Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, created a sixty-second segment called the Turner Doomsday Videowhich was to broadcast worldwide once the “end of the world was confirmed.” The video features a military band playing “Nearer My God,” the same song allegedly played as the Titanic went down.

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The video gives me chills every time I watch it, but it also fills me with a sort of excitement. I can’t explain it, I guess I’ve always wanted to watch the world burn. It’s this unexplainable obsession with the impending collapse of mankind that prompted me to make my worst investment to date.

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My dad was a successful real estate investor and had accumulated tens of millions of dollars throughout his career. He died last year, leaving me and my two brothers several million dollars each.

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His final request was that we use the money wisely—to invest it or start a business. I’m not close with my brothers at this point, so I don’t know what they did with their money, but for me, I took Dad’s words to heart.

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I’ve flailed through life, to put it mildly. Three failed engagements, a failed bachelor’s degree, a failed career as a real estate agent. If it wasn’t for my dad giving me property management gigs here and there, who knows where I’d be today. In short, I was determined to do something meaningful with my inheritance.

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I didn’t have a strategy, per se, just a general plan to capitalize on the coming collapse. I thought about food storage, guns, shelters, gold, you name it. I eventually found my calling in life at a random estate sale in backwoods Appalachia: gas masks.

 

The estate had a collection of thousands upon thousands of gas masks from seemingly every era. Some had been used. Others, refurbished. Most of them were outdated, sure, but otherwise workable. So, I bought them.

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Attending estate sales, especially in rural areas, became a weekly occurrence for me. While not as fruitful as the first estate sale, they still provided me with another few hundred gas masks. After a few weeks of this, I decided to go big. I found an abandoned nuclear plant in Japan and arranged to buy 50,000 unused gas masks. 

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I became somewhat of a gas mask connoisseur in the meantime and began developing opinions on product design. This led me to manufacturing my own top-of-the-line gas mask named after my father: The Winston XD.

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After months of buying and manufacturing gas masks, I started a website and opened the doors. Fast forward a few months, and sales have not been great. I’ve sold some, but not enough to make a dent in my massive inventory. At last count, the warehouse attached to my compound holds 300,000 gas masks.

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The world will end at some point. There will be mass hysteria, famine, war. They will come running to me. 

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Now let’s see how much sarin gas my remaining inheritance will buy.