"Something is deeply wrong with America, and it extends beyond our decaying infrastructure."
...
"Something is wrong with America and it’s not just regulations or corruption. Most of those exist everywhere. America’s thinking has become too small, too shortsighted."
LOL!
It's so ironic to hear that from a finance industry professional, the very source of our overly-short-term thinking!
Profits = short-term metric
Results = medium-term metric
Outcomes = long-term metric
Sustained survival = evolution = dynamic balance across short/medium/long-term processes. Over-adaptation to transient context (profit-seeking alone) is the surest way to disappear from the archaeological (& historical) record. It takes far more work to undo institutional momentum than it does to sit back and preserve Reserve Capacity of medium-/long-term thinking & adaptive capabilities.
If the finance industry propaganda wasn't so out of control, we wouldn't have outsourced so much reserve capacity across all categories (people, skills, facilities). Those capacities can't be regained overnight.
The entire financial sector across the USA-UK-EU has become more trouble than it is worth. A cataclysmic re-gearing is inevitable.
The human body expends >>55% of it's net energy just pumping Na/K ions across all cell membranes. By analogy, if we don't maintain the massive investment necessary to maintain a growing infrastructure of children entering and making an adequate living at all still-required professions .... it's like dreaming of future Penthouses sans foundations or foundation-maintenance staff with the adequate range of pragmatic skills. That'll happen - briefly - when pigs fly. Having bank account balances w/o pragmatic skills & experience is like lawyers & accountants trying to run Boeing (or the USA), minus domain expertise.
Well, I'm not a finance industry professional. I'm an entrepreneur who's built more than a dozen businesses from the ground up. I, like many entrepreneurs, have been called a 10-year overnight success story. Don't tell me about long-term thinking.
No need to take it over personally, Matt. In a country of >340 million people no amount of personal metrics translates to aggregate outcomes. That challenge lies in how we manage a completely different magnitude of interdependencies. Call me back when we make a dent in the first figure in this article, or reverse the trend.
This wasn’t personal? “It's so ironic to hear that from a finance industry professional, the very source of our overly-short-term thinking!” Personally, I think it's insulting to be referred to as someone from the finance industry.
Not intentionally. Sorry that you took it that way. Your article triggered a bit of an epiphany & I rushed to express it before the thought disappeared.
No insult intended.
It's early am here, so I'm gonna rush to dump some more thoughts before they disappear too.
Your insight reminded me of the famous line from the "Last of the Conquistadors," where the last of the "wildly successful" perps are the first to recognize the excessive damage that has occurred, although it may take additional pondering to recognize their own institutional momentum as the main actor.
Today, we have a new cycle of the same phenomenon, writ on a yet larger scale in the transitions from tribal to supra-tribal to supra-national culture and economics. It's not about the immediate, local revenue & results of any of the (for example) ~300 cell types in the human body, nor of any one of the thousands of disciplines in the NAICS codes. We're in a chaotic transition period between different scales of "cultural physiology."
Here's a case in point.
"Data Centers Devour Electricity. Private Equity Is Buying Utilities to Cash In"
On the one hand, that presents an obvious case of attractive, "ILR" - immediate, local revenue & results - at least to those with still limited perspectives.
Yet on the other hand, full-spectrum feedback has built up to the point of revealing non-negligible "DDC" (delayed, distributed costs & consequences) - at least for those across all disciplines who have arrived at the stage of trying to make whole economies and cultures work, via regulation of increasingly complex interdependencies.
So a given "opportunity" seems either attractive, or like an entirely maladaptive approach - all depending on the extent of one's Context Awareness. Not all local innovations & inventions can be integrated into our highly-preserved foundations. Integration, as Walter Shewhart famously noted, is actually much harder than invention.
We always need additional perspectives, bridging both ILR & DDC.
More "Yes, And" .... less "No, But."
For the power-grid example, what is an analogy between "unstable energy sources" and "unstable profit-seeker's motives;" ,,,,, Base Loads anyone?
The same data sends different signals to all involved.
Ultimately, to fix things systemically before parasitic processes run amok to the point where they cause more host-damage than they're worth, as utilized.
Eventually, a more important question must be answered. Where in aggregate investing is the equivalent of Aggregate Base Load?
Municipal Bonds?
Treasury, i.e., Public Appropriations?
