COVID Part Three: A Hugely Harmful Heap of Hogwash! 

When the COVID-19 vaccines were first rolled out, they were pitched as a miraculous solution to a global health crisis.

Governments, health officials, and the mainstream media praised them as revolutionary, life-saving, and safe. At the center of this miracle was the mRNA technology. Unlike traditional vaccines, which use weakened or inactivated viruses, the COVID vaccines used genetic instructions to trigger cells into producing just a part of the virus to do the work that weakened and inactivated viruses had done before. This was the spike protein – which was going to teach immune systems to fight off and destroy the virus we came to know as COVID-19.

The rollout of the shots was immediate and nationwide. It was much like the rollout of the polio vaccine at the height of the polio pandemic.

But as the vaccines made their way into the bloodstreams of tens of millions of bodies, reports of serious side effects started to surface. People, including young people who had been healthy and who were considered unlikely candidates for serious side effects from the virus, began suffering from all sorts of surprising and surprisingly serious side effects, such heart inflammation, strokes, and even sudden cardiac arrest.

For whatever reason, these reports were not publicized by the health services that were receiving them. And there was virtually nothing about them reported by the legacy media.

In Part One of this report, I examined how government agencies, the media, and pharmaceutical companies pushed a narrative about the virus and vaccines – the virus was life-threatening, and the vaccines were safe and highly effective. I talked about how the facts that were known then, including the facts known by the WHO, the NIH, and the CDC, seemed to contradict this narrative. But my concerns, along with those of a handful of doctors and scientists saying the same thing, were either ignored or dismissed as “conspiracy theories.”

In Part Two, I examined how this “official” narrative was used to justify the countrywide lockdowns and government mandates that essentially ended the tradition of individual freedom on health issues that had always been the norm in the US. I also touched on the cost of those lockdowns and mandates – in terms of personal liberty, social mobility, and the country’s GDP.

The costs were enormous. And yet the virus was not defeated or even diminished by these authoritarian measures. In fact, it continued unabated until herd immunity kicked in.

From all the standard metrics for determining the effectiveness of mass inoculations and mandatory social protocols, the vaccines had little to no positive effect at all. Meanwhile, the reports of serious side effects continued to mount, including unusual and unexpected deaths – by the thousands.

In this, Part Three of the report, I will tell you what I’ve learned about how the mRNA technology itself contributed to all the war-level death and destruction. I will give you evidence that the original design of the vaccines was flawed from the outset, and how it was never vetted in any serious, scientific way for safety or effectiveness.

I’ll also point out why that was so. Why the incentives made it inevitable. And if you are the least bit open-minded and the least bit skeptical of Trillion-Dollar Industries and the least bit willing to believe that bureaucrats and politicians can be corrupted, you will be outraged at what has taken place and you will never trust Big Medicine, Big Media, and Big Government again.

This is one big, scary story – of how the vaccine rollout became a global disaster that killed and seriously injured millions of people, and of a coordinated network of media, government agencies, and pharmaceutical companies that continued to promote claims that were clearly false, while also concealing crucial negative data and information from the public.

And to be clear: This is not a story about scientific missteps and doing the best “with the information available.” It was a deliberate effort to hide the truth and spin lies whose only benefit was putting billions and billions of net dollars into the P&L statements of some of the largest and most powerful corporations in the world.

1. The Lies and Obfuscation About Vaccine Effectiveness and Safety 

When the COVID vaccines first came out, we were told they would prevent infection and transmission. The messaging was clear: Get the shot, stop the spread. But that’s not what happened.

I have found dozens, literally dozens, of substantial, credible studies that came to that conclusion. One, from the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS), showed that despite one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, COVID deaths didn’t drop as they should have. Instead, during the COVID waves, many of the vaccinated groups that were tracked had higher death rates than many of the groups that were unvaccinated. Steve Kirsch, a data analyst who’s been all over this, pointed to linear regression analysis showing that in some regions, higher vaccination rates correlated with higher death rates.

That study was not an outlier. It was part of a pattern. As the months went by and the booster campaigns rolled out, the data kept showing the same disturbing trend: more shots, more deaths.

Yet, the health narrative coming from most governmental health agencies and the mainstream media didn’t budge.

As the evidence mounted, some of these public agencies, such as the CDC, began quietly walking back their initial claims about preventing infection and transmission. We went from “100% effective” to “effective” to “well, it may not prevent spreading or infection, but it will reduce the chance of severe illness.”

But even that claim had no serious scientific studies behind it. What real evidence that was emerging painted a different picture.

One very important study by the Israeli Ministry of Health revealed that the vaccines’ effectiveness dropped off so quickly that within a few months of getting the vaccination, there was a possibility that the effectiveness was negative. (This is an oblique way of saying that, after several months, you might be more likely to get infected if you were vaccinated.) Let that sink in. Similar data came out of Canada, Australia, and even the US, but it was buried under headlines celebrating the next booster rollout.

Meanwhile, Pfizer and Moderna were raking in billions, while health officials kept pushing boosters.

But for some of the people who had been told the shots would keep them safe, the reality was a lot darker. In this next section, I’m going to touch on how the narrative around vaccine effectiveness was manipulated – and how the health agencies knew early on that the shots weren’t living up to the hype.

2. The COVID Vaccines Were Good for the Hype,
but Bad – Very Bad – for Our Hearts!

When the COVID vaccines first rolled out, we were told that the side effects were non-existent for most and only minor for some. This continued to be the message as the months passed, despite mounting evidence to the contrary – thousands of reports of serious side effects, including prolonged and debilitating conditions, and even death. And not a handful of deaths. Hundreds and then thousands and then tens of thousands.

But we didn’t hear a peep about any of that from Big Pharma, Big Government, or Big Media. Not a peep.

On the contrary, what we heard from these “trustworthy” institutions was that the vaccines were “saving millions of lives.” That’s what they were saying, but there was no “science” behind those claims. They were being made by media bloggers that were using various rhetorical arguments to prove their point. None of those conclusions made their way into reliable scientific journals because they had no basis in the scientific method. And today, they are still being circulated by some people (including Senator Blumenthal in the most recent Senate hearing on the vaccines) who are citing these same completely dismissible sources.

After four years of this charade, however, the truth is coming out. Just last month (April 2025), for example, a massive study involving 85 million people exposed that narrative as false – an egregious falsehood that should embarrass anyone and everyone who advanced that story, including the mainstream press, who – despite having reams of contradictory information available to them – decided to ignore the true science and stick to the official government and Big Pharma narrative.

The study was titled “COVID-19 Vaccination and Cardiovascular Events: A Systematic Review and Bayesian Multivariate Meta-Analysis of Preventive Benefits and Risks.” It was published in the International Journal of Preventive Medicine in April 2025.

It analyzed more than 85 million individuals, including nearly 46 million vaccinated individuals and nearly 40 million unvaccinated (as “control” participants).

The study found “significant increases” in the risks of stroke, heart attack, coronary artery disease (CAD), and arrhythmia following COVID-19 vaccination.

Serious Cardiovascular and Myocardial Risks 

The risk of coronary artery disease, for example, was found to be 70% higher overall. And – get this – 244% higher for those who get the jab twice (as recommended).

It would be an understatement to say that these findings have raised concerns among medical professionals. Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the study’s co-authors and a cardiologist who has been reporting on COVID-19 and the vaccines since day one, said, “We are seeing myocarditis at unprecedented rates in young males. This is not rare, and it’s not mild. Some of these young men will suffer long-term cardiac damage.”

One of the many stories I remember reading about was the case of 17-year-old athlete Alex Mitchell, who, just two days after receiving his second mRNA vaccine dose, collapsed during a basketball game and was later diagnosed with myocarditis.

Of course, one example proves nothing. But, as I said, the examples have been in the thousands, and the numbers are still mounting. I thought by now the reports would have been declining, but they haven’t. I continue to get reports like these on a daily basis from a half-dozen blogs that have been following the vaccine story since reports of adverse reactions began coming in.

The mega study, led by epidemiologist Nicolas Hulscher, was clear about the facts. It found “significant increases” in strokes, heart attacks, coronary artery disease (CAD), and arrhythmia following mRNA vaccination. And by “significant,” they meant significant. The risk of heart attack, for example, was up 24% in the six months following vaccination, while arrhythmia rates increased by 18%.

These are not small numbers. And they didn’t just show up in older populations. Many young and otherwise healthy people were among the affected, including athletes and military personnel who had previously passed cardiac screenings with flying colors.

Persistent Spike Proteins and Vascular Damage 

A large Japanese study published in 2024 found that the vaccine “spike proteins” continued to create havoc in blood vessels for much longer than the drug promoters has been saying. Dr. Makis, the lead researcher, reported that these lingering spike proteins were causing endothelial inflammation and vascular damage as long as 17 months after the vaccine was given.

“We were told the spike proteins would degrade quickly. That’s clearly not happening,” he said. “This ongoing inflammation is a serious concern, particularly in individuals with pre-existing cardiovascular conditions.”

Myocarditis and Pericarditis in the Healthy Young 

Myocarditis wasn’t supposed to be a problem. But within weeks of the vaccine rollout, it became clear that young males, particularly those aged 16 to 24, were experiencing myocarditis at rates far above normal.

Hulscher, McCullough, and other researchers conducted a comparative study of the risk of myocarditis after COVID vaccinations. They found that the risk of myocarditis was higher among those who had received the COVID vaccine than among those that had not.

The study was so large, so comprehensive, and so definitive that Dr. McCullough called for an immediate withdrawal of mRNA vaccines until more comprehensive safety studies could be conducted.

“We are seeing myocarditis at unprecedented rates in young males. This is not rare, and it’s not mild. Some of these young men will suffer long-term cardiac damage,” he warned.

Sources: 

1. Hulscher, N., Cardiovascular Risks of mRNA Vaccines: A Nationwide Study, April 2025

2. McCullough, P., Rose, J., Makis, R., Comparative Study on Myocarditis Rates Post-Vaccination vs. Post-Infection, Journal of Cardiology, March 2025

3. Makis, R., Vascular Persistence of Spike Proteins Following mRNA Vaccination: Implications for Cardiovascular Health, Japanese Journal of Vascular Research, Dec. 2024

The Dirty Trick Behind Vaccine “Effectiveness” 

In the Czech Republic, unvaccinated individuals were required to undergo mandatory COVID-19 testing, often twice a week, while vaccinated individuals were exempt.

This differential testing policy skewed the data, making the vaccines appear highly effective by disproportionately testing the unvaccinated.

Steve Kirsch asserts that similar testing policies were implemented in many countries, distorting efficacy data globally.

The logic is simple:

If the unvaccinated are constantly tested and the vaccinated are not, more COVID cases will naturally be found among the unvaccinated, artificially inflating the vaccine’s apparent effectiveness.

Kirsch contends that the only honest measure of vaccine impact is to compare all-cause mortality rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated groups over the entire study period. His calculations suggest that when this is done, the vaccines were not only ineffective but potentially deadly across age groups.

3. Some Vindication from Recent Disclosures 

Although the mainstream press has been virtually silent about it, there have been other corrective measures and responses to all the deception and damage done by those that pushed the pro-vaccine narrative.

For example:

* Resignation: Peter Marks, the FDA’s top vaccine regulator, resigned on April 15, 2025, amid growing controversy over his decision to approve COVID-19 boosters for infants. Critics argued that the approval was based on limited data and ignored emerging evidence of serious side effects. In his resignation letter, Marks acknowledged the pressure to greenlight the boosters, saying, “The pressure to approve was immense. I did what I could to balance the science with the political and media pressure, but in hindsight, it was not enough.”

* Collusion Exposed: According to a whistleblower complaint filed in federal court on March 12, 2025, the FDA and Pfizer allegedly conspired to delay the release of clinical trial data until after the 2020 presidential election. The complaint, filed by former FDA analyst Daniel Harper, claims that key data showing a higher-than-expected incidence of myocarditis and pericarditis in young males was buried under pressure from top executives at Pfizer. “They knew. And they hid it. And they pushed it anyway,” Harper said in a sworn affidavit. The case is ongoing.

* Big Pharma’s Hold on the NIH and CDC: Recent reports from investigative journalist Nicholas Hulscher reveal a pattern of financial ties between vaccine manufacturers and senior officials at the NIH and CDC. Hulscher’s investigation, published on April 30, 2025, shows that both agencies received millions in “donations” from Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J, raising serious questions about conflicts of interest. In one particularly damning email exchange, a senior CDC official wrote, “We need to make sure our messaging aligns with the pharmaceutical partners.”

Sources: 

1. Marks, P., Resignation Letter, FDA, April 15, 2025

2. Harper, D., Whistleblower Complaint, Harper v. FDA, Federal Court Filings, March 12, 2025

3. Hulscher, N., Big Pharma’s Influence on Public Health Agencies, Courageous Discourse, April 30, 2025

On June 8, 2022, Israeli Ministry of Health officials met with scientists to discuss COVID vaccine adverse events. The meeting was secretly recorded and published on Rumble by Israeli journalist Yaffa Shir-Raz.

Here is some of what was acknowledged to be true by the participants but never found its way to the general population until now:

* Ministry officials acknowledged that vaccine effectiveness against infection dropped to negligible levels after just a few months.

* Some data suggested potential negative effectiveness (higher infection rates in vaccinated individuals) after 4-6 months.

* Officials admitted they had no long-term safety data despite mandating multiple boosters.

The meeting included a discussion about how to present this information to the public without undermining the vaccination campaign.

The Bottom Line 

The Israeli Ministry of Health had evidence by early 2022 of:

* Rapidly waning or absent protection against infection,

* Serious and persistent adverse events, including neurological and immunological conditions,

* No structured long-term safety follow-up, and

* A coordinated effort to control how the data was framed rather than re-evaluate the vaccination campaign.

Despite these concerns, the Ministry continued recommending and mandating booster doses.

And so did the CDC!

4. Despite Mounting Evidence of Harm, Media Censorship and Propaganda Has Continued 

As I pointed out in Parts One and Two of this report, since the virus began, there has been a handful of doctors, scientists, and journalists who have questioned the “highly infectious and deadly” narrative being pushed by the pro-vaccine cartel.

And just about every one of them that had more than a thousand social media followers faced censorship, libel, threats, and, in some cases, professional and legal recriminations.

A few of at least a dozen prominent examples:

* Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the most prominent critics, had his Twitter account suspended in January 2025 after posting about myocarditis cases in young athletes. “They don’t want us talking about the side effects because they know it undermines their entire narrative,” McCullough said in a podcast interview.

* Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, advocating for focused protection of vulnerable populations rather than widespread lockdowns. He questioned the severity of COVID-19 and the efficacy of lockdowns, leading to substantial criticism from the scientific community. Bhattacharya’s views were labeled as fringe, and he faced professional ostracism, including being placed on a Twitter “Trends blacklist,” which limited the visibility of his posts.

* Dr. Paul Marik, a critical care physician and co-founder of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), promoted alternative treatments for COVID-19, such as ivermectin. He faced professional repercussions, including the retraction of his research papers and disciplinary actions from medical boards. Marik’s hospital privileges were revoked, and he resigned from his position at Eastern Virginia Medical School amid the controversy.

* Paul D. Thacker, an investigative journalist, reported on alleged conflicts of interest within the pharmaceutical industry and regulatory agencies. His articles, including a piece in The BMJ highlighting issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trials, drew criticism from some in the scientific community who accused him of promoting anti-vaccine sentiments. Thacker faced professional challenges, including being labeled as a conspiracy theorist and facing pushback from colleagues and institutions.

* Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson reported that her COVID vaccine coverage was “shadowbanned” on multiple platforms, including Facebook and YouTube.

5. The Legacy Media Was 100% Complicit in the Deception 

Despite a flood of evidence of serious vaccine side effects, mainstream media outlets have continued to downplay or ignore the data.

I don’t have the time and you don’t have the patience to go through all the examples of this silencing and propaganda campaign, but here are some of the dozens I’ve found:

* NBC: In April 2025, NBC ran a segment titled “COVID Vaccine Myths and Facts,” in which they claimed that reports of myocarditis in young males were “extremely rare.” However, data from the CDC itself contradicted that statement, showing rates of myocarditis that were far higher than the baseline, especially in young males aged 12 to 24.

* Bloomberg: In Feb. 2025, Bloomberg published an op-ed demanding that platforms like Substack and Rumble be held accountable for “promoting vaccine misinformation.”

* Dr. Aaron Kaplan claimed that allowing vaccine skeptics to publish unverified claims was a “public health risk.” Kaplan specifically targeted Substack, which had become a hub for dissenting voices like Dr. Robert Malone and Steve Kirsch.

* Journalist Matt Taibbi pushed back, arguing that the real danger was the suppression of legitimate scientific debate. “If the only voices we’re allowed to hear are those approved by Big Pharma, how can the public make informed health decisions?” Taibbi wrote on Substack.

* Twitter: A former New York Times reporter, Alex Berenson became a prominent critic of COVID-19 vaccines, often appearing in right-wing media to share his views. He claimed that the vaccines were “dangerous and ineffective,” leading to his permanent suspension from Twitter in August 2021 for violating the platform’s COVID-19 misinformation policy. Berenson later sued Twitter and was reinstated in 2022 after reaching a settlement.

* PayPal: British journalist Toby Young faced backlash for his articles downplaying the severity of COVID-19 and questioning vaccine efficacy. In 2020, the UK’s press regulator ruled that one of his articles was “significantly misleading.” Later, in 2022, PayPal suspended accounts associated with Young, including The Free Speech Union and The Daily Sceptic, citing violations related to COVID-19 misinformation. These accounts were reinstated after public outcry.

* Twitter: An American academic and signatory of the Great Barrington Declaration criticized COVID-19 vaccines, particularly highlighting concerns about myocarditis. He was suspended from Twitter after multiple violations related to COVID-19 misinformation.

And finally…

* All the smugly ignorant liberals: When Trump picked Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, it seemed like the entire Liberal and Leftist press, along with every House and Senate Democrat, went ballistic, accusing Kennedy of being unqualified, an “anti-vaxer,” and a conspiracy theorist, particularly because he has long called for studies to investigate the very substantial correlative relationship between the emergence of vaccines and the rise in cases of autism. If you didn’t see the confirmation hearings, you should watch a few of them. RFK embarrasses and humiliates his critics by showing them, again and again, that he knows the science and they don’t.

Sources: 

1. Kaplan, A., Why Platforms Must Stop Promoting Vaccine Misinformation, Bloomberg, Feb. 15, 2025

2. Taibbi, M., When Censorship Becomes a Public Health Hazard, Substack, Feb. 20, 2025

3. McCullough, P., Podcast Interview, Myocarditis and Censorship, March 2, 2025

4. Attkisson, S., COVID Vaccine Coverage and Social Media Censorship, SharylAttkisson.com, Jan. 18, 2025

5. NBC News, COVID Vaccine Myths and Facts, April 4, 2025

6. New Discoveries of Long-Term Harm

Over the past 12 to 18 months, as it became more and more difficult for the vaccine promoters to continue claiming that the vaccines were “safe and effective” – or even that they reduced serious illness – they went quiet on the issue and focused their efforts on quashing the reports that the vaccines were doing harm – serious, long-term harm.

While short-term side effects like injection site pain, fatigue, and fever were widely acknowledged, more serious long-term side effects have begun to surface – side effects that were initially dismissed as “rare” or “unproven” but are now demanding urgent attention, including autoimmune disorders, cancer, neurological conditions, and a cluster of symptoms increasingly referred to as “Post-Vaccination Syndrome.”

Autoimmune Disorders 

Reports of autoimmune conditions such as Guillain-Barré Syndrome, lupus, and myocarditis have become more common among vaccinated individuals. A study by the Mayo Clinic published in February 2025 indicates a 34% increase in autoimmune diagnoses post-vaccination, with the highest risk observed in young males under 30.

Dr. Peter McCullough, whom I’ve cited above and who I believe is not only one of the best-known experts on the negative effects of the vaccines, but also the most qualified in terms of experience, is now warning that “the autoimmune response generated by the spike protein appears to persist for months, potentially triggering chronic conditions that may not resolve.”

Very Scary: The “Turbo Cancer” Phenomenon 

One of the most alarming discoveries is the potential link between mRNA vaccination and aggressive cancers, colloquially referred to as “turbo cancers.”

Unlike conventional cancers that typically develop over years, these aggressive malignancies appear to progress rapidly post-vaccination.

According to a May 2025 article in Focal Points, pathologists in the US and Europe are documenting an uptick in unusual cancers, including glioblastomas, lymphomas, and pancreatic cancers, particularly in younger, previously healthy individuals.

Dr. Angus Dalrymple, an oncologist with over 20 years of experience, stated, “We are seeing an unprecedented rate of rapid-onset cancers that defy the usual staging and progression. The only common factor in most of these cases is recent mRNA vaccination.”

Neurological Dangers and Complications 

A Yale study published in April 2025 has identified a cluster of neurological symptoms now being classified under “Post-Vaccination Syndrome.” Symptoms include severe headaches, cognitive decline, vertigo, and memory loss. The study found that individuals with prior neurological conditions were at higher risk, but even healthy individuals were developing debilitating symptoms months after vaccination. The report also notes that the spike protein’s persistence in the central nervous system could be the underlying cause.

Just the Facts 

Okay, I’m going to stop here.

As you know, I’ve spent a lot of time over the last four years clipping and filing stories and studies about the virus and the vaccines and the outright lies that were sold to the American public. By publishing this three-part report here – a summary of everything I discovered – I hope I’ve persuaded you that the mRNA COVID vaccines were not just ineffective, but that they had many serious, life-threatening side effects – and that the public should have heard about them years ago, when they were first reported.

In the complete monograph that I’m going to be publishing, I will provide a lot more evidence for every claim I’ve made. But since your eyes are probably glazing over right now, I’m going to end here with eight facts that I believe are indisputable.

Eight Facts We Now Know about the 
Safety and Effectiveness of the COVID Vaccines

1. The mRNA Vaccines did not prevent infection or transmission. Real-world data shows vaccinated individuals still catch and spread COVID, often at similar or even higher rates than the unvaccinated.

2. From the beginning, the CDC and the FDA failed to warn the public about internal reports about dangerous vaccine side effects. FOIA-released emails and whistleblower reports show adverse events were downplayed or ignored.

3. The vaccines offer no demonstrable reduction in all-cause mortality. Randomized trials from Pfizer and Moderna showed no statistically significant mortality benefit compared to placebo. (This should have been a flashing light to the CDC. See Fact #8.)

4. Risk of myocarditis, especially in young men, is well-documented and sometimes fatal. Multiple studies have confirmed this, including military datasets and insurance claim reviews.

5. Spike protein persistence and distribution is greater than claimed. Studies have found vaccine-induced spike proteins lingering in the bloodstream and even penetrating organs for weeks or months.

6. Post-vaccine complications have included strokes, clotting disorders, and sudden deaths. Many of these are under investigation and have not been adequately explained by authorities.

7. There is evidence of DNA plasmid contamination in mRNA vials. This may pose theoretical long-term risks and violates regulatory manufacturing standards.

8. The vaccines almost certainly killed people – possibly millions of people. All-cause mortality went up – significantly – after the vaccines were rolled out. That should never happen. When it does happen, it means that something – and most likely the vaccine – is causing all the extra deaths. In addition to all-cause mortality, more specific studies are being published that show direct links between vaccinations and deaths. One recent study in Florida found a 36% increase in non-COVID death after mRNA vaccination. Especially among young men, this increase in all-cause mortality should have triggered immediate concern and further investigation.

Final Thoughts: I’m Disgusted. You Should Be Too…

Just last week, as I was editing this for the last time, I discovered that Senator Ron Johnson was running Senate Hearings on the narrative that the COVID vaccines were “safe and effective.”

It was a bloodbath for Big Pharma, Big Media, and the politicians that tried so desperately to try to convince voters that (a) the virus was really, really infectious and really, really lethal (both wrong) and (b) the COVID vaccines that were so quickly created and so unconstitutionally mandated were both safe and also effective.

There has always been a ton of evidence disproving both of these narratives. But so long as the Democrats were in control of HHS, the NIH, the CDC, and the FDA, that information was not leaving the vaults it was stored in. (Remember, fear of the virus was perhaps the most significant reason that Biden got elected in 2020.)

Now that the Republicans have the keys, the documents are coming out. And they are as bad as I thought. They reveal that the CDC knew about the heart risks, including serious myocarditis tied to the Pfizer vaccine as early as February 2021 – but said nothing to the public. And they show that they also had the data and the conclusions from Israel and the Department of Defense that made it quite clear that the vaccines were not saving lives, but ending them.

They knew, too, that VAERS, the reporting agency for adverse reactions to the vaccine, had accumulated nearly 3,000 post-vaccine deaths, almost half of which occurred within 72 hours of injection!

Instead of sounding the alarm and halting the vaccinations immediately, they issued a milquetoast set of “new guidelines” that were designed to be ignored and were.
Senator Johnson’s Senate Hearings on the vaccines have been a shitshow.

