. It is about the love of the game and using one’s brain to be true to it. All of this being an intriguing exercise for an otherwise sleepy Sunday, I’ll end it on this note - intriguingly, Citrini offered of his own volition the following comments.

According to Citrini, 'dismissing it outright requires intellectual laziness that tends to get expensive.' This was in his original post, before I ever commented. He set the terms: critique equals laziness. Obviously I didn't dismiss it, but Citrini tells himself one story that makes a critique about the form of the writing from an unknown writer palatable and then blocks me for offering the rewrite. Professional decorum and standards of judgement are fluid, but blocking a 2,000-follower account for engaging seriously with your work through a rewrite that reflects your own ideas and research is not the flex of a man confident in his craft.

If these are the standards of intellectual honesty in our community, we should probably rewrite those too.

You can decide which version you'd rather read to the end. I just think intellectual honesty requires engaging with something rather than shutting it down. Disappointing from a fellow Bruin. But he is sure I’m the better writer, so based on him being sure about how things are, I won’t question the logic.

Timeline of posts:

1. My original post at 11:48am this morning after my initial read of the report with Citrini’s two replies at 12:32pm questioning what the future is for writers and then showing all his cards on critique:

2. Less than 30 minutes after my original post, Citrini’s post at 12:25pm reflecting the vast wound of intellectual laziness:

Reader note: For comments/consulting inquiries, reach me at ani@anibruna.com. An obligatory message to like and subscribe follows: Like and subscribe for updates. If you do not like it, tell everyone immediately by sharing this link. Merci’

“Karp herself remains the most eccentric of Palantir’s eccentrics. The lifelong bachelorette, who says that the notion of settling down and raising a family gives her “hives,” is known for her obsessive personality. She solves Rubik’s cubes in less than three minutes, swims and practices the meditative art of Qigong daily and has gone through aikido and jujitsu phases that involved putting cofounders in holds in the Shire’s hallways.

A cabinet in her office is stocked with vitamins, 20 pairs of identical swimming goggles and hand sanitizer. And she addresses her staff using an internal video channel called KarpTube, speaking on wide-ranging subjects like greed, integrity and Marxism. ‘

The only time I’m not thinking about Palantir,’ she says, ‘is when I’m swimming, practicing Qigong or during sexual activity.’”

Forbes, “How A ‘Deviant’ Philosopher Built Palantir, A CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut,” 2013.

(This incredibly based image/source is from the Quartr team from the 2025 Q3 earnings cover, all credit to them.)

What the fuck does ontology even mean anyways?

You’ve seen or heard the word somewhere before, on a podcast or a pitch deck about paradigm shifts or in relation to Palantir, the all-seeing all-knowing all-powerful panopticon as a program piloted by a peripatetic philosopher known as Dr. Karp.

The company, which has charted a wild trajectory from CIA-funded venture to dark horse retail trader hero to memetic roadshow and everything in between, built its entire operational backbone around something it calls the Ontology: a system that purportedly decides what a thing actually is. Feed it enough data on any entity, and it strips noise from signal, sorts the essential from the incidental, and tells you what you’re actually looking at for different use cases.

Palantir’s ontology does not confuse the properties of a thing with the thing itself, a distinction credited to its original technical co-founder Aristotle circa 350 BC, as ontology is also a philosophical discipline about the study of being. It’s the study of what things are, not what things do or what they look like or what they have.

That, of course, is the irony, as all the seeing and all the knowing anyone has ever done on Dr. Karp has seemingly only amounted to tai chi sabers, a cocaine quip about short sellers, and a retail cult that calls him Papa. If Palantir sees everything, we have looked at Dr. Karp for fifteen years and seen nothing.

Everything you have ever known about Alex Karp is a categorical philosophical error.

Not so long ago, it would have sounded like its own categorical philosophical error if I told you that Palantir, known for building surveillance tools for ICE, would be announcing a move of its headquarters to Miami, a county with one of the highest concentrations of foreign-born residents in the country. Since we’re already in the impossible and the year is full of surprises, let’s push further, as everything we need to know about the ontology of Alex Karp is also found in Miami. Let’s consider: what happens when Alexandria Karp walks into a bar?

I have been thinking about this for a long while because what initially captured my attention about Karp was how a woman would never be able to say what was said in that 2013 interview. For literally months, I’ve pondered - who would Alexandria Karp be, how would we characterize her, and where would she get to in terms of professional reception, much less the strata between all-knowing, all-seeing, and all-powerful? I’m not interested in superficial takes like “Well a woman could never” or the banal, utterly mundane, entirely devoid types of easy parallels that come to mind when I point out Alexandria Karp is a deviant philosopher. I wanted to dig deeper into this to do the ontology of Dr. Karp justice as well as to myself as a woman writing about a man being reimagined as a woman in a man’s world. Something about writing about Martha Zuckerberg or Jennifer Bezos did not sing to me the way this did.

So like any good philosophical thought experiment put to the test, I thought a lot about it, far too much really, and it occurred to me that we need a method for sorting what’s actually Karp from what’s just the world’s reception of Karp. It had been there all along through ontology as the frame, but it didn’t occur to me until 3am far more recently than I’m willing to admit.

That’s why I insist that we pay attention to two words especially throughout this essay: essence and accident. Aristotle, the aforementioned technical original co-founder of Palantir’s ontology, distinguished between the two words as follows.

Essence is what makes a thing what it fundamentally is. Remove it and the thing stops being itself. Accidents are properties that could be otherwise, which means they are thus temporal. If you remove essence, the thing no longer is. To illustrate these abstractions concretely, consider what happens when I write the words red chair and you read them. The color is an accident, because you can paint over it and the thing is still a chair, even if you paint it black. Even if you see a red chair and want to paint it black, with no colors anymore, if you want the chair to turn black, you can take care of that.

Yet if you are to knock off a foot of the chair, something else happens entirely - the fact that it’s a structure for sitting is essential, and once you take that away from the chair by knocking the foot off, well, it is just firewood now. The essence of the chair no longer exists. So how does this help us as a point of entry to understand Dr. Karp and how everyone’s gotten him wrong so far?

Consider how every major piece on Karp has virtually done the same thing. Forbes catalogs the goggles, the qigong, the Rubik’s cubes. Dowd inventories the Norwegian ski instructor, the Swiss-Portuguese chef, the Austrian assistant. Steinberger narrates in long-form and in book-form how geographical non-monogamy shows up in Karp’s life like sneaker colors, nonalcoholic German beers, and German women.

Fortune indexes the philosophers, poets, and power players quoted in Karp’s based shareholder letters. This methodology of listing attributes is something I’m going to call the catalog, since like long forgotten catalog mail, they list attributes to present the accumulation and its overwhelm as the idea of a person. It’s almost like flipping through a mail-order catalog, really, because it’s as if “Here is Alex Karp. Here is what this person IS. List. List. List.”

But those are all accidents, every single one of them - Karp could stop skiing tomorrow and still be Karp. Karp could sell the Rubik’s cubes. Karp could pick up knitting instead of tai chi and lose nothing fundamental about being Karp, and it’d probably generate massive hype for a new exclusive limited edition PLTR merch release along the way (Karp Knit Fit dropping exclusively for 48 hours before Q3 results.)

And yet notice, dear reader, how the accumulation of all these attributes can feel like a person? It generates the sensation of intimacy without any of the machinery of it, because at no point does anyone stop to ask what - underneath all the accessories in the accumulation of Aristotelian accidents - or who - Karp actually is.

The skiing, the Rubik’s cubes, the tai chi, the soundbites, the doomscrolling, the soundbites as unhinged doomscrolling loops, all of it muddles into a melange metastasizing into a morass masquerading as a man. It’s easy to do this, but in the frenzy of creating such a mix of bits and pieces as the biography, what we have is a catalog, not character. Set it all aside and I’m wondering - what’s actually Karp and what’s just what it’s like to look at Karp? These are not the same question. We have been treating them as the same question for almost two decades now. It’s one thing to see Karp skiing in a video update about the company, but take the skiing away, and who is Karp?

What I’m going to do is sort them. I’ll take each attribute, each quote, each behavior, and ask: does this change when I swap a few letters onto the name Alex to conjure Alexandria? If it changes, it never was about the person. It was about the reception, context, permission, meaning it was temporal, meaning it was an accident. If it doesn’t change, it’s closer to what’s essential, closer to the actual human being, closer to the ontology.

I know you’re excited to talk about this at the next party you’re going to attend in the Bay area, and I’m so happy to hear that.