Private financial savings? (Treasury appropriations spent, not yet clawed back as taxes)
There come points of transition, in every discipline's lifespan, where it grows
... from from novel beginnings,
... to grand ILR & self-import, and
... then to self-awareness that it's own excess consumes & limits the host systems it lives within (DDC);
If not already constrained by neighbor disciplines, it may eventually self-discipline to a dynamic, catalytic, "just-right" role that allows further evolution of whatever host it is a dependent part of.
Whether a given discipline accedes, kicking and screaming, as a just-adequately controlled cancer, or voluntarily with agile self- & host-awareness, is initially a function of circumstance. The latter, voluntary, informed approach is always better when possible, since no one perceives better how a discipline may best self-regulate than the people in that discipline.
America can't get things done because of grift, subversion, corruption and beauocracy. Ask any business owner or operator and you'll understand the challenges.
America stupidly spent trillions of dollars on pointless wars, shipped its production capacity overseas for profit, and financialzed everything for Wall Street to plunder. Lets not even mention the absolute welfare state part of the equation and its associated issues. It shouldn't suprise anyone that almost 70% of US adults are overweight or obese and that 25% of the population is on psych medications.
"You can ignore reality but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality" -Ayn Rand
Matt You have been well an truly snowed pal. In your feverish enthusiasm for an Islamic state you claim its area of land as similar to that of Connecticut . So obviously out of it I looked up reality Connectict - 14,000 sq km Azerbeijan 85000 sq km. How then can we have fregard for the other data you give us ? Did these people pay you to be Spriuikers or can we doubt you generally?
Matt, thank you for the summary of your trip with Doug. There is so much happening around the world that most of us do not know. The contrast with America is both startling and troubling.
Israel — Quiet supporter; energy ties (Azeri oil funds 28% of Israel's imports)
Summary
Azerbaijan’s drone-enabled victory and U.S.-backed TRIPP rail are forging a Turkic-Caspian axis to reroute Eurasian trade, isolate Iran, sideline Russia, and challenge China’s BRI — all while avoiding direct military blocs.
Fascinating history, and facts!.....thank you so much. Since my sister is involved with an Armenian, you would hear a totally different story from that person about who persecuted who. Many of the Armenians were Christian, and not accepted by either the Sunnis or the Shiites. Thank you for this info on what will be an interesting future for these people!
As others have said, thanks for a very informative & revealing article; I had no idea... All I get via western media is a filtered version of what they want me to know...what's that word again? Oh yes, propaganda.
I enjoyed this article very much. Not so much as a history lesson, just more about what is going on around the world that most don't know or care about. There are pockets of conflicts everywhere...some well known and others not-so-much or completely forgotten about that continue to simmer away until some future boiling point. Back to Azerbaijan, I though I would include this YouTube link as I am positive this man is the most famous person from there..
PS..Matt, I bought 'The Preparation' for myself... I don't have any children of my own. However at 64, I still feel lost now as when I was Maxim's age.
My major takeaway was the propaganda there, propaganda here, propaganda everywhere. From birth, through school, through everyday news and conversations, all the time ever present. How to get above it all and actually see the truth is beyond me. Thanks for the wake up (again) article.
Thanks for the detailed first person observations and the many conversational insights! As for the comparison between America and every country that is able to build big projects modernizing their cities and transport, perhaps the biggest handicap Americans face is our legal system which cripples everything. We will continue to decay until the complete authority or lawyers in this country is brought low.
I'm no expert but a little research indicates that Armenian citizens inhabited the disputed region for two millenia. In my book that makes it theirs. Whitewashing its capture via propaganda can't change that moral reality, but propaganda and power projection can cause a change of ownership, if any resistance from the legitimate inhabitants can be permanently crushed. Same story in Israel, where resistance is not crushed, and the US, where resistance is fully rushed. It's all theft to me, but you can "move on" if there can be no further push back from the original inhabitants.
Thank you for a great article, and all the links which were available to read in English. I'm getting all of my history lessons from reading "Doug Casey's Take".
I believe a significant reason why America has such difficulty doing simple things is it is just where it is right now in its civilizational cycle.
It will eventually return to it's frontier mentality where no project is too ambitious and no obstacle is too overwhelming, however, that will take a full on collapse first where nothing works anywhere and there is no money to pay for anything.
Then and only then with the American mind clear of the fog that has been incrementally installed in their collective brain by the sponsors of the bureaucracy, i.e. globalist banksters which dip their proboscis into the veins of the American productive class. Grandiose edifices and bureaucracies have been constructed as well as generous make work jobs for family members of the elites, using the siphoned wealth of those who can and do... things.