OB-GYN Dr. James Thorp presented data suggesting that miscarriage rates for women vaccinated during the first trimester may have been as high as 82% – figures the CDC ignored. He also cited animal studies showing a 60% destruction of ovarian reserve in rats. If true in humans, the implications for fertility are catastrophic.

Dr. Peter McCullough testified that he’s now treated thousands of patients with vaccine-induced myocarditis – something he had seen only twice in his entire career before COVID. He cited cases of healthy teenagers dying in their sleep days after injection and slammed public health officials for failing to respond to clear warning signs.

Dr. Jordan Vaughn provided testimony that up to 15 million Americans may now be living with long COVID or post-vaccine injury.

He described widespread spike protein damage detectable in patients more than 700 days after their last shot – despite initial claims the protein stayed in the arm. “We didn’t just inject people,” he said. “We turned them into spike protein factories.”

Attorney Aaron Siri offered a brutal reminder that vaccine makers enjoy blanket liability protections under the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act – and therefore no financial incentive to make vaccines safer. “They don’t have the incentive,” he said. “In fact, they have the disincentive.”

Senator Johnson displayed a devastating chart showing that COVID cases and deaths actually spiked after vaccine uptake became widespread in 2021. If the vaccines worked, the numbers would have dropped. They didn’t.

Still, as the narrative collapses, defenders like Senator Richard Blumenthal are already retreating to an old script: “We did our best with the information we had at the time.”

When I was writing about this four years ago, I predicted this day would come. I said that I was sure the truth about COVID would eventually come out and I hoped that when it did, the malefactors behind the propaganda would not be taken seriously when they said, “We were working on the best information we had at the time.”

I figured out that this whole thing was a crock of shit back then just by doing a little math.

The incredible damage in terms of lives, culture, education, and wealth that was destroyed was not caused by honest mistakes made in the fog of crisis. They were lies, deliberate and sustained, propped up by government officials, media personalities, and a complicit medical establishment.

And most of those who believed the lies still aren’t ready to admit they were deceived – because that would mean admitting they were naïve and that it was they who didn’t “follow the science.”

This horrific story is hardly over. On the contrary, it’s only the first few pages that have so far been written. How much we will eventually know about who was behind this – the individuals in charge, not the institutions (we know them) – is impossible to say.

The grift is so large. The money is so great. The secrets are so incendiary. The only thing I feel certain about is that if Kamala Harris were president now, this entire debacle would already be yesterday’s conspiracy theory.

Sources: 

1. Goldberg, Y., et al, Waning Immunity after the BNT162b2 Vaccine in Israel, NEJM

2. Kirsch, S., Data on COVID-19 Vaccine Mortality Trends

3. Hulscher, N., Cardiovascular Risks of mRNA Vaccines: A Nationwide Study

4. Office for National Statistics (UK), Deaths involving COVID-19 by vaccination status, England

5. Makis, R., Persistent Spike Protein Effects Post-mRNA Vaccination

6. McCullough, P., Rose, J., Myocarditis Post-Vaccination Analysis

7. Yale School of Medicine, Post-Vaccination Syndrome Neurological Study

8. Florida Department of Health, Brand Differential Study on mRNA Vaccine Mortality

9. Focal Points, Turbo Cancers and COVID-19 Vaccine Link

10. Taibbi, M., On Media Suppression and Vaccine Discourse

11. Attkisson, S., Shadowbanning and Vaccine Coverage

12. Harper, D., Whistleblower Report Filed March 2025

13. Marks, P., Resignation Letter from FDA, April 2025

14. CDC Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)

15. NIH Conflict of Interest Disclosures, 2024–25

16. Nature Biotechnology, mRNA Vaccine Development under EUA: The Fast Track Risks, Jan. 2022.

17. Clinical Research in Cardiology, Sudden Cardiac Death and mRNA Vaccine Exposure, March 2023

18. OneAmerica Life Insurance, CEO Statement on Mortality Rates, Jan. 2022

19. BMJ, Poor Practices in Pfizer’s Vaccine Trial Sites, Oct. 2021

20. German BKK Insurance, Adverse Event Undercounting in COVID Vaccine Reporting, Feb. 2022

21. Columbia University Pathology, Myocarditis Autopsies Post-Vaccination, Dec. 2022

22. Ministry of Health, Japan, Spike Protein-Associated Pericarditis Advisory, March 2024

23. Oxford University, Short-Term Booster Efficacy and Rapid Decline, July 2022
Worth (Further) Reading

As I said, this is a story that is just beginning to be told. Here are five new depressing and highly disturbing revelations that I found within the last 24 hours:

1. Welcome to the cover-up for the cover-up 
By Alex Berenson 
“Are Joe Biden and his handlers telling the truth about his prostate cancer diagnosis? The way they’ve tried to hide his cognitive decline gives us reason to ask hard questions.” Click here.

2. Unheard of: So Many Young People with Heart Failure 
By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH 
“One of the most alarming aspects of the pandemic for me as a cardiologist is to see young people develop heart failure because of COVID-19 vaccine myopericarditis.” Click here.

3. Many with Serious Reactions from the Vaccine Die Quickly 
A new, retrospective cohort study on COVID vaccine-related deaths found that nearly half of those with serious side effects died within 42 days of being vaccinated. The Korean government-backed study, published in PLos One, found that out of 358 patients who suffered severe SAEs post-vaccination, 160 died within 42 days, yielding a 42-day case-fatality rate of 44.7%.
You can read more about it here.

4. Biden Adm.: “Criticism of COVID Mandates Is Doctrine of Violent Domestic Extremists” 
By John Leake, Focal Points 
Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, just declassified a 13 December 2021 National Counterterrorism Center memo warning that Domestic Violent Extremists “will threaten to mobilize to violence in opposition to new or expanding COVID-19 related mandates.” Click here.

5. Highlights from The Corruption of Science and Federal Health Agencies
By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH 
How health officials downplayed and hid myocarditis and other adverse events associated with the COVID-19 vaccines. Click here.

How to Make Your Good Copy Great

Writers love to argue about what makes writing “good.” But until you define what kind of writing you’re talking about – and what goal that writing is meant to achieve – you’re not really saying much.

As copywriters, we’re not writing to impress English teachers. We’re not chasing literary awards or critical acclaim. We’re writing to persuade someone – quickly, clearly, and powerfully – to take a specific action. Sign up. Click. Buy. Say yes.

And in that context, good copy is easy to spot. It’s competent. Clear. It explains the product not by focusing too much on its features, but on emphasizing its benefits. It resolves any doubts about the product that may arise, and it ends by making the offer (the price, the terms, the guarantee, etc.) seem like a good deal.

And finally, and most importantly for direct marketing, good copy should sell a goodly amount of the product or service it is promoting.

So, what about great copy? Is that just good copy that’s a little bit better?

The answer is obviously no.

Great copy doesn’t just sell a lot of product – it sells the idea of the product so persuasively that the prospect not only purchases more of it than he would have otherwise but feels good about it. He feels as if, in buying this product, he’s acquiring other things he values even more – relief, identity, power, control, peace of mind.

That’s my explanation of what great copy does. But what makes it great? What separates it from merely good? And how can one take a good piece of copy and make it great?

I wish I could say that I discovered the difference between good and great copy as a single idea at a single moment in my copywriting career. But the truth is, it was a discovery made piecemeal over more than 30 years of writing copy, critiquing copy, editing copy, and teaching copy.

It turns out that copywriting, like any complicated skill, involves myriad insights, instincts, techniques, strategies, and habits – none of which is hard to understand or learn, but all of which are essential if you want to go from being good to being great.

Along the way, I’ve come to believe that three core principles lie at the heart of truly great copy. And if you want to write copy that consistently moves the needle – copy that transforms a reader into a buyer, and a buyer into a repeat customer – you need to be fluent in all three.

 

A Working Definition of Great Copy 

To understand what makes copy great, we need to be precise about what we mean. Not poetic. Not philosophical. Just clear.

Let’s start here: Good copy does its job. It’s readable. It’s persuasive. It identifies a need or want and presents a solution. It introduces the product, frames the benefits, answers objections, and closes with a solid offer.

You’ve probably written a fair bit of good copy. So have I. It gets results. Sometimes even excellent results.

But then – if you’re lucky – you come across a piece of copy that does something else. It doesn’t just check the boxes. It takes hold of your attention and doesn’t let go. You’re drawn in. You feel something. You want something you didn’t even know you wanted five minutes ago. That’s great copy.

So, what changed?

It’s not just the mechanics. Great copy uses all the same tools as good copy: headlines, leads, bullets, guarantees, calls to action. It still follows the same guidelines – clarity, urgency, specificity, credibility.

But great copy elevates those requirements. It uses them in the service of something bigger. It delivers an emotional charge. It surprises. It offers insight. And most importantly, it convinces the reader that this product (and this idea behind it) is not just useful or valuable – it’s necessary.

That emotional necessity is key. Great copy doesn’t just persuade your intellect. It awakens your imagination. It creates a felt sense that this thing you’re reading about will change your life, even if just a little. It reframes how you see a problem or desire. It introduces an idea that sticks in your head all day.

And behind that emotional pull, you’ll usually find the core elements of great copy: a story the reader can identify with, a sense that a valuable secret is about to be revealed, a believable but powerful promise, compelling evidence to support every claim, and a voice the reader wants to spend time with.

When these elements work together, the result isn’t just attention – it’s transformation. The reader begins to feel understood. He sees himself in the story. He believes the promise. He wants to know the secret. And by the time the close arrives, the sale is no longer a question of logic – it’s a foregone conclusion.

Which raises the obvious question: How?

Over the years, I’ve narrowed my answer down to three principles – three drivers that show up in almost every piece of copy I consider great:

1. An Emotionally Compelling Idea that anchors the message and grabs attention

2. The Rule of One, which gives the copy its laser focus

3. A deliberate Architecture of Persuasion, which guides the reader step-by-step toward action

 

An Emotionally Compelling Idea – the Engine of Great Copy 

In earlier days, I called it the “Big Idea.” That term still has a certain weight. But over time, I’ve come to prefer something more precise: the “Emotionally Compelling Idea.”

It doesn’t have to be “big” in the philosophical sense. It doesn’t have to solve a cultural dilemma or make a sweeping promise. What it must do is feel undeniably attractive to the reader – almost irresistible – from the very first moment it’s introduced.

In great copy, the idea is the gravitational center of the message. And it deserves to be ranked at the very top of the hierarchy. Without a powerful idea, the rest of the copy struggles. With one, everything else aligns.

But here’s the key: What gives the idea its power isn’t just what it says – it’s how it’s said. How it’s framed, how it’s worded, and how it’s timed.

The Emotionally Compelling Idea hits a nerve. It may come disguised as a promise, or a story, or even a secret. But when you strip those elements down to their essence, what you find is an idea – a fresh or surprising way of seeing a familiar problem, or a provocative way of solving it. And when that idea is delivered with emotional resonance, it feels like a revelation.

The prospect doesn’t just hear it – they experience it. They say to themselves: “Yes! That’s exactly what I’ve been missing. That’s what I need.”

And here’s where the promise comes in. A great idea doesn’t stand alone. It contains a promise – sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly. It assures the reader that if they keep going, something meaningful will be delivered: relief, clarity, transformation, success.

The idea must also feel like a bit of a secret – that the reader feels they’re being let in on something not everyone knows. It creates a subtle exclusivity. “Here’s the truth nobody told you about…” That dynamic short-circuits resistance and keeps the reader engaged.

And when the idea is wrapped in a story, its emotional charge intensifies. The reader becomes the protagonist. They see themselves in the struggle, feel the tension, and experience the triumph – all before the product is even introduced. That emotional preview builds belief faster than any logic ever could.

But even the strongest idea will fizzle if it lacks durational power. Great copy needs an idea that can do heavy lifting over time – months or even years. It can’t just be a clever hook that works once. It must be capable of anchoring a full promotion, and then a control, and then an entire campaign.

This is what makes great ideas rare. But when they work, they don’t just move product – they create a Tipping Point.

As Malcolm Gladwell described in his book, a Tipping Point occurs when an idea spreads beyond its initial audience and starts to change the broader landscape. I’ve seen this happen in direct response. One great idea, expressed with perfect timing and emotional force, can redefine how people think about a product – or even an entire category.

It sets a new benchmark. Other writers have to answer to it. Prospects begin repeating its phrases. Competitors shift their messaging to match it.

That’s what a truly Emotionally Compelling Idea can do. It doesn’t just persuade. It changes the game.

And finally – none of this matters if the idea is hard to understand. Accessibility is essential. That’s why I use the Flesch-Kincaid scale to test my writing, and why I insist that copy aimed at a mass market reads at a 7.5 grade level or lower.

Writing simply isn’t about dumbing things down. It’s about helping your prospect say “yes” without having to decode your meaning. If your idea is emotionally compelling but buried under abstraction or jargon, it won’t move anyone.

To write great copy, you must learn to take a complex emotional or intellectual idea and express it simply, clearly, and urgently. That’s where craft meets discipline. And that’s where good copy turns into great.

 

The Rule of One 

One of the simplest – and most easily ignored – principles of great copywriting is something we’ve come to call The Rule of One.

At first glance, it might sound limiting. One idea? One reader? One benefit? Shouldn’t persuasive copy try to do more?

But in practice, The Rule of One is what gives a sales message its punch. It creates focus. It sharpens the emotional core of the offer. And it eliminates the fatal distractions that kill so many otherwise promising promotions.

When you’re writing copy that’s meant to sell, the worst thing you can do is try to cram in every possible selling point or, worse, try to speak to “everyone.” You end up with a flabby, wandering pitch that means something to no one.

Great copy always feels personal and urgent. That only happens when the message is designed with a single reader in mind. Not a demographic or persona, but a vivid, specific individual. Someone you know – or feel like you know – and whose desires, fears, and dreams you understand deeply. That imagined intimacy forces the copy to speak clearly, emotionally, and directly.

Likewise, the copy should be built around one dominant idea – an Emotionally Compelling Idea that powers the whole message. That’s the idea you must sell before you can sell the product. It should be simple enough to say in one sentence and strong enough to trigger an almost subconscious “yes” response.

And finally, you want one overwhelming promise – a core benefit the prospect can’t ignore. Yes, your product may have ten great features. But your reader can’t hold all that in his mind at once. So give him one thing to desire above all else. If your copy is persuasive, he’ll believe the rest will follow.

There’s one more element worth adding – because it’s often overlooked: Great copy makes its case one argument at a time. Not in parallel, but in sequence. It builds like a story, with each sentence supporting the last and preparing the reader for the next. That’s how you move a prospect logically and emotionally toward the sale – by stacking belief on belief, not by throwing everything against the wall and hoping something sticks.

The Rule of One does not mean you’re limited to only one claim or one piece of evidence. You can have supporting facts, stories, comparisons, demonstrations, and testimonials. But they must all serve one central thesis. And they must be deployed with narrative discipline: no tangents, no lists of disconnected claims, no copy that reads like a catalog.

Every paragraph should do one thing. Then the next paragraph does the next thing. And so on.

Great copy builds layer after layer of persuasive power around a single emotionally charged core. And it leads the reader along a straight, purposeful line – never in circles and never in scattershot bursts.

When you follow The Rule of One, you create copy that’s not just tighter and stronger – but dramatically more effective.

The Architecture of Persuasion 

Great copy doesn’t just talk – it moves. And it doesn’t move in circles or digressions. It moves forward, in a straight persuasive line, from curiosity to belief to action. That’s the job of persuasive structure.

You can call it the persuasive journey. Or the flow of emotional logic. I like to call it The Architecture of Persuasion. Because like a well-designed building, great copy has bones. There’s a frame holding it up, a foundation keeping it stable, and a sequence that determines how the reader moves through the message.

And when it’s done well, the reader doesn’t even notice the structure. He just keeps reading – and ends up buying.

The Persuasive Journey: A Proven Flow 

Many copywriters are taught the classic AIDA formula: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. It’s a useful shorthand. But in real-world direct response, the path is usually more layered. Here’s the structure I’ve seen in most of the best-performing promotions of the last 40 years:

1. The Hook 
You have seconds – sometimes less – to grab attention. So the opening must hook. What makes a hook work isn’t its format, but its effect. It could be a bold promise, a surprising fact, a provocative question, a compelling story, or even the offer itself. The key is that it stops the reader cold and compels him to keep going.

2. The Problem or Opportunity 
This is the emotional setup. What’s at stake? What’s the reader suffering from – or about to miss out on? This doesn’t always have to be framed as a problem. In many successful promotions, it’s an opportunity: a breakthrough, a shortcut, a new path to something the reader wants. The point is to stir emotion and create a sense of need or possibility.

3. The Emotionally Compelling Idea (the Insight) 
This is the “Aha” moment – the turning point. A new way of seeing the problem, or a hidden truth behind the opportunity. It often comes as a fresh articulation of something the reader has felt but never put into words. It lands with emotional and intellectual force. He thinks: “Yes! That’s exactly it.”

This is also where the core idea lives – the gravitational center of the entire promotion. It must be simple, striking, and worded in a way that makes it feel new, true, and deeply relevant.

4. The Solution or Offer 
Once the reader believes the problem or opportunity is real – and that the idea behind it makes sense – you present your product as the next logical step. If you began with a problem, this is the solution. If you began with an opportunity, this is how the reader takes advantage of it. In either case, the product must feel inevitable.

5. Proof 
Now you must substantiate your claims. This is where credibility is built. The types of proof vary:
* Factual Proof – data, studies, historical precedent
* Expert Proof– endorsements, credentials, authority quotes
* Social Proof – testimonials, user ratings, mass adoption
* Demonstrative Proof – show how it works; side-by-side comparisons

Each type of proof supports different kinds of claims. The best copy uses multiple types, layered and sequenced strategically.

6. Overcoming Objections 
Before you close, you must address the reader’s hesitations. What doubts remain? What silent objections are holding him back? Address them directly. Acknowledge them empathetically. And answer them persuasively.

This can be done through FAQs, guarantees, logic, story, or even tonal voice. The key is to make the reader feel understood and reassured.

7. The False Close 
Here, you recap everything the reader is about to get. You begin to wind down the pitch – but instead of asking for the order, you surprise the reader with something extra: a new benefit, a bonus, or a hidden feature.

Ideally, this extra has a perceived value equal to or greater than the price you’re about to ask. I call this the “liquidating benefit” because it liquidates the cost in the reader’s mind. It makes the offer feel irresistible.

8. The Final Close 
Now you ask for the order. But you do it carefully and completely. This section includes:
* A restatement of the core promise and key benefits
* A reminder of the liquidating bonus
* The guarantee (risk reversal)
* And a final reason to act now (urgency, scarcity, or time-sensitive reward)

And finally, of course, the call to action – plus (in a print ad or mailed offer) the order form itself.
Flow and Transitions 

The best copy feels frictionless. The reader never wonders “Why am I reading this?” or “Where is this going?” That smooth flow doesn’t happen by accident – it’s built into the structure.
Transitions are the glue. Each section should point to the next. Each paragraph should set up the one that follows. When the rhythm is right, the reader is carried forward.

Most of the time, when a piece of copy feels clunky or hard to follow, it’s not the writing – it’s the architecture.

Common Pitfalls 

* Presenting too much at once – parallel instead of sequential persuasion
* Asking for the sale too early
* Ignoring objections or assuming belief
* Overloading features without emotional framing

Structure Is Freedom 

Some writers fear that structure is formulaic. But the best copywriters know the opposite is true. Structure liberates your creativity. It gives you confidence that the message will land.

When you understand The Architecture of Persuasion, you stop writing aimlessly. You write with purpose. And your reader doesn’t just read – he responds.

The Interplay 

We’ve covered the three principles that separate good copy from great:

* An Emotionally Compelling Idea
* The Rule of One
* The Architecture of Persuasion

The Emotionally Compelling Idea is the engine that drives the copy. It’s not just any idea – it’s one that strikes the reader emotionally and instantly feels relevant. It makes him want to keep reading. This is where five additional elements come into play in whatever form best serves the piece.

1. A Well-Told Story 

Story brings everything to life. It humanizes the problem, dramatizes the benefit, and keeps the reader emotionally engaged. It often delivers the idea, demonstrates the solution, or even acts as the proof. A good story isn’t just entertainment – it’s structure in disguise.

2. A Powerful Secret 

Great copy often hinges on the promise of revelation. A secret gives your copy tension, intrigue, and emotional pull. It can take many forms: a hidden truth, a forgotten principle, a newly discovered method. The key is that it feels exclusive – like something the reader is lucky to be learning.

3. A Persuasive Promise 

A strong promise gives the reader something to want. It’s the expression of your core benefit – and it must be simple, bold, and believable. It focuses the copy and aligns with The Rule of One. A vague or weak promise kills persuasion. A clear and emotionally satisfying one can carry the entire piece.

4. Convincing Proof 

You must support every major claim with proof. But not all proof is created equal:
* Use factual proof when logic is needed.
* Use expert proof when authority matters.
* Use social proof when trust is lacking.
* Use demonstrative proof when the product’s advantage is visible.

Great copy selects the right kind of proof at the right moment – and layers it for effect.

5. An Authentic Voice 

Voice is what makes the reader stay. It’s the human quality in your copy – the tone, rhythm, and personality that makes it sound real. Voice builds trust, reinforces the message, and makes the emotional beats land. Without voice, even strong copy can feel flat or artificial.

These elements don’t live in separate compartments. They work together.

* The idea often arrives through a story.
* The secret is embedded in the idea.
* The promise is born from the idea and supported by proof.
* The voice binds it all into something fluid and believable.

The more fluently you can blend them, the more persuasive and powerful your copy becomes.

Final Thoughts: Practice, Iterate, Master

The best copywriters don’t write great copy by accident. They build it, using all of the above elements, again and again, until it becomes instinctive.

Study them. Practice them. Use them deliberately. You’ll stop writing decent copy, and start producing promotions that pull harder, convert better, and stand the test of time.

COVID Part Two: Why I Trusted the Vaccine – and Why I Changed My Mind 

When the COVID-19 vaccines were first announced, I was relieved. Grateful, even. After months of global panic, lockdowns, and conflicting expert opinions, the vaccines seemed to offer what we all desperately wanted: a way out.

I wasn’t a “vaccine enthusiast,” but I wasn’t skeptical either. Like most people, I grew up accepting that vaccines were part of what made modern medicine so successful. Polio, smallpox, measles – these had been deadly diseases until vaccines helped bring them under control or, in some cases, eradicate them. I got my flu shot most years. I had my childhood immunizations. And when COVID arrived, I watched with interest, not suspicion, as companies raced to develop a new kind of vaccine for a novel virus.

I followed the early news: the record-breaking speed of development, the glowing headlines about efficacy – “95% effective” said one press release after another. I also noticed how quickly the idea of “herd immunity” became associated with getting a shot. Protect yourself. Protect others. Return to normal. The appeal was hard to ignore.

By the time the vaccines were available to the public, I had made up my mind. I got my first shot in the spring of 2021 and followed up with the second dose a few weeks later. I didn’t do it because I was worried about dying from COVID. Based on what I had already read about the virus and my personal risk factors, I wasn’t especially concerned about that. I got the vaccine because I believed it was safe, effective, and the responsible thing to do.

And then – shortly after my second dose – I had a stroke.

It came without warning. No history of strokes, no family predisposition, no red flags. I had a blockage in my left carotid artery. I was lucky to survive. I was even luckier to recover most of my faculties. But as I lay in the hospital bed, the question kept looping through my mind: Could the vaccine have caused this?

Doctors were careful not to speculate. And I didn’t want to jump to conclusions. But I also couldn’t ignore the timeline. I had been healthy. Then, within days of my second dose, I wasn’t. That was the beginning of my doubts.

In the months that followed, I began to look more seriously into claims being made about the vaccines: that they stopped transmission, that they were “safe and effective” for nearly everyone, and that side effects were “exceedingly rare.”

I read everything I could get my hands on, including newspaper articles, magazine stories, precis from scientific journals, and reports from about a dozen doctors and scientists that were skeptical of the claims mentioned above.

I was reading six or eight pieces a day and filing under in the obvious categories: safety, effectiveness, government announcements and proclamations, and media coverage. Initially (and understandably) most of what I was reading were positive reports from the government, the legacy media, and the pharmaceutical industry. But as the weeks and months passed, I was reading some worrisome reports that contradicted the official narrative.

Increasingly, evidence was emerging that the vaccines were not nearly as effective as claimed at both reducing the chance of contracting COVID and reducing its infectiousness.

It soon became clear that the vaccines had become a political issue, with one side arguing that they were not only safe and effective but also necessary to keep the total count of deaths down.

And then I noticed a new tactic on the part of those that supported mass vaccinations. Dissenting voices were being shamed, silenced, and censored.

Caution was equated with selfishness. Uncertainty was rebranded as “misinformation.” And ordinary people – like me – who had experienced something unexpected or wanted to ask questions were treated as a problem to be managed rather than as participants in a shared search for truth.