To understand the ontology of Dr. Karp, we need this thought experiment that enables us to sort the essential from the accidental to dig properly into the question, and it turns out that what happens when Alexandria Karp walks into a bar in Miami is incredibly demonstrative. The gender swap is the instrument, but god, what pleasure it gives me as the writer to let you know from the start that the way this develops will be absolutely and utterly nothing at all like you envision it will be. And I can’t wait to show you how to understand the ontology of Dr. Karp is a way of understanding me and you and everyone we know.

II. Sorting it all out: How did we get this man so wrong?

“Are they worried I’m too crazy or too evil?” Alexandria Karp, CEO of Palantir, recently asked me. She was disarmingly blunt, pacing around her office swinging a tai chi saber over her head. — The Free Press, October 2025

Every profile on Karp always contains two kinds of information: one kind is about him. The other kind is about what the world does with him. No one has ever sorted these systematically in their writing, and to be fair, why would they? It’s not as exciting as say the perennially referenced tai chi swords, sabers, sharp objects always associated with Karp. Is the sword about Karp? Sort of. He does tai chi. That’s a fact. But the way every profile uses the sword, it’s doing work about how unusual he is, how eccentric, how “not your typical CEO” it is. Yes, I am aware this is coming from a writer with the handle that I have, but it reinforces my point - the sword is telling you about the room Karp’s in, which is a room full of typical CEOs, and how Karp deviates from that room.

The sword is relational, the sword is temporal, the sword is a prop in a list of attributes that catalog Karp but not Karp’s essence. The sword describes the gap between a person and the context. Karp’s use of these swords stands in contrast, for example, to the possibility of another defense tech CEO also being a sword enthusiast. It’s not like we hear about Lockheed Martin’s CEO’s love of fencing, or Raytheon’s executive board taking on an annual retreat in knife throwing (though one hopes there are spicy groupchats where they all gossip about one another. Gossip Girl, but maybe the group chat title is known as Garrison Girl. Just kidding, there’s no women in defense tech). The swords, sabers, all of this? It is not, in any meaningful sense, telling you what Karp IS.

“We have to find places that we protect away from the government so that we can all be the unique and interesting and, in my case, somewhat deviant people we’d like to be.” — Alexandria Karp

“I didn’t sign up for the government to know when I smoke a joint or have an affair.” — Alexandria Karp

“I went to Germany for intellectual reasons. The reason I stayed was emotional.” — Alexandria Karp

I told you I’m not interested in the superficial or easy, which is why I’ll gloss over the obvious right now in the sorting hat of Karp’s ontology when we conjure Alexandria Karp in lieu of Alex. I don’t want to berate with the obvious or belabor the point but goodness, you can already feel it working, can’t you? Everything codes differently as “somewhat deviant” from a male defense contractor CEO is transgressive-intellectual whereas from Alexandria it’s a contradiction so loud, it short-circuits the sentence.

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Alex mentions not having a security clearance to go smoke some weed and perhaps (presumably) have stoned sex which is (allegedly) amazing versus a female CEO saying this and obfuscating the possibility of an affair? Sign me up for the day we get this reality, because that is equality indeed.

A woman saying these things is not unimaginable, a woman doing these things is not impossible, but the thing me, you, and everyone else also knows - because Leonard Cohen told us, everybody knows, everybody knows - is that if Alexandria Karp said these things, it would not be broadcast nor received in the way it has been for Alex Karp. Forbes’s “lifelong bachelor” has chosen solitude versus the spinsterhood of “she never married” as the first line of an explanation of what went wrong.

Now that I’ve acknowledged the obvious, here’s the not so obvious part I’m building towards. When we sort Alex to Alexandria, what changes is our reception, though what stays is the person.

That’s how you find out what’s actually Karp, what the ontology of Karp is, the essence of Karp. And what’s actually his, every time I run it, is feeling. He doth protest too much, if any.

Every time I strip the accidents away, what’s left is a man having a feeling. Different feelings every time. But feeling itself, the orientation, the willingness, the exposure of it, that’s the constant. That’s the essential Karp, and that’s what nobody can metabolize.

The grief about Berlin, the loneliness of not knowing how to be normal, the sentimentality that’s been sitting in every single profile for fifteen years and sputtering, spazzing, sadness solidifying into solitude. The sort of thing you can find it if you’re any good at pattern matching, but here’s the thing, I can sort accidents from essence all day and still not touch the real question, which stated obviously is this: why has fifteen years of coverage managed to look directly at this sentimentality and still not see it, much less have a space for it? For that we need to go back to Forbes’ 2013 work.

The article does stumble onto something real right near the very end when Karp talks about Berlin.

“I had $40,000 in the bank, and no one knew who I was. I loved it. I loved it. I just loved it. I just loved it!” — Alex/Alexandria Karp

The hands waving. The voice rising. And then the drop:

“I have to get over this.”

This, dear reader, is obviously not an attribute, obviously not an accident, obviously not temporal. This is a person who has grief, this is a person mourning a version of themselves that no longer exists, and never will be able to.

I understand we can say “go cry into your billions” and I’d say the same, except billionaires buy, borrow, and die, so I guess it’d be more like, go cry into your abstraction of wealth so galactic that all I can do is wonder aren’t you happy somehow you have to deal with people less, bro? My Substack is free, but fine, I get it, I’ve gotten up and left a life in Europe too, it happens. But I digress - as does Forbes.

What does Forbes do with this peek into Karp’s ontology? They file it as privacy and take the single most essentially Karp moment in the entire article to categorize it as a position on a policy debate.

They can’t let him be sad. They have to make the sadness instrumental. It has to be about something other than itself. The catalog, like the centre, cannot hold, if things fall apart. Things falling apart in the construction of Karp means they cannot let Alex Karp be sentimental. That’s the categorical error in real time. The moment closest to Karp’s essence, the moment where the person flickers through the catalog of attributes and accumulated accouterments, all of this gets immediately recaptured and filed as another attribute. The essence of a person and what it is to be them is crushed, compartmentalized, categorized, concatenated, cataloged. The catalog absorbs everything, even the thing that is not a thing that should break the list because you cannot manufacture grief and sell it like a cozy Italian merino wool sweater.

Don’t believe me? Alexandria would also grieve the loss of anonymity. Alexandria would also mourn Berlin. The essential stuff survives even with the swap. Everything else was just the reception to how we viewed Karp.

III. Faster, faster, until the thrill of sentimentality overcomes the failures of seeing and speed

This is also the same Alex Karp who called campus protests a “pagan religion of mediocrity and discrimination,” who fantasized out loud about using drone-enabled technology to exact revenge on Silicon Valley VCs “in violation of all norms,” who said his software has “taken the lives of our enemies, and I don’t think that’s something to be ashamed of,” who wants fentanyl-laced urine sprayed on analysts from a drone.

You’d think that when I strip the accidents away, what I’d find underneath is the hawk, the ideologue, the techno-nationalist philosopher king the profiles keep reaching for and even alluded to by the title of Karp’s own book, The Technological Republic. Instead the sort keeps returning grief, devotion, a man crying about his mother, mourning a city he left, digging up a dead dog, an existential exhumation at every corner.

I keep looking for the thesis of Alex Karp and the sort keeps handing me the feelings of Alex Karp, and the coverage has been staring directly at those feelings for fifteen years and somehow producing profiles about swimming goggles.

Rosita was Karp’s childhood dog, per Steinberger’s biography. His mother walked into a shelter, saw this dog, said that’s our dog. Rosita broke out of cages, opened locks for other dogs, was by Karp’s account “more like a human than a dog.” She sounds like she would have been Al Capone’s spirit animal. Rosita died. Decades later Karp had the yard where she was buried exhumed and her remains moved to his property in New Hampshire, and every outlet that touched the story framed it as “one of the perks of being wealthy,” because apparently the correct reading of a man digging up his childhood dog is money. He cries about his mother on Axios and the only two bins anyone can reach for are “calculated PR move” or “genuine vulnerability,” two bins for an entire human feeling, no bin for “a person had a feeling,” and I find it genuinely bleak that we’ve gotten this far as a species with such impoverished categories for someone crying about their mom on television.

The man who wants fentanyl-laced urine sprayed on analysts from a drone is the same man who needed his dead dog close. That’s the contradiction I keep finding, and both sides of it survive the swap, and what doesn’t survive is the permission to hold them in the same being.

The sentimentality is not hidden. It has never been hidden. It is sitting in plain sight in every single profile ever published about this man, and every single profile walks right past it on the way to the next talking point. We ignore men’s sentimentality because we don’t expect it and don’t know what to do with it. We pathologize women’s sentimentality because we expect it and then punish it for arriving. Both are failures of seeing, failures of speed, failures of feeling that replace a person and their being with a catalog.