Eventually, it will go full circle and this suffocation of will and innovation will be swept away along with the useless elites that have nurtured, grown, controlled and benefited generationally from this poisonous siphon.
Azerbaijan and Armenia have already gone through this period of collapse when the Soviet Union went full dodo bird. When we zoom out on the timeline of history and focus less on the fractal and more on the cyclical patterns of the birth / growth / sclerosis / death / rebirth, then we see clearly that it is just time. Right now, the rebirth of the Silk Road is just at its time to flourish, AFTER all the fetid weeds of interference and grift were essentially burned away from a few decades of very tough times.
Eventually, people have to work together in order to survive and as a result they pay less attention to those that want to divide and more to those that wish to unite. America will experience this rebirth as well, although in order for that to happen it must collapse under its own hubris and grift first. Then and only then will the soil be fertile once again for the time and effort of the adventurous.
Thank you for the article. It was very interesting and insightful. I would note, however, that the conflict over the Karabakh region predates Armenia taking it back in the 1990s, and Azerbaijan's recent reclamation of it through drone war. That is not a full picture of the dispute of this region. If I'm not mistaken, these lands were taken from Armenia under Stalin's Soviet Union, and given to Azerbaijan as a ploy to keep the two regions in a never-ending conflict instead of rebelling against the Soviets. Certainly the history of this conflict will predates the 1990s. I think your article, though honest about the heavy-handed Azerbaijani propaganda did fail to note that there's a complicated history here and the Armenians might not be just land grabbers who got theirs their comeuppance in a recent drone war loss.
"Something is deeply wrong with America, and it extends beyond our decaying infrastructure."
...
"Something is wrong with America and it’s not just regulations or corruption. Most of those exist everywhere. America’s thinking has become too small, too shortsighted."
LOL!
It's so ironic to hear that from a finance industry professional, the very source of our overly-short-term thinking!
Profits = short-term metric
Results = medium-term metric
Outcomes = long-term metric
Sustained survival = evolution = dynamic balance across short/medium/long-term processes. Over-adaptation to transient context (profit-seeking alone) is the surest way to disappear from the archaeological (& historical) record. It takes far more work to undo institutional momentum than it does to sit back and preserve Reserve Capacity of medium-/long-term thinking & adaptive capabilities.
If the finance industry propaganda wasn't so out of control, we wouldn't have outsourced so much reserve capacity across all categories (people, skills, facilities). Those capacities can't be regained overnight.
The entire financial sector across the USA-UK-EU has become more trouble than it is worth. A cataclysmic re-gearing is inevitable.
The human body expends >>55% of it's net energy just pumping Na/K ions across all cell membranes. By analogy, if we don't maintain the massive investment necessary to maintain a growing infrastructure of children entering and making an adequate living at all still-required professions .... it's like dreaming of future Penthouses sans foundations or foundation-maintenance staff with the adequate range of pragmatic skills. That'll happen - briefly - when pigs fly. Having bank account balances w/o pragmatic skills & experience is like lawyers & accountants trying to run Boeing (or the USA), minus domain expertise.
Well, I'm not a finance industry professional. I'm an entrepreneur who's built more than a dozen businesses from the ground up. I, like many entrepreneurs, have been called a 10-year overnight success story. Don't tell me about long-term thinking.
No need to take it over personally, Matt. In a country of >340 million people no amount of personal metrics translates to aggregate outcomes. That challenge lies in how we manage a completely different magnitude of interdependencies. Call me back when we make a dent in the first figure in this article, or reverse the trend.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/MAHA-Report-The-White-House.pdf
This wasn’t personal? “It's so ironic to hear that from a finance industry professional, the very source of our overly-short-term thinking!” Personally, I think it's insulting to be referred to as someone from the finance industry.
Not intentionally. Sorry that you took it that way. Your article triggered a bit of an epiphany & I rushed to express it before the thought disappeared.
No insult intended.
It's early am here, so I'm gonna rush to dump some more thoughts before they disappear too.
Your insight reminded me of the famous line from the "Last of the Conquistadors," where the last of the "wildly successful" perps are the first to recognize the excessive damage that has occurred, although it may take additional pondering to recognize their own institutional momentum as the main actor.
Today, we have a new cycle of the same phenomenon, writ on a yet larger scale in the transitions from tribal to supra-tribal to supra-national culture and economics. It's not about the immediate, local revenue & results of any of the (for example) ~300 cell types in the human body, nor of any one of the thousands of disciplines in the NAICS codes. We're in a chaotic transition period between different scales of "cultural physiology."
