All Tweets are legal advice & you were far too charitable in your analysis of my message “Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome” - Charlie Munger
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Joined July 2007
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I mostly agree, but... retweeted
“The holding companies of these insurance companies that also own the alternative asset management firms, Apollo, KKR - you’re saying that if the insurance entity dissolved & went bankrupt, even though they don’t go bankrupt, that KKR, Apollo, or the parent company would have no obligation to make things whole?"
“They have zero obligation to make things whole. And you can see that in Athene investor presentations.” $APO $KKR
Out now - how Private Equity turned your retirement into a taxpayer backstop and what ACTUALLY happens when a life insurer fails (it's way worse than a bank) plus Lebron James/Guggenheim
Private equity had its hands on about $23 billion of life insurance assets in 2009. That figure is now over 1 Trillion.
@agranato42 (UT Austin Law) & @PranjalDrall (Yale) argue in their new paper that this has built a system that socializes losses more sharply than federal deposit insurance does for banks. Banks pre-fund the FDIC every quarter, weighted by the risk they take. Life insurers pay nothing until a rival fails. Then the survivors are assessed based on premium volume, not risk, and in 44 states they recoup the cost through tax credits. Taxpayers foot the bill, and no one ever votes on it.
Meanwhile, the asset side has changed. PE-owned insurers shift balance sheets out of investment-grade corporates and into private credit, affiliated loans, CLOs and ABS. Those assets get rated by agencies the insurer pays, sometimes via private letter ratings no one outside the regulator ever sees. Egan-Jones alone has vouched for roughly $40 billion of insurance debt. On the liability side, captive reinsurers in Bermuda let the parent escape US disclosure and capital rules, with reported leverage of 30-to-1 to 50-to-1.
We also get into the run risk that "permanent capital" is supposed to rule out: funding agreement-backed notes with withdrawal rights, policy surrenders, and the Executive Life collapse. And we close on Guggenheim, Delaware Life and Clear Spring, where Mark Walter's insurers reported 3% of assets as affiliated when the corrected figure was 42%, including a loan to LeBron James, and he sold the Lakers to raise liquidity.
Their fix include, tax opacity itself, ban private letter ratings, pre-fund guarantee funds on a risk-weighted basis, and make holding companies partially liable when their insurers fail.
Out now on all podcast platforms.
And to be clear PE funds do not directly "own" insurance rather the alternative asset management firms that does Private Equity / Private Credit also owns the insurance company (as in case of Apollo / KKR) or the alternative asset management firms has agreements such as Blackstone / Blue Owl.
I mostly agree, but... retweeted
Private Equity Life Insurer goes bankrupt, leaving policyholders with nothing.
People are about to start learning of PE firms dumping their high default risk bonds like $CRWV into fake insurance companies acting as a shell for bad debt 🍿 $ORCL $NBIS
PE firm → owns life insurer + asset manager → asset manager originates private AI/data-center debt → insurer supplies long-duration capital → debt can be packaged into ABS/CLO/fund structures → exposure may end up in affiliated or third-party funds.
Policyholders of a struggling life insurer sued its private equity owner, accusing Golden Gate of self-dealing and mismanaging PHL to the point that it now faces possible liquidation bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
I mostly agree, but... retweeted
Finally.
Sanity.
America will no longer be subsidizing the worst degrees and punishing those who earn useful ones.
That's going to reverse: no subsidies for useless degrees. Go get a useful one instead!
I mostly agree, but... retweeted
This was posted on 4chan in May of 2013. Reflect on how the world has changed in just that period of time.
“There will be no “collapse” the way some of these people think of it. It’s not going to be like the movie “Dawn of the Dead” or whatever where one day suddenly shit hits the fan and prices skyrocket and everyone begins to riot and the SS comes marching down the street to kill everyone.
There will be no “happening.” It’s far more insidious than that. Read the poem “The Hollow Men” by T.S. Eliot and you’ll understand.
You’ll just notice that every day simple things will become a little more expensive. Everyone’s homes and apartments will start to get smaller. Your work hours will get longer, but your pay will decrease. You’ll see family and friends less, and find that in time you care less about them. Every day you’ll find yourself lowering your standards for everything: work, food, relationships, etc. Job security will no longer exist as a concept. People will start hanging on to clothing longer and longer. Less people will get married, even less will have children. People will engross themselves in technological distractions and fantasy while never truly experiencing the real world.
Whatever dream people used to have about what their lives were going to be will become for them a distant memory. The only thing left for them will be the reality of their debt and their poverty. And every minute of every day they will be told, “You are stupid, ugly, and weak, but together we are free, prosperous, and safe.””
I mostly agree, but... retweeted
This is exactly what has happened
They missed a bit though: those of us that see what is happening are treated like the one eyed man in the village of the blind.
The conformists just carried on conforming. It was us that were exposed. Quite the ride so far.
This was posted on 4chan in May of 2013. Reflect on how the world has changed in just that period of time.
“There will be no “collapse” the way some of these people think of it. It’s not going to be like the movie “Dawn of the Dead” or whatever where one day suddenly shit hits the fan and prices skyrocket and everyone begins to riot and the SS comes marching down the street to kill everyone.
There will be no “happening.” It’s far more insidious than that. Read the poem “The Hollow Men” by T.S. Eliot and you’ll understand.
You’ll just notice that every day simple things will become a little more expensive. Everyone’s homes and apartments will start to get smaller. Your work hours will get longer, but your pay will decrease. You’ll see family and friends less, and find that in time you care less about them. Every day you’ll find yourself lowering your standards for everything: work, food, relationships, etc. Job security will no longer exist as a concept. People will start hanging on to clothing longer and longer. Less people will get married, even less will have children. People will engross themselves in technological distractions and fantasy while never truly experiencing the real world.