The issue is not that nobody noticed Karp’s sentimentality. People noticed, it’s been circulated, crystallized, calcified, then covered. The sentimentality isn’t invisible, but it’s metabolized too fast.

It arrives, gets noted, gets a label slapped on (surveillance CEO saying batshit crazy thing or humanizing, PR move, perk of wealth, what have you eccentricity), and then the catalog moves on to the next item. The feeling never has time to land, because why would we afford that luxury, especially to him? It gets converted into content and shipped as a talking point before anyone has to actually sit with what it means that this man dug up his dog. Or what it means that a male CEO (now billionaire) openly cries on TV within nearly seconds of discussing housing instability (read: the threat of homelessness and human mercy rearing its miracle at the last minute) from a situation in a past not yet past, never past still, all brouhaha and saving of western civilization through software be damned, clearly, this man still feels something and feels it deeply.

You cannot be nonplussed when you’re crying on TV about your mother almost becoming homeless. This isn’t something I can articulate to readers and frankly, I don’t want to, because you will never understand it and I hope you never will. Before anyone has to stay in the room with his feeling long enough to see the person having it, it is consumed. Soundbite, soundbite. Cynical takes could say this is engineered on purpose, but even my darkness has a limit. So what I see is not blindness to feeling and sentimentality that is gendered, but a speed limit given to it that does an immense disservice to everyone everywhere.

When Karp cries, there’s a beat and given the available categories for male CEO feelings are sparse, there’s also a stutter. A half-second where the feeling just exists as a feeling because the sorting infrastructure hasn’t caught up yet, and this is the closest the live video coverage ever gets to the essential. It’s not seeing, it’s not skiing, but it’s the ghost of the possibility floating by with a fleeting sense of seeing.

For Alexandria, the categories are pre-built. The sorting infrastructure for female feeling is ancient and comprehensive and runs on arrival. There is no pause where the feeling just exists because the feeling has been pre-empted, pre-judged, pre-labeled. It can range widely and wildly from “emotional,” “manipulative,” “unstable,” “performing relatability” and much more.

People’s insanity and the creativity it inspires will never cease to awe you, as the sheer cornucopia of gendered labels are already locked and loaded before Alexandria Karp even opens her mouth. For women, the conversion from feeling to attribute is instantaneous. The gap where you might actually perceive the essential doesn’t open at all.

Understanding the ontology of Dr. Karp requires understanding that the asymmetry between Alexandria and Alex Karp isn’t about judgment or just the reception to them, it’s about time. His feelings get a fractionally wider window in which they exist as themselves before being converted into accidents. Hers are pre-converted and pre-determined and pre-judged. For him, the window opens and closes and nobody walks through it, but at least it opens. For her, there is no window to breathe air from.

His sentimentality gets beaten out of existence and then gets swallowed by the catalog just like everything else. The difference between how we treat his feelings and how we’d treat hers isn’t the difference between seeing and not seeing. It’s the difference between almost seeing and never having the chance to almost see, about the failure of speed when it comes to sentimentality and how we sort it.

Every time I take an attribute and sort to ask “does this survive the swap,” I’m slowing it down rhetorically because I’m preventing the conversion from someone’s being to someone being said to be this person. I am trying to stop time and our entropy of existing as essences instead of exemplifications. The gender swap forces the slowdown because when you read “Alexandria Karp swinging a tai chi saber,” your pre-built categories stop working.

The labels don’t fit, the brain stumbles, there’s a stutter between wait what and huh, and in that stutter, the essential flickers through. The feeling, the behavior, the person, exists for a moment as itself before being reconverted into meaning. This is the light that never goes out.

Damn you, Morrissey.

Reader note: For comments/consulting inquiries, reach me at ani@anibruna.com. An obligatory message to like and subscribe follows: Like and subscribe for updates. If you do not like it, tell everyone immediately by sharing this link. Merci’

The Frenchman I met on Tinder, which is somehow embarrassing, but not as embarrassing as the fact that he had a married girlfriend he was smitten with when we met (he didn’t tell me until later, obviously, because no one ever does, and by then, it was too late for me as I had been hypnotized by the fornicating). She was manipulative, married and knew how to market martyrdom unlike any other - she even gave him a ring, had him regularly traveling long distances to see her, everything always on her own terms of course, a real power move situation, you know how this goes, right? He was spellbound, and in between all of this was yet another third party in the form of a second Frenchman I was involved with (whose name I couldn’t pronounce) basically for 75% of the time of this situation, all in a half-hearted attempt to forget the first Frenchman (who encouraged me to do the second Frenchman thing as much as possible). It was everything you wanted a ménage à trois to be except it wasn’t satisfying, so it’s kind of a bummer that it truly never worked out between the original Frenchman and his married girlfriend because all these years later you’d want a real love story to come out of all that pain, right? But maybe the mid Belgian makes him happy. I hope so. Also, I actually don’t know who she is, but she’s Belgian, so she’s mid, unless she’s a DJ (sorry, I don’t make the rules).

Anyways, the second was a Dutchman who I met because he literally walked into me at a bar, which, for context, is basically the height of romance in the Netherlands, no pun originally intended (though after I wrote it out, absolutely). On average, Dutch women are 170cm (5’7”), American women are 162cm (5’4”), and moi, I’m 168cm (5’6”), but none of these numbers matter because in the Netherlands you are short regardless and everyone’s eyeline is above your head and you get used to it and you wear high heels whenever you go biking to ensure you stay upright. The Dutchman was a bit more simple than the Frenchman situation because all that happened is that he walked into me at a bar by accident, said something in Dutch (which I didn’t speak a l’epoque natuurlijk) to me and since I’d had 2 drinks already, I just replied ‘Nice to meet you. You’re very attractive, you know.’ And that, reader, is how years of my life spent thinking about a person came to be.

Both ended as disasters, of course, and I had no business being anyone’s anything given my immaturity, of course, but looking back at it, I don’t think I was ever truly in love with either man as much as I felt in love with the possibility of one day falling in love with either considering us as an entity together. Yet I felt that potential because I can honestly say I did love their personalities and personhood, warts, good, bad, and ugly, this whole mess, so however much I idealized them and then found them to be human all too human and disappointing - frankly, even when things ended, it truly felt like someone died. I was devastated. It was unbecoming. I don’t think I have that much moisture left in my body anymore but god, I wept openly on the streets both times.

Now here’s the thing that matters for this essay that has a very joyous start to Valentine’s Day 2026 (not): funny enough, I ran into the Dutchman ages later on Bumble (when I was still living in the Netherlands). And reader, goodness, his profile was of someone I absolutely would not have swiped right on. Ever. If it had not been for the circumstances of how we actually met, the whirlwind of it, the physical reality of the charm of it all, of sitting on a swing outside a bar while making out with a man who literally collided with me in a bar in Amsterdam, minutes earlier - well, no. Never. He would have been another face I swiped past late at night on yet another rainy day in the Netherlands where everything fades to gray from dusk til dawn.

Do you know what that means? It means a relationship that came closest to love in my entire life so far would not have survived the filter of a dating app. If the Dutchman hadn’t walked into me at a bar and had simply been a profile I swiped left on, I could have saved years of my life, my love, my lament, and most importantly, years of my time! But no, that didn’t happen, I met him in person. The app would have killed it before it started. And that, reader, is the entire argument I’m about to make.

After all, haven’t you heard the news about dating app fatigue? It’s so over since we’re so back. Everyone you know has said it: dating apps are over. Dating apps don’t work. Dating apps are where battered egos go to get validation and then wilt into incelhood or findom or whatever.

The feeling is correct, but nobody has the right language for why exactly (notwithstanding Phil Collins feeling what’s in the air), and feelings without frameworks are just vibes. Vibes don’t survive contact with reality (see: every situationship you’ve ever been in), so what do we call it? Like Heidegger’s quest to make sense of the meaning of being, but far less lofty, what you’re experiencing on dating apps has a name in financial economics called market failure.

Specifically, a secondary market failure. Dating apps are secondary markets, which is a term for exchanges where previously issued assets get resold and recycled. Secondary markets have known failure modes that economists have studied for decades. Those failure modes have predictable consequences. And those consequences have a causal chain: the market rots from the inside, good participants leave, trading moves off-exchange into unregulated territory, and what you get in that unregulated territory are zombie instruments that look alive but aren’t. Every step of that chain maps onto what’s happening in dating right now, from the apps to the situationship you’re in to the reason nothing you do seems to make it move. The playbook ends exactly where you most likely are right now, which is possibly alone on Valentine’s Day or in the bed of someone who won’t fully call you their partner. Of the first two possibilities, I’m not sure which is worse. I’d rather be alone, just like Alice Deejay divined in 1999.