Here's a case in point.
"Data Centers Devour Electricity. Private Equity Is Buying Utilities to Cash In"
https://www.crisisinvesting.com/p/its-time-to-buy-the-most-hated-industry
On the one hand, that presents an obvious case of attractive, "ILR" - immediate, local revenue & results - at least to those with still limited perspectives.
Yet on the other hand, full-spectrum feedback has built up to the point of revealing non-negligible "DDC" (delayed, distributed costs & consequences) - at least for those across all disciplines who have arrived at the stage of trying to make whole economies and cultures work, via regulation of increasingly complex interdependencies.
So a given "opportunity" seems either attractive, or like an entirely maladaptive approach - all depending on the extent of one's Context Awareness. Not all local innovations & inventions can be integrated into our highly-preserved foundations. Integration, as Walter Shewhart famously noted, is actually much harder than invention.
We always need additional perspectives, bridging both ILR & DDC.
More "Yes, And" .... less "No, But."
For the power-grid example, what is an analogy between "unstable energy sources" and "unstable profit-seeker's motives;" ,,,,, Base Loads anyone?
The same data sends different signals to all involved.
Ultimately, to fix things systemically before parasitic processes run amok to the point where they cause more host-damage than they're worth, as utilized.
Eventually, a more important question must be answered. Where in aggregate investing is the equivalent of Aggregate Base Load?
Municipal Bonds?
Treasury, i.e., Public Appropriations?
Private financial savings? (Treasury appropriations spent, not yet clawed back as taxes)
There come points of transition, in every discipline's lifespan, where it grows
... from from novel beginnings,
... to grand ILR & self-import, and
... then to self-awareness that it's own excess consumes & limits the host systems it lives within (DDC);
If not already constrained by neighbor disciplines, it may eventually self-discipline to a dynamic, catalytic, "just-right" role that allows further evolution of whatever host it is a dependent part of.
Whether a given discipline accedes, kicking and screaming, as a just-adequately controlled cancer, or voluntarily with agile self- & host-awareness, is initially a function of circumstance. The latter, voluntary, informed approach is always better when possible, since no one perceives better how a discipline may best self-regulate than the people in that discipline.
I enjoyed my time there a few years ago. A fascinating place
America can't get things done because of grift, subversion, corruption and beauocracy. Ask any business owner or operator and you'll understand the challenges.
America stupidly spent trillions of dollars on pointless wars, shipped its production capacity overseas for profit, and financialzed everything for Wall Street to plunder. Lets not even mention the absolute welfare state part of the equation and its associated issues. It shouldn't suprise anyone that almost 70% of US adults are overweight or obese and that 25% of the population is on psych medications.
"You can ignore reality but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality" -Ayn Rand
Matt You have been well an truly snowed pal. In your feverish enthusiasm for an Islamic state you claim its area of land as similar to that of Connecticut . So obviously out of it I looked up reality Connectict - 14,000 sq km Azerbeijan 85000 sq km. How then can we have fregard for the other data you give us ? Did these people pay you to be Spriuikers or can we doubt you generally?
Matt, thank you for the summary of your trip with Doug. There is so much happening around the world that most of us do not know. The contrast with America is both startling and troubling.
Western Corridor Strategy
Geopolitical Goal: Block Russia-Iran-China North-South Corridor (INSTC + BRI)
INSTC: Russia → Iran → India (bypasses Suez, avoids sanctions)
BRI: China’s global land bridge
Western Counter: Middle Corridor (China → Kazakhstan → Caspian → Azerbaijan → Georgia → Turkey → EU)
• 2025 Breakthrough: U.S.-brokered TRIPP Corridor (ex-Zangezur)
• 43-km rail/pipeline through Armenia (99-year U.S. sublease)
• Links Azerbaijan to Turkey without Iran or Russia
• $50B trade potential; cargo up 50% in 2024
New Alliances
U.S. — Mediator, financier, strategic anchor
Turkey — Drone supplier, rail builder, NATO bridge
Azerbaijan — Corridor gatekeeper, energy hub
Kazakhstan — Eastern anchor, diversifying from Russia/China
Armenia — Reluctant participant (EU pivot, sovereignty preserved)
Israel — Quiet supporter; energy ties (Azeri oil funds 28% of Israel's imports)
Summary
Azerbaijan’s drone-enabled victory and U.S.-backed TRIPP rail are forging a Turkic-Caspian axis to reroute Eurasian trade, isolate Iran, sideline Russia, and challenge China’s BRI — all while avoiding direct military blocs.