This essay is not an anti-vaccine rant. It’s not a conspiracy manifesto. It’s also not a medical treatise. I’m not a virologist, and I don’t pretend to be one. I’m a writer. I try to pay attention. I try to be honest about what I see and what I learn. And what I’ve seen, since 2021, has forced me to reconsider nearly everything I thought I understood about modern medicine, public health, government messaging, and risk.

As you may recall, Part One of this monograph was about the virus itself – how early reporting, flawed assumptions, and poor communication distorted our understanding of the COVID-19 threat.

This second part will be about the vaccines. A fact-based look at what we were told about them, how that differed from what was being said, how this campaign of disinformation came about to validate them, and why.

It begins with my own story. But it doesn’t end there.

Chapter 1. The Promise: Safe, Effective, and Our Best Hope 

In late 2020 and early 2021, the message from government agencies, pharmaceutical companies, and the media was remarkably consistent: The COVID-19 vaccines were not just a medical breakthrough. They were a miracle.

The language was bold and reassuring. The vaccines, we were told, were “safe and effective.” They would protect individuals from contracting COVID-19. They would help prevent the spread of the virus to others. They would end the pandemic and allow society to return to normal life.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), declared in December 2020 that the vaccines were “extraordinarily effective.” President-elect Joe Biden promised that mass vaccination would lead to “a future that is brighter.” Leading media outlets ran headlines like:

* “Pfizer and Moderna Vaccines 95% Effective, Early Data Show” (New York Times, Nov. 2020)

* “Vaccines Are the Fastest Way Back to Normal” (Washington Post, Jan. 2021)

* “Experts Agree: Vaccines Will End the Pandemic” (CNN, Feb. 2021)

Public health campaigns emphasized urgency. Commercials and public service announcements encouraged people to get vaccinated not just for themselves but for their families, their communities, and the country. Slogans like Get Vaccinated: Do Your Part and One Shot Closer to Normal appeared on buses, billboards, and television screens.

The initial rollout strategy relied heavily on these ideas:

* Effectiveness: Clinical trials reported very high efficacy against symptomatic COVID-19 – about 95% for Pfizer-BioNTech and 94.1% for Moderna.

* Safety: Side effects were portrayed as minor and short-lived – sore arms, mild fever, fatigue.

* Social Responsibility: Getting vaccinated was framed as an act of altruism, protecting the vulnerable and hastening the end of lockdowns.

For many, including me, this messaging seemed credible. The vaccines had been reviewed by the FDA under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), which suggested a degree of rigorous evaluation. We were told that no steps had been skipped in the development and testing process, despite the unprecedented speed of production.

Operation Warp Speed, launched by the Trump administration, was praised for facilitating rapid development without compromising safety protocols. Scientists and regulators appeared together at press conferences, offering assurances that the vaccines were the product of decades of prior research into mRNA technology, not something invented overnight.

Moreover, the numbers appeared persuasive. Early data suggested that vaccinated individuals were far less likely to be hospitalized or die from COVID-19. That was powerful reassurance, especially for older adults and those with pre-existing conditions.

In this context, choosing to get vaccinated felt both prudent and civic-minded. It wasn’t a political decision – at least, not yet. It was simply common sense based on the best available evidence. The promise was clear:

* The vaccine would protect me.
* It would help protect others.
* It would speed the return to normal life.

And there was little public discussion – at least at first – about possible downsides. Serious adverse effects were said to be vanishingly rare. Long-term risks were dismissed with statements like “there is no biological reason to expect problems down the line.” In effect, the public was encouraged to think of the vaccines as if they were seatbelts: overwhelmingly safe, smart, and essential.

Few paused to ask whether the early clinical trials, which lasted only a few months, could truly reveal long-term outcomes.

Fewer still pointed out that Emergency Use Authorization, by its very nature, involved a gamble – a calculated risk based on incomplete data.

Looking back, it’s clear that much of the public’s trust – my trust – was built not just on scientific claims, but on the certainty with which those claims were delivered. The tone was emphatic, the confidence absolute.

There was little room for nuance.

No admission that we might discover problems later.

No acknowledgment that a novel technology (mRNA vaccines) being deployed at global scale for the first time might hold unknown risks.

Those doubts, where they existed, were kept far from the public conversation. Instead, the promise was repeated, louder and more frequently.

And for a time, I, like millions of others, believed it.

Chapter 2. The Cracks Begin to Show

For a while, it seemed like the vaccines were living up to the hype. Case numbers fell. Hospitalizations dropped. People started traveling again, gathering again, living again.

But by the summer of 2021, reports started trickling in that fully vaccinated people were still catching COVID. The term “breakthrough case” became part of the public vocabulary.

At first, these cases were described as rare exceptions – statistical outliers that didn’t undermine the overall promise.

Breakthrough infections are exceedingly rare,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said in an April 27, 2021 interview. “The vaccines are working.”

But the numbers told a different story.

In July 2021, an outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts, made headlines: Nearly three-quarters of the COVID cases linked to crowded July 4th festivities occurred among the fully vaccinated. A CDC report published on July 30, 2021 (MMWR Weekly) acknowledged the findings and quietly revised its internal guidance, noting that vaccinated individuals could transmit the virus.

The messaging shifted almost overnight.

Instead of promising prevention of infection, the authorities now emphasized protection against severe disease.

Dr. Fauci, in an interview on Meet the Press (Aug. 1, 2021), said: “The vaccines are doing what we intended them to do – to prevent severe disease, hospitalization, and death.”

That was a significant change. But rather than admit that public expectations had been set too high, officials largely framed the pivot as a natural evolution of science.

Critics noticed. Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Aug. 2, 2021:

“Public health officials owe the public an honest accounting of vaccine limitations. Pretending that breakthrough infections are insignificant does more harm than good.”

Meanwhile, concern over vaccine side effects was building.

On April 13, 2021, the CDC and FDA recommended a nationwide “pause” in the use of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine after reports of six cases of a rare blood-clotting disorder, cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST), among women aged 18 to 48.

Though six cases may seem small, they occurred among 6.8 million doses administered – enough to warrant alarm.

The pause was lifted after 10 days, but trust, once shaken, wasn’t easily repaired.

Even more concerning was the emerging data on myocarditis and pericarditis – inflammation of the heart muscle or surrounding tissue – especially among younger males following mRNA vaccination.

In June 2021, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) acknowledged the connection.

The CDC reported 1,226 cases of myocarditis or pericarditis among people aged 16 to 24 after mRNA vaccination – substantially higher than the expected background rate.

A joint statement by the CDC and HHS described the risk as “extremely rare,” but the agency updated its vaccine fact sheets to include warnings about myocarditis and pericarditis, particularly after the second dose.

Dr. Vinay Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist and professor at the University of California, San Francisco, was among early skeptics. He wrote in MedPage Today (June 28, 2021):

“Young men have a non-trivial risk of vaccine-associated myocarditis. The CDC should be clearer about that risk and let people make informed decisions.”

Similarly, the British Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization (JCVI) took a more cautious approach. In Sept. 2021, the JCVI advised against vaccinating healthy 12- to 15-year-olds with mRNA shots, citing the low risk of serious illness from COVID and the emerging myocarditis data.

It was a rare public break from the American approach.

Meanwhile, new studies complicated the case for durable vaccine protection.

A Qatar-based study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in Oct. 2021 showed that vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic infection from the Delta variant declined sharply over time, falling to as low as 20% by six months post-vaccination. Protection against severe disease remained high – but the notion of lasting immunity against infection was effectively debunked.

The Israeli Ministry of Health reported similar findings as early as July 2021: Among fully vaccinated individuals over 60, effectiveness against infection had dropped to 39%.

Israel, once a model for global vaccination success, responded by launching the world’s first booster campaign in August 2021 – just eight months after its initial vaccine rollout.

Yet here in the US, booster discussions initially faced resistance. Officials worried that talking about waning effectiveness might fuel vaccine hesitancy.

Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, warned:

“The perception is going to be that the vaccines are failing. They’re not failing. Protection against severe disease is holding.”

Maybe so.

But the public had been promised something closer to immunity – not merely an insurance policy against hospitalization.

All the while, questions about serious side effects persisted – not just myocarditis, but also reports of Guillain-Barré syndrome (linked to Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine), thrombocytopenia, and severe allergic reactions.

Authorities continued to insist that the benefits outweighed the risks, which for most people was probably true. But by now, it was impossible to deny:

* The vaccines didn’t reliably prevent infection.
* They didn’t reliably prevent transmission.
* They carried real risks – especially for specific demographic groups.

Still, the public messaging didn’t shift to match the evidence.

Mandates were introduced across workplaces, schools, and travel industries as if the original story still held up intact. Slogans like Get Vaccinated to Stop the Spread were still everywhere – long after it was clear that vaccinated individuals could and did spread the virus.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford epidemiologist and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, summarized the situation bluntly in a Newsweek op-ed (Nov. 2021):

“The public health establishment made promises it could not keep. And when reality diverged from the script, they chose to deny, downplay, and demonize those who raised legitimate concerns.”

None of this meant the vaccines were worthless. They may have saved many lives among the elderly, the obese, and those with serious underlying conditions – which was obvious to anyone following the studies (like me) from the very first few months!

But they weren’t even remotely the miracle we were sold in late 2020. And worse – it was now clear that they came with serious and possibly life-threatening risks.

For people like me, who trusted the original promise, it was becoming harder and harder to square what we had been told with what we were now seeing.

The cracks weren’t just surface flaws anymore.

They were running deep.

Chapter 3. The Shift: From Science to Politics 

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when COVID vaccination moved from being a scientific question to a political wedge. But sometime in the fall of 2021, it was pretty clear to me that vaccination status was no longer so much about public health, but about allegiance, morality, even virtue.

I admit, the early signals were not obvious – at least to those that were not habituated to following the story. When vaccines were first rolled out in Dec. 2020, the only dubious essays I was reading were coming from a handful of doctors and scientists I’d never heard of.

The CDC and other government agencies were holding fast to their original, pro-vaccine (and even pro-mandatory-vaccine) stance. And political leaders across the divide (except for Rand Paul) were united in encouraging people to get vaccinated.

Although it was clear to me that then-President Donald Trump was dubious about the severity of the COVID virus and the need for vaccines, he decided to get on board and put Operation Warp Speed into action, which did, indeed, fast-forward the production of the vaccines.

On Dec. 21, 2020, President-elect Joe Biden got his first jab of the vaccine on television, telling Americans, “There’s nothing to worry about.”

And Dr. Fauci, appearing alongside Biden, described the vaccines as “an historic scientific achievement.”

Notwithstanding my own doubts, I was hopeful that somehow this near unity on the necessity for widespread vaccination might transcend intense polarization that had already defined American life.

But that didn’t happen.

In March 2021, the Biden administration announced a national goal of vaccinating 70% of American adults by July 4.

Initially, the effort leaned on persuasion. But when it became clear that millions were hesitant – especially younger adults, minorities, and conservative rural populations – the tone began to harden.

Public health messaging started to frame vaccination not just as a smart choice, but as a moral obligation. People who expressed doubts were increasingly described as selfish, ignorant, or worse.

On July 16, 2021, President Biden announced that that “The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated.”

And Dr. Walensky magnified the sentiment with a statement that became a rallying call for pro-vaccine Americans:

“This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”

The phrase was everywhere – on television, in newspapers, in online forums.

But it wasn’t accurate.

As early as May 2021, a study out of Israel had shown that vaccinated individuals could still contract and transmit the virus – particularly as the Delta variant spread.

Later studies, including a UK report from Public Health England (Aug. 6, 2021), confirmed that while vaccination reduced the risk of severe illness, it did not fully prevent transmission.

In other words, the vaccinated could still catch COVID – and still spread it to others.

But by then, the political momentum had already shifted too far.

Vaccine mandates began rolling out across the country.

On Sept. 9, 2021, President Biden announced sweeping new requirements:

* All businesses with 100 or more employees were required to “mandate” vaccines or weekly testing.

* Federal employees and contractors must be vaccinated, with no testing option.

* Healthcare workers in facilities receiving Medicare or Medicaid funding had to be vaccinated.

“We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin,” Biden said in his announcement. “And your refusal has cost all of us.”

It was a remarkable moment.

The US government was now openly coercing private citizens to accept a medical intervention –or face loss of employment, income, and public standing.

At the same time, social pressure intensified.

Major corporations, universities, and sports leagues rushed to implement their own vaccine mandates. Airlines began requiring proof of vaccination for staff. Some cities, like New York and San Francisco, instituted vaccine passport systems for indoor dining, gyms, and theaters.

If you were unvaccinated, life became difficult – by design.

Mainstream media coverage reinforced the message. Unvaccinated individuals were routinely portrayed as reckless threats to public safety.

CNN anchor Don Lemon declared on Aug. 2, 2021: “Don’t have a vaccine? Don’t go to the hospital when you get sick.”

And MSNBC’s favorite birdbrain, Joy Reid, said on Aug. 23, 2021: “It’s time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks.”

The rhetoric expanded across most of the developed world. In Jan. 2022, French President Emmanuel Macron proudly stated, “I really want to piss off the unvaccinated.”

Critics of this approach warned that turning public health into a political weapon would backfire.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya wrote (Oct. 2021):

“Public health depends on trust. Once you politicize it, you lose that trust – and it’s very hard to get it back.”

And for a time, the strategy seemed to work. Vaccination rates rose. Corporations, government agencies, and universities all reported higher compliance after mandates were put in place.

But something deeper was happening too.

The definition of “vaccinated” began to shift.

Originally, it meant two doses of Pfizer or Moderna or one dose of Johnson & Johnson.

But by late 2021, as booster campaigns ramped up, officials suggested that “fully vaccinated” would soon mean three shots.

Dr. Fauci said in an interview on CNN (Nov. 21, 2021):

“I would not be surprised at all if ‘fully vaccinated’ will mean three doses.”

This moving target frustrated many who had gotten vaccinated in good faith – and alarmed those who had complied only under pressure.

Meanwhile, censorship of dissenting views accelerated.

Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube cracked down on vaccine-related “misinformation.”

Sometimes that meant removing obvious falsehoods. But often it meant suppressing legitimate debates – about vaccine mandates, side effects, natural immunity, and policy trade-offs.

For example:

* In July 2021, YouTube removed videos from Sen. Rand Paul questioning the effectiveness of cloth masks.

* In Oct. 2021, Twitter suspended the account of Dr. Robert Malone, one of the early pioneers of mRNA vaccine technology, after he raised concerns about risks associated with the COVID vaccines.

The message was clear: Disagreement, even from credentialed scientists and physicians, would not be tolerated.

I was listening to this and thinking, “Isn’t the core of science open inquiry? Asking questions – including unpopular ones – and then doing reliable tests to answer them?”

In the rush to promote vaccination, officials and media figures often portrayed any questioning of vaccine policy as anti-science, anti-vaccine, or even anti-American.

But the issues were far more nuanced.

By that time a sizeable contrarian conversation had begun among the skeptics and even among the moderates. They were asking what seemed to me very reasonable questions:

* How long does vaccine-induced immunity last?

* What are the real risks of myocarditis for young men?

* Should natural immunity from prior infection be considered equivalent to vaccination?

* How much should individual risk profiles shape vaccine recommendations?

But instead of treating them scientifically, the establishment was refuting them out of hand. These were conspiracy theories, they were saying.

And it wasn’t just establishment figures. It was now the argument of half the country. This critically important scientific issue had become almost entirely political. It was furthering the divide not just among scientists and doctors, but among ordinary Americans – even within friendship groups and families.

Chapter 4. Emerging Evidence: Safety Signals and Scientific Dissent 

While the public messaging around COVID vaccines continued to insist that they were not just safe and effective but essential, the evidence against it within the scientific and medical communities was piling up.

Myocarditis and Pericarditis 

The first major red flag was myocarditis.

By June 2021, the CDC had confirmed an elevated risk of myocarditis and pericarditis – especially among young males aged 16 to 24 – following the second dose of mRNA vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna).

The advisory panel’s June 23 meeting laid out the numbers plainly:

* Among males aged 12 to 17, there were 62.8 cases per million second doses – far higher than expected background rates.

* For males aged 18 to 24, the rate was slightly lower but still concerning: 50.5 cases per million.

These numbers came from CDC’s own Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and later confirmed through more detailed studies. Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, head of the CDC’s vaccine safety team, admitted that “There does appear to be a likely association of myocarditis with mRNA vaccination.”

Young men who developed chest pain, difficulty breathing, or palpitations were advised to seek immediate medical attention – but the official narrative was that incidents of myocarditis and pericarditis were rare and mild.

This was a lie. And every cardiologist knew it. Or should have known it. But 95% of the Health Industrial Complex and most journalists reporting on health hardly mentioned it. And when they did, they echoed the lie.

There were a few brave exceptions.

In the June 2021 issue of MedPage Today, Dr. Vinay Prasad wrote:

“Myocarditis is not always benign. There are long-term risks, including arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death. We need honest risk-benefit discussions, especially for low-risk groups like adolescents.”

In August that year, a study published in JAMA Cardiology found that myocarditis after mRNA vaccination had a median onset of just two to three days post-injection, with clinical presentations ranging from chest pain to heart failure symptoms. And that MRI scans often revealed lasting inflammation weeks after hospitalization.

Still, the CDC and FDA continued to publicly pronounce the vaccines as safe and effective. (For the most part, they still do today!)

Blood-Clotting Disorders 

Reports on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine (and AstraZeneca’s vaccine abroad) raised a different concern – blood-clotting disorders.

And then came credible reports of “cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST) combined with low platelet counts – a condition later labeled Vaccine-Induced Thrombotic Thrombocytopenia (VITT).

And a few weeks earlier, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) identified a similar pattern with the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Ultimately, the regulators acknowledged a causal link between adenoviral vector vaccines and clotting disorders – particularly in women under 50.

The risk was small – estimated around 7 cases per million vaccinations – but it wasn’t nonexistent.

By Dec. 2021, the CDC recommended that Americans opt for mRNA vaccines (Pfizer or Moderna) over Johnson & Johnson whenever possible – a quiet admission that not all vaccines carried the same safety profile.

VAERS Data and Underreporting Concerns 

Meanwhile, the US Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) – a database co-managed by the CDC and FDA – began accumulating an unprecedented number of negative reports on the after-effects of the vaccines.

In fact, by mid-2021, VAERS had received over 400,000 reports related to COVID vaccines, including deaths, hospitalizations, and serious adverse events. And by the end of 2021, that number would rise to more than 700,000.

Note: It’s important to understand that VAERS reports are not proof of causality. Anyone can submit a report. Some reports are incomplete or unverified. But historically, VAERS has been viewed as a useful early warning system for potential safety signals.

Critics such as Dr. Peter McCullough, an internist and cardiologist, argued that the sheer volume and nature of the reports should have triggered more formal investigations. In a presentation to the Texas Senate Health and Human Services Committee (June 27, 2021), McCullough stated:

“In the past, when we had fifty unexplained deaths following a vaccine, we would pull it off the market. Here, we have thousands.”

Note: The actual numbers of negative reports were probably much higher. That’s because VAERS had traditionally suffered from systematic underreporting.

A famous 2010 report commissioned by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and conducted by Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare found that “Fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported to VAERS.”

As the number of vaccine skeptics grew, so did efforts by the government, the Dems, and the Health Industrial Complex to discredit them as “conspiracy theorists.”

Some examples:

* Dr. Robert Malone, a pioneer of mRNA technology, was banned from Twitter in Dec. 2021 after questioning vaccine safety and efficacy.

* Dr. Jessica Rose, a Canadian immunologist who published analyses of VAERS data showing elevated risks of myocarditis, found her work removed from preprint servers and rejected by mainstream journals.

* The Great Barrington Declaration authors – Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford), Dr. Sunetra Gupta (Oxford), and Dr. Martin Kulldorff (Harvard) – who had earlier criticized lockdown policies, were increasingly lumped into the “misinformation” category despite impressive academic credentials.

Rather than engage with these critics in open debate, public health institutions – and many media outlets – chose to silence or sideline them.

Dr. Bhattacharya later described it this way in an interview with The Epoch Times (Feb. 2022): “They decided that it was better to manipulate public opinion than to have an honest scientific discussion.”

What’s Worse 

It was bad enough that the government and the mainstream media were selling a narrative that was largely untrue, but they then began promoting the completely absurd idea that the administration of vaccines should include large portions of the population for whom contracting the virus was no more dangerous than getting the flu.

By this time, it was already widely accepted that the virus was seriously dangerous to only two segments of the American population: very old people and obese people suffering from comorbidities (primarily diabetes).

I remember writing about this back then. There were already charts available that provided the lethality of the virus by age and sex. And it was clear that healthy people – even middle-aged people – had very little risk of getting very sick, and younger people (younger than 30) had virtually zero risk.

Yet the advice coming out of the CDC and NIH was for every age group, every health status.

By late 2021, the evidence pointed to a reality that was very different from the mainstream narrative.

We knew back then that the vaccines were responsible for elevated risks of myocarditis for young men and rare but nonetheless serious clotting disorders.

Furthermore, there was a growing suspicion among vaccine skeptic researchers that they were also responsible for many other heart-related illnesses and even something they were calling “turbo” cancers. (Cancers appearing at late stages among healthy young people.)

It was a binary of bad factors:

* A surveillance system showing an unprecedented volume of adverse event reports, and…

* The suppression of scientific dissent and open debate.

Here’s the thing that bothers me. It would have been very easy for government health officials to adjust their messaging. They could have acknowledged the complexities. They could have treated adults like adults – capable of weighing benefits and risks based on their individual situations.

Instead, they doubled down on their promotions and policies.

From The 7 Natural Laws of Wealth Building:

Gravity: The 6th Natural Law of Wealth Building 

Why Most Investors Fail to Match Market Averages 

In 1982, I got into the investment advice business by joining a start-up publisher in South Florida that specialized in B2B legal and business newsletters.

The founder – a former Wall Street broker and serial entrepreneur – soon decided to pivot into personal finance and investing. He asked me to lead the transition as CEO.

Over the next seven years, I helped grow that business from under $2 million in revenue to $135 million. We did it by serving a very specific group: mostly men, aged 55 to 75, recently retired or nearing retirement.

They weren’t satisfied with conservative returns. They wanted moonshots. Stock picks with 100% or even 500% potential. And they were willing to pay for any analyst who could make a compelling case.

We built an entire marketing machine around that appetite. Ads promising modest but realistic returns – say, 12% to 15% – barely moved the needle.

But ads that hinted at extraordinary ROIs (returns on investment)? They exploded.

At the time, I didn’t understand it. I couldn’t figure out why our subscribers were so obsessed with getting outsized returns.

After those seven years, I retired. I had amassed an eight-figure net worth and assumed I could coast on passive income from safe, stable investments.

I put two-thirds of my wealth into triple-A municipal bonds, with the rest in cash, gold, and a few blue-chip stocks.

I thought I was sitting pretty.

But that’s when I was brought back down to Earth.

A Note on the This Series of Essays

Over the last six months, I’ve been appropriating scientific concepts – principles that explain much about how the physical universe operates – and using them as metaphors for the equally complex, but no less universal, truths of building wealth. So far, I’ve covered Entropy, Inertia, Friction, and Momentum.

These aren’t literal laws. Rather, I am making creative comparisons to reveal underlying truths. Because when you set out to build wealth, you will face certain forces and resistances – just as you would in physics. And if you expect this, and you prepare for it, and learn how to work with or against it, you’ll have a much higher likelihood of success.

The natural law I am discussing today – Gravity – is the one I’ve taken the most liberty with. I’ve done so because I believe it illustrates a truth about wealth building that few people talk about – and even fewer understand.

Gravity: You Can Beat It Only Some of the Time 

There is a force in physics that everyone intuitively knows and experiences every day. But while we can easily observe and model its effects, and we can describe it with incredible precision, we do not understand where this force comes from, or why.

It’s called gravity.

In physics, gravity is the force that holds things in place. It keeps planets in orbit, brings objects back to Earth, and defines the shape of motion.

In markets and business, there’s a kind of gravity that pulls things down, too. Not the kind that degrades and ruins things, like entropy, but one that draws outcomes back to their natural level. A reversion to the mean.

Every investment, every business strategy, has a natural rate of return. You might beat it for a while – maybe even for a long while. But the longer you stay above that baseline, the stronger the pull to return. Gravity doesn’t punish. It just balances.

You invest in an asset that outperforms expectations.

At first, the returns are exciting, even validating. But over time, the outperformance fades. Margins compress. The market adjusts. The returns start moving back toward their historical average. Nothing went wrong. It’s just the way things tend to go.

In business, it’s the same. You discover a strategy that works unusually well. For a stretch, it feels like you’ve found something truly different. But competitors learn, conditions shift, and the easy gains give way to steadier, more ordinary, results. The strategy is still good. It’s just no longer extraordinary.