Here’s the plan. First, I’m going to explain what a secondary market is and why dating apps are one. Then I’m going to show you the specific financial mechanism that’s been degrading them since inception (spoiler: it won a Nobel Prize). Then I’m going to show you where trading goes when the market breaks, which is off-exchange, which is situationships, and why the one you’re in right now is a zombie company surviving on cheap credit. Then I’ll tell you the one thing that kills it.

I. Download

If you thought redownloading Hinge to get back on the dating apps meant you were inevitably dealing with damaged goods, well, no, let’s reframe, what you’re dealing with is a secondary market, so let me explain.

A primary market is where assets first get sold to the public. That’s the IPO, the initial offering, the moment something enters circulation for the first time. When a company like Airbnb goes public and sells shares for the first time, that’s a primary market. When you buy a new car off the lot from the manufacturer, that’s a primary market. When a developer sells a condo in a building they just finished, that’s a primary market. You’re the first buyer, the asset is fresh. You know its full history because there is no history yet.

A secondary market is where those assets trade after that initial issuance. The stock exchange where you buy Airbnb shares from someone else who already owns them? Secondary market. A used car lot? Secondary market. Zillow listings for that same condo three years later with “minor cosmetic updates” for a “charming” place that may or may not be concealing water damage? Secondary market. The asset has been previously owned already, which means the information is asymmetric in that the seller knows more about what they’re selling than you know about what you’re buying. You’re working with whatever’s been disclosed, which is not always everything and honestly (just like getting involved with a Frenchman, I’m just saying). Now apply this to dating.

In dating, primary markets are organic meetings through friends or work or whatever. A friend’s dinner party is as much of a primary market as a Dutchman literally walking into you at a bar is a primary market. They have original issuance, fair price discovery, and actual context for you to get to know the asset you’re dealing with directly. In other words, it’s the equivalent to a real human standing in front of you whose vibe you could never have extracted from a 500-character bio and three badly taken photos.

In contrast to a primary market, a secondary market is where assets trade after that initial issuance. They are, in Daft Punk voice, resold, recycled, marked up, marked down, traded between, all of this exchanged by people who weren’t there at the beginning and don’t know the full history of what they’re buying. That’s dating apps in a nutshell with their recycled inventory, previous investors’ leftovers, photos from 2019, heights rounded up by two inches if not three, and a universal agreement to pretend this is a functioning marketplace when it is, in fact, a lemon lot at best. I’m being charitable here because the Dutchman’s Bumble profile proved it. The man I almost loved was, on the secondary market, indistinguishable from the men I’d never look at twice. Yes, it gives me shudders to think about it. I spent years of my life - years - yearning for someone whose profile description simply read ‘passionate about positivity’. At times I think if I discovered his profile earlier, it would have knocked me into sense far more quickly, to be honest.

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When I say a lemon lot, I don’t mean the kind on a Dolce & Gabbana majolica print dress, I mean the kind of defunct or broken down thing that should not be on the road or in your bed. Of course, the lemon lot mafia is aware of this, given that several of the most popular dating apps in the United States are owned by Match Group. That means every time you quit Tinder in frustration and download Hinge to find something more palatable or seemingly serious, you are migrating between products in a single corporation’s portfolio. There is really not much market choice - you will have the lemons, and you will like it. Match’s dominance in this area means they have you hook, line, and sinker. Imagine breathlessly storming out of a Zara and going to Massimo Dutti to cool off. Joke’s on you, house always wins, it’s the same parent company. Just like how all the same apps seem to have the same people being the same but presenting differently is the environment for this sameness to flourish to begin with.

II. Smothered Hope

Have you ever felt like you were in a Kafka-esque nightmare if you’ve returned to dating apps after a long time and you swore you’ve seen this person somewhere before? Well, it’s not just you (though screenshots help to remember). If you want to understand why your dating app matches are terrible, consider an unlikely source: an economist’s 1970 paper about used cars that won him the Nobel Prize. George Akerlof’s work showed that in any market where sellers know more about quality than buyers, the market degrades over time. That’s because the quality picks - as in the good cars - leave (owners keep them or sell to friends). Yet of the choices left, the bad cars, well, that’s what’s here to stay. Buyers can’t tell the difference, so they offer average prices. As good car owners refuse and exit, quality drops, and more and more good cars leave. Eventually the market is all saturated by all the bad cars, colloquially known as the lemons.

On dating apps this plays out with the precision of a Swiss watch that nobody asked for. Good partners find relationships and leave. Bad partners can’t maintain relationships and stay. New users encounter the lemon density, get demoralized, and either leave (depleting volume) or lower their standards (degrading norms further, which is how you end up on a date with a man who tells you he’s “not really into labels” before the appetizers arrive). Only 11% of users say their app is “good at matching them.” 45% feel more frustrated than hopeful.

Tinder lost 594,000 users in the UK alone in one year. Bumble lost 368,000. More than half of Gen Z reports feeling burned out on the apps. The good money is leaving. There’s an economic principle called Gresham’s Law that says bad money drives out good, and this is Gresham’s Law executing on schedule, which honestly makes it worse because it means the math was always going to do this. The apps were structurally destined to degrade. You just happened to be swiping while it happened.

So the secondary market is broken and the lemon problem is accelerating. The question is: what happens next? In financial markets, when an exchange fails, trading doesn’t stop. It moves off-exchange. Dark pools, private deals, no clearing house, no standardized contracts, nobody regulating anything. The alternative is not trading at all and humans don’t do that. In dating, the off-exchange equivalent is the situationship. About half percent of aged 18 to 34 have been in one. A peer-reviewed study on situationships, out of Baylor in 2024 found they feature the same behaviors as committed relationships but with lower satisfaction and almost no conversion rate into anything real. That’s not a relationship category. That’s off-exchange trading in a failed market. And the instrument it produces has a name.

III. Dead Lines

A zombie company is a firm that generates just enough revenue to service its debt but not enough to pay it down. It is like many people roaming amongst us alive but not alive, sustained by interest rates so low it’s cheaper to keep refinancing than to force a reckoning. Japan has been studying this for thirty years. After their bubble burst in 1991, banks kept lending to insolvent firms rather than recognize losses on their books. This resulted in a generation of zombie firms absorbing capital that could have gone to something viable, blocking new market entrants for decades.

A late-night text here, an Instagram like there. A “we should hang out soon” that has no date, no time, no specificity. This is a zombie company in human form which generates just enough revenue to service its debt. The modern minimum viable product of human intimacy is a story tapback reply or a meme at 1am. The subprime instruments of modern romance are low-cost, low-effort, and high-volume, accordingly requiring no collateral whatsoever.

Even worse still, zombie firms don’t just fail to die. The Bank for International Settlements found they actively prevent healthy companies from forming. Every dollar lent to a zombie is a dollar not lent to something viable. Every hour spent decoding a text is an hour not spent on someone who would make plans on a Wednesday. The situationship doesn’t just waste your time, it destroys the future by crowding out the possibility of something that works. There is some good news though. After 20 something odd years, the Bank of Japan finally raised interest rates in 2024. Twenty-five basis points, a quarter of one percent, and zombie bankruptcies surged 13% year over year. That’s all it took. A tiny increase in the cost of capital and the things that were never alive started dying for real.

The equivalent of raising rates in a situationship is asking “what are we?” One small, reasonable, twenty-five-basis-point request for clarity. And the thing collapses instantly because it was never viable. It was only ever surviving on cheap credit. A willingness to not ask is the low interest rate, and the moment it is withdrawn, the entire enterprise files for emotional bankruptcy with its read receipts still on.

So that’s what a situationship is: a zombie company. Yet how is it dealt with, how does knowing the diagnosis somehow seemingly still not cure the disease?

IV. Love

The apps are a secondary market in structural decline where Gresham’s Law drove the good money out, the lemons stayed, and the lemons won for survivorship bias. Trading moved off-exchange, into situationships, where zombie companies survive on cheap credit and your willingness to not ask questions. Your situationship is a zombie company with no business plan and you keep refinancing it because the alternative is recognizing the loss. But do you know something cool?

The whole thing about Valentine’s Day is that the true story behind it seems to oft get forgotten: St. Valentine was beaten with clubs and beheaded for performing illegal marriages. The Catholic Church couldn’t even verify which martyr they were honoring, so they put a kibosh on the Valentine feast day in 1969 due to insufficient due diligence. The patron saint of love is defined by execution and the holiday named for him lost its own regulatory approval. Yet the commercialization and importance of this day through inflation means things changed because the market for how to deal with St. Valentine itself also changed. Now it has become the market itself.

