I want to talk about the way the world works — or more accurately, my small and still incomplete understanding of how it works.
That distinction matters to me. I’m not pretending I’ve cracked some grand code or uncovered some secret truth that nobody else sees. I’m just trying to reconcile what I was taught with what I’m seeing. And the gap between those two things keeps getting wider the older I get.
I grew up in a small town in northern Minnesota. I’ve worked my entire adult life — roughly fourteen years now — in construction and mining. That industry alone forces you to confront reality pretty quickly. Things either work or they don’t. Budgets are real. Gravity exists. If something fails, there are consequences, and you don’t get to explain those consequences away with theory or intention.
Fourteen years isn’t long enough to know everything. I don’t believe anyone ever truly does. But it is long enough to recognize patterns. Long enough to understand incentives. Long enough to see how decisions are actually made versus how they’re explained to the public.
And the higher you climb, the more uncomfortable those realizations become.
It feels a lot like The Wizard of Oz. You pull back the curtain expecting something powerful, wise, or at least competent — and instead you find ordinary people improvising, protecting themselves, and desperately maintaining the illusion that they’re in control.
Once you see that, it changes how you look at everything.
The Worldview I Was Raised With — And Why Letting Go of It Is Difficult
I was raised to believe the world was mostly straightforward.
Not perfect — but functional. Not free of corruption — but largely self-correcting. Conspiracy theories were nonsense. Outlandish ideas about shadow systems or institutional fraud were dismissed as excuses made by people who couldn’t accept responsibility for their own failures.
That worldview made sense where I grew up. It was practical. It was clean. It was easy to understand.
My dad always told me the same thing: go to school, go to a good college, get a good degree — engineering was always the example — and you’ll get a good job. That was the formula. Those were the rules.
Follow them and you’ll be fine.
Looking back, I understand where that came from. He was a middle-class man who didn’t go to college and felt that he limited himself by not doing so. There’s honesty in that. There’s accountability. And ironically, his generation didn’t even need degrees to succeed the way later generations would — but hindsight has a way of reshaping memory.
I internalized that mindset completely. I believed effort mattered. I believed competence mattered. I believed institutions, while flawed, were ultimately aligned with progress.
That’s why this shift has been hard for me.
I don’t want to believe the system is this broken. I don’t want to believe that so much of what we were told was either naïve or intentionally misleading. I prefer clean explanations. I prefer rules that make sense.
But the deeper I look, the more I realize the world doesn’t operate in clean lines. It operates in incentives, leverage, and power — and those things rarely align with fairness or transparency.
When “Conspiracy” Stops Being Theoretical
There’s an irony I can’t shake.
When you’re younger, you’re more open to mystical thinking. Hidden truths. Secret forces shaping the world. As you grow older, you’re told to abandon that thinking — to be rational, grounded, realistic.
But what I’m finding is that adulthood doesn’t eliminate hidden systems. It just exposes them.
The difference is that they’re not mystical. They’re bureaucratic. Financial. Legal. And once you see them, it becomes difficult to unsee how much of society runs on quiet manipulation rather than open debate.
Fraud isn’t rare. Abuse of government programs isn’t accidental. Shell organizations aren’t anomalies. Money doesn’t just “disappear” — it gets routed, laundered, and justified through complexity.
You don’t have to believe anything exotic to see this. You just have to pay attention.
And in Minnesota, that attention becomes unavoidable.
Minnesota Isn’t Hypothetical: Fraud in Somali Communities
I want to be very clear here, because people love to twist this conversation.
This is not about immigration policy.
This is not about legal vs illegal immigration.
This is not about race.
This is about corruption and fraud, and pretending otherwise is dishonest.
In Minnesota, we are dealing with billions of dollars in documented fraud tied to nonprofit organizations operating largely within Somali immigrant communities. Federal money flowed into organizations that either barely existed or existed solely to siphon funds.
If you live here — truly live here, not just read headlines — this wasn’t a shock.
For the better part of a decade, people noticed something didn’t add up. You had individuals with no formal education, no employment with established corporations, and small cash-based businesses with minimal customer volume living lifestyles that would require household incomes of $150,000–$200,000 a year.
People noticed. People talked about it quietly. And anyone who did was labeled racist, paranoid, or conspiratorial.
Meanwhile, neighborhoods changed — and not subtly. Crime increased. Areas became visibly run down. Businesses closed. Safety declined. Anyone who drove through or worked in these areas could see it plainly.
This isn’t bad-mouthing. This isn’t opinion. This is observable reality.
For years, the narrative was that these claims were exaggerated or outright false. Now, with charges filed and investigations public, it turns out people were seeing the truth — they just didn’t know how it was happening.
The curtain finally got pulled back.
And once that happens, it forces you to ask a much bigger question:
If this was happening this blatantly at the state level, what’s happening everywhere else?
Federal Politics: When the Math Stops Working
Zoom out to the federal government.
I don’t care if someone is Republican, Democrat, or Independent. Strip the labels away and just look at incentives and outcomes.