The mistake is thinking that means failure. It doesn’t. It means systems have a center. They have a range that they tend to operate within, and when you drift too far from that center – up or down – forces begin to pull you back.

Recognizing that can make you a better investor, a better entrepreneur. It helps you spot unsustainable trends. It keeps you from chasing momentum too far or holding onto fading winners too long. And maybe more importantly, it teaches you to appreciate steady returns, consistency, and durability.

Understanding gravity means accepting that you don’t need to defy it to succeed. You just need to work with it. Let it shape your expectations. Let it temper your reactions. And when you do find yourself rising, know when to enjoy the view – without assuming you’ll float there forever.

Because in a world governed by gravity, staying grounded is often the smartest investment of all.

But that is not what I wanted to believe when I hit a net worth of $10 million by the age of 40.

My investment account was divided equally between stocks and bonds. The long-term ROI on stocks back then was about 9.5%, and I was getting about 4.5% on my bonds.

That gave me a combined average of 7%, which meant that the annual ROI I could expect in dollars would be about $420,000.

That’s a lot of income, even in today’s dollars. After income taxes, it left me with about $250,000. And that was further reduced by the expenses associated with keeping my house: mortgage payments, utility bills, the costs of upkeep and maintenance, etc.

Which left me with about $200,000.

And although an income of $200,000 is (and was) more than enough to live on comfortably, the lifestyle my family and I had adopted over the years – including luxury cars, lavish vacations, and private schooling for the children – amounted to a yearly outflow of nearly twice that amount.

Which meant I had three choices. I could…

1. Go back to work and somehow earn the cash needed to bridge the gap.

2. Aggressively reduce spending, which would probably have meant moving into a smaller house.

3. Increase the average ROI I was getting from my retirement account from 7% to 15%.

The Eternal Struggle: Trying to Boost the ROI 

Fifteen percent didn’t seem crazy to me at the time. I figured I could safely increase my ROI by bringing up the percentage of stocks in my portfolio from 50% to 75%.

That was something. But the increase only improved my ROI from 7% to about 8.5%.

What else could I do?

I could replace my super-safe, triple-A rated, guaranteed municipal bonds when they matured with unsecured and lower-rated bonds that might get me another 1.5% yield, bringing the ROI on my bond portfolio from 4.5% to about 6%.

That brought the overall ROI I could expect to about 9.5%. The rest had to come from stocks.

At the time, my stock portfolio consisted of a handful of market-dominating companies like Coca Cola and IBM. To get higher ROIs, I traded about half of them in for a basket of growth stocks, which could conceivably bring my target ROI to about 12%.

From there, I had only one more tweak I could do to hit that 15% target: invest in speculative stocks whose risk profile was considerably higher but whose potential ROIs were those doubles and triples that some of the analysts I’d known in my previous career had been shooting for.

In doing all of this, I felt like I was acting wisely. I was in the unique position of being on personal terms with dozens of financial analysts, all with investment track records I could see. I wasn’t making blind decisions. I felt like I was acting rationally, not carefully. I was looking forward to learning more and making more, while watching the bottom line grow.

Of course, that’s not what happened.

What happened was that I slipped into a life that became increasingly about money – how much I had and how I should invest it to give me the best possible return. That didn’t feel like the retirement I was hoping for. It changed my life in seven not-so-great ways:

1. I was spending a lot of time looking at my stock and bond portfolios.

2. The more I looked at them, the more confusion I felt.

3. The more confusion I felt, the more questions I asked.

4. The more answers I got, the more second opinions I requested.

5. The more second opinions I received, the more contradictions in concept and in specific advice I got.

6. As these contradictions mounted, so did my feelings of anxiety and uncertainty.

7. The more I felt anxious and uncertain, the worse my decisions became – either acting impulsively and carelessly or freezing and failing to act at all.

I was experiencing the reality of what the investors that used to subscribe to our financial newsletters had experienced.

I was retired. I had no more active income. My lifestyle was entirely supported by passive income.

Legendary economist Paul Samuelson once said, “Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.”

I knew that quote. I just wasn’t living it.

The Right ROI for the Right Role 

ROI isn’t one-size-fits-all.

* Capital-dependent investors feel they need a high ROI because they’ve stopped earning.

* Entrepreneurs can rely more on active income and protect wealth with safer investments.

Chasing ROI without skill or discipline often reduces returns.

The real power move? Know whether you’re in a wealth-building or a wealth-preserving phase – and act accordingly.

My Escape Plan Back to Success 

I don’t remember how long I swam in this swamp of financial self-delusion. It was more than a year, but less than two.

When you have the habit of checking your net worth every single month, as I had been doing since I “decided to get rich” in 1982, there are only so many times you can look at your retirement nest egg and see how many of those eggs keep disappearing every time you peek in.

I could no longer avoid reality. I had made a fundamental mistake about managing assets like stocks and bonds.

It is difficult to grow wealth by investing in financial instruments such as stocks, commodities, and options. Very few pros can beat the markets at all. And when they can, it is for a limited time before gravity kicks in.

Protecting the wealth that you have accumulated with passive financial instruments is considerably easier. It takes less knowledge, less attention, and less worry. And the results are much more reliable.

During the years when my money was in safe bonds and stocks, my portfolio grew at pretty much the market rates I expected: 9% to 10% for my stocks, 4% to 5% for my bonds.

That was, I realized, a wealth preservation strategy. And it was one that worked for me.

But when I changed my goal to actively increasing my wealth by taking more risk with stocks and bonds, my financial life became a nervous mess and my net worth was going steadily south.

If I wanted to maximize wealth, I needed to focus my time and energy on financial activities that had bigger potential on the upside than stocks and bonds, and risk profiles that could be significantly reduced by acquiring knowledge and regaining control of my finances.

I had to earn an active income.

And that’s exactly what I did.

How I Relaunched My Wealth 

This realization, that I had to regain an active income, sparked the next major phase in my financial life – a 10-year period where I restructured my priorities and reallocated my time and resources towards a wealth-building plan that eschewed all the ideas and strategies that had failed me and replaced them with the ideas and strategies that had worked.

Always a fan of Pareto’s Principle, I devoted 80% of my attention, time, and resources to a combination of generating more active income and limiting unnecessary (or emotionally ungratifying) expenses.

That left me with 20% of my attention, time, and resources to focus on passive income – such as my retirement account.

The first and most obvious opportunity for creating more income was to deep-six my retirement fantasies and go back to work. But getting back into business wasn’t all I did. I also began saying “yes” to all sorts of financial opportunities that could generate income in proportion to how actively I took part in the day-to-day operations.

The best of these were in real estate. I began investing in income-producing (i.e., rent-generating) properties that I could not just own, but manage and develop too.

Thanks to a formula one of my brothers shared with me, I bought condos, single-family homes, and small apartment buildings that priced at no more than 100 times the monthly rents they could command.

This was, admittedly, a quick and crude way to value the properties. But it was also, I discovered, a very reliable way to make sure that I never greatly overpaid for any of them and that they always gave me a net-positive monthly cash flow.

I also invested in some small businesses – start-ups in financial publishing that were already producing an income. Which meant that, once again, I could base my investment in them on current income, rather than conjecture about their potential for growth.

So that was what I did that made a big difference in the rate at which my net worth grew.

I made another decision at the time that, in retrospect, was equally important: I decided to stop trying to beat the market with my passive investments.

This was big – so big that I should spend a bit of ink here trying to explain it.

Once my active, income-generating activities began to flow cash into my bank accounts every month, the time and effort I’d previously given to my passive investments all but disappeared. I mean, I was getting all this new cash coming in, and there was no reason to believe it would stop any time soon.

Moreover, the ROIs were significantly greater than what I was getting from the passive investing I was doing in stocks and bonds.

How did it make sense, I asked myself, to spend time stressing out on the hope of bringing my stock portfolio up to 20% a year, when shifting that money into an index fund would give me a long-term return of 10%, without risk of getting what other individual investors were getting – i.e., less than 5% a year?

Back to Gravity 

In the natural world, gravity determines so many things, from the arc at which the moon orbits the Earth, to the energy it takes to lift a plane off the tarmac, to the height a pole-vaulter can clear.

Going beyond these norms (i.e., defying gravity) is possible in the natural world. But it is difficult. It requires a considerable degree of additional energy input – often more than is rational to provide.

Likewise, in the world of wealth building, it’s possible to achieve more-than-average ROIs over short- and medium-term spans of time. But doing so requires an expenditure of intellectual energy toward finding a strategy that works and then researching and monitoring the individual investments made.

And that’s to say nothing of the amount of emotional energy it takes to stick to one’s strategy – even and especially when the investor’s feelings contradict his charts or signals.

And even if the investor is willing to put in all this extra time and energy doing the research and the monitoring, and even if he has the self-discipline to stay with his program despite his inclinations to do otherwise, history tells us that there is still no guarantee that he could beat the market – and especially beat it by a significant degree.

In fact, even professional investors – super-smart analysts that get paid enormous salaries and bonuses to manage stock portfolios for institutions or for individual investors – have a very tough time beating the markets. And when they do, it doesn’t last forever. Over the past 15 years, for example, less than 10% of active large-cap fund managers have outperformed the S&P 500.

Moreover, individual investors that try to mix and match advice from experts generally do considerably worse. On average, they see long-term ROIs that are a fraction of historical average ROIs.

Most ordinary wealth seekers don’t have the time, the willpower, or – to be frank – the emotional control to manage stock and bond investments successfully.

And many of them, despite the hubris of telling themselves they can, know in their hearts that they can’t.

So what they do is rely on professional investors to give them the buy and sell signals that determine the eventual ROI of their portfolios.

And although I was in the investment advice business for more than 40 years, and during that time worked with several extraordinary analysts that beat the market over time, I knew that many (perhaps most) of their readers and clients did not have the mental and emotional discipline to adhere to the strategies they had created.

Once I recognized what had happened with my own stock, bond, and cash-equivalency investing – i.e., that despite having direct access to some of the best analysts in the world I was still failing to achieve even historical averages for stocks, bonds and cash – I began to see the historic ROIs as almost insurmountable forces of financial gravity.

However, as mentioned above, there was one thing I was doing that was giving me ROIs that were greater than 10%: investing in start-ups and young businesses that (a) I understood from the inside-out and (b) could generate income from day one.

I recognized that an essential component of my success with these businesses was the result of being an active participant in them. I not only understood them well (because I worked in them), but because I was a direct investor, I had some degree of authority when it came to key product development, marketing, and sales decisions.

That changed my strategy for accumulating wealth.

From then on, I told myself, I would desist from trying to beat the markets when it came to stocks, bonds, and cash. I would learn to be happy with historic averages for each. I would put my energy towards the active, income-oriented businesses I understood and over which I had some control – which would give me the greatest chance of getting big overall ROIs, without taking on all sorts of risks that come with an attempt to defy gravity.

And that is what I tell people who ask me for advice: Put your stock, bond, and cash investments in funds designed to equal, not exceed, historical averages. Then look for higher ROIs by investing in businesses that you understand and can, to some degree, control.

Sources 

* Historical Stock Market Returns: The long-term average annual return for the S&P 500, including dividends, has been approximately 9.5% since its inception in 1926. Source: Morningstar, Ibbotson SBBI Yearbook.

* Bond Market Averages: US government and AAA-rated municipal bonds have historically returned between 4% and 5% annually. Source: US Federal Reserve historical data; Vanguard bond fund returns.

* Performance of Active Fund Managers: Over a 15-year period, 88% of active large-cap fund managers underperformed the S&P 500. Source: S&P Dow Jones Indices, SPIVA US Scorecard 2023.

* Paul Samuelson Quote: “Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.” Source: Quoted in The Money Masters by John Train (1980).

* Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule): This principle is commonly applied in business and personal finance to emphasize high-leverage actions. Source: Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle (1997).

* Investor Behavior and ROI: Studies by DALBAR and Morningstar have shown that individual investors underperform the market primarily due to poor timing decisions, emotional trading, and inconsistent strategy adherence. Source: DALBAR’s Annual Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behavior (QAIB), 2022.

COVID Part One: The Virus
Chapter 1. Even I Could Tell: The Early Numbers Made No Sense 

When the pandemic hit, I wasn’t trying to be a contrarian. I just started paying attention.

Very early on – March 2020 – we were hearing reports from the mainstream media that COVID’s fatality rate was insanely high. Some numbers were as high as 15%. Then 10%. Then 4%.

But even at 4%, it didn’t make sense. We already knew that many people had mild symptoms or none at all. Testing was limited, and the denominator – the total number of infected people – was being ignored. Just using basic logic and arithmetic, I estimated the real number was probably under 1%, and likely closer to 0.5%.

And as it turned out, I was right.

The Early Arithmetic Error: COVID’s Contagiousness vs. Apparent Lethality

In the earliest weeks of 2020, the messaging around COVID-19 was a whiplash mix of alarming figures and scientific uncertainty. I remember reading claims – some of them published in respected journals like The Lancet – that suggested a case fatality rate (CFR) of 10% or more. One study from late February 2020, based on hospitalized patients in Wuhan, reported a death rate of 15% to 28%, depending on how you parsed the data. At the time, I understood that these figures were derived from a limited, severely ill sample – but still, they were appearing in publications that I (and most people) considered reputable. And they were being picked up and echoed by the media with little clarification.

It added to the panic.

Meanwhile, a New England Journal of Medicine editorial around the same time referenced a CFR around 2%. But again, these numbers were being reported at the same time we were hearing that the virus was highly contagious – possibly more so than the seasonal flu.

I remember thinking: These two things can’t both be true. If COVID was as contagious as early modeling suggested, and if the symptomology included a large proportion of mild or asymptomatic cases (which we also knew from early Chinese reports), then millions of people were likely getting infected without being tested – or even knowing it. This meant the denominator in the lethality equation – the number of total infections – was massively understated.

At the time, it was extremely difficult to get tested. Appointments were limited, criteria were strict, and test capacity was low. Combine that with the fact that many people who experienced mild symptoms didn’t even try to get tested, and you had a textbook case of denominator bias.

The math didn’t add up. If you take the number of reported deaths and divide by only the small, sick, and tested portion of the infected population, you get a high fatality rate. But I believed, even then, that actual infections were likely undercounted by a factor of 10 or more.

So I began saying – on phone calls, in emails, in my own head – that COVID’s true infection fatality rate (IFR), the number of deaths divided by the total number of people infected, including the untested and asymptomatic, might end up being less than 0.5%.

And as it turned out, that projection wasn’t far off.

By mid-2021, large-scale seroprevalence studies began to confirm what many outside the panic chorus had suspected. According to the CDC’s estimates, the US infection fatality rate across all age groups was closer to 0.3% to 0.4%, and far lower for healthy individuals under 60.

A Nature review published in late 2022 surveyed IFR estimates from multiple countries and found that most fell between 0.1% and 0.7%, depending on age demographics and healthcare system strength. In many regions, the IFR was closer to that of a bad flu season than a civilization-threatening plague.

It was never about denying that COVID was serious – especially for the elderly and medically vulnerable – but the arithmetic from the start was flawed. We were warned that a wildfire was coming but told to expect a 10% casualty rate. Anyone willing to look past the headlines and apply basic logic could see that the real story was far more complex – and far less catastrophic – than the media made it out to be.

I reached out to a few independent doctors I knew – people I had worked with and respected for years. They were skeptical, too.

I kept digging. I stayed plugged in to alternative media, read summaries of every study I could find, including reports issued by the WHO and the CDC.

I was excited about what I was learning. But many of my friends and family members – well-educated, media-savvy people – did not take my discoveries well.

To them, anyone who questioned the “official” numbers was either a Trump supporter or a conspiracy theorist. I was neither. But nuance didn’t seem to matter.

If the epidemic came up in conversation, it would get heated. And as the months wore on and more evident impossibilities were being “reported” in the mainstream media, these people who liked to think of themselves as pro-science got worse. They abandoned fact-based discourse entirely and reverted to quoting sound bites.

Conversations were no longer strained. They were explosive. Family gatherings could be torn apart by the very mention of the word COVID.

Eventually, I gave up speaking to family and friends about it, which meant that I had to quietly endure hearing them parrot the most absurd government-issued statements.

I love these people. But I knew that if I shared what I was reading, what I was thinking, even what I was noticing with my own eyes, I’d be dismissed as “anti-science,” and the conversation would be over.

Instead, I wrote about it. I published an essay on my blog and got some good response from it from my readers. So I published another. Friends and family members who read them weren’t persuaded. They despaired of my crackpot mission. In person, we limited our conversations to other matters.

Over the next two and a half years, I posted very little about the pandemic on my blog, but I was researching it almost non-stop. Gradually, as I expected it would, the facts were seeping out and making their way into the mainstream discussion. Not in the form of “We were wrong. The conspiracy theorists were right.” More like, “Well, I never disputed that. That was never a question.” (Yeah, right.)

After all the work I had put into it, I wanted to share the research, the facts, the logic – and, yes, the skepticism – that had guided me through those years.

But I kept quiet in public. I wasn’t looking to argue. I didn’t want the eye rolls, the silence, the condescension. So I kept most of what I was discovering to myself or shared it quietly with like-minded people. Working on this monograph became the deeper expression of everything I couldn’t say out loud.

And here’s the thing: I always knew that, eventually, the truth would come out. But I also knew that when that day came, no one would remember where they stood back in 2020. Or what they said. Or what they accused me of.

That, too, is why I’m writing this. To remember. To document. To say to all those who bought all the lies so easily – and with such obvious disdain for those who questioned them – “I told you so.” Not because I’m angry (I’m no longer angry), but because the truth matters.

 Chapter 2. The Initial Panic 

Uncertainty and worry were rising. News clips from China showed people collapsing in the streets, hospital workers in hazmat suits, entire cities welded shut from the outside. Then Italy got hit hard. Northern hospitals were overwhelmed. ICUs filled up. Patients were being treated in hallways. The same footage played again and again on the news.

The implication was clear: This was coming for all of us.

Governments scrambled. So did public health bureaucracies. But the media? They did what they do best. They turned up the volume.

I remember watching the numbers climb on the Johns Hopkins dashboard. Red dots spreading across continents like a digital plague. Each day brought a new surge – cases, deaths, projections – presented as settled facts. But most of it wasn’t hard science. It was guesswork. Sometimes educated guesswork, but still far from definitive.

Early modeling from Imperial College London became the foundation for global policy. Their March 2020 report warned of over 500,000 deaths in the UK and 2.2 million in the US without strict intervention. Governments used that report to justify lockdowns, school closures, and sweeping restrictions. But the assumptions were based on high fatality estimates and models that quickly turned out to be flawed.

And yet, fear took hold. Once it did, it was hard to shake.

Even then, if you were paying attention, there were signs the virus wasn’t as deadly as advertised.

Cruise ships gave us early test cases. The Diamond Princess, for example, had more than 3,700 passengers and crew, many of them elderly. After a full outbreak, 712 people tested positive and 14 died – a fatality rate of just under 2%. And that was before any standardized treatment. Still, instead of updating the narrative, officials and the media pushed the same dire warnings.

That’s when I started to question what we were being told.

It wasn’t just the science that was unsettled. It was the messaging. The tone. The posture. The insistence. Institutions seemed to be aligning around a single story. Whether by coordination or inertia, it didn’t matter. The effect was the same: Fear took center stage.

And that fear became the filter through which everything else would be seen – data, policies, even other people. Once fear became the driver, reason moved to the back seat.

Panic Sells 

February 28, 2020 – The New York Times: “Coronavirus Could Kill Millions If Spread in US”

March 16, 2020 – Imperial College London: Model predicts 2.2 million US deaths without intervention.

April 7, 2020 – Dr. Deborah Birx: “If someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death.”

March/April 2020: Toilet paper vanishes from shelves – not from supply breakdowns, but from fear-fueled hoarding.

Fear wasn’t incidental. It was the strategy. And it worked.

Chapter 3: Testing and the Case Count Game 

From the beginning, I never doubted that COVID-19 was highly contagious. It spread quickly and efficiently through households, workplaces, and communities. But to understand the real-world implications of that contagiousness – and how it shaped our response – we have to put it in context.

COVID-19’s basic reproduction number, or R0 (pronounced “R naught”), measures how many people, on average, an infected person will spread the virus to. For the original SARS-CoV-2 strain, early estimates placed the R0 between 2 and 3. That meant each infected person would, on average, transmit the virus to two or three others. Seasonal influenza, by contrast, has an R0 between 1.1 and 1.8. So, yes – COVID-19 was significantly more contagious than the flu, roughly twice as transmissible in its original form.

But that doesn’t make it uniquely contagious. For comparison, measles has an R0 between 12 and 18. Chickenpox ranges from 10 to 12. Norovirus and rotavirus (common stomach bugs) can also spread with extreme speed in enclosed spaces. So while COVID-19 clearly warranted caution, it wasn’t outside the boundaries of what we’d seen before.

And yet it was presented as if it were.

Testing, Visibility, and the Numbers Game 

One of the most significant differences between COVID-19 and influenza wasn’t the virus itself, but the scale of testing. Prior to 2020, influenza testing in the United States was limited. Most people with flu-like symptoms weren’t tested unless they were at high risk or required hospitalization. According to the CDC, during the entire 2020–2021 flu season, US clinical laboratories tested around 818,939 specimens for influenza.

By contrast, in the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic alone, more than 1 million COVID-19 tests had already been administered in the US. And that number exploded over time. According to the COVID Tracking Project, by mid-2021 the United States was performing an average of 1.5 to 2 million tests per day. In total, more than 900 million tests were performed in the US over the course of the pandemic.

That disparity – several orders of magnitude – is key to understanding why COVID case numbers appeared so shockingly high. If you test a thousand people and find 10 positives, you get one kind of data. If you test a hundred million people, even with the same infection rate, you’ll get a number that looks overwhelming. The volume changes the scale.

The public was told that this mass testing was a crucial part of controlling the pandemic. And on one level, that made sense. More testing meant better visibility into where outbreaks were happening. It helped allocate resources, protect vulnerable populations, and inform decision-making. But it also created a major distortion in public perception.

When you test tens of millions more people than you ever did for flu – and include people with no symptoms or known exposures – you will detect far more infections. This doesn’t necessarily mean the virus is more prevalent or more dangerous. It just means you’re looking harder.

If we had conducted flu testing on the same scale as COVID-19, especially with the same definition of a “case,” it’s likely the seasonal flu would have appeared far more widespread and serious than we’ve ever thought.

The Case Count Conundrum 

That brings us to the term “case.”

In pre-COVID medicine, a “case” meant someone who was sick – someone with symptoms. If a person had strep throat or pneumonia or the flu, they were counted as a case when they sought care and tested positive. The concept of a “case” was synonymous with illness.

During COVID, that definition changed. A “case” became any positive PCR test, regardless of symptoms, severity, or context. You could be asymptomatic. You could be post-infectious. You could be recovering. You could test positive weeks after your immune system had already done its job. None of that mattered. If your swab lit up in the lab, you were a case.

This was a fundamental shift in the way disease was tracked and understood – and the consequences were enormous. Daily “case counts” became the lead story on every news broadcast. Public dashboards tracked these numbers like stock tickers. Politicians used them to make policy decisions. And the public absorbed them as a real-time barometer of danger.

But those numbers didn’t distinguish between a child who briefly carried the virus without symptoms and an elderly patient on a ventilator. They were all counted the same.

Sensitivity and the PCR Problem 

Then there’s the issue of testing sensitivity. PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests are designed to detect even the smallest fragments of viral RNA. To do that, they run amplification cycles – each cycle doubling the genetic material in the sample. The higher the number of cycles needed to detect a signal, the lower the amount of virus in the sample.

Many COVID-19 PCR tests were run at 37 to 40 cycles. At those levels, the tests can detect minute traces of non-viable viral particles – debris from past infections that pose no threat of transmission. Dr. Anthony Fauci, in a July 2020 interview, acknowledged that a cycle threshold above 35 is likely to be detecting “dead nucleotides” – viral remnants that do not indicate live, infectious virus.

Despite this, positive tests at those high cycle thresholds were still being counted as new cases. They inflated the numbers. And since the public was never told what the cycle threshold was – or what it meant – they assumed each “case” was a sick, contagious person.

The CDC and FDA later issued guidance to reduce the amplification cycles for diagnostic relevance. But that guidance came long after the narrative had been set. And even then, many labs and hospitals continued using the higher cycle thresholds.

The Psychology of Numbers 

One of the things I noticed early in the pandemic was how the daily drumbeat of “cases” created a psychological environment of crisis. It wasn’t just about raw numbers. It was about momentum. A sense that things were spiraling.

You’d hear: “Yesterday, we had 50,000 new cases. Today, it’s 70,000. Tomorrow it could be 100,000.” That kind of framing creates a mental model of exponential threat. And it drives behavior – emotional, political, economic.

But these numbers were being generated not by hospitalizations or deaths, but by the sheer scale of testing. You could double the number of tests and double the number of positive results, even if the actual risk of severe illness hadn’t changed at all.