Our key lesson to take away from this transfiguration from martyr to money making palooza?

Raise your rates. Even a quarter of a percent. Watch what dies. Give change a chance. Try a new marketing campaign. There’s always more options around you than just merely what’s in front of you on your screen.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Reader note: For comments/consulting inquiries, reach me at ani@anibruna.com. An obligatory message to like and subscribe follows: Like and subscribe for updates. If you do not like it, tell everyone immediately by sharing this link. Merci’

My future first husband has no idea about this plan simply because I haven’t run it past him and that’s because I am not sure where he is at the moment. More pressingly than what my future first husband thinks, I have a flight to Canada in a few hours, so we’ll deal with this when it comes.

Besides, I already met the love of my life (myself, tbh) and I’m not sure it’s socially acceptable to throw a wedding for my love for myself, though to be fair, the entire global financial system, just like a wedding, is also a fiction.

1. Once in a lifetime: why markets and weddings are the same ki…

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In the part one essay, Love in the Time of Cap Tables, I made the case that marriage is angel investing. You’re betting your entire emotional portfolio on one unproven asset with no liquidity, no diversification, and a 50% historical failure rate.

Here’s what’s coming in part two where I go more deeply into how angel investing is like marriage through founder-market fit, runway, and all the due diligence you didn’t do and forgot about because they always made you laugh.

If we survive the audit, the return on investment becomes our focus. This is important considering that I have tried to examine all the reasons one should not marry. God, there were so many.

Servant and master: founder-market fit, runway, and the due diligence nobody do…

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After you’ve seen enough people marry and divorce and try to make it work with all sorts of measures in between and after you’ve read enough about venture capital, it becomes striking how taking the leap of faith to marry is just like investing. You’re betting…

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So dizzying is the uncertainty of whether I’ll hear from him or not, the uncertainty of the countless other fires in my life, the uncertainty of what happens when I leave the country in a week and what that bears for my goals for my career, much less if I’d be on this person’s mind (and vice versa), that instead of figuring out what any of it means, I’m writing an essay about the Black-Scholes formula that prices uncertainty because I don’t know what to do with uncertainty in my life. What I am certain of, however, is my thesis that attraction is volatility.

Since volatility is the star of the Black-Scholes model as the variable everything else orbits (because the more volatile something is, the more valuable the option on it becomes), that means that the cost of not knowing what happens next is also the engine of desire.

That’s why this options pricing model that sounds like a nefarious law firm is actually a way we can understand something about attraction and maybe ourselves.

1. Kiss off: how options pricing is actually derived from the desire

In 1973, the economists Fischer Black and Myron Scholes solved a problem that had haunted finance for decades: how do you price uncertainty? Specifically, how much should it cost to buy the right, but not the obligation, to do something later, once you have more information? The formula changed finance forever. Similarly, when you meet someone whose future moves you cannot predict, your nervous system prices that uncertainty to make it feel like excitement, anticipation, or even need (in lieu of trauma bonding, attachment styles, and whatever else is in the zeitgeist of self-evolving nowadays). Every single person that you have ever wanted to take to bed has been your body running Black-Scholes this whole time.

For those blissfully unaware of the Black-Scholes before reading this post, a brief explanation here is helpful. Black-Scholes prices financial instruments known as options. A call option gives you the right to buy something at a set price by a set date. A put option gives you the right to sell. You pay a small fee upfront, called a premium, for this right. If you’re wrong, you lose the premium. If you’re right, you can make multiples of what you paid. Capped downside, uncapped upside means the asymmetry is the appeal. Do you know what else is also asymmetrical? The fact that I had to learn about Black-Scholes during a set of 6 week lectures spanning 4.5 hours every Saturday and Sunday during the prime exact weeks where there is actually consistent sun in the Netherlands.

When it comes to options, think of it like buying someone a drink and where that can go. Sixteen dollars for a campari is the premium. You’re purchasing the right, not the obligation, to a conversation. If something happens, you exercise into a phone number, a walk, maybe a night you’ll think about for months. If nothing happens, you’re out sixteen dollars, maybe some dignity, and definitely lost time. That is the price of keeping your options open, literally.

Black and Scholes figured out you can calculate what that premium should be if you know five things: where the stock is now, the price you’re betting it crosses, how much time you have, the opportunity cost of your capital, and how much the stock tends to move around. That last variable is called volatility. It’s measured by standard deviation, which is the number that captures how far things tend to swing from their average. I know some of you forgot what it means because you repressed your statistics course memory and TikTok has rotted your brain, so it’s fine, I get it.

Consider how a stock that goes up 1% then down 1% then up 1% has low standard deviation. It’s calm and predictable, whereas a stock that goes up 8% then down 12% then up 15% has high standard deviation as it is chaotic and volatile. The individual experience of holding these two stocks is completely different even if their average return is identical.

Now imagine two people’s moods on a scale of 1 to 10 over five days. To make this example stick, imagine they are people you have had entanglements with.

Person A goes: 6, 7, 6, 7, 6. They text you good morning. They text you goodnight. You go to dinner on Thursday. It’s nice. You go to dinner next Thursday. It’s nice again. You know exactly what you’re getting and you’re getting it. The experience with them resembles a fad about a set of numbers children are constantly calling out instead of embracing the classic of how seven ate nine.

Person B goes: 2, 9, 3, 10, -5, then 11, because this man is spinal tap. You have an innocuous talk with them that initially feels like you’re pulling their teeth, you say something autistic about how just let me know what time to wrap this up, and then he’s kissing you at a transit point, and also is the same person who won’t look at you as you leave because they are enraptured with their phone. I’m not sure what to make of those signals.

When you calculate the numbers out, they can have the same average but it feels like a completely different experience depending on who it is. Person A is calm while the experience of being around Person B is not always that. Person B has high standard deviation. Person B is volatile. Person A has low to no standard deviation. Person A is low volatility. Person A has inspired someone’s writing somewhere to justify their life, much like Person B has inspired my writing to justify it in my mind.

Volatility in markets is how much a stock moves. Volatility in attraction is how much someone moves you. It all maps out when you consider the five Black-Scholes inputs of current stock price, strike price, time to expiration, interest rate, and volatility - and how they connect to attraction.

2. Add it up: how the Black-Scholes variables connect to attraction

So how exactly does each variable of Black-Scholes map onto attraction?

S, the current stock price, is where you are with them right now. “We matched but haven’t met” is a different starting point for value than “your husband is a good kisser.” Everything else is calculated from here.

K, the strike price, is the threshold you’re betting they’ll cross. It’s the line in the sand like “I’m betting they’ll want something serious by month three”, “I’m betting they will introduce me to their company holiday party this year”, or “I’m betting that the person drowning in a room full of people who all want something from them stops choosing the chemical that makes you feel like love is everywhere and nothing hurts because that’s how people end up accidentally dying, and I don’t know what happens when someone realizes the thing they thought was nourishing them is the thing destroying them visibly.”

Something like that. All thresholds, all bets, all lines in the sand. The further that strike is from your current reality, the cheaper the fantasy and the less likely it pays off. That part I also find dizzying, personally.

T, time to expiration, is the deadline. “They’re moving in six months.” “If they don’t text by Saturday I’m done.” Every option has an expiration date. After that, it’s worthless. The less time you have, the more every interaction matters. This is why I think, for example, vacation flings hit so hard. You’re at expiration, and everything is maximally charged. The scarcity is inherent to the entire pricing mechanism. It’s also how some of my friends have ended up married to foreigners, which has another set of results entirely.

r, the interest rate, is opportunity cost. Every hour spent refreshing their Instagram is an hour not spent on your work, your friends, someone who might actually show up for you, or with a therapist who is a professional trained to understand and treat this neuroticism. We treat attention like it’s free, but it’s your most expensive asset. The carrying cost of obsession is everything else you could be doing with your life, like reading much of my other writing.

σ, volatility, is attraction itself. How much they keep you guessing, how much uncertainty they generate in your nervous system.

Black-Scholes highlights to us how options become more valuable as volatility increases. The model says uncertainty is worth paying for. But now that we’ve established volatility drives attraction, here’s the catch - there’s volatility you expect and the volatility you actually get.

3. Blister in the sun: implied volatility vs realized volatility & why you are deeply unhappy in your relationship’s reality

Four of the five inputs are observable as you can look up the stock price, the strike, the time, the rate. But you don’t actually know future volatility since it hasn’t happened yet. The entire Black-Scholes model depends on a number you have to guess, which is why traders work with two numbers via implied volatility and realized volatility.