Whatever dream people used to have about what their lives were going to be will become for them a distant memory. The only thing left for them will be the reality of their debt and their poverty. And every minute of every day they will be told, “You are stupid, ugly, and weak, but together we are free, prosperous, and safe.””
the economy will become far more efficient AND far more extractive finance.yahoo.com/economy/ar…
I mostly agree, but... retweeted
🚨BREAKING: Jensen Huang just EXPOSED Dario and Altman’s "Rogue AI" grift to avoid getting sued into oblivion under EXISTING law
“Don't let this doomsday narrative cause somebody to relieve them of the laws that currently exist.
Go and read between the lines. They're actually not asking for more laws; they're asking to be relieved of the laws we do have.”
ABSOLUTE TRUTH NUKE
I mostly agree, but... retweeted
Truth becomes open to reason, beauty relative, freedom exchanged for the mirage of convenience. Every day a repetition of absurdities and atrocities. An infinite regression of algorithmic sameness. A world without transcendence, without peace, without flo winteroak.org.uk/2026/09/17/…
I mostly agree, but... retweeted
It is genuinely insane to think that this is a real SAT exam question:
The SAT and ACT literally compete to see who can make the dumbest test. I'm not joking.
Higher scores = more scholarships = more students = more money.
The SAT now has "reading passages" that are 25 words long. Half the applicants at some Ivy campuses are showing up with SAT scores over 1500.
The race to the bottom only leads to one place: the bottom.
The SAT must be replaced now.
I mostly agree, but... retweeted
About those rising GPU rental prices: what are they without Nvidia renting its own unused GPUs from its "customers"?
Nvidia Pauses Some Revenue Sharing Deals With AI Cloud Companies, Putting Circular Financing House Of Cards In Jeopardy zerohedge.com/technology/nvi…
I mostly agree, but... retweeted
Hayek on what true scientists understand that most intellectuals don’t:
“The man who has learned a little science lacks the humility the real scientist gladly acquires. The typical intellectual believes everything must be explainable, but a scientist knows that a great many things are not. A good scientist is essentially a humble person.”
I mostly agree, but... retweeted
talked to a guy from anthropic for a long time last night. fascinating conversation.
& believe it or not, one of their biggest problems is still hiring.
there simply aren’t enough exceptional ppl, esp for long term high conviction bets where the stuff is not obvious yet. i.e. people who can independently generate good judgment under extreme ambiguity.
I mostly agree, but... retweeted
Your entire life will change when you realize energy is the most attractive human trait. Not looks, wealth, or status. Energy. Start walking into rooms with genuine enthusiasm, curiosity, and interest. Watch what happens. You become a magnet for the highest quality people. Energy is contagious. Spread the kind you’d want to catch.
I mostly agree, but... retweeted
your daily reminder that ppl are almost biologically drawn to:
- belonging
- certainty
- status within a tribe
- a charismatic interpreter of reality
- rituals & shared language
- an enemy or out group
- a story that makes suffering meaningful
- the feeling that we know something they don’t
religions, political movements, startups, fandoms, fitness communities, crypto, even certain friend groups can all activate pieces of this same machinery. & some companies are doing it brilliantly well right now.
I mostly agree, but... retweeted
Brazilian researchers counted the cells in the part of the brain that handles smell. Women had 16.2 million. Men had 9.2 million.
That is 76 percent more. Counting only the nerve cells that do the actual work, women had 6.9 million against 3.5 million. Almost exactly double.
Worth flagging one thing, because the number gets mangled everywhere. The paper reports the gap as 43 percent, and news write-ups turned that into women having 43 percent more than men. It measures the gap against the female total. Run it the normal way, against the male number, and it is 76.
The bit that makes this land is the weight. The structure itself was the same size in both, 0.132 grams in women and 0.137 in men, near enough identical. Every previous study had measured volume, found no difference worth mentioning, and moved on. Nobody had opened it up and counted.
The technique for counting is only a few years old. You dissolve the tissue into a soup where every cell is loose and evenly spread, then count what is in a sample and multiply up. It gives you an actual number instead of an estimate from a photograph.
Women have outperformed men on smell tests for as long as anyone has run them. Identifying odours, remembering them, detecting them at lower concentrations. The usual explanation was that women pay more attention to smells, or care more, or are trained by circumstance to notice. They were working with twice the equipment.
The sample is small, 11 women and 7 men, all over 55, and the researchers say so. What they had was postmortem tissue, which is the only way to count cells in a human brain.
Every woman who has walked into a room and said something smells wrong, and been told she is imagining it, was carrying about seven million cells the other person did not have.
journals.plos.org/plosone/ar…
I mostly agree, but... retweeted
Welfare recipients have been using taxpayer dollars on tattoos, video games, and vapes instead of better feeding themselves and their families?
I mostly agree, but... retweeted
humans have now essentially constructed an environment where not reproducing is an individually rational choice at enormous scale despite reproduction being the mechanism evolution spent hundreds of millions of years optimizing us around.
the modal adult life will now likely become one person living alone punctuated by relationships rather than marriage + children being the organizing structure of adulthood.
that is an absolutely gigantic civilizational change. if ai weren’t a thing, this would basically cause markets to tank over the long term because the primary growth mechanic has thus far been an ever increasing demand due to just rise in number of peeps. that is now likely done.
The sociologist Susan Pickard chose career over motherhood. She writes about being the last of her line.
compactmag.com/article/daugh…