In hindsight, it’s clear that some public health officials encouraged this momentum deliberately. Not necessarily out of malice, but out of strategy. There was a belief, sometimes stated outright, that fear was necessary to drive compliance. If the public wasn’t scared, they wouldn’t wear masks, or stay home, or agree to shut schools.

Government Messaging and the Role of Fauci

Dr. Fauci became the face of the government’s COVID response. He was everywhere – TV interviews, press briefings, podcasts. And to his credit, he often tried to be measured. But the messaging from the institutions he led wasn’t always so balanced.

The NIH, CDC, and FDA all leaned heavily on case counts in their public communications. They emphasized rising numbers without explaining the role of testing scale or test sensitivity. There was little distinction made between being infected and being sick. That subtlety got lost in the charts.

Why didn’t public health agencies emphasize hospitalization and mortality rates more clearly? Why didn’t they communicate that many “cases” were mild or asymptomatic?

One answer is bureaucratic inertia. Once a metric becomes the focus, it tends to stay that way. But another possibility is strategic: Fear worked. It increased compliance. It made people take the virus seriously. And from a public health perspective, that was the priority.

But that choice came at a cost: Clarity. Trust. Long-term credibility.

When people eventually learned that many “cases” were not serious – or not even symptomatic – they felt misled. That erosion of trust continues to this day.

A Manufactured Sense of Scale 

Looking back, it’s clear that the enormous COVID case numbers were partly a product of the virus’s contagiousness – but also a function of how we chose to count. We tested more people, more often, with more sensitive tools. We redefined what counted as a “case.” We erased distinctions that used to matter: symptomatic vs. asymptomatic, contagious vs. post-infectious, serious vs. mild.

These choices made COVID look – and feel – unprecedented. But much of what was new wasn’t the virus. It was the system we used to track it.

That system wasn’t neutral. It created a narrative. It created a climate. And in doing so, it changed everything – from how we responded to how we remember.

Chapter 4. Lockdowns 

“Two weeks to flatten the curve.”

That phrase became the rallying cry of early 2020. We were told that by staying home for a couple of weeks, we could slow the spread, preserve hospital capacity, and buy time for the system to prepare. It sounded reasonable. And for the most part, people complied.

But two weeks turned into months. Then into an indefinite suspension of normal life.

Schools were closed. Businesses shuttered. Playgrounds were taped off. Weddings were canceled. Funerals were restricted. Church services went online. And in some states, even walking on the beach was forbidden.

There was never a clearly defined exit plan. Instead, there were shifting metrics and vague targets. First it was hospital capacity. Then it was positivity rates. Then it was daily case counts. And each time one benchmark was reached, another was introduced. The goalposts moved, but the restrictions stayed.

In theory, lockdowns were supposed to be targeted and temporary. In practice, they became blunt instruments – broad policies imposed at the state or national level, often with little regard for local conditions or real-time risk assessments. And very little public discussion was allowed about the cost.

And the costs were massive.

Mental health deteriorated across all age groups. According to CDC data, symptoms of anxiety and depression tripled among US adults during the pandemic. Domestic violence incidents rose. Drug overdoses spiked. Small businesses – especially restaurants, salons, and retail shops – were devastated, while big-box stores and online giants consolidated market share. Students lost critical instructional time. Seniors were isolated and, in some cases, died alone. The social and economic fabric of everyday life frayed.

I remember reading the justifications in real time. Governors and public health officials repeatedly cited “the science” as their guiding star. But more often than not, they were selectively referencing data or models that supported continued restrictions. And when friends and family members parroted the talking points – “lockdowns save lives,” “it’s just temporary,” “we can’t be too careful” – I found myself wondering if anyone was actually looking at the numbers.

Because the numbers didn’t justify the scale of the lockdowns.

Florida, which ended its lockdown early and resisted future closures, saw health outcomes that were no worse – and often better – than places like California and New York, which imposed some of the longest and strictest restrictions in the country. Sweden, which never instituted a full lockdown, recorded COVID death rates comparable to or lower than many European countries that did. And yet, these outcomes were often ignored or downplayed.

The lockdown debate quickly became moralized. Questioning the efficacy or cost of restrictions was framed as selfish, anti-science, or even dangerous. It was no longer about what worked – it was about what was acceptable to say.

Meanwhile, some of the rules defied basic logic. Liquor stores stayed open while schools remained closed. Casinos reopened before churches. Big-box retailers packed with shoppers were deemed safer than playgrounds or park benches. Protests for approved causes were allowed. Outdoor gatherings with family were not.

The media played its part. Case counts were presented without context. Death tolls scrolled across the bottom of screens. There was little appetite for nuance. Anyone who raised questions was labeled a conspiracy theorist or an irresponsible contrarian. The psychological effect was cumulative: Fear became habitual, and compliance became normalized.

Policymakers showed little interest in cost-benefit analysis. Economic losses were assumed to be recoverable. Psychological distress was labeled an unfortunate side effect. School closures were justified indefinitely despite mounting evidence of harm to students. Even as studies began to show that the most aggressive lockdowns didn’t correlate with significantly better health outcomes, many leaders chose to double down rather than pivot.

And then came the hypocrisy.

Officials who imposed the strictest rules were often the first to break them. California’s governor attended a private indoor dinner. The mayor of Chicago got a haircut after banning them for everyone else. British officials, including the prime minister, attended parties during national lockdowns. These incidents weren’t just bad optics. They undermined the legitimacy of the restrictions themselves. If those in charge didn’t take the rules seriously, why should anyone else?

Still, millions complied. Not everyone, of course, but enough to give the appearance of consensus. And once the norms were established – masking, distancing, stay-at-home orders – it became socially risky to question them. It didn’t take a police state. It just took social pressure and a culture of conformity.

In retrospect, lockdowns began to look less like emergency public health measures and more like an experiment in behavioral compliance. The tradeoff wasn’t just economic. It was civic. People gave up their autonomy in exchange for the promise of protection.

But for some of us, the longer it went on, the more it felt like a test – of independence, of critical thinking, of how far people would go to avoid being seen as selfish.

And the policies left scars. Many students are still catching up from months – or years – of interrupted education. Mental health systems are overwhelmed. Small businesses haven’t come back. Entire industries have changed. And low-income families, elderly residents, and people with disabilities paid the steepest price.

Even more troubling is what remains. The legal frameworks that allowed emergency powers to bypass normal checks and balances are still on the books. The belief that government can – and should – suspend basic freedoms during a crisis has become embedded in the public imagination.

Some politicians and pundits have since admitted that the most aggressive lockdown policies weren’t really about stopping the virus. They were about “showing leadership,” “sending a message,” and “signaling seriousness.” The optics took priority over the evidence. It was policy as performance.

Parents were left in impossible situations. Work or care for your kids? Trust the officials or go your own way? Voice your concerns or stay silent? People were caught between public messaging and private intuition – and punished for not picking the right side.

What’s most alarming, in hindsight, was the silence. Leaders rarely admitted mistakes. They rarely updated guidance in light of new evidence. Instead, the narrative was maintained, and dissent was treated as deviant.

In a supposedly open society, the space for genuine debate disappeared. Experts who questioned the wisdom of lockdowns – many of them credentialed epidemiologists – were smeared, deplatformed, or ignored. The public heard from one kind of expert. And that’s the story that stuck.

Meanwhile, the long-term damage mounted. And it’s still mounting. Learning loss, mental health deterioration, business closures, civic distrust. The ripple effects continue – and they will for years.

Lockdowns weren’t just a response to a virus. They were a stress test for democratic norms. And it’s not clear how well we passed.

Chapter 5. Early Treatments and the War on Cheap Drugs 

From the beginning, it was clear that finding effective treatments for COVID-19 would be critical. The virus was here, it was spreading, and people were getting sick. Most of us understood that we needed options – fast. Anything that could reduce the severity of illness or keep people out of the hospital wasn’t just nice to have – it was urgent.

But instead of pursuing every promising lead, the medical establishment – backed by public health agencies and echoed by the media – quickly narrowed the field. The message was clear: Wait for the vaccine.

Now, I understand the appeal of a vaccine. It offered the promise of a long-term solution. But the idea that we should put all our eggs in that one basket – and ignore or even suppress every other possibility in the meantime – never made sense to me.

Safe, affordable medications like hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and ivermectin had long histories of use. HCQ was widely prescribed for malaria and autoimmune diseases. Ivermectin had been used globally to treat parasitic infections. Both drugs were familiar to doctors and known to be safe when used properly. So when some clinicians started reporting success using them for early-stage COVID – often alongside zinc, vitamin D, and other supportive therapies – I thought, “Why not give it a closer look?”

Instead, those doctors were met with suspicion and, in many cases, outright hostility. Some were mocked. Others were censored or threatened with losing their licenses. Platforms like YouTube and Twitter banned discussions about these treatments. It wasn’t just caution. It felt like a coordinated effort to shut down the conversation.

I watched it unfold in disbelief. These weren’t quacks. Many of the doctors advocating for early treatment were well-respected, with decades of experience. They weren’t saying they had a magic bullet. They were saying, “This seems to be helping our patients – can we talk about it?” And for that, they were labeled dangerous.

Dr. Pierre Kory and the FLCCC (Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance) come to mind. I remember watching his testimony before the US Senate in December 2020. He laid out the case for ivermectin, citing clinical results and published data. The video went viral – and then it vanished. YouTube removed it. No rebuttal. No counterargument. Just deleted.

Later, when Joe Rogan said he used ivermectin after testing positive, the media pounced. “Horse dewormer,” they said. Never mind that ivermectin is an FDA-approved drug for humans and had won the Nobel Prize. Never mind that Rogan’s approach seemed to work. The important thing, apparently, was making him look ridiculous.

In my opinion, a big part of this backlash had nothing to do with science. It was political. Trump had mentioned HCQ early in the pandemic. He wasn’t nuanced about it – but once he said it, the issue was poisoned. Suddenly, supporting or even investigating these treatments meant you were “on Trump’s side.” That’s all it took.

What followed felt like a nationwide effort to discredit – not just the drugs, but anyone who talked about them. Social media platforms cracked down. Major outlets ran headlines mocking “Trump’s miracle cure.” Friends of mine who relied on mainstream media still believe that HCQ and ivermectin are essentially snake oil. They think people were drinking bleach. And it’s not their fault. That’s what they were told.

The tragedy is, the science wasn’t on the side of the smear campaigns. Both drugs had safety profiles established over decades. There were studies – some flawed, yes, but others that showed promise. More importantly, there were doctors on the ground saying they were seeing real results.

But instead of debating the evidence, the conversation turned into a culture war. You were either “pro-science” or “pro-conspiracy.” There was no middle ground.

One reason for this, I’ve come to believe, is the way Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) laws work. In order to issue an EUA for a vaccine, there can’t be any “adequate, approved, and available” alternative treatments. So acknowledging that HCQ or ivermectin might work – even a little – could have complicated the regulatory path for the vaccines. And that was a risk no one seemed willing to take.

There was also the optics. Leaders needed to project strength and competence. They needed a clear solution to point toward. Vaccines were simple. Scalable. Easy to market. A patchwork of early treatment protocols? Not so much.

And then, of course, there’s the simple momentum of narrative. Once the media framed these treatments as fringe, it became difficult to walk that back. Doing so would require admitting they’d been wrong – or worse, that they’d misled the public. That kind of institutional humility is rare.

To be clear, I’m not saying ivermectin or HCQ were miracle cures. Not every study was positive. Some trials were small or poorly designed. But some weren’t. Some showed real benefit. And at the very least, these treatments deserved a fair hearing.

Instead, we got silence, smears, and suppression. Many doctors fell in line. Others stayed quiet, afraid of losing their jobs or licenses. A few spoke out – and paid the price.

Looking back, the war on early treatment wasn’t about keeping people safe. It was about maintaining control over the narrative. If people could manage COVID at home, the fear would drop. The urgency for mass vaccination might slow. The sense of emergency might fade. That couldn’t happen.

So the system turned its fire not on the virus, but on the people trying to treat it differently.

And the cost? We’ll never know for sure. But it’s hard not to believe that lives were lost – not just to COVID, but to the suppression of ideas that could have helped.

Chapter 6. Masks, Distancing, and Behavioral Control 

In early 2020, public health officials gave conflicting advice about masks. Dr. Anthony Fauci and then US Surgeon General Jerome Adams both advised against the public wearing them. The World Health Organization echoed that message. At the time, the rationale given was that masks should be reserved for health workers and that they offered limited protection to the general public.

Then the message changed. Virtually overnight, masks went from being discouraged to mandatory. Fauci explained the shift by saying the original advice was intended to preserve supplies for hospitals. Whether that’s true or not, the public takeaway was simple: We were being asked to believe one thing, then the opposite, with very little acknowledgment that the original message had been wrong.

And here’s the part that bothered me most: Fauci later admitted that his initial guidance was strategic. He didn’t say that the science changed. He said that the message was tailored to preserve masks for frontline workers. In other words, it was a lie. A purposeful one. And once someone admits they lied to you for strategic reasons, why would you believe the next thing they say? This became, in my view, a pattern throughout the pandemic. Many of the government’s pronouncements – whether about masks, distancing, school closures, or early treatment – turned out not just to be wrong, but deliberately misleading. Officials admitted they said things not because they were true, but because they wanted to influence public behavior.

They may have believed they were lying for the greater good. Or maybe not. Either way, they were lying. And they admitted it.

Soon, cloth masks became required in nearly every public setting, even though the data supporting their effectiveness was limited. And as time went on, the narrative hardened. Masks weren’t just helpful – they were essential. If you doubted their usefulness, you were accused of being anti-science.

But there were reasons to doubt. Even the CDC and WHO eventually admitted that cloth masks, especially the kind most people were using – homemade, loose-fitting, poorly maintained – offered minimal protection. A 2020 CDC journal article reviewing existing studies found that cloth masks were far less effective than medical-grade masks, and that many performed no better than wearing nothing at all.

A 2023 Cochrane Review – widely regarded as one of the gold standards of evidence synthesis in medicine – looked at randomized controlled trials (RCTs) on masking. The conclusion? There was little to no evidence that wearing masks, especially in community settings, made a meaningful difference in the spread of respiratory viruses like COVID-19.

In other words, the gold-standard scientific data did not support the sweeping mask mandates that were imposed across the country.

That didn’t stop the mandates. And it didn’t stop the social pressure. Masks quickly took on symbolic meaning. Wearing one meant you were a good person. Not wearing one meant you were reckless, selfish, or “one of those Trump people.”

And yes, the division fell along political lines. If you were skeptical of masks, you were viewed as anti-Biden, pro-Trump, or worse. In Biden’s own words during the 2020 campaign: “Be a patriot – wear a mask.” The implication was clear: Patriots mask up. Rebels don’t.

But COVID isn’t a political virus. It doesn’t care who you voted for. Still, I saw the effects firsthand. Friends refused to enter rooms where someone was unmasked. Others wore masks jogging alone, outdoors. I saw parents mask their toddlers at the beach. These weren’t based on any actual science. They were fear responses – or worse, rituals of obedience.

Let’s be clear: Respiratory viruses like SARS-CoV-2 are transmitted primarily through aerosols – tiny particles that linger in the air. While N95 masks, when properly fitted and used consistently, can filter these particles to some extent, cloth masks and even surgical masks fall short. A 2021 MIT study concluded that in poorly ventilated spaces, six feet of distance and a cloth mask would not protect you from airborne transmission over time.

That six-foot rule? It turns out it wasn’t based on solid evidence either. Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former FDA Commissioner, later admitted the six-foot guideline was “a perfect example of the lack of rigor” behind many COVID-era policies. “Nobody knows where it came from,” he said. Yet schools rearranged desks, stores marked floors, and people were shamed for standing too close – all to maintain a distance that may have had little practical benefit.

Still, the mandates continued. Some airlines removed families from flights because their toddlers wouldn’t wear masks. Restaurants asked patrons to “mask between bites.” In cities like New York and Los Angeles, people were fined for not wearing masks in outdoor spaces – despite very limited evidence of outdoor transmission.

Meanwhile, many of the leaders pushing these rules broke them openly. California Governor Gavin Newsom dined indoors, maskless, at the French Laundry. Washington, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser went maskless at a wedding hours after reinstating a mandate. These incidents sent a message: The rules are for you, not for us.

That hypocrisy wasn’t lost on people. But instead of fostering skepticism of the rules, it often just made people double down on their own adherence. I saw people cling even harder to their rituals – masks on while driving alone, pulling them up between sips of coffee, avoiding eye contact with the unmasked in line.

And the social tensions were real. According to FAA reports, more than 6,000 incidents of unruly passengers were reported in 2021 alone, and roughly 72% of them were related to mask disputes. Passengers were removed from planes for not masking toddlers. Flights were delayed because of fights over face coverings. Some of these incidents turned violent. There were altercations on buses, in grocery stores, even in elevators. People threw punches, screamed at strangers, called the police over bare faces.

The Washington Post documented more than 200 reports of confrontations in retail and restaurant settings in just the first year of the pandemic – many of them involving threats, physical violence, or arrests. And for what? A mask that, in most cases, offered limited to no protection in real-world settings.

It didn’t stop at airports. Across the country, stores posted signs warning patrons to mask up or leave. Police were called on unmasked customers. Videos went viral of shouting matches in grocery stores, of employees being berated, of neighbors reporting each other to hotlines set up for “COVID violations.” It created a culture of surveillance and suspicion.

And one of the strangest and most harmful chapters was the masking of children. For years, we’ve known that children are far less vulnerable to severe illness from respiratory viruses like COVID-19. Studies published in journals like Pediatrics and JAMA confirmed again and again that children, especially those under 10, were both less likely to transmit and far less likely to suffer from the disease.

And yet, toddlers were forced to mask up in schools and daycare centers. In some places, children were expected to wear masks for seven or eight hours a day – even during recess. There was no consistent logic. States like Florida never imposed child mask mandates and saw no worse outcomes than those that did. In fact, CDC data showed that infection trends in schools did not correlate clearly with mask rules at all.

Doctors, including those at UCSF and Stanford, publicly questioned the wisdom of masking young children. “The benefits are minimal, the harms are real,” said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. “We are teaching children to fear one another, and for no good reason.”

It reminded me of a term from psychology: learned helplessness. When people are subjected to inconsistent, confusing, or irrational rules long enough, they stop asking questions. They adapt. They internalize the fear. They comply.

By 2021, there were dozens of studies showing that school masking – especially for young children – had limited benefit. European countries like Sweden never mandated masks for kids in schools. Their health outcomes were no worse. But in states like Illinois and California, kids were forced to mask through most of 2022. Some schools punished children who removed their masks even briefly. Again, the data didn’t seem to matter.

When I pointed this out, I wasn’t trying to be defiant. I wasn’t trying to make a political statement. I just wanted honesty. I wanted leaders to acknowledge that some of the rules didn’t make sense. But instead, dissent was framed as dangerous. Questioning the efficacy of a policy meant you didn’t care about other people. That kind of framing shuts down conversation.

I’ve said it before: The real damage wasn’t just from the virus. It was from the loss of critical thinking. The social silencing. The replacement of science with slogans.

Most people don’t wear masks during flu season. And flu, as we now know, has a similar infection fatality rate (IFR) as COVID for most healthy individuals under 65. Yet we were told that masks were essential – not just recommended but mandated – for years. What changed? The politics. The media coverage. The fear. But not the virus.

COVID was serious. But the response to it was sometimes performative. And masking became the most visible expression of that performance. It became a social uniform. A political litmus test. A test of obedience.

We’re now three years past the height of the pandemic. But many people still walk around with masks. They’re not doing it because the data supports it. They’re doing it because they were conditioned to. Because once fear takes root, it’s hard to uproot.

I don’t fault individuals for being afraid. I fault the people who weaponized that fear. Who confused the public. Who punished questions instead of answering them.

Masks may have helped a little. In specific settings, with proper use, they may still help. But they were never the magic shield we were promised. And pretending otherwise did more to divide us than protect us.

It’s time we admit that.

Chapter 7. The Experts and Their Power

At the start of the pandemic, most people were looking for answers. For leadership. For someone to explain what was happening and what to do about it.

That void was quickly filled by the experts.

We were told to trust them. Not question them. Just follow the science. But it didn’t take long to realize: What we were being asked to follow wasn’t science. It was authority.

The Rise of Fauci

No one embodied this more than Dr. Anthony Fauci.

He became the face of the pandemic response. He appeared on 60 Minutes, Meet the Press, CNN, The Daily Show. He threw out the first pitch at a Nationals game. He graced the covers of InStyle and Time. For a period, you could even buy prayer candles with his face on them. Fauci told the public that criticizing him was equivalent to criticizing science itself. A direct quote: “Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.”

Early on, like most Americans, I found Fauci reassuring. He sounded confident. His comments thoughtful and carefully considered. But as time went on, and I paid closer attention to what he was saying – and how often it changed – I started to lose confidence.

* Masks were unnecessary. Then they were essential. Then maybe double up.

* Shaking hands might be gone forever. Then it was fine.

* He dismissed the lab-leak theory as fringe. Then admitted it was plausible.

Each reversal was wrapped in confidence. No apologies. No humility. Just a new directive.

The Technocracy Problem 

COVID revealed something deeper than just bad policy. It exposed a quiet technocracy that had been building for years.

Unelected bureaucrats – CDC directors, FDA administrators, NIH advisors – suddenly had the power to shut down businesses, override governors, censor dissent, and reshape daily life. The CDC extended eviction moratoriums, issued mask mandates for air travel, and provided school reopening guidelines that were reportedly edited in consultation with teachers unions.

Even the WHO, while often deferential to China and late to acknowledge human-to-human transmission, positioned itself as the global referee of truth. Its early January 2020 tweet claimed there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission” – a position that cost the world precious time.

These were not people you voted for. But they had more power than most of the people you did.

Conflicts of Interest, Everywhere 

The “experts” weren’t always independent. In many cases, they were up to their necks in conflicts of interest.

* Fauci’s NIAID had helped fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

* Many public health officials, including NIH scientists, received royalty payments from pharmaceutical companies developing COVID-related treatments and vaccines. Between 2010 and 2021, Fauci and former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins received 37 and 21 royalty payments, respectively – some of which were collected during the pandemic.

* A 2005 Associated Press investigation revealed that 916 NIH scientists received royalties for products they helped develop, with individual payments as high as $150,000.

* Members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) had prior financial ties to Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J, raising concerns about impartiality.

* The CDC Foundation, which funds public health campaigns, accepted over $161 million in corporate donations – including from pharmaceutical firms like Roche, which donated $193,000 to support a CDC flu campaign.

None of this was illegal. But it mattered.

It raised the question: Were decisions being made for public health, or for profit? And when the answer wasn’t clear, trust began to break down.

Dissent Was Not Allowed 

It wasn’t just that the experts got things wrong. It was that anyone who pointed it out was censored, fired, or blacklisted.

* Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, and Dr. Martin Kulldorff – authors of the Great Barrington Declaration – argued for focused protection rather than blanket lockdowns. Emails later revealed that Francis Collins, then head of the NIH, called for a “devastating takedown” of their ideas.

* Dr. Scott Atlas, briefly a White House COVID advisor, opposed school closures and lockdowns. He was denounced by Stanford faculty in an open letter.

* Dr. Robert Malone, a scientist involved in early mRNA research, raised concerns about vaccine side effects and was suspended from Twitter.

* Dr. Pierre Kory’s testimony before the Senate on early treatment was removed from YouTube.

This wasn’t just a scientific debate. It was an information war.

Big Tech, Big Media, Big Government 

The alliance was clear: Government agencies shaped the narrative, and Big Tech enforced it. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube – each played their part.

In the Missouri v. Biden case, emails revealed that White House officials and the CDC regularly flagged posts for removal or suppression. “This is exactly the kind of content we’re concerned about,” read one email from the White House to Facebook in July 2021, referring to vaccine skepticism.

You didn’t need to post misinformation to get silenced. All you had to do was ask the wrong question. Raise the wrong doubt. Share a study that didn’t support the official line.

What We Lost 

When trust is broken, it doesn’t return easily. The COVID era didn’t just damage public health – it damaged the idea of expertise itself.

People learned that “following the science” could mean following someone with power, not someone with proof. That’s a dangerous lesson, and one we’ll be living with for a long time.

It’s also a lesson that has left us unsure of where to turn. For decades, institutions like the CDC, the FDA, and NIH were seen – however imperfect – as sources of credibility. Now, it’s not so clear. When people hear official guidance, the default reaction isn’t compliance. It’s suspicion.

Surveys bear this out. According to Statista, only 20% of Americans in 2024 said they had a “great deal” of trust in the CDC’s recommendations. That’s down substantially from pre-pandemic norms. And vaccine willingness is falling, too – just 44% said they would get an annual COVID booster if recommended. Mask compliance has also dropped sharply.

I remember talking to a longtime friend – a lifelong Democrat, someone I’ve always respected. When I asked if he still trusted Fauci, he hesitated. “I did at first,” he said. “But I don’t know anymore. Too many reversals. Too many headlines. I feel like I was manipulated.” That pause said everything.