Fascinating history, and facts!.....thank you so much. Since my sister is involved with an Armenian, you would hear a totally different story from that person about who persecuted who. Many of the Armenians were Christian, and not accepted by either the Sunnis or the Shiites. Thank you for this info on what will be an interesting future for these people!
As others have said, thanks for a very informative & revealing article; I had no idea... All I get via western media is a filtered version of what they want me to know...what's that word again? Oh yes, propaganda.
I enjoyed this article very much. Not so much as a history lesson, just more about what is going on around the world that most don't know or care about. There are pockets of conflicts everywhere...some well known and others not-so-much or completely forgotten about that continue to simmer away until some future boiling point. Back to Azerbaijan, I though I would include this YouTube link as I am positive this man is the most famous person from there..
https://www.youtube.com/c/WILDERNESSCOOKING
PS..Matt, I bought 'The Preparation' for myself... I don't have any children of my own. However at 64, I still feel lost now as when I was Maxim's age.
My major takeaway was the propaganda there, propaganda here, propaganda everywhere. From birth, through school, through everyday news and conversations, all the time ever present. How to get above it all and actually see the truth is beyond me. Thanks for the wake up (again) article.
Thanks for the detailed first person observations and the many conversational insights! As for the comparison between America and every country that is able to build big projects modernizing their cities and transport, perhaps the biggest handicap Americans face is our legal system which cripples everything. We will continue to decay until the complete authority or lawyers in this country is brought low.
I'm no expert but a little research indicates that Armenian citizens inhabited the disputed region for two millenia. In my book that makes it theirs. Whitewashing its capture via propaganda can't change that moral reality, but propaganda and power projection can cause a change of ownership, if any resistance from the legitimate inhabitants can be permanently crushed. Same story in Israel, where resistance is not crushed, and the US, where resistance is fully rushed. It's all theft to me, but you can "move on" if there can be no further push back from the original inhabitants.
Thank you for a great article, and all the links which were available to read in English. I'm getting all of my history lessons from reading "Doug Casey's Take".
Great summary of your trip Matt.
I believe a significant reason why America has such difficulty doing simple things is it is just where it is right now in its civilizational cycle.
It will eventually return to it's frontier mentality where no project is too ambitious and no obstacle is too overwhelming, however, that will take a full on collapse first where nothing works anywhere and there is no money to pay for anything.
Then and only then with the American mind clear of the fog that has been incrementally installed in their collective brain by the sponsors of the bureaucracy, i.e. globalist banksters which dip their proboscis into the veins of the American productive class. Grandiose edifices and bureaucracies have been constructed as well as generous make work jobs for family members of the elites, using the siphoned wealth of those who can and do... things.
Eventually, it will go full circle and this suffocation of will and innovation will be swept away along with the useless elites that have nurtured, grown, controlled and benefited generationally from this poisonous siphon.
Azerbaijan and Armenia have already gone through this period of collapse when the Soviet Union went full dodo bird. When we zoom out on the timeline of history and focus less on the fractal and more on the cyclical patterns of the birth / growth / sclerosis / death / rebirth, then we see clearly that it is just time. Right now, the rebirth of the Silk Road is just at its time to flourish, AFTER all the fetid weeds of interference and grift were essentially burned away from a few decades of very tough times.
Eventually, people have to work together in order to survive and as a result they pay less attention to those that want to divide and more to those that wish to unite. America will experience this rebirth as well, although in order for that to happen it must collapse under its own hubris and grift first. Then and only then will the soil be fertile once again for the time and effort of the adventurous.
Thank you for the excellent report from Azerbaijan, really enjoyed the read and the news clips included.
Alex, I think Doug and I missed you at the Kempinski Istanbul by 48 hours or so. Too bad.
Thank you for the article. It was very interesting and insightful. I would note, however, that the conflict over the Karabakh region predates Armenia taking it back in the 1990s, and Azerbaijan's recent reclamation of it through drone war. That is not a full picture of the dispute of this region. If I'm not mistaken, these lands were taken from Armenia under Stalin's Soviet Union, and given to Azerbaijan as a ploy to keep the two regions in a never-ending conflict instead of rebelling against the Soviets. Certainly the history of this conflict will predates the 1990s. I think your article, though honest about the heavy-handed Azerbaijani propaganda did fail to note that there's a complicated history here and the Armenians might not be just land grabbers who got theirs their comeuppance in a recent drone war loss.