Implied volatility is what the market expects as extracted from what people are willing to pay right now. Realized volatility is what actually happens. If everyone in your neighborhood suddenly starts paying triple for home insurance, you can infer they’re expecting a disaster. Nobody had to tell you. The prices revealed the belief. But the disaster might never come. The gap between what people expected and what actually happened is the gap between implied and realized.

Implied volatility in attraction is fantasy. It’s the dating profile, the first date, their reputation, whatever projection you have built from limited data about the person scrambling your brain due to pesky hormones or unresolved past life contracts or some death drive. Realized volatility is who they actually are, masks off, what happens when you spend real time together in the reality that emerges after the projections burn off.

The gap between implied volatility and realized volatility is where most romantic suffering lives.

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You thought they were going to be exciting with some mystery, edge, intensity, maybe they’re kinky. The implied vol is high, but they turned out to be boring, predictable, and a proud Swiftie or something. Realized vol is low. You overpaid for the option. Classic disappointment, sorry, you’re sleeping with someone mid. Or the reverse: you thought they’d be safe and predictable. Their implied vol is low, but they turned out to be chaos with a sheer force of depth, damage, and disaster that was hidden. Your realized vol is high as you were unprepared for what you bought. It’s not that they are kinky, it’s that they are sheer chaos.

What I think is that the real best trade, the arbitrage, is finding someone where implied vol is mispriced. They look boring on paper but they’re fascinating in person. They look chaotic on the surface but the underlying asset is actually stable. Reading the fundamentals under the price action, that’s the trade of a lifetime if you’re a romantic. Or Midwestern, I guess.

4. Good feeling: how delta, theta, gamma, and vega describe the emotional exposure, time decay, instability, and uncertainty of attraction

Options traders use something called “the Greeks” to describe how their positions behave - these are known as delta, theta, gamma, and vega. If Black-Scholes tells you what an option is worth right now, the Greeks tell you how that value changes when conditions shift. They’re the dashboard. They tell a trader how exposed they are if the stock moves, how much value they’re losing every day they hold the position, how unstable things get near a deadline, and how sensitive the whole thing is to uncertainty itself. Each one measures sensitivity to a different variable and I think they measure onto relationship dynamics with eerie precision.

Delta is emotional exposure, or how much your mood moves when they move. Delta runs from 0 to 1 for calls (negative for puts, but the idea is the same). At 0, you feel nothing. At 0.1, you’re mildly interested. They’re cute, whatever. At 0.5, your day bends around their behavior. Good text, good day. No text, you’re checking your phone in the bathroom at dinner. At 0.9, your emotional state is tracking theirs in near-perfect lockstep. At 1.0, you are them. Your mood is their mood. This is codependency wearing a trench coat. Think of someone you matched with on an app and never met. Low delta. Think of someone you’ve been sleeping with for four months who won’t call you their girlfriend. The delta is 0.9 and you both know it. Also girl, dump him.

Theta is time decay. Options bleed value every day since like a situationship, the clock eats your investment. Every day you don’t know where you stand, you’re paying theta. Every week of “let’s just see where things go” turns into a month as time marches on. What is mildly annoying at month two is excruciating at month eight because theta accelerates. You feel this in any relationship once the resentment begins. You know exactly what month it stopped being fun and became a burden. You also know that theta benefits sellers. The person with less investment is collecting the premium of your attention without paying any carrying cost. You’re buying, they’re selling, the short side always has the better deal.

Gamma is instability near the moment of truth. The closer you get to a decision point, the more unstable everything becomes. Small signals can produce wildly different interpretations. “They said ‘I had a great time’ with a period instead of an exclamation point.” Crisis. “They took two hours to respond. Usually it’s forty-five minutes.” Catastrophe. This is why people spiral before The Talk. Every text is either confirmation or annihilation. There is no neutral input. This is also why I don’t text as much as possible or keep things short/curt/neutral. Texting is a weapon of mass destruction. I am a woman in my thirties, I do not need to belabor a point by sending paragraphs and blowing up a phone. Seriously, people, it isn’t worth it. Miscommunication abounds, dopamine spikes, disaster much?

Vega is your relationship to uncertainty itself (not the person), to the not-knowing as an abstraction. Some people are long vega: they’re aroused by not knowing. They lose interest the moment someone becomes available because the chase was the point and resolution kills it. Some people are short vega as they need clarity to function and ambiguity causes them pain. Uncertainty isn’t exciting to some people while others need it to breathe. Most relationship failures are vega mismatches. One person’s “we’re just vibing” is the other person’s nuclear event. Neither is wrong, but they’re just positioned differently relative to volatility. They have opposite vega. If you’re wondering which position I hold here, my vega is that I’m going to a cabin in Canada for a month and I’m pretty sure that as much as someone wants to say out of sight, out of mind, I’m just not a person you forget, but maybe I forget.

5. Gone daddy gone: the problem with assumptions about volatility

The Black-Scholes model and its assumptions have problems, like the ones that blew up Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) in 1998, the global economy in 2008, or that YouTube options guru’s entire Discord on Christmas 2025.

Black-Scholes assumes volatility is constant, but people change. Your model of them at month one is already wrong by month four. Your ex who bored you might be fascinating to someone else who decides to marry him and doesn’t know he randomly emailed you right before their wedding. The person who consumed your every thought for years might one day bore you. The model doesn’t account for people becoming different people. The model doesn’t account for people encountering different people. Worse still, the model doesn’t account for when people become different people as a result of who they encounter.

The model also assumes your bets are uncorrelated. That your career, your friendships, your hobbies, your sense of self are all independent of one relationship. How many people do you know where this is actually the case? For example, the SNL skit Man Park always brings to mind how to consider the social lives of men and their dependence relative to a female partner’s network. What happens to that social fabric when the relationship ends? On paper, it becomes the end of all endings, but the reality of that is assuming the same network is one that stands to withstand any extreme event to begin with. You can't stress-test the status quo enslaving you without first allowing for new mental models, and most people aren't ready for that. What I find more overwhelming is denying that, because assuming that dominoes always fall in line is a dangerous assumption when it comes to romance and in reality. For example, LTCM assumed their diversified bets wouldn’t correlate. In the Russian debt crisis of 1998, correlations spiked to 1, then everything crashed at once.

Reality for LTCM disagreed just like it does in relationships. Romance does that, too depending on how entwined things are, as your friends, career, hobbies aren’t separate bets. They’re linked, which means one crisis and your emotional portfolio collapses. It becomes havoc and engulfment where the considerable degradation of emotional experience reflects in the worst possible way that a “diversified” emotional portfolio was one big bet the whole time, and one skewed not at all to your advantage. It’s exhausting and the opposite of life-affirming, if not one of the biggest signals of something that is not working in reality.

Reality can also be something like meeting someone you’re attracted to while believing you’re madly in love with someone else already, and the model assumes you can exit cleanly which is no small feat. In markets, you click “sell” and it’s done. Feelings can outpace readiness or circumstances can cause complications, but you can’t click sell on a relationship. Exits can be messy and sometimes they’re also engineered to seem impossible because of their structure to prevent it to begin with, which lends new meaning to the phrase no exit. Sometimes the same person is both the market maker and the compliance department, so they set the prices, surveil the trades, and call it risk management. Their leverage is emotional, baked into counterparty positions, and allows them to exploit that asymmetry to make a trade where someone becomes a captive position without realizing they were ever being priced. It’s kind of a genius move if you think about it, because it means someone becomes a call option held at a strike price that never needs to be exercised as long as the primary position doesn’t blow up. The option never realizes it’s the product, not the trader.

All the convexity flows one direction, and it is to the benefit of one person who exploits this asymmetry. Some structures exist not to make people happy but to keep them available, which is part of the asymmetric upside they don’t profit from because it is being extracted from them. They pay a premium in being the out-of-money call option.

Sometimes this goes on for years, decades, or a lifetime. Sometimes this involves kids, sometimes it does not. Sometimes some people remain married to someone until their last child is 18 and has left the home. All sorts of volatilities are occurring behind closed doors you’ll never peek behind.

Sometimes you realize that there is no clarity to this reality, at least for now, because sometimes people run multiple positions that contradict each other in their own form of doing risk management. Sometimes you encounter a person so acutely in pain that the public performance takes precedent over their actual well-being. Many such Instagram cases.

Sometimes an entire life can be built on the idea that volatility can be modeled, measured, traded, but some people themselves exceed the instrument and its capabilities.

6. Violent femmes: when the model breaks but it’s liberating since volatility is not risk, but possibility, and that’s beautiful, really

Spectacular blow ups in finance occur when people forget they are merely using a model, just like we do when we’re attracted to a person and built a model of who they are, all of this rallying fueled by desire. When reality diverges, we don’t always update the model, but instead deny what’s in front of us.