Fauci, Trump, and Biden 

Fauci’s relationship with the presidents he served under was complex – and in my view, not at all what it appeared to be. With Trump, there was always tension. Trump never fully trusted Fauci or the things Fauci was saying. He had a gut instinct that something was off. He didn’t have the expertise or the right people around him to back up those instincts, so instead of confronting Fauci outright, he pretended to trust him. And Fauci played the same game in reverse – pretending to support the president while clearly working around him.

But Fauci didn’t like Trump. I believe he feared that Trump would eventually uncover something – whether about gain-of-function research, early treatments, or the shifting advice on masks and lockdowns. He saw Trump as a threat. Biden, on the other hand, posed no such risk. Fauci said he felt “liberated” working under Biden, and that makes sense. With Biden, he knew his narrative would be protected. He wouldn’t be second-guessed, and he wouldn’t be challenged. That may have made things more comfortable for him – but it also removed the one thing science requires most: skepticism.

We now live in an era where AI can generate fake videos, where deepfakes can put words in anyone’s mouth, and where social media can amplify lies faster than facts. The only way through that kind of chaos is trust. And we’ve lost it.

For a while, I held out hope that someone – maybe someone like RFK Jr., who has openly challenged the pharmaceutical industry and government overreach – could help rebuild that trust. But even that hope feels fragile. Because once people stop believing in institutions, they don’t usually come back. Not without real transparency. Not without real accountability.

And we haven’t seen much of either.

Voices of Authority – and Dissent 

“There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.” – Dr. Anthony Fauci, March 2020
(And later: “I wear a mask not only to protect myself but also to protect others.”)

“Attacks on me are, quite frankly, attacks on science.” – Dr. Anthony Fauci, June 2021

“Cloth masks are little more than facial decorations.” – Dr. Leana Wen, CNN, December 2021

“We knew early on that young people were at minimal risk. Yet we closed schools anyway.” – Dr. Scott Atlas

“If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to get COVID.” – President Joe Biden, July 2021

“We have trained an entire generation to be afraid of each other.” – Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

“Science isn’t about consensus. It’s about debate.” – Dr. Martin Kulldorff

“YouTube deleted my Senate testimony on early treatment. That should scare everyone.” – Dr. Pierre Kory

Chapter 8. The Financial Toll of COVID-19 

Attempting to quantify the total financial cost of the COVID-19 pandemic is an immense challenge. The ramifications have touched every sector of the global economy – from emergency medical spending and stimulus packages to the ripple effects of lockdowns and long-term shifts in labor, productivity, and public health. The direct costs are staggering, but the indirect consequences are even harder to tally.

The $20 Trillion Disruption 

Globally, COVID-19 is estimated to have cost the world more than $20 trillion as of early 2024. That figure includes lost economic output, government spending, healthcare costs, and future productivity losses. Some estimates are even higher, projecting a cumulative global cost approaching $30 trillion by the end of the decade.

In the US alone, the financial toll may have exceeded $14 trillion, according to research published by the USC Schaeffer Center. That includes direct spending on healthcare, vaccine development and distribution, federal stimulus packages, and the economic impact of deaths, disability, and missed education.

Massive Government Spending and Record Debt 

To avoid total economic collapse, governments around the world opened their fiscal floodgates. The US government passed multiple stimulus bills, totaling more than $6 trillion in spending. Programs like the CARES Act, the American Rescue Plan, and Paycheck Protection loans poured billions into the economy. The federal deficit ballooned to over $3.1 trillion in 2020 alone – more than double the 2009 deficit at the height of the Great Recession.

Meanwhile, US national debt soared past $34 trillion by early 2025, a nearly 30% increase from pre-pandemic levels. Many economists warn that the interest payments alone – already exceeding $1 trillion annually – are unsustainable in the long term.

The Great Economic Pause 

At the peak of the crisis in 2020, global GDP contracted by 3.4%. The US economy shrank by 3.5%, its worst year since 1946. Tens of millions lost their jobs. Entire industries – especially hospitality, travel, and entertainment – were brought to a standstill. In April 2020, the US unemployment rate hit 14.7%, the highest since the Great Depression.

Small businesses were among the hardest hit. By the end of 2021, an estimated 200,000 US small businesses had closed permanently due to the pandemic. Minority-owned and low-income businesses were disproportionately affected.

Remote Work: Boon or Burden?

One of the lasting shifts has been the normalization of remote work. Before the pandemic, only about 5% of US workdays were conducted from home. At the height of the pandemic, that number rose to more than 60%. As of 2024, it’s stabilized at around 25% to 30%, depending on the sector.

The economic implications of this shift are massive:

* Commercial real estate values have dropped significantly in major urban centers.

* Local economies built around office life – restaurants, dry cleaners, retail – have struggled to adapt.

* Some studies estimate long-term productivity losses of 5% to 10% in industries not well suited for remote work.

On the flip side, remote work has reduced commuting, lowered carbon emissions, and given some workers greater flexibility. But the broader economic impact is still being sorted out – and likely will be for years.

Education and Future Earnings 

School closures had a devastating effect on learning. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, US students lost an average of six months of learning during the 2020-2021 school year, with low-income and minority students disproportionately affected.

The long-term economic consequence of this educational disruption is estimated at $2 trillion in future earnings losses due to lower academic achievement, diminished job prospects, and reduced overall productivity.

Healthcare Spending and Long-Term Costs 

Direct COVID-19 healthcare costs are estimated to have exceeded $1 trillion in the US alone. That includes hospitalizations, testing, vaccines, PPE, and emergency care. But the indirect costs are mounting, too:

* Long COVID, affecting an estimated 10% to 15% of infected individuals, has reduced productivity and increased disability claims.

* Delayed care for non-COVID illnesses has contributed to a surge in preventable deaths and chronic disease complications.

* Mental health-related costs have soared, with anxiety, depression, and substance abuse diagnoses all spiking.

The Cost of Fear and Misinformation 

The pandemic didn’t just damage economies – it changed behavior. Fear, uncertainty, and mixed messaging led to:

* A surge in mental health costs, now estimated at over $280 billion annually in the US.

* An erosion of trust in public institutions, impacting future crisis response.

* A rise in public sector inefficiencies and fraud. For example, the Department of Labor estimates that over $191 billion in unemployment benefits were improperly paid during the pandemic, much of it due to fraud.

A Reckoning Still to Come 

While the world has largely moved on from the immediate crisis, the financial legacy of COVID is still unfolding. Inflation, supply chain instability, labor shortages, and massive deficits are all downstream effects.

Some costs will never be fully known. Others – like the debt, the interest, the lost lives and livelihoods – will linger for decades.

If there is one thing the numbers make clear, it’s this: The COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t just a public health crisis. It was one of the most expensive mistakes in modern history.

And if, as increasing evidence suggests, it originated from a lab accident enabled by careless research and lax oversight – then that cost is not just tragic. It’s infuriating.

Chapter 9. The Legacy of the Virus 

Now that the dust has started to settle, the headlines have faded and the emergency declarations have mostly expired. But the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic – especially the way governments, institutions, and media responded – are still with us. Some of the damage is visible. Some of it will take years to fully understand.

What’s certain is this: The virus changed more than our health. It changed our world.

Trust Was the First Casualty 

One of the defining features of the early pandemic was the appeal to trust. Trust the experts. Trust the models. Trust the government.

That trust is gone now. And for good reason.

* We were told the virus couldn’t spread human to human. It could.

* We were told lockdowns were temporary. They weren’t.

* We were told school closures were necessary. They weren’t.

* We were told early treatments didn’t work. Some did.

* We were told the unvaccinated were driving the pandemic. That wasn’t true either.

Every time the narrative shifted, those in charge pretended nothing had happened. No apologies. No accountability. Just a new set of rules.

It wasn’t just the facts that kept changing. It was the tone. The certainty. The moral pressure to fall in line. Those who asked questions were labeled selfish or reckless or anti-science. But in hindsight, many of those questions were not only reasonable – they were right.

A New Normal – or a New Problem? 

People talk about “getting back to normal.” But normal has a new definition now.

* Remote work is here to stay – but so is increased surveillance.

* Schools and businesses are more reliant than ever on digital infrastructure.

* Travel still carries the faint scent of biosecurity theater.

* “Emergency powers” became a routine political tool.

In the name of public health, we saw the normalization of censorship, lockdowns, and the idea that basic rights could be suspended indefinitely for “safety.”

Governments learned how quickly people would comply. That might be the most important – and unsettling – lesson of all.

And the tools created to track and control a virus haven’t gone away. They’ve simply been repurposed. Digital vaccine passports. Contact tracing apps. Emergency-use authorizations. All remain on the table for the next crisis – whatever it may be.

Winners and Losers 

Not everyone suffered. Some profited handsomely.

* Tech companies – Zoom, Amazon, Google – posted record-breaking earnings.

* Pharmaceutical companies banked tens of billions in vaccine sales and saw their influence expand globally.

* Media outlets enjoyed record traffic and advertising revenue during peak fear cycles.

Meanwhile:

* Small businesses were decimated.

* Children’s education was set back by years.

* Mental health plummeted.

* Medical trust – once the bedrock of public health – was deeply eroded.

The people who paid the highest price were often the ones with the least to give: the working class, children, and the elderly isolated in nursing homes.

In many cases, those who made the rules were exempt from them. Politicians attended parties and galas. Public health officials dined indoors while telling others to stay home. The hypocrisy was blatant – and corrosive.

We Were Gaslit in Real Time 

Perhaps the most unsettling part of the COVID response was how easily reality was rewritten – sometimes overnight.

What was a “conspiracy theory” one week became official guidance the next. What was “misinformation” turned out to be true. But the labels stuck. People were banned, silenced, fired, or mocked – not for being wrong, but for being early.

You didn’t need to be a scientist to see the contradictions. You just needed to pay attention. Masks were first declared useless, then mandatory. Natural immunity was dismissed, then quietly acknowledged. The lab-leak theory was censored, then investigated.

Truth became secondary to optics. And fear became the ultimate justification.

And when public figures were caught in contradictions – Fauci’s shifting statements, CDC reversals, WHO denials – there were no consequences. Just another press conference. Another tweak to the guidelines. Another plea for trust.

Closing the Curtain on Part One 

COVID was never just about a virus. It was a stress test for society – and for liberty. It revealed the fault lines, the pressure points, and the playbook.

That playbook included:

* Emergency declarations that rewrote the rules
* A compliant media class that reinforced panic
* Tech platforms acting as censors
* Experts elevated to infallibility
* Citizens conditioned to obey first, ask later

And maybe most important: a total realignment of who we trust, and why. For many people, the pandemic ended any illusion that our institutions – medical, media, governmental – were operating objectively. That damage is lasting. And it matters.

Even now, years later, public confidence has not rebounded. Polls show deep skepticism toward public health authorities. Vaccine uptake is down. Mask mandates are mostly ignored. And people are far more cautious – not about germs, but about the credibility of the people issuing the warnings.

This wasn’t just a moment. It was a transformation.

All of it set the stage for what came next: the vaccine era – a campaign more aggressive, more polarizing, and arguably more consequential than anything that came before.

That’s where we go next.

From The Art of Investing in Art:
The Struggles and Stress of Selling Art
vs.
The Simple and Profitable Pleasure of Buying It 

In the years that followed my first attempt as a gallery owner, I gave up on selling art and resumed the simpler, easier, and more fun practice of buying it. And although I was buying only a few pieces a year, I was comfortable with the admittedly eclectic collection I was gradually assembling.

Then one day in the autumn of 2008, a woman came into my office in Delray Beach to drop off some newly framed pieces I’d acquired, and we got to talking.

Her name was Suzanne Snider. She was a long-time fan of the art world, had studied art in and out of college, and had even spent several years in Costa Rica running a surf shop and collecting Costa Rican paintings and prints. I told her about my experience learning about Mexican modern art from Bernard Lewin. And with her background in Costa Rican art and my acquaintance with Nicaraguan art, it didn’t take long before we were talking about the Central American modern and contemporary artists we both knew and wondering whether it made any sense to open a small gallery specializing in that relatively unknown corner of the art market.

We agreed to think about the feasibility of the idea and meet again the following month to discuss it further.

I spent the next several weeks researching the history of Central American art since the 1950s, and it wasn’t easy to find the information I was looking for. The only available books were basically publicity pieces for individual artists and individual shows.

It was discouraging at first, but what kept me going was the artwork itself. The images I was looking at were impressive in so many ways: skillful, sophisticated, and beautiful. Central American art was, in my opinion, the equal of Mexican art, and considerably less expensive.

For example, significant paintings by Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros were being bought at the time for $100,000 to $1 million. Significant paintings from Central America’s best modernists were being bought for less than a tenth of that.

I knew that I couldn’t afford to assemble an important collection of Mexican art, but it occurred to me that, with Suzanne’s help, I might be able to develop an equally great collection of Central American art.

And so we launched Ford Fine Art.

To keep expenses down, we rented a space that was half the size we probably needed and stocked most of it with paintings we already owned.

I was to act as founder and CEO, which meant writing a mission statement (which evolved as the years passed), creating and recreating business plans every six to twelve months (depending on our successes and failures), meeting with customers (especially those that we felt had “whale” potential), and signing an endless stream of checks.

Suzanne was to act as VP and Director, which meant doing everything I wasn’t doing, including researching the art market, identifying and contacting artists, negotiating deals with them (or their trusts), creating and placing advertising (under my guidance), keeping various inventories, entertaining clients, closing sales, and traveling to Central America when necessary.

Since both of us had had experience enduring the frustrations and fragility of retail art sales, we opted to sell high-quality art to serious art collectors. This meant we had to finance an inventory of such pieces, which I felt I could do because Central American artwork was so reasonably priced. It also meant finding and enlisting at least a dozen potential customers who could be persuaded to buy not just a single work here and there but to build their own collections.

While we were trying to develop our gallery business, Suzanne took on the additional task of helping me achieve my personal goal of building a comprehensive collection of Central America’s most important modernists.

Ford Fine Art, we had decided, was going to bill itself as a vendor of Mexican and Central American modernist masters, although we knew that the pieces we were going to be selling would be by the secondary artists or would be secondary works by the important artists. The important art from the most important artists… that we were going to secure for my personal collection.

The first major obstacle we faced in that quest was something I had already discovered. There was no authoritative literature on Central American modern art in general, nor were there many reliable books about the important modernists from the individual countries.

There were a few artists in each country that had achieved international fame. In Nicaragua, for example, there was Armando Morales and Alejandro Aróstegui. In Mexico, there was Francisco Zuñiga and Carlos Mérida. And in El Salvador, there was Benjamin Cañas and Ernesto “San” Aviles.

The rest were known only within their own countries, and only then by the few brokers that dealt with high-end art. These brokers, of course, would have been happy to sell to us, but they had very little of what we were looking for. At least 90% of it was hanging in the estates and mansions of a small number of very wealthy people.

Wealthy people generally don’t make a habit of selling their art because they are proud of what they own. And even when they run into financial difficulty and might be willing to sell some good pieces, they are reluctant to do so, lest their wealthy neighbors find out about it and gossip amongst themselves about poor old Señor or Señora Whatever. We eventually came up with a strategy for identifying these people and purchasing their art discreetly – a long, slow, and expensive process.

For most of our buying, Suzanne kept track of pieces I was personally interested in as they went on auction, identifying a price range that we believed was good and then bidding within that range, but no higher. As expected, we won some and we lost some.

Meanwhile, we struggled to make Ford Fine Art profitable.

We advertised in a variety of local and national media, and we tested different copy approaches. Some worked and some didn’t. But the ones that worked, worked only marginally, and the ones that lost tended to lose big.

We opened a “branch” of Ford Fine Art at Rancho Santana, an award-winning resort my partners and I had built on the Pacific Coast in Nicaragua. We were hoping that the combination of wealthy resort guests and the Latin American theme would provide us with a new income stream. But it turned out that the only things we could sell to the resort’s guests were mementos of their trips that were priced at less than $3,000.

We opened yet another gallery in Miami, on a main boulevard that was peppered with boutiques and galleries. There was even a dealer of fine Cuban art across the street. Given that the local community was mainly Latin and wealthy, and considering its proximity to other galleries, we decided that if that gallery didn’t work, none would, and we should consider retiring from the business if it hadn’t become profitable within twelve months.

There were just enough sales to give us hope. But at the end of our second year (which was the end of our lease), we cut bait and closed.

The gallery in Nicaragua did better, having profitable quarters here and there. But as I said, what we were selling was mostly low-priced pieces meant for tourists, and there was not enough traffic at the resort or margin in the pricing to give us steady, quarter-after-quarter profits.

Retail sales weren’t working. However, based on some advice from our neighbor across the street, the very successful dealer of Cuban art, we spent another two years renting booths at secondary art shows in Miami during the yearly Art Basel fairs. We might have made a profit, had we been permitted to show our wares in one of the bigger venues, but there were no openings. So that failed, too.

In all, we spent about eleven years and invested more than half a million dollars before we gave up on selling Mexican and Central American art on a retail basis.

Meanwhile, the investing and collecting side of our partnership was moving along. Piece by piece, artist by artist, we were developing what one day could be the world’s most valuable collection of Central American modernist art.

We were getting regular calls from collectors in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador who had heard about what we were doing and were open to selling us some of what we were seeking, so long as we kept it on the down low. It began as a trickle, but as time passed it became a flow.

Once the supply side of our enterprise was moving, I asked Suzanne to implement an “up-trade” protocol for the pieces I owned. This was not a new idea, but it was an approach that hadn’t been used in this corner of the art market – and with Suzanne’s attentive management, we could do it without creating a lot of buzz.

I had an initial goal in mind for what I considered to be the minimal optimal collection: two large, museum-quality pieces from the most cherished years of each major artist, and a half-dozen smaller pieces (pencil and ink drawings, gouaches, and limited-edition graphics) that illustrated the artist’s development over his or her career.

Of course, there was a fly in my ointment. Suzanne and I had figured out who we thought the most important Central American modernists were, but our opinions didn’t really matter because, as I said, there was no definitive authority out there. Not internationally and not even nationally.

The world needed an authority. And I thought, “Why can’t that be us?”

I had always wondered, when reading books on art history (or on any historic subject), “Who decided that this movement was more important than another movement, or this person was more gifted than someone else?”

And the answer I always arrived at was: The first person to codify and evaluate a cultural trend or movement or style is the prime mover, because everyone with an opinion that comes afterwards must refer to the framework and the opinions of the first.

And then I had this thought: this ambitious, almost arrogant thought: Why couldn’t Suzanne and I produce such a book on the modern art of Central America? We had all the published research that had been done until that time. We were building a network of the dealers, collectors, curators, and historians we needed. We were in touch with the few modernist artists still alive. This was a book that someone was going to write eventually. Why couldn’t we do it then?

Next chapter: The Book That Nearly Broke Me. 

 

From The 7 Natural Laws of Wealth Building:

The Speed of Money – 
Harnessing the Power of Momentum 
to Propel Your Wealth Higher 

Did they all, for example, have Alpha personalities – pushing themselves and others to work tirelessly to accomplish a goal? Did they all have certain advantages, such as friends or family members with money or connections?

I found nothing – no single set of circumstances or characteristics that was common to them all.

But I did discover one fascinating thing about their journeys from zero to a million dollars. All of their net worths rose slowly in the first two years, picked up somewhat in years three to five, and then shot up dramatically in years six and seven.

It looked like this:

That, I did not expect. Seven years or fewer? That seemed unrealistically fast. Reading the bestseller The Millionaire Next Door had given me a different idea. In that book, the authors had provided evidence that it took, on average, 30 or 40 years to achieve millionaire status.

Of course, The Millionaire Next Door was about American millionaires. And the fact is that most millionaires in America are not entrepreneurs or real estate investors or stock traders. They are people that earned a modest income but saved a larger-than-average percentage of that income over their entire lives.

To get a sense of how what they had achieved might look, I pulled up a chart I had developed years ago for Automatic Wealth and various articles and essays to illustrate the “miracle” of compound interest. (Note: To be conservative, I had used an average ROI of 7% to represent an equally weighted stock and bond portfolio, one averaging 10% and the other averaging 4%.)

As you can see, both lines begin with a very gradual rise over the first 10 years, increase a bit in the next 10 years, but don’t really start shooting up until year 30.

Using that as my basis of comparison, I had my accountant pull out the financial reports on about a dozen companies I had either personally started or had started with partners that had broken the million-dollar barrier.

I was looking not for gross revenues but for the book value of the companies – that is, the value of each business on a net-worth basis.

And I found that the timeframe to get from zero to a million had been less than seven years.

I then plotted the timeframes for all the companies on a line graph. And sure enough, they had the same growth curve – gradual during the first five years and then sharply up in years six and seven!

This, of course, is not the growth trajectory of all businesses. For most, it is up a bit for the first several years and then it flattens or dies off.

But that did not contradict what I was seeing. It’s commonly known that most businesses – as well as most financial schemes to achieve fast growth – fail. They fail because of bad business and investment decisions, either at the beginning or somewhere along the way.

What I was looking at, in other words, is not what happens to most people most of the time, but what happens to those people that get rich – i.e., break through the million-dollar barrier in seven or fewer years.

The difference: In the case of the successful businesses I had started, they grew at an average rate of 25% to 30%.

With a stock and bond portfolio, I would only expect an average ROI of 7%.

But in every case, the growth curve was basically the same.

Slow at first.

Increasing a bit in the middle.

And then at some wonderful point in time, shooting up sharply.

I didn’t think of it in these terms then, but what I had discovered was the wealth-building equivalent of Newton’s Second Law of Motion…

Momentum: Newton’s Second Law of Motion

One of Newton’s key theories was that “as an object gains speed or size, the rate of its momentum will increase.”

And that, I believe, is exactly what happened with the people I interviewed for Seven Years to Seven Figures and what I experienced with my own entrepreneurial ventures and real estate investments.

Look at this:

Mass x Velocity = Momentum 

Momentum is the result of something Newton called Mass multiplied by something he called Velocity.

That may sound vague and abstract. But as I discovered when I took the time to think about it, it’s actually easy to understand because it’s something we’ve all experienced thousands of times in our lives.

If you’ve ever seen a “Strongman” competition, for example, where each participant is chained to a huge truck or a railroad car and is challenged to get it moving as fast as he can, you’ve seen an example of this.

For the first 10 or 15 seconds, they strain with all their might, but the truck or railroad car doesn’t budge. Then it begins to move. Very slowly at first, but as each minute passes it picks up speed. And as they approach the finish line, they often appear to be sprinting.

What Did Newton Mean by “Mass”? 

In Physics, Mass (more correctly, Inertial Mass) is defined as “a measure of resistance to acceleration when a force is applied.” And the rule is that the larger its Inertial Mass is, the more difficult it is to accelerate an object.

You might think of it in terms of the density of the object, or even its weight.

A cubic foot of feathers, for example, is going to have much less Inertial Mass than a cubic foot of wood, and a cubic foot of wood is going to have much less Inertial Mass than a cubic foot of lead.

Got it?

What Did He Mean by “Velocity”?

Velocity is defined as “the rate at which an object changes its position with respect to time,” or the speed of an object combined with its direction of motion.

Imagine a person taking two steps forward and then one step back. He may be going at the same speed while stepping forward as he is while stepping backward, but his Velocity in getting from his starting point to his finish point will be about half that of his speed.

Got it?

Now we must simplify one more term: “Momentum.”

As mentioned above, the technical definition of Momentum is a measure of Velocity times Mass. In simpler terms, it is the inherent power or force of a moving object, which is a factor of its weight and speed.

You can visualize Momentum in the physical world by imagining the impact of, say, a small car like a Volkswagen hitting a wooden fence at, say, five miles an hour.

What is likely to happen to it? Probably nothing. And what would happen to the fence? Maybe a scrape or a scratch. But not much.

Now imagine that same car hitting the fence at 60 miles an hour. The front end of the Volkswagen would surely be damaged. Maybe significantly. And the fence? It would probably be knocked down.

Next, imagine a much heavier vehicle, say, a 10-ton truck, hitting the fence at 60 miles per hour. What would be the damage then? The truck would again have little damage, but the fence would almost certainly be destroyed.

Newton also talked about the force of Momentum in terms of how much energy it would take to slow down or stop an object that was already in motion.

So imagine the Volkswagen moving down a very slight decline at five miles per hour. And imagine it rolling toward a powerful man (like those participants in the “Strongman” contests mentioned above). He would probably be able to stop it, right?

But what if it were moving at 30 mph?

Or what if, instead of a VW, it was a 10-ton truck traveling at 60 miles an hour?

You get the point.

In Physics then, Momentum is a measure of the force it would take to move a still object from one position to another or, contrarily, the force it would take to slow down or stop an object that is already moving.