Take Ukraine. I’m not deeply versed in Eastern European geopolitics, but you don’t need to be to understand that Russia was always going to move on Ukraine. Geography alone makes it strategically critical.
Now overlay one simple fact: Hunter Biden — with zero experience in energy — sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company and was paid enormous sums of money.
Ask yourself honestly: would you be placed on that board?
Of course not.
So why was he?
The answer is obvious, even if people refuse to say it out loud. And if you think that’s the only instance — or even the worst — you’re fooling yourself.
This isn’t about Joe Biden specifically. It’s about career politicians as a class.
Look at how long members of Congress have been in office. Look at their official salaries. Then look at their net worth.
I personally know presidents of companies making far more than congressmen who aren’t even close to that wealthy. The math simply doesn’t work unless corruption is involved.
This isn’t partisan. It’s arithmetic.
A System Designed to Protect Itself
One of the hardest things to come to terms with is how deliberately insulated the system has become.
People like to believe dysfunction is accidental — that things are messy because they’re complicated, not because they’re designed that way. But after a certain point, incompetence stops being a convincing explanation.
The legal and political system isn’t just complex — it’s entangled. Laws reference other laws, which reference agencies, which defer to courts, which reinterpret prior rulings. Every layer creates plausible deniability. Every reform effort gets bogged down in procedure.
This doesn’t just protect institutions — it protects individuals.
Career politicians don’t just benefit from the system; they survive because of it. Longevity becomes power. Power becomes leverage. Leverage becomes immunity.
That’s why voting out one person never fixes anything. The structure remains intact. The incentives remain unchanged. New people enter old systems and quickly learn which battles are allowed and which ones end careers.
We didn’t wake up one day with a broken government. We tolerated small compromises for decades. We accepted inefficiency because life was comfortable enough to ignore it. We assumed someone smarter or more principled would eventually fix it.
They didn’t. And now we’re left with a structure that primarily exists to defend itself.
Why Millennials Don’t Get the Same Deal
This is where the generational divide becomes impossible to ignore.
Previous generations benefited from a system that still had momentum. Manufacturing jobs existed. Housing was affordable relative to income. One person could support a family. Upward mobility wasn’t guaranteed, but it was plausible.
That deal is gone.
You can point to charts all day — income versus housing costs, education costs, healthcare, transportation — but you don’t even need charts anymore. You can feel it. Everyone can.
Two incomes are now baseline survival in most places. Homeownership is pushed further out of reach. Debt becomes normalized. Risk is shifted downward while profits move upward.
Rural America, meanwhile, is hollowing out. Jobs disappeared decades ago. Infrastructure decays quietly. Young people leave because there’s no opportunity — and opportunity doesn’t return because young people are gone.
This isn’t a moral failing. It’s structural.
And it leaves millennials and younger generations in a position no one prepared us for: inheriting responsibility without inheriting stability.
Infrastructure, Automation, and the Cost Paradox
I’ve spent fourteen years in construction. Our infrastructure is failing — storm sewer, utilities, power grids. We are far closer to catastrophic failure than people realize.
At the same time, automation should be making goods cheaper. Food, clothing, shelter — all of it requires far less labor than it once did.
So why is everything more expensive?
Because the system is no longer optimized for abundance or stability. It’s optimized for extraction. Outsourcing. Financialization. Endless money printing.
The system has become so complex that no one understands it as a whole anymore. Pieces break, and instead of fixing them, we patch them with duct tape and keep going.
That works — until it doesn’t.
Human Nature and the Collapse of Illusions
One of the biggest lies we tell ourselves is that people are inherently good and systems fail because of a few bad actors.
History doesn’t support that.
People respond to incentives. Remove consequences and behavior changes immediately. Legalize theft under a certain threshold and theft explodes. Provide resources indefinitely without accountability and dependency follows.
This isn’t cruelty — it’s realism.
Society functions because rules exist and are enforced. Without them, everything becomes transactional, tribal, and short-term. People protect themselves and those closest to them. Everyone else becomes abstract.
We were able to believe otherwise because prosperity masked those instincts. As that prosperity erodes, so does the illusion.
Where This Leaves Us
This is the part where people want solutions. I understand that urge. I feel it too.
But pretending there are simple fixes is how we got here.
Layer everything together — corruption, fraud, failing infrastructure, economic pressure, artificial intelligence, water shortages, demographic shifts — and it becomes clear that we’re entering a period of contraction, not expansion.
The golden era is over.
That doesn’t mean collapse is guaranteed, but it does mean comfort is no longer the default. Hard choices are coming whether we want them or not.
Ideological thinking brought us to this point. It replaced problem-solving with slogans. It replaced accountability with identity. And it allowed corruption to hide behind moral language.
More handouts won’t fix this. More subsidies won’t fix this. More denial definitely won’t.
At some point, our generation has to stop arguing about narratives and start dealing with reality — even when the reality is uncomfortable, unfair, and unpopular.
I don’t know exactly what that looks like yet.
But I do know this: pretending the curtain hasn’t already been pulled back won’t put it back in place.
KON Investing 