Black-Scholes tells me that the spark I feel is not chemistry, but not even a spark to begin with - it’s just the spark of uncertainty. It’s not knowing where I stand since the uncertainty generates perceived value for some, and volatility inflates that premium I keep paying because the option feels expensive, which my brain interprets as worth something.

But volatility is not value, much like excitement is not compatibility. An option on a volatile stock isn’t inherently better than an option on a stable stock. It’s just priced differently, and the excitement of the volatile option doesn’t mean it’ll pay off. It might expire worthless. So thanks for nothing, because the model is useful but the model is not real. Yet there’s a part that the model gets wrong that I think I might be getting right - volatility is not about risk at all, but about possibility.

The model assumes volatility is risk. Something to hedge against, neutralize, minimize.

When I say what if volatility is not risk but possibility, I mean that the beauty inherent to volatility is to be celebrated for its expansiveness rather than reduced to what it represents. We expand through pain as we expand through pleasure, or at least I hope we do, because risk is inherent to everything we do in life. The expansiveness of risk is what facilitates the space for possibility, and they go hand in hand. How much you’re willing to risk for human connection is your choice, and that can’t be priced, it shouldn’t be ever.

My point is that the model was always wrong because it assumed the underlying was stable. I have spent my whole life being the fat tail in every distribution of virtually every system I have operated in and I am not interested in being priced by a bell curve that says I shouldn’t exist. I’m also not a fan of certain thresholds and I know how many standard deviations before I draw the line. And desire allows us to derive that point if we ask ourselves honestly what it is we need versus what we want versus where we are going and how. It’s worth the risk of attraction, in my view.

After all, desire is also representative of possibility, for any possible future, implied to then be realized. Sometimes the price of an option is worth the glimpse of the upside. Sometimes some markets are so chaotic that the only thing you can do is acknowledge the reality of this to see if it sorts itself out. Sometimes you just keep your options open and dip when someone else arbitrages or a delisting event occurs. Anything can happen.

Love means never having to say you’re sorry, according to the 1970 film Love Story. They got it all wrong. You definitely have times in your life where you have to say and mean that you’re sorry. What they should have understood is that love is long vol. Love has always been long vol. Just read the posts from early investors on Palantir’s subreddit and you’ll see it in action.

Besides, this isn’t love. It’s only a kiss, it was only a kiss, which I just know will be playing at a wedding I’ll be going to in Idaho, it’s a millennial classic, and I’m dreading it already because the better nostalgia play really is “When You Were Young”. I don’t expect anything from this man. I don’t even know what he’d say to me. He is, however, to my surprise, a damn good kisser, and that particular premium was worth every penny. Maybe. I think the move here is to let the volatility do what volatility does, which is resolve on its own timeline. There’s plenty of other market forces to be occupied with.

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What exists now are parallel systems in situations like when I as a woman have interviewed for roles to be asked out on a date by my interviewer, or be seriously told ‘we don’t know what to do with your unconventional background for PE, have you thought about going into sales or investor relations instead, it may be easier’ - this is a system that somehow exists suspended alongside a parallel world involving a recruiting pipeline that seriously treats 22-year-olds doing keg stands like fissile material.

There are a lot of incompetent men in finance who never really graduated maturity-wise and have been coddled their entire lives. Perhaps that explains the structure of the private equity recruiting cycle in the U.S., which resembles fraternities and sororities on college campuses. I’ve wondered why the American finance industry places such a frenzied premium on a cohort of candidates who are, broadly speaking, children who must be secured immediately.

I.

In the 1980s, a young man named Philip Waxelbaum was getting recruited to Wall Street. Dinners with managing directors. Interviews that felt like auditions. Decades later, after becoming a finance recruiter himself, he wrote about it on LinkedIn: “I wasn’t in queue for a job. I was pledging and this was rush week.” When he received his offer, he called it receiving a “pledge pin.” When he declined Lehman Brothers, he described it as “returning his pledge pin.”

Forty years later, in 2024, an analyst told the Financial Times his interviews began at 7:30am on a Monday and by 9pm, he had accepted an offer. The job itself however starts in twenty months. Classmates reportedly skipped work to shuttle between Park Avenue buildings, abandoning one firm mid-interview when another texted. One candidate hid in a bathroom stall to text a competing firm while his interviewers waited outside. He called it the most stressful twelve hours of his life and also the best day of his life. I suspect he’ll feel the same way about his first divorce in the future.

II.

Do you know why it’s called rush week?

The word “rush” in Greek life comes from a game theory phenomenon called market unraveling. Alvin Roth won the Nobel Prize for studying it. Chapters used to recruit juniors. Competition pushed it earlier. Sophomores. Freshmen. Freshmen during orientation week. Each chapter, acting rationally, tried to lock in pledges before competitors could. No one could stop because defection meant losing candidates.

They called it rush because everyone was rushing. The etymology is the diagnosis.

Private equity recruiting follows an identical pattern. Fifteen years ago, firms hired analysts about 13 months before start. By 2023, it was 20 months. By 2024, some firms were interviewing candidates before they had started their first day at the banks meant to train them. The timeline moved from August 29 in 2022 to June 24 in 2024.

Framed another way, the frenzy of the private equity recruiting cycle is mimicking the rush for Labubu releases. Think about what that means and how the secondary market for Labubus falls apart.

III.

Let me be specific about who gets rushed.

The typical candidate is 22 or 23 years old. Graduated from one of roughly 15 universities the industry has decided matter. Completed a summer internship at an investment bank, received a full-time offer, started as an analyst in July or August.

They have been working for approximately four months when the headhunters call. They haven’t closed a deal. Most haven’t worked on a deal that closed. They’ve built some models, sat on some calls, fetched coffee, learned where the bathrooms are, figured out how to expense dinner. They have not even passed the rite of “pls fix” on a slide deck.

And now they’re being evaluated for a job that will determine the next decade of their career, in a process lasting 48 to 72 hours, with offer windows that close in 24 hours or less.

Headhunters control access. Firms like CPI, Henkel, SG Partners serve as gatekeepers to the megafunds. They’re paid on commission, around 20 to 30 percent of first-year salary. A $250,000 placement generates $50,000 to $75,000 in fees. The incentive optimizes for pure speed.

Who benefits from this?

How does this timeline actually work? The 22-year-old accepts an offer for a job starting in twenty months. They spend the remaining time at Goldman in limbo. Still pulling all-nighters, still getting screamed at, but mentally checked out. Running out the clock. Tick, tick, tick. When they finally start at the PE fund, they’re 24 or 25 with two years of banking experience. They can build a model. They’ve closed some deals. That’s…it.

This is who private equity actually employs, as the 22-year-old with four months of experience is just a future claim and a pledge who won’t be initiated for two years.

IV.

No other country does this. In the United Kingdom, PE firms recruit candidates who have been working for two or three years. Hiring happens three to four months before start, not twenty. The process spans weeks. One London professional called the American system “absolute lunacy.”

In continental Europe, German funds wait until candidates have actual deal experience. French firms evaluate over months. Stockholm, Amsterdam, Madrid hire on rolling timelines. In Asia, the compressed psychodrama does not exist. Hong Kong and Singapore recruit year-round. Hillhouse Capital runs six interview rounds over two months.

The US is the only market that does this, and when it comes to money? US and European funds generate roughly the same returns. Both produce approximately 14 percent net IRRs over a decade. In Q1 2025, Europe actually outperformed.

The psychodrama produces no alpha.

V.

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Now let’s look at the research on this.

London Business School partnered with Capital Dynamics, a fund of funds that conducts extensive due diligence on private equity managers. With access to 25 years of internal data across 500 funds, 138 PE managers, 5,772 deals, and nearly 6,000 professionals tracked over time, this is the largest dataset ever assembled on private equity human capital.

The researchers, Francesca Cornelli (now Dean of Kellogg School of Management), Elena Simintzi, and Vikrant Vig, wanted to know whether team stability affected fund performance. This is the conventional wisdom in the industry that stable teams are good. Investors write key-man clauses into fund documents. Limited partners get nervous when senior people leave. Everyone talks about retention. The data said otherwise and found that funds with higher turnover outperformed funds with lower turnover

Funds with higher turnover outperformed funds with lower turnover. The top tercile of turnover, the firms that churned through the most people, produced 25 percent net IRR. The bottom tercile, the most stable teams, produced 11.5 percent. That’s a gap of thirteen and a half percentage points. That means revolving doors of hires made more money, but wait, hold on, it gets better (or worse, depending on what you believe) - can you guess what happened when they broke down turnover by professional background?