Applying this same natural law to the universe of building wealth, we could say that Momentum is the measure of what it takes to move from one position of wealth to another – for example, what it takes to increase your income from $50,000 a year to $250,000 a year. Or what it takes to go from a net worth of $500,000 to $1 million.

Are you still with me?

This brings us back to Newton’s equation: Mass x Velocity = Momentum.

So now, to convert that Law of Physics to a Law of Wealth Building, we need an analogy for both Mass and Velocity.

I suggest we define Velocity as the time it takes to move from one stage of wealth to a higher one. As in: It took me two years to reach a million dollars in net worth, but only nine months to get to $2 million, and only six months to get to $3 million, and so forth.

That’s simple enough. An analogy for Mass, however, is a bit more complicated.

When I began to work on this chapter, I equated Mass with work, as in how much work you might be willing and able to do to get to a net worth of $1 million.

But after discussing it with Sean, I realized that it was more than simply hard work. Looking again at those charts and remembering what it took for me to get to equity values of a million dollars or more in my businesses, I realized that it was a combination of many things.

Yes, hard work was a big factor. But another undeniable factor was making smart decisions. Another one was having intelligent and hardworking people around me – not just employees, but also professional advisors and consultants and even, in some cases, competitors who were willing to lend me a hand. Another one was the goodwill I developed with my suppliers, subcontractors, bankers, and investors. The more they trusted and believed in me, the easier it was for me to get the capital and terms I needed to grow the business. And that’s to say nothing of the goodwill of my customers. There may be no other business-building “resource” more powerful than that.

The more I thought about it, the more obvious it became. The resources that helped me build those companies so successfully in seven years or less were many – maybe too many to count.

This brought me to a definition of Mass as a component of Momentum in wealth building:

Mass is the span and depth of the personal, financial, social, and political resources 
that can be applied to building wealth. 

Let’s Count the Ways

Personal Resources 

By Personal Resources, I mean everything you (or in business, everyone involved) bring to the table. Here are some that immediately pop to mind:

* Intelligence (IQ)
* Emotional Intelligence (EQ, or common sense)
* Knowledge (both general & specific)
* Skills (leadership skills, negotiating skills, etc.)
* Ambition
* Confidence
* Tenacity
* Endurance
* Charisma
* Commitment

I don’t think I have to explain how helpful all of the above can be in building wealth, either as an individual or as a business leader.

What needs to be said, however, is just as obvious: No one has all or even most of these qualities. What is also obvious is that the more of them you put into play, the more likely it will be for you to efficiently grow your income and, thus, build wealth.

Also worth mentioning: Some of these qualities, such as IQ or charisma, may be inherent – i.e., you have them or you don’t. But many more are things you can learn and improve on over time.

Financial Resources 

This would include the following (no explanation needed):

1. Cash and other liquid financial assets
2. Additional financial assets
3. Creditworthiness
4. Financial connections

Social Resources 

Admittedly, Social Resources is not a category you’d likely find in a textbook on building businesses or acquiring wealth. Nevertheless, in my experience, they can be amazingly helpful.

To my mind, these are the most powerful:

1. People that like you
2. People that trust you
3. People that will vouch for you
4. People that will confide in you
5. People that will teach you
6. People that believe in you
7. People that will share with you

I could write a separate chapter just on this category. And given its importance (and how seldom these resources are considered), perhaps one day I will.

For the moment however, I’d like you to consider your own experiences as a businessperson and wealth seeker. Think about the many ways working with such people helped you create partnerships, build teams, and negotiate deals.

Political Resources 

I’m conflicted about this category because I usually think of politics and political people as being antithetical to building wealth. For the purposes of this discussion, however, I am including it as being potentially helpful so long as you think of it as a subset of Social Resources.

It’s virtually impossible to build a large business or develop a financially successful project without dealing with political players – either on the federal, state, or local level. And although I would advise you, if I were your mentor, not to seek out political connections as a general rule, I also know from experience that when you need a loan or a business project approved or you have to settle some dispute with a government entity, it is much easier if the bureaucrats and other political parties involved in making the decision like, trust, and/or believe in you.

The More Wealth-Building Resources, the Better 

When I think of what it took to increase my net worth from below nothing to a hundred thousand dollars and from there to a million dollars and from a million to 10 million and from 10 million to beyond 100 million, I recognize that I sought out as many of the financial, social, and political wealth-building resources as I could find.

Perhaps I did that because I felt insecure about the few personal resources I had in the beginning (intelligence, ambition, and commitment).

Or perhaps it was because it just seemed like common sense.

What I can tell you with certainty is that I have seldom met anyone who was greedier than I was to acquire and use them all.

I have worked with many businesspeople who believed in the “less is more” approach to building businesses and personal wealth. Most of them had some success with it, but I can think of very few who began with as little as I did and ended up with as much.

As I said, when I first stepped onto the path of building a fortune, I had just a small handful of personal resources to rely on. Not much, but enough to put myself on an upward climb within the hierarchy of the company I worked for. But by the time I reached the pinnacle in terms of becoming a partner in a thriving business, I had already developed dozens of additional resources that I could use to keep growing my wealth.

What did I initially bring to the table?

I was usually the first to get into the office and the last to leave. By volunteering to do just about anything asked, I acquired valuable knowledge about how the company worked as well as valuable skills (how to read a balance sheet, write a contract, negotiate a deal, etc.).

By making a commitment to keep my business promises and do anything I could to help them achieve their goals, I gained the trust of my fellow workers and managers and eventually my boss.

I spent time outside of the business at trade shows, conventions, and seminars, where I met smart and accomplished people, some of whom became colleagues and friends.

I saved money by reducing my spending on unnecessary things and spending a portion of it wisely on things that would make me more money, such as home-study programs on public speaking and negotiating and “winning friends and influencing people.”

As my contributions to the business I worked for increased, so did my salary. And by keeping my living expenses in check, I was able to bank an increasingly larger percentage of my take-home pay.

When I became not only the number one marketer in my company but one of the top marketers in my industry, I persuaded my boss to give me a share of the profits.

I then used every resource I had – my knowledge, my skills, my industry connections – to help my boss (and now partner) grow our business from several million to more than $100 million.

And I did it again with a second business, helping to grow that one to more than a billion dollars.

Looking back at all that now, I can see that what I was doing was taking advantage of the natural law of Momentum to achieve more of my wealth-building goals faster and faster.

Yes, it took a good deal of hard work. There is no question that I outworked almost everyone I worked with. But I could have done that and made very little progress were it not for the steadily increasing “Mass” of my resources being multiplied by the steadily increasing “Velocity” of my net worth’s upward trajectory.

And if you remember Newton’s theory: If you can increase both Velocity and Mass, what you get is an increase in Momentum – i.e., the likelihood that, as time passes, the results of anything you try to do will increase geometrically.

 

From Rancho Santana Then and Now:

Chapter 3. Scouting for Some Promising Land 

The goal was to find an overseas location, preferably on a seacoast, where International Living could buy and sell beachfront property to its subscriber base.

Price was perhaps the top consideration. We were looking to arbitrage the difference between beautiful coastal property, the kind you can find in the U.S. or on some Caribbean islands, but for a fraction of the price that our subscribers would expect to pay for a piece of it.

“We needed someone to do the research for us,” says Kathleen Peddicord, International Living’s publisher at the time. “But not just anyone. We needed someone who understood real estate and property development, too.”

That person turned out to be Bob Fordi, the brother of an editor that was working for the publication.

Fordi had experience in real estate (as an accountant, a consultant, and an investor). Plus, he had a lot of travel experience. He was given the assignment.

It so happened that International Living had just published its annual “Best Places to Retire” issue, and Nicaragua was rated number one in the budget category. “Beachfront land in Nicaragua wasn’t only relatively cheap,” says Peddicord, “it was absurdly cheap back then.”

Top billing plus inexpensive land! So… Fordi was off to Nicaragua to start the search.

The perception of Nicaragua at that time was not good. Most Americans knew it as a dangerous, poverty-stricken, and war-torn country, still suffering from civil strife.

The reality was that the civil war had ended with a peaceful election ten years earlier. Nicaragua’s economy was poor and still recovering from the war. But political discord had died down and, for the most part, Nicaraguans wanted to put the war behind them and move forward.

“In those days,” says Fordi, “when you would fly into Managua, it was like the 1950s at the airport. No jetway, just those old-style roll-up stairs. No air conditioning. There wasn’t even any power at the open-air customs station. Everything was still quite primitive.”

Primitive, but beautiful. Prices for beachfront property in neighboring Costa Rica, where Americans were already looking for a safe and sunlit retirement haven, were climbing strongly. The same type of beachfront property in Nicaragua, just several dozen miles north, was three to five times cheaper.

Fordi spent more than six months touring the country, traveling from its southern border with Costa Rica to its northern border with Honduras, and from the Pacific Ocean on the west to the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea on the east. And as he visited potential project sites, he was meeting with government officials, business leaders, travel professionals, lawyers, accountants, and even foreign tourists.

“Nicaragua was brand-new to me,” Fordi says. “Not just the land and the culture, but the laws and regulations governing the kind of project we were attempting to do.”

What Fordi found was tens of thousands of salable and available acres – on the beach, on the hills overlooking the ocean, and on cliffs and mountainsides overlooking lush valleys and fertile plains.

“The quality of the land and the views was as good as I saw anywhere in Central America,” he says. “But the prices were so much better. And the Nicaraguan people were so welcoming and positive about our plans.”

Matt Turner, International Living’s corporate counsel, had the same impression. “I’m a big fan of the average Nicaraguan,” he says. “They are a hardy and very optimistic people. They’ve had a rough time. But when I spoke to them, they weren’t complaining about the difficulties of the recent past. They were talking about the possibilities of the future.”

Encouraged by Fordi’s appraisal of Nicaragua’s investment potential, the International Living team – headed by Bill Bonner, Mark Ford, and Kathleen Peddicord – gave the go-ahead for him to take the next step and find the right property for them to buy.

Back home in Baltimore, Fordi located a Nicaraguan attorney who introduced him to Steve Snider, an American expat who was living in Nicaragua and looking to start a real estate business there. After several conversations to clarify exactly what they were looking for, Snider set out to see what he could find.

A few months later, Fordi got a call.

“I think I found what you’re looking for,” Snider said. “It’s called Rancho Santana. It’s basically a large, neglected cattle farm. But it has everything: beautiful beaches, hills and cliffs with fantastic views of the ocean, and it’s only about an hour north of San Juan del Sur and about ninety minutes southwest of Granada.”

Granada, circa 1993
When Mark Ford heard that, he decided to go down and check out the property for himself. It was late in the year, and the rainy season had already begun. The drive from Tola, a small town in the county of Rivas thirty miles or so west of the property, usually took about forty minutes. During the rainy season, it was more difficult.

Ford remembers: “For the first forty minutes, the road was bumpy and muddy, but that was to be expected given that it was used only by big trucks, horses, and oxen. Then we began hitting runoff streams of water coming from the hills to the west of us and, in some cases, lake-fed streams that were moving like raging rivers. We made it past a few of them – just barely – and then, when we were just a mile or so from the property, we hit one that was so intense it would have picked up our SUV and deposited in the ocean if we had been foolish enough to try to drive across it.

“We asked a local farmer to haul us across with his small tractor. He refused. But he did agree to guide us over on muleback, which, having no other option, we agreed to. So, there I was, thirty minutes later, in the middle of nowhere, on a donkey, following a guy on a donkey with a wide-brimmed sombrero on his head and a bandolero across his chest. And I was thinking that I could just as well have been Meriwether Lewis crossing the Missouri River after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803!”

On this, Ford’s first visit to the property, there was only one building: the shack on the beach that the owners, the Granados family, had stayed in when they vacationed there.

The parcel on offer was 1,600 acres of flatland, hills, and cliffs, including two rivers and five beaches.

“The big, pure beauty of it was very California,” says Ford. “The topography struck me as very much like the West Coast of the United States – which, now that I think about it, should not have seemed surprising since it is the same coastline. But this was California as it looked 200 years ago.”

One by one, the other members of the team came down. Struck by the natural beauty of the property – and the entire country – they all agreed. They had found their land. Rancho Santana was it.

Chapter 3 of The Challenge of Charity

Discovering How a Wealth Gap Is Also a Learning and Responsibility Gap

In Chapter 2, I talked about some of the mistakes my partners and I made early on with Rancho Santana, the resort community we were developing in Nicaragua. Some of those mistakes were because we had no experience with real estate outside of the United States. But another mistake – a big one that I was personally guilty of – had to do with a lack of understanding of Third World economics.

Antonio had given me good advice when he explained why the $400 a month that I planned to pay the housekeeper we would be hiring for the vacation home K and I had built at the resort was a bad idea. Although it contradicted my impulses, I could see that it was sensible.

Still, I wasn’t comfortable with paying my housekeeper the local market rate. Notwithstanding the logic of Antonio’s argument, paying a full-time person just $100 a month felt miserly. I wrangled with the dilemma for a few days and landed on a compromise. I would hire two people instead of one. One would work indoors only as a housekeeper and the other would work outside as a gardener, pool cleaner, and occasional handyman. I would pay each of them $125. (Antonio was okay with that.) And I would find some extra chores outside of their regular duties for which I’d pay them an additional $50, which put my overall outlay to $350, but spread over two jobs instead of one.

Experience and Expectations

Yessenia, a young woman from the area who had worked for Antonio’s family, became our housekeeper. And Enrique, a young man Antonio recommended, became our outside worker.

They both seemed grateful for their jobs, arrived promptly every morning at 7:00 a.m., and worked with energy and enthusiasm. It was a promising beginning, but I quickly discovered they had little to no idea about what to do, or even how to do it.

Enrique and Yessenia had grown up in a world without electricity, let alone modern devices. The houses they knew – in the nearby hamlets where they lived – had simple openings for windows, outdoor latrines, and dirt floors. No gardens. No pools. (The first time I gave Yessenia the keys to let herself in and out of our place when we weren’t there, she blushed. She had never seen house keys before.)

So the job of teaching Enrique how to trim hedges with electric clippers, mow the lawn with a gas-powered lawn mower, and change the pool filter fell to me. And we had to hire someone to teach Yessenia how to use a vacuum cleaner, a microwave, an electric stove, a wash machine, and a dishwasher.

But the challenge went deeper than that. Yessenia and Enrique had very different perspectives on what “clean” and “dirty” or “orderly” and “neat” meant. When you have grown up walking on dirt floors all your life, you aren’t accustomed to seeing dirt below your feet as a problem – as something that needs to be fixed. Likewise, when you’ve grown up surrounded by plants in their natural state, it’s not easy to understand why anyone would want to shape them into something else.

It was obvious to me that Enrique and Yessenia needed to learn more than the basics of what is required to maintain a US-styled home, and K and I were going to have to learn how to teach them what they didn’t know.

A happy surprise was discovering that they were as eager to learn as we were to teach them.

Una Pequeña Petición 

There was, however, one thing that bothered me.

As soon as their regular duties were completed, they would find a shady spot and sit down. I would see them talking, relaxing, sometimes even napping until the “official” end of their workday. It didn’t seem to matter whether they had finished their chores an hour early or an hour after they began in the morning. They did what they were asked to do. Then they simply stopped.

This didn’t jibe with my notion of a good “work ethic.” How would they be able to have more in life if they were not willing to do more than the absolute minimum?

But the fact was, I had knowingly and purposely hired two full-time people to do one full-time job. There simply wasn’t enough work to do in and around the house to keep them both busy. At the same time, I recognized that if we’d had additional chores for them to do, they would have happily done them and worked what I would consider to be a full day. In fact, had we asked them, I’m sure they would have even worked extra hours.

In other words, this had nothing to do with being lazy. They simply had a different view of what was expected of them. It wasn’t about staying busy for seven or eight hours. It was about doing what their employer asked them to do. A difference of culture, not character.

I mentioned it to Antonio one day. He shrugged it off.

I persisted. “But don’t you think…”

“Mark,” he said. “Just two months ago, you were telling me that you wanted to pay them too much money. Now you are telling me that they are not working enough to earn the money you are paying them. Your house is orderly. Your garden is manicured. Your pool is clean. What more do you want?”

I had no answer for that. My concern wasn’t about trying to get more work out of them. I feared that I was enabling them to develop a bad habit that would keep them from achieving what I assumed were their dreams. Clearly, Antonio didn’t see it that way.

A Little Emergency

One day, several months after I had hired her, Yessenia came to me to tell me that her mother was very sick. The problem was that the local hospital in Rivas did not have the equipment for the treatment she needed. She would have to go to the big hospital in Managua. And that would cost money – both for the treatment and the transportation.

I asked her how much it would cost, expecting to hear something in the thousands of dollars. But it was less than $500. So it was a no-brainer. I gave her the money and she thanked me.

Then one day Enrique mentioned something about wishing he had a bicycle to get to work. I asked him how he had been doing it. He had been walking. I asked him how much a bike would cost. Less than $100. I gave it to him without a second thought.

These little “solicitations” from Yessenia and Enrique continued as the months passed. And I always felt good about helping them. It wasn’t lost on me that I was solving their personal problems at a fraction of what it would cost me to do so in the US. That is, of course, a common logic to being charitable in poor countries. The cost/benefit ratio is much better than it is in rich countries. And by benefits, I mean the benefits to the giver as well as the receiver.

As the years passed, Enrique and Yessenia found spouses and had children. As their families grew, I found myself helping them with all sorts of wants and needs. There was infant care, grammar school graduations, birthday parties, confirmations, household improvements, and never-ending medical expenses.

Although their wishes were always posed as requests, I had the distinct feeling that they expected me to grant them. To be clear, they never pressured me. On the contrary, with each request I felt like I was the one being given a gift.

And there was an unforeseen bonus: It gave me many opportunities to interact with their children in an avuncular sort of way. And the relationships that developed, immensely gratifying to me, have continued to the present day.

But some of the other homeowners at Rancho Santana didn’t feel the same way as I did. Their attitude was, “I’m paying them well by local standards, so why are they asking me for more money? They should be happy to have such a good job.”

That makes some sense. This time, however, Antonio agreed with me. “We are obligated to help them,” he said. “Because of who we are, we have a responsibility to the people that work for us. Not just to them, but to their families. And especially to their children.”

Anagnorisis 

It clicked. Finally, I had a clear understanding of the dynamics of what was going on.

In deciding to build a resort in this remote area of Nicaragua, my partners and I had invested in a local economy that was very poor and almost entirely undeveloped. Given our intentions, the amount of money we were investing, and the state of the economy, what we were doing was in some ways akin to what the French and English had done in colonizing African countries. We were developing a beautiful part of the world for our use and profit by taking advantage of cheap property prices and labor.

Our project would initially bring millions – and then tens of millions, and eventually more than a hundred million dollars of investment income – to the area. In theory, a good thing. But our purpose was not to improve the local economy. It was to build a tourist resort and residential community for wealthy gringos and, as I said in the beginning of this book, to profit from it.

For this part of Nicaragua to move up to an economy that could support a thriving middle class, it needed more than tourism and a few wealthy landowners. It needed industry. It was, after all, the Industrial Revolution in the US that ended the stark, binary divide that had existed for a thousand years between the world’s rich and poor.

But what we had done, unconsciously and inadvertently, was insert ourselves into a culture that was already, in many ways, like the culture of the feudal medieval societies of Europe.

Noblesse Oblige 

Back then, as we all know, there was the concept of noblesse oblige (literally, “nobility obligates”). It was a moral code that governed the relationship between the nobility and the commoners. It defined the rights and responsibilities of both parties.

But there were also unwritten rules beyond, for example, the written rule that the lord “owned” 10 percent of whatever his serfs produced. And among those unwritten rules was the understanding that when one of his “dependents” became sick or disabled or their children needed something, it was his duty to step in.

Some of those rules were codified. But they also existed in the more general notion of proper conduct.

I believe that idea displayed itself in Antonio’s support of my gut feeling that I had a responsibility to take care of Enrique, Yessenia, and their families. It was how his grandparents and parents treated their workers. It was how he treated the low-paid people that worked for him.

His approach to his workers was informed by the culture he grew up in. And because the local economy was still essentially feudal, that culture included a commitment to noblesse oblige.

Afterthoughts 

Today, the idea of noblesse oblige would likely be viewed as antiquated and even condescending. It was an ethic born out of a worldview that saw in the stark divide between rich and poor, landed gentry and serfs, a natural order. Perhaps even a divine plan. That attitude was replaced at the end of the 18th century by the idea that all men are created equal. And with the higher wages that millions of middle-class workers earned after the Industrial Revolution, it had become feasible for them to take care of their personal needs themselves.

As an employer of primarily white-collar, middle-class employees in my US and European companies, I don’t expect them to ask me for help when they have financial problems. But today in Nicaragua, and particularly in the Tola region of Nicaragua where Rancho Santana is located, the economy is not yet modern in the industrialized sense. Nicaraguan employees get some benefits and protections, thanks to fairly recent governmental regulations. But because the minimum wage is still so low, it is not – for most employees – nearly enough.

In the future, if Nicaragua’s economy develops to the point where unskilled workers are earning $15 or $20 an hour, the idea of noblesse oblige will surely disappear. In the meantime, I will continue to enjoy a relationship with my domestic employees that is archaic but mutually satisfactory.

Lessons Learned 

* When the lifestyle standards between you and your employees is ten times what it is in your home country, accept the fact that even the best and most willing workers will need to learn lots of things that you take for granted.

* When you are paying someone that works for you a tenth of what you’d pay for the same service in the US, understand that it is not reasonable to eschew the local customs of noblesse oblige.

 

An Excerpt from The Art of Collecting Art 

My First (Accidental) Collection – a Little of This, a Little of That

Building a valuable art collection takes more than time and money. It takes patience and discrimination and knowledge of the art industry that is not normally available to the public. During my time as co-owner of an art gallery, working with a partner that understood the game, I had acquired a bit of that knowledge. Among other things, I had learned that…

* The art industry is made up of four different sectors, each with its own practices, protocols, risks, and opportunities: (1) producers (artists, agents), (2) sellers (brokers, dealers, galleries), (3) casual buyers (decorators, casual collectors), and (4) investors (speculators, serious collectors, museums).

* Successful art dealers aren’t dilettantes, like I was. They are serious marketers and salespeople. They are 20% about the art and 80% about the deal.

* The big and fast money is made – also lost – by speculators.

* The sure money is made with “investment-grade” art.

The rest I would eventually learn through trial and error, and with the help and advice of dozens of people I would befriend in the years ahead.

Meanwhile, when I made the decision to step down as co-owner of the gallery, my interest in collecting art got a major boost from the buyout deal I made with my partner.

Our gallery specialized in modern and contemporary art, with a focus on limited-edition lithographs by “names” like Marc Chagall, Picasso, and Salvador Dali. We also sold Color Field and COBRA paintings – two schools of modern art that I knew very little about at the time.

I didn’t like Chagall. (I still don’t.) But I very much liked Picasso and Dali. So I really wanted to be “paid” for my share of the business with pieces of their work. But I knew enough by then to know that if I wanted to be a serious collector, I didn’t want the lithographs. I wanted “significant” one-of-a-kind pieces – i.e., paintings.

I wasn’t attracted to either the Color Field or the COBRA paintings that we had in the gallery. The Color Field art was minimalist and abstract – canvasses of flat bands and boxes of muted color. But even though the COBRA art looked like children’s fingerpainting to me, I arbitrarily chose five pieces. A large painting by Karel Appel. Two small pieces by Asger Jorn, and two pieces by Guillaume Cornelis van Beverloo, a.k.a. Corneille. I found places in my home to hang the smaller works and I put the large Appel in the basement.

I made up my mind to forget about COBRA art and create a collection that I would actually enjoy looking at. But as the years passed and I learned more about the COBRA artists, the seemingly childish things they had produced became more and more interesting to me. The Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale had a collection of COBRA art that I occasionally visited, strengthening my interest. And one year, when my wife and I were visiting Amsterdam, I happened upon a gallery that specialized in COBRA art and bought a second Appel and two large works by Jacques Doucet and Theo Wolvecamp.

Since then, I’ve added to that small collection with additional works by Appel, Alechinsky, and Corneille.

I now have a reasonably complete assembly of COBRA art that I display in one room of our home in Florida. I’m no longer embarrassed by its apparent lack of technique and juvenile subject matter. I like it. (And its value has multiplied many times.)

My Second Collection – Early 20th Century Modernists

The collection that I began to assemble after exiting the gallery business was comprised of the works of artists that I had first seen in Gabriella’s house so many years before: early 20th century European modernists such as Jules Pascin, Jean Derain, and Édouard Vuillard.

I bought small paintings and drawings as my budget would allow. But the works of these artists were already pricey when I started buying them and have become even more costly. So that collection, near and dear to my heart, is still a modest one, at best.

My Third Collection – Mexican Modernists

I was speaking at an investment conference in Palm Springs, California. Strolling through town, I wandered into an art gallery.

The gallery was dimly lit and dead quiet. The art – mostly oil paintings and some gouaches – was stunning. I spent several minutes meandering around before being greeted by an elderly man in a tattered sweater who had emerged from somewhere in the back. He introduced himself as Bernard Lewin.

