There’s a story John Polomny tells early in our conversation that is revealing.
He’s 14 years old, standing in a grocery store in rural South Florida. His mother has forgotten her checkbook (yes, she was American, she used checks, not cheques). She’s flustered. The groceries are piling up. And John reaches into his pocket, peels off $40 or $50 from a rubber-banded bankroll, and pays for them.
He’d been running a lawn care business since he was a kid. A hundred lawns and other kids working for him.
That’s John Polomny. Not a Wall Street analyst. Not a Georgetown-educated geopolitics PhD. Just a guy who grew up working class, joined the Navy at 18, travelled everywhere from Mongolia to the Philippines, commissioned and ran nuclear power stations and taught himself investing from Buffett and Munger, built a Substack from scratch, and now spends his days telling anyone who’ll listen (there are about 20,000 across youTube and Substack) that the West is living through its Brezhnev era and most people are too comfortable to admit it, even to themselves.
He calls himself just a guy on the internet. But that’s just John.
Liturgy Is Still Said. Nobody Believes It Anymore.
There’s a concept John keeps coming back to, one that, if you read HyperNormalTimes regularly, you’ll recognise immediately.
It’s called hypernormalisation.
The idea, coined by a Soviet-era social philosopher, describes the terminal phase of an empire: a period when everyone, its citizens, leaders, and bureaucrats, knows the system has failed, but nobody dares say so. The liturgy continues. The speeches are given. The forms are filled in. But the faith is gone.
We do the liturgies, John says, but they don’t matter. No one believes it.
He has a friend who was an engineer in the Soviet Union. Travelling by train in 1978, he passed a billboard that read: Socialism is bread and electricity.
He’s going, no one believes this bullshit anymore, but you couldn’t say it.
Sound familiar?
We are living, John argues, in the Brezhnev era of the Western liberal order. Not a sudden collapse. Not a fiery implosion. A long, grinding stagnation. A hollowing out. A civilisation going through the motions while the foundations quietly rot.
And yes, he’s now aware that this Substack you are reading is called HyperNormalTimes. Since our chat, he has gone to check out Adam Curtis's work, who popularised the term with his hard-hitting BBC documentary HyperNormalisation (yes, really, the BBC).
World War Three Has Already Started. You Just Haven’t Been Told.
John doesn’t use the phrase lightly. He’s not talking about Stalingrad-style industrial carnage across thousand-mile fronts. He’s talking about something more insidious: a global contest between a declining West and a rising East, fought through proxies, missiles, drones, and energy chokepoints. Sound familiar? David Murrin was saying much the same last week.
The Strait of Hormuz is closed. The Houthis are blocking the Red Sea. The global economy is having a cardiac arrest. And the policy response from Western leaders has been, in John’s framing, a clown show.
Are you going to ignore the fact that 20% of the world’s oil, 25% of the world’s LNG, 30% of the urea is blocked and can’t get out? This is like me going up to you when in intensive care after a cardiac arrest and asking if you’re still going to go on holiday next week. (Translated from the original American).
The US waives sanctions on Russian oil tankers to try to cool prices. Ukraine bombs the same Russian ports from which those tankers leave. The UK then boards and detains the exact tankers the US just exempted. Nobody’s talking to each other. Nobody has a plan.
This is what World War Three looks like, John says. Competing interests. No coordination. No strategy. Just chaos.
America’s Suez Moment
In 1956, Britain and France invaded Egypt to retake the Suez Canal. The US told them to stop. They stopped. And the world understood, for the first time, that the British Empire was finished.
John thinks the current crisis in the Middle East could be America’s equivalent.
The deal Kissinger stitched together in the 1970s was elegant in its simplicity: Arab states sell oil in dollars, recycle petrodollars through Western banks, and in return, America guarantees their security. It was symbiotic. It worked.
Now that Iran has closed the Strait, American carriers are exposed as vulnerable to cheap anti-ship missiles, and the Gulf States are watching carefully. Saudi Arabia’s biggest customer is China. The UAE is hedging. The implicit guarantee is crumbling.