Researchers were examining established PE investors who were not 22-year old recruits but an average age of 37 with an average tenure of six years in roles like partners, vice presidents, and principals.

They specifically examined three categories of professional backgrounds in PE funds: those with operational experience, those with prior private equity experience, and those with a financial and investment banking background.

When teams regularly refreshed their operational expertise, fund performance improved. Operational skills need to evolve with market conditions, so churning through fresh hires with diverse industry backgrounds actually helps.

When people with PE backgrounds left, performance declined.

When people with investment banking backgrounds left?

Nothing. Per the researchers, they had “little impact on returns”, along with the mic drop that “financial skills appear to be a commodity.”

VI.

Do you know what that means?

The entire private equity recruiting apparatus and all its psychodrama exists to sort and secure candidates whose departure, according to the largest study ever conducted, does not meaningfully affect fund performance.

Midnight modeling tests, hiding in bathroom stalls, 2:30am interviews, candidates skipping work, flying cross-country for a single meeting. All of it is for nothing. It’s but a walking shadow, a poor player in financial markets that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Shakespeare clocked it 400 years ago. The system optimizes for the one talent pool that doesn’t move the needle.

Pls fix.

VII.

So why the frenzy, why the rushing, why the insanity that mirrors Greek life on university campuses? American PE runs on a fraternity-to-firm pipeline. I’ll state the obvious - it is not about meritocracy, it is about class and social reproduction.

Meritocracy in finance is a mirage, and the system self-selects not for competence but for cultural fit. After all, why doesn’t Europe recruit this way? Their infrastructure of social reproduction is different, they typically don’t have the same undergraduate Greek system feeding into the same banks feeding into the same funds feeding into the same failure of hiring for actual talent (excepting the Dutch, whose undergraduate fraternity/sorority system combines the worst of both worlds by bringing in Eurosmug along with the elitism).

None of it is merited, it just has to do with money and socioeconomics of whose family you were born into and how that shaped your access. Sociologist Lauren Rivera studied how elite firms hire in her book “Pedigree”, which documents this. The metric always comes back to not about if a person can do this job but would I want to be stuck in an airport with this person. The problem with that, of course, is what your barometer is for who you’d speak to.

Think about a time in your life where you have unexpectedly been in a situation where you’ve ended up making conversation with someone you didn’t expect to and it turned out to be a wonderful exchange or moment. Think about how unexpected that was and how it worked out to be a good time, good vibes, good rapport, whatever. Now think about how selecting for certain factors excludes that possibility from happening to begin with, and how that scales on a massive basis when an entire ecosystem is based around hiring for it. The person you’re not even considering interviewing could be the best airport lounge buddy and slide deck fixer and deal maker your firm has ever encountered. But they never made it to this pipeline to begin with because you didn’t even bother to consider them due to arbitrary criteria. The inanity of this hazing to hiring pipeline exists because systems perpetuate it.

A 2013 Bloomberg investigation found that at some investment banks, fraternity brothers outnumber women four to one in analyst programs. JPMorgan alone employs 140 members of Sigma Phi Epsilon. A reporter interviewed a UPenn Sigma Chi chapter president who approached a banker at a recruiting event with a secret handshake, and the banker’s response was that “Every Sigma Chi gets a business card. We’re trying to create Sigma Chi on Wall Street, a little fraternity on Wall Street.” In what other industry would this be considered good judgement or publicity to promote? Think about that, but we all know the other angle - do you know why he said that to a journalist out loud? Because just like Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran was once said to respond to the question - why do rockstars date supermodels?

Because they can. Because he can. Because the system selects people who are not always competent but have the confidence of the coddled, which would be fine if confidence compounded returns, but it turns out it doesn’t. The coddled are commodities, as the Cornelli study confirmed it.

So what does this mean for evaluating the recruiting arms race in finance? The research findings suggest this frenzied competition for IB analysts into PE may be solving for the wrong problem because if IB-trained professionals are highly substitutable even after years of experience, then capturing candidates 4 months into their banking career provides no clear performance advantage.

That means the key differentiator isn’t the IB training itself. Rather, the study’s emphasis on operational expertise and team evolution capability points toward a different hiring philosophy where I’m going to use everyone’s favorite buzzword right now (not): diversity. That’s right - PE funds might actually benefit from hiring people with different and diverse professional backgrounds instead of winning bidding wars over identical IB-trained candidates from the same fifteen schools. The research says so. But I’m sure the firms will get right on that…not? Perhaps - in June 2025, something cracked.

Apollo announced it would not participate in on-cycle and shortly thereafter General Atlantic followed along with TPG. For the first time in memory, megafunds opted out.

Jamie Dimon told incoming JPMorgan analysts they’d be fired if they accepted PE offers during their first 18 months while Apollo’s Marc Rowan said "When great candidates make rushed decisions it creates avoidable turnover—and that serves no one.”

Notice how Rowan used the word rushed? Deliberate or not, it’s on the nose for the PE recruiting cycle and how it resembles Greek fraternity and sorority recruiting as I’ve been describing throughout this piece.

As I publish this in January 2026, we’re going to see how this plays out in the future. Will it hold? Will someone defect? Will it even matter? It’s telling that the people running the system are admitting it serves no one. The research says to hire differently for candidates with more diverse backgrounds. Money in the bank shows that results in higher returns. The writing is on the wall. Whether anyone reads it is another question.

Reader note: For comments/consulting inquiries, reach me at ani@anibruna.com. An obligatory message to like and subscribe follows: Like and subscribe for updates. If you do not like it, tell everyone immediately by sharing this link. Merci’

Send me money, send me green, heaven you will meet

Make a contribution and you’ll get a better seat

Bow to Leper Messiah — Metallica, Master of Puppets (1986)

In Part 1, I showed you how an iron condor (four options contracts arranged in a specific configuration) is structurally identical to a Celtic Cross tarot spread (ten cards arranged in a specific configuration).

In Part 2, I introduced you to Gerolamo Cardano, the gambling addict and astrologer who invented probability theory, to illustrate how his work underpins the financial models running on Bloomberg terminals today and how those models are structurally identical to astrological natal charts.

Part 3 is about what happens in fortune telling and fortune making when the prophecy fails and nobody blames the oracle. Here’s the plan - first I’ll show you how ancient prophecy worked at Delphi as the structure is identical to how trading gurus operate today…

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Happy January 8th! It has now been one week and a day since the new year, and I expect everyone is having a better time than I am. Between my mother being hospitalized, some gross male behavior, and existential angst, I also recently discovered my email settings were broken. This means about 75% of my posts never made it to your inbox but were viewed from Twitter.

Firstly, I’m genuinely sorry about that, unlike those marketing trend emails of ‘sorry’ and not being sorry but being coy about it. I am not being coy about it. I am sorry you missed on the emails. I am not sorry about it though, because there is this email. Now, either you kept your resolution or not, but the only thing I’m truly sorry about is if you missed some fantastic writing I did recently - so I’m doing something about it.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sending digest emails to resurface the best content you missed. Think of this as your catch-up reading list and if you’re already behind on your new year resolution, don’t worry.

Let’s start with the essentials:

What is the Price of Love?

My (currently) 2nd most-read piece. A deep dive into the Olivia Nuzzi scandal, quantifying what happens when journalists monetize their romantic entanglements. Part spreadsheet, part cultural criticism.

On Leaving Europe

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A personal essay on leaving Amsterdam. What it feels like to divorce a continent and what you learn about yourself in the process. This was unedited stream of consciousness so you know if I were a Beatnik man, you’d be all over it and writing about how amazing my writing is too.

Why Not Your Typical Finance Bro Exists

The manifesto. Why I started writing this, what I’m trying to do, and why the intersection of finance, geopolitics, and culture matters.

More coming soon in the form of digest emails. Thank you for being here.

—Ani

Reader note: For comments/consulting inquiries, reach me at ani@anibruna.com. An obligatory message to like and subscribe follows: Like and subscribe for updates. If you do not like it, tell everyone immediately by sharing this link. Merci’

“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” — Donald Rumsfeld

Back when I used them, my dating app profile description said that I’m looking for my first husband in someone smart, pre-IPO, and/or a poker teacher.

I considered it due diligence that selected for certain signals in matches and assessed risk factors for future matches, just like financial models assess signals and outcomes to determine theirs.

Just like in the quest to meet my first husband, the world’s known unknowns drive our risk appetite and curiosity to figure out the future before it happens, which is why finance bros are actually astrology girlies. Mercury is in Zyn, y’all, since that’s the thesis I’m exploring for part 2 of the div…

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