If you’re in the government in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, John says, you’re watching. And you’re thinking: can they actually protect us?
The answer, increasingly, looks like no.
And, crucially, you can’t bomb your way out of it. Not in mountainous terrain, with an enemy that views the conflict as existential and religious. Not without a decade-long, WWII-scale mobilisation that no Western government has the appetite or industrial capacity for.
The military threat is hollow, John says. The Nash equilibrium holds.
The Donroe Doctrine and the World That Comes After
So what does the map look like when the dust settles?
John’s best-case scenario, and he’s the first to admit it’s optimistic, is a kind of managed retreat. America pulls back to its hemisphere. China dominates Asia. Russia, in some version of a better world, should have been invited into Europe in 1991, but it wasn’t. (The combination of Russian resources, German engineering, and a common market, John argues, would have been “unstoppable.” Instead, we got Brzezinski and NATO expansion, and here we are.)
He calls Trump’s foreign policy the Donroe Doctrine, a sardonic reworking of the Monroe Doctrine. The empire is retreating to its backyard.
And in that backyard, he sees opportunity.
Where John Is Actually Putting His Money
John’s framework is deceptively simple: find things that are moving from terrible to less bad. Ignore the shiny objects. Buy the crown jewels when nobody wants them. And he agrees with Jim Rogers’ contention that,
There is always a bull market somewhere.
That meant Canadian oil sands and Exxon, when energy was deeply out of favour, were companies generating $50 billion in collective free cash flow while spending only $25 billion on maintenance capital. Pure Walter Schloss: pay down debt, then return everything to shareholders. It worked.
It now means Latin America, a continent he believes will be largely insulated from the geopolitical chaos consuming the rest of the world.
This resonated with me. I went to Argentina in late 2024 and am a Milei fan. The Monroe Doctrine means these countries get protection and proximity to the US market: Bolivia, Chile, Brazil and Argentina, commodity producers sitting outside the blast radius of World War Three.
He’s also setting up a brokerage account in Uzbekistan.
Yes, really.
Go to these places, he says. Get a bespoke suit. Find the top law firm. Put in a small retainer. People will start saying: "This guy’s a player.”
It’s the same instinct that led him to Mongolia when the economy was growing 15% a year. The same instinct that got him an email from Jim Rogers about buying coins from North Korea, in the hope that the regime would one day open up. The same instinct that marks John out as a maverick contrarian today.
What He’s Reading
Edward Thorp, he’s rereading about probability.
The wit and wisdom of Charlie Munger, his cultural mentor, not just for investing but for how to live a good life.
The textbook on energy return on energy investment (EROEI) by Canadian Czech author Vaclav Smil, because, John says, energy is everything, and we’re self-sabotaging our access to it. (The Doomberg axiom).
Psychology and game theory, he goes back to his poker roots constantly. Investing is probabilistic. Certainty is an illusion. Learn to think probabilistically.
The Bottom Line
John Polomny spent 14 years in the US Navy, worked his way up from the tool bag to plant manager at one of America’s largest utilities, and has been investing his own money for four decades. He has no advanced degree, no institutional backing, and no interest in telling you what you want to hear.
What he has is 40 years of pattern recognition, a voracious reading habit, and a willingness to say out loud what most people are only prepared to think privately.
The West is in terminal decline. The Middle East crisis is not a blip. America’s military supremacy is more fragile than it looks. And the opportunities for investors who are paying attention are hiding in exactly the places nobody’s looking.
Time, he keeps saying, is your most valuable asset. Don’t waste it chasing shiny objects.
If you can just compound at 10%, 11%, or 12% over a career, you will do well enough. You don’t have to be a super investor.
In a world full of people trying to get rich quick, that might be his most contrarian take of all.
Where to Find John Polomny
Substack: actionablenews.substack.com
Twitter/X: @JohnPolomny
Podcast: Available on Apple, Spotify and all major platforms
If you enjoyed this episode, then share it with someone who still thinks the post-WWII liberal order will be fine.
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And if you want to stop for a chat and a coffee, then you can do that here:
Thanks for being here.
Jeremy