I explained that I was in town for business but had the afternoon free and was “in the market for a few pieces.”

Hand on his chin, Mr. Lewin studied me for a moment. Then he smiled, spread his arms, and said, “Look around. Take your time. Ask if you have questions.”

He turned and disappeared into the back.

I spent a good hour or so looking and making mental notes of the pieces I especially liked. I left without seeing Mr. Lewin again, but I went back the next day… and the next day… and the next. Each time, I was warmly received and my many questions were answered before he would, again, disappear.

Despite Mr. Lewin’s apparent indifference towards me as a potential buyer, I loved the art I was looking at and was determined to buy something from him.

What I didn’t know at the time was that I had inadvertently wandered into a gallery that featured some of the most important Mexican modern artists, including Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, Rufino Tamayo, Francisco Zúñiga, and Frida Kahlo. And this old man in a tattered sweater was not only a major collector, he was the most important US dealer of their work. (Before his death, he and his wife Edith donated more than 2,000 pieces from their private collection to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.)

Most of what I thought I wanted to buy – “significant” works by these artists –was way out of my price range. But Mr. Lewin helped me select three pieces that I could afford: a large “mixograph” by Tamayo, a drawing by Rivera, and a beautiful little oil painting by Orozco.

The three cost me considerably more than I had planned to spend. But in retrospect, they were very good investments. The Orozco alone is worth more than ten times what I paid for it.

Over those several days, I had spent a total of no more than four hours with Mr. Lewin. But in that time, he had set me on a path that would immeasurably enrich my life.

Having fallen in love with the Mexican modernists, I began to add to this mini collection with pieces by Francisco Toledo and Vladimir Cora, whose work at the time was relatively affordable. I also bought additional reasonably priced pieces by contemporary (living) Mexican masters.

This set me up for the next phase of my collecting career: I met Suzanne Snider and got back into the art business.

An Excerpt from The 7 Natural Laws of Wealth Building 

Friction

Thirty-four years ago, on my 40th birthday and a year into my first attempt at retirement, I decided that K and I should do some estate planning for our family.

I came to that decision because I had recently gotten into the habit of paging through publications like The Robb Report and Forbes issues on the richest men and women in the world, and I was reading the occasional biography or autobiography of great American industrialists like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Flagler, and Henry Ford.

I was doing this sort of reading because I had, in the span of less than 10 years, brought myself up from humiliating penury to a net worth of more than $10 million, which, in 1990, put me in what I believed was the category of having “great wealth.”

So, I engaged a lawyer I knew to write me up an “estate plan.”

After seeing the size of our financial assets, he assembled a small group of people to provide us with the full spectrum of the legal and accounting services that he told me we needed. The group consisted of my tax accountant, another guy I knew that was an accountant, and a local lawyer who did my real estate closings. At the last minute, on impulse, I asked MN, at that time the CFO of my primary business, to sit in on our first meeting and tell me what he thought.

After the meeting, he pulled me aside and said, “Mark, these guys are clowns. What you need is a company that specializes in this sort of thing.” And he recommended what was perhaps the best estate planning firm in the US. They were way more expensive than I had anticipated, but in retrospect, they were worth every penny of the more than $1 million I have paid them so far.

As it turned out, this was in the middle of my wealth building career. Since then, my net worth has increased by a multiple of 15, which has made their intensive, personalized, state-of-the-art advice worth even more.

A Concern Surfaces 

When the plan was in place, K and I felt pretty good – like we had accomplished what responsible people with significant assets should do.

But then I read something that concerned me. Apparently, even the wealthiest people, working with the most sophisticated estate planning professionals, didn’t always get it right. Even with the best technical and legal structures, the most common result of leaving fortunes to their heirs was (A) the destruction of the wealth they left behind within two generations, and (B) the destruction of the family itself.

A few families, however, such as the Cargills and Waltons, had avoided these heartbreaking outcomes. One of the deciding factors was the way they wrote their wills and structured their family businesses. The other one – the more interesting one, it seemed to me – was that the entire family met several times a year to make financial decisions together.

I expressed my concern about the long-term effects of our estate plan to several people whom I’d come to trust at the firm that had put it together. Three of them recommended the same company – a small husband-and-wife team that specialized in what is called the “soft” side of estate planning.

When I contacted them, I explained that K and I weren’t so much interested in growing or even preserving the wealth that we would be leaving to our heirs. “We’re much more concerned,” I said, “that in leaving so much money to them, it could result in resentments, objections, fights, and even worse if things got really out of hand.”

They told me that we were right to be worried. They said that they used to work on the “hard” side of estate planning – asset protection, portfolio management, etc. But because of their own experiences as children of wealthy parents, they had decided, instead, to focus their careers on helping clients like us who were aware of the dangers of giving away a fortune.

The program they laid out sounded very much like the approach I’d read about that was taken by the Cargills and Waltons. They called it “family governance.” We liked the way it sounded, and we signed a contract.

And then, within days – before we could even begin the program – two of our sons got into a tiff about what they should do with our primary residence after our deaths. Sell it and split the proceeds? Or keep it and use it as a beach house for the extended family?

“I hope this ‘family governance’ stuff works,” I thought. “If it doesn’t, K and I might be looking at the beginning of the end of everything we’ve worked so hard to achieve over all these years.”

 

Introducing Friction 

In the science of physics, the word “friction” is used to describe forces that slow forward momentum – more specifically, forces that resist “the relative motion of solid surfaces, fluid layers, and material elements sliding against each other.”

Common examples of physical friction include such things as dryness, roughness, competing currents, and so forth.

In the world of wealth building, “friction” would include countless impediments. For simplicity, I’ve classified them into five categories: external friction, internal friction, economic friction, personal friction, and political friction.

External Friction 

In business, external friction includes all the built-in demands and obstacles you can run into that come from outside forces, such as the regulatory agencies of federal, state, and local governments, industry associations, business groups, and basically any outside organization whose requirements get in the way of your efforts to grow your business and your wealth.

Those requirements would include OSHA and ADA rules, SEC and FTC regulations, state and local zoning and building codes, local business regulations, and so on.

Though many of them are necessary to reduce malfeasance and safeguard public interests, they almost always slow down forward momentum.

What to Do About External Friction 

I wish I could tell you that I’ve discovered ways to avoid every sort of external friction we experience when we are building businesses and building wealth. Alas, I cannot.

External friction comes, as I said, from outside agencies, many of which have enforcement powers. Unless the project you are bringing them is going to add tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenues to their coffers, any energy you spend on attempting to alleviate the friction by getting them to back down is likely to be wasted. More than likely, you’ll just end up delaying your project and tacking on extra dollars to its cost.

What you can do, however, is keep the friction to a minimum by being stoic about it and not allowing yourself to get upset.

 

Internal Friction 

Internal friction refers to problems that arise from within a business. These would include differing priorities, communication systems, and corporate cultures.

Individual departments, for example, may have different vacation policies, working hours, break times, and so forth. Or one department might use a different meeting and/or notetaking system than another department, which can make it difficult for everyone to be on the same page.

Most irritating can be clashes between individual employees… and you!

What to Do About Internal Friction

You might think, “I can’t believe these people are giving me – the person who pays their salaries – such grief!”

And to be sure, one way you can eliminate that kind of internal friction is to fire the offender.

But although that is sometimes exactly the right thing to do, it’s not always so. Sometimes employees slow you down because they can see that what you want them to do is going to have negative repercussions that you will regret.

That’s the challenge in dealing with internal friction.

What I’ve learned to do is not especially clever. It’s a technique I discovered 40 years ago, and it’s worked so well that I’ve never needed another one. Here it is: When an employee criticizes a plan or project you want to set in motion, instead of discussing it with them to try to win them over to your side (which could take a lot of time and only increase your frustration), say something like, “That’s an interesting point, John. I’d like you to think about it and come back to me tomorrow morning with three suggested solutions.”

The next day, one of three things will happen. John will come back and admit that your idea is good to go. He will come back with a better idea. Or he will come back and tell you, “It’s not my job to find solutions, that’s your job!” – in which case… you fire him.

 

Economic Friction 

Economic friction in business includes macroeconomic factors such as inflation and deflation, industry factors such as material and labor gluts and shortages, supply chain issues, regional and local competition, union demands, and, of course, federal, state, and local taxes.

The big problem with economic friction is that it is often unpredictable and almost always beyond your control. Taxes, of course, are predictable and therefore easy to plan for. But macroeconomic swings cannot reliably be predicted. And even industry trends and responses, which often can be foreseen, will sometimes happen quickly and without warning.

What to Do About Economic Friction 

The good news about economic friction is that – although there is almost an infinite number of types – they all have the same solution: insurance.

Insurance was invented to protect individuals and businesses against unpredictable and uncontrollable negative future events. Because insurance programs work with large pools of customers, they can often give you the protection you will need for a price you can comfortably afford.

But is it possible to buy insurance against economic events like inflation or deflation or recession or depression? Not conventionally, as you would against fire or flooding. The way to insure yourself against future economic friction is two-fold: Always keep the spending you do to a minimum. And put a portion of every dollar of profit you get in an “economic emergency fund.”

I have done that with every business I’ve ever owned or run. I do it with my personal income, as well. I do it because I know myself. I know that what I hate much more than saving money for a rainy day is having to come out of pocket to pay for that rainy day.

 

Personal Friction 

Now we come to the sort of friction that every wealth builder and every aspiring wealth builder will inevitably have to deal with. It’s what I call personal friction – meaning it is manifested by your family and friends.

When internal friction in business is manifested personally, it usually comes from partners or colleagues or employees that are not on board with your plans to build the business and are making it more difficult for you to move ahead. And as I explained above, my technique for dealing with it in the case of employees (which is most often the case) is, in my experience, extremely effective.

But here’s the problem with personal friction. If you try to apply that technique to family and friends – as would happen if you tried to apply it to partners or colleagues in business – they won’t likely be willing to come back to you with three solutions to the problem at hand. And if they don’t, you can’t fire them.

What to Do About Personal Friction 

The most important thing to know about personal friction problems is that your chances of solving them by persuading the friction-causing friend or family member to see things your way are very, very slim.

When friends and family members question and criticize your ideas, they are rarely doing so because they want to help you avoid making serious mistakes. They’re doing it because of what psychologists would refer to as “relationship dynamics” – patterns of behavior developed over the years by the people in the relationship, for whatever reasons, that affect the way they interact, communicate, and relate to each other.

And this puts you in a very difficult position:

* You can’t change them.
* And you can’t fire them.

So, what do you do?

I have discovered only one thing that works. And even then, it is far from perfect. My solution is to change the only thing I have a chance of changing: the way I react to the friction they are creating.

I convince myself that, however much it irritates me, they are doing what they are doing out of love. And then I imagine myself – I actually visualize myself – receiving their criticism calmly and even gratefully. I imagine myself thanking them for their caring thoughts. And then I imagine myself ignoring everything they’d said.

It may be hard to believe, but you really can, through purposeful thinking, meditation, and visualization, do this.

Because this kind of friction is a part of you, you have the power to control it.

 

Political Friction 

There is one final sort of friction you may encounter – especially when you’re trying to build a family-owned business.

In terms of a category, I’d call it half personal and half internal. What makes it especially difficult to handle is that it is invisible. Which means that it can fester and grow without you even being aware that it is happening. And its potential for destroying a strong and profitable business is great.

This kind of friction exists in almost every medium- to large-sized business. And yet it is almost never addressed in business classes or talked about among businesspeople.

I call it political friction.

What to Do About Political Friction 

The fundamental currency of business – the metric one uses to measure the financial health of a business – is profit. Honest, sustainable, enduring profit. Which means that whether you’re the CEO or an employee working on the clock, the obvious way to advance your career is to continually contribute to the long-term profits of the business you’re in.

Politics is nearly the obverse. The currency of politics is power. All politicians understand that advancing their careers is about acquiring more and more power. Although having wealth can sometimes help a politician advance, wealth is not, in and of itself, a reliable way to acquire power. In politics, it’s all about making connections and making deals and making promises to colleagues and constituents.

The problem with power as a currency is that it operates in a zero-sum universe. Gaining more power means, by definition, taking power away from others.

In business, on the other hand, the potential for profit is unlimited. A business can (and often does) continually grow its profits by, for example, continually expanding the market for its products.

There are, however, more than a few smart and ambitious people in every industry who take the political approach to advancing their careers. Rather than focusing their time and intelligence on improving the profit potential of the businesses they work for, they apply their energy to acquiring personal power within the organization – which usually means pandering to their superiors.

Politically minded executives breed political underlings because they are not seeking to hire people to help them improve the profits of the business. They hire people like themselves – people who they know will do whatever it takes to please their boss. And that often includes executing projects and policies that make the customers unhappy and the business weaker.

If you have someone like that working for you, it may be difficult to spot them. That’s because political employees are especially skilled at making you believe they have your back and will help you move up the corporate ladder. And they will do so, so long as it helps them in their own climb. But since their loyalty is only to themselves (and the power they hope to acquire), they will throw you under the bus the moment it is helpful to them.

You’ve been warned. So be wary.

When I mentor young executives, I explain to them that, in rising to the top of any business, they will encounter all sorts of challenges and problems. I tell them that they will be able to handle many of them by analyzing data and using logic to find solutions. But when they get involved in people problems – either individual personalities that aren’t committed to the company mission or political personalities who think only in terms of acquiring power – they are getting themselves into corporate quicksand.

There is one more type of friction that has a significant impact on slowing down the natural wealth accumulation curves. It applies to not just business building but to individual investing – and if not identified and remedied, will eventually erode any progress you’ve made over the years by hard work and smart thinking.

I’m talking about…

 

Friction in Finance and Investing 

The most common and most serious friction you will encounter as an investor is expenses – often hidden expenses – that you will be asked to pay.

I’m thinking about such impediments to wealth building as brokerage commissions and fees, transaction costs, taxes, and more.

Benjamin Obi Tayo, Professor of Engineering & Physics at the University of Central Oklahoma, talks about this sort of financial friction using the metaphor of a rocket:

When a rocket is launched into orbit, the rocket has to generate enough thrust to compensate for the incessant gravity [friction] produced by Earth. As a matter of fact, rockets burn about 95% of their fuel to escape Earth’s soupy atmosphere.

When the rocket is in orbit, it becomes the master of space – covering thousands of miles with just a touch of propulsion.

The Earth’s atmosphere and incessant gravity are your investment costs and fees. These fees and costs can greatly slow down your wealth building process.

To illustrate, Tayo offers this hypothetical study of two investment strategies.

Case 1: An investment in an S&P 500 index fund with an annualized average return of 10%.

Case 2: An investment in an actively managed fund that produces an annualized return of 11% but charges 3% for management fees and costs.

The table below shows the portfolio balances for the two cases.

“We observe from the table above,” says Tayo, “that over a 50-year period, a portfolio that is passively managed with less frictional costs produces a return of over $1,100,000, while the portfolio with more frictional costs produces a return of about $500,000 over same period, a difference of over $600,000.”

In a recent issue of Legacy Wealth Monthly, Sean had this to say about the friction caused by financial fees:

The financial industry has been under a lot of pressure recently to lower fees, and it’s all thanks to low-fee or no-fee competition.

In the past, stock brokerages made most of their money from commissions and trading fees. It used to be the case that stockbrokers would charge 2% fees for the amount traded.

That’s buying and selling.

Meaning: When you purchased, you were immediately 2% in the negative. And when you sold, you lost 2% of your total stake.

Now we’re entering an era where trading fees are almost non-existent for the vast majority of self-directed online brokerages. (This hasn’t begun happening all over the world. But in America? It is now almost impossible to find a brokerage that has trading fees.)

However, wealth managers will still charge up to 1% of your assets that they manage per year.

And many mutual funds, closed-end funds, and ETFs will charge management fees and expense ratios.

Consider something like the Invesco KBW High Dividend Yield Financial ETF (KBWD), which lures investors in with its 12%+ dividend yield.

What most investors fail to notice is the fund’s 3.84% expense ratio!

Just to illustrate the comparison, let me show you how this can impact your wealth.

The chart above shows how much $25,000 would grow to if you achieved a 10% return for 20 years with no fees. That’s investment A.

But investment B shows you the same investment, the same returns, but with a 3.84% fee.

As you can see, adviser and fund fees are a major drag on the performance of your portfolio. And it only gets worse over time.

So not only is it important to avoid trade commissions and wealth management fees, it’s also important to avoid mutual fund expense ratios – especially if they’re greater than 0.6%.

 

Back to the Idea of Estate Planning… 

I began this chapter by telling you what I learned about the dangers of dumping a ton of money on your family after you die and hoping it will make everyone happy.

When the wife-and-husband team we hired to help us avoid a trap that so many other wealthy families had fallen into joined us in our first official family meeting, they arrived with countless stories and facts confirming our worry that leaving our heirs lots of money would only create anger and family fragmentation.

And they arrived with at least a half-dozen techniques that they said they had used with other families with good results.

The first was a test designed to identify our individual work or “leadership” styles – to match each of us with one of four profiles: directors, persuaders, counselors, or analysts.

You should understand that neither side of our family – neither the Fords nor the Fitzgeralds – are comprised of people that would be comfortable with these sorts of psychological assessments. Especially any that sought to suggest that our individual personalities could fit into some sort of universal type. Speaking for myself, I would say that the test seemed more akin to astrology than to science.

Nevertheless, we all agreed to suspend our suspicions for the moment and take it.

Each of the leadership types, we were told, tends to approach decision-making in different ways.

Directors are quick to take the lead, suggest solutions, and are impatient to see their solutions carried out.

Analysts are uncomfortable with quick decisions, preferring to mull over questions and opportunities, considering what might go awry before coming to a conclusion.

Like directors, persuaders are quick to come up with solutions. But unlike directors, they are not necessarily impatient when it comes to implementing them. They prefer, as their title suggests, to first achieve consensus through persuasion.

As for counselors, they are not much interested in solutions per se. Their main interest is in keeping the group dynamics pleasant.

None of us was particularly optimistic that this test would be at all applicable to us. But when we saw the results, we were surprised.

I was identified as being strongly in the “director” corner. And everyone agreed that “director” matched very well with my actual work style.

K and our first two boys were labeled “analysts,” and our third son was somewhere between “persuader” and “counselor.” Again, we all agreed that the test’s conclusions were right.

The next step was about recognizing the challenges that each personality type has in communicating effectively with the other three.

We learned that of the four types, the greatest natural conflict tends to be between directors and analysts. And it was clear to all of us that if we wanted to succeed as a family unit, our director and our three analysts had to learn how to get along with one another, without the constant squabbling and subsequent bad feelings.

Which brings me back to the reason we got involved in this program in the first place…

 

Overcoming Friction to Make Good Financial Decisions 

I eventually realized that what we were dealing with here – the tension caused by a clash of personalities within the family – was a form of friction that would inevitably thwart the estate planning I was trying to put in place to benefit them. To overcome it, the group came up with several suggestions.

One example: When I have an idea about something we should or shouldn’t do as a family, instead of simply stating it as a “done deal” (which is what I usually did) and then being forced to defend it against the barrage of criticisms that would always follow, they told me to present the idea as soon as I come up with it, and then give them some time to consider it.

At first blush, this seemed unnecessary and artificial. But when we put it into practice, it worked very well.

I didn’t feel attacked. And they didn’t feel pressured to have an immediate opinion. They could go home and take a day or two to do the analytical thinking they liked to do.

The net result was that decisions involving the family were made with more cooperation and less stress. Better yet, we learned that when decisions were made by consensus, it immeasurably improved the likelihood that they would work long-term.

The Takeaway 

Almost everything you do to build wealth – either by starting or investing in active businesses or by investing – is going to meet with some sort of resistance or “friction.” It’s The Third Natural Law of Wealth Building. And like Newton’s Laws of Motion, it is governed by internal and external forces.

You can’t avoid it, but you can overcome it.

It will be challenging, but that’s a good thing. The fact is that the universe is designed in such a way that nothing worth having is easy to get.

 

An Excerpt from The Art of Collecting Art 

Introduction

I fell in love with art when I was twelve.

That’s not exactly right. I fell in love with Gabriella, a petulant 14-year-old beauty.

She was the daughter of German aristocrats – Jewish intellectuals who had emigrated to America before World War II. Our parents knew one another through part-time teaching jobs they had at St. John’s University on Long Island, New York.

Gabriella’s father was an art critic and historian, and both of her parents were collectors of art. Their home was a museum of paintings and drawings and sculptures – much of it done by (I now know) early 20th century modernists – as well as curiosities and collectibles of every possible kind.

They lived in a neighboring town, and once a month or so, our family would spend a day visiting them. I loved being there, mostly to be in the Gabriella’s aura. But my love was not requited. She was more interested in spending time with my elder sister. And so, I spent a fair amount of time in that house by myself, looking at all the art.

Thinking back now, I don’t know if Gabriella’s family was wealthy or merely upper-middle class. But their house, with all its art, felt like wealth to me. Later, in my teens and twenties, whenever I would dream about becoming “rich,” the image that would come to mind was always some version of that house.

And that may be why, as soon as I could afford to, I began collecting art.

At first, I bought from street fairs and flea markets – whatever I could afford that pleased me. And what I could afford back then wasn’t much. As the years passed and my income rose, what I was willing and able to spend on art rose along with it.

Eventually, I experimented with buying art at auctions. That was an entirely different experience. Very fast. Very exciting. And, usually, a lot of fun. Auctions are tailormade to appeal to buyers like I was then: enthusiastic, overconfident, and ignorant.

But there was an upside to buying at auctions – at least at the bigger auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s. They were public. That meant there were published evaluations of the art they were selling. And those estimates could be validated by the bidding. So long as I didn’t let myself get carried away and kept my bids at or below the estimated ranges, I could feel reasonably confident that what I was buying had some legitimate market value. So long as I didn’t chase any piece too far into the bidding, I could feel comfortable knowing that, if I won it, the price I paid was realistic.

That was my thinking. And in retrospect, it was mostly correct. Later in my collecting career, I came to understand more about how art is priced from the inside. And how much auction houses make on selling it. And how they participate in buttressing certain artists and types of art.

Still, buying at auction the way I was doing it then was giving me some protection against being swindled. That was something that surely happened to me time and again when I did all my buying at street fairs and flea markets, with no understanding of what I was buying and no idea how to determine its actual worth.

I have come a long way since then. And, based on my experience, I believe that it is possible for anyone, even a rank amateur like I was, to assemble, over time, a first-class collection that will not only provide decades of enjoyment, but also an appreciating store of wealth and a lasting legacy for their heirs.

It can be used to balance a conventional portfolio of stocks, bonds, and real estate, help protect that conventional portfolio from inflation, insure against economic or political instability, and even contribute to a retirement income.

I did it, and you can, too.

Let’s get started…

Part I: I Dip My Toe into the Art Business and End Up with My First Collection… and Then Another One… and Another One

In 1989, I bought a half-interest in an art gallery in my hometown of Delray Beach, Florida. It was a way for me to live out a fantasy that had been materializing in my imagination for many years. I had this image of myself owning a boutique gallery and spending many happy hours there surrounded by beautiful things, reading books, and occasionally chatting about art with potential customers that would stop by. I thought of it as something I could enjoy in my free time while I was still working and eventually do full-time when I retired. (My main job was in publishing, but I had also started to develop several entrepreneurial businesses.)

Reality did not comport to my imagination.

In my role as co-owner, I learned that the art business was 80% about selling and only 20% about the art. And one needed to work just as hard to sell art as one would work to sell anything in any other industry.

So, instead of the leisurely hours of enjoyment I had imagined, I was spending all my time there trying to make sales.

I stuck with it for more than a year. But I finally had to admit to myself that it wasn’t for me.

I took my partner out for drinks one evening and told him that I wanted out. He wasn’t happy. But he wasn’t surprised. “What the hell did you think this was?” he said, shaking his head sadly. “It’s a business!”

He was right. The gallery business – at least the way he did it – was intense and non-stop person-to-person selling. He expected me not only to close a sale with every warm body that wandered into the gallery but also to harass my family and friends into spending money there.

The deal that we worked out was interesting. Rather than buy me out with cash, he would give me artwork from the gallery with a retail value equal to my original investment. I understood the difference between retail and wholesale was considerable, but I figured that was the tuition I owed him for learning two very important lessons: One about what sort of work I was willing to do at that point in my life. And the other about the day-to-day business of buying and selling art.

I had closed the door (at least temporarily) on my dream of living out my retirement years as an art dealer. But I had opened the door to the equally enticing dream of becoming a collector.

 

An Excerpt from Wealth Culture 

Introduction

In The Wealth of Nations, the 18th-century Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith said that “wherever there is great property (private wealth), there is great inequality.” And “for every rich man… there must be at least five hundred poor.”

When Smith wrote those lines in 1776, the English and American economies were still largely agrarian. And notwithstanding a rising middle class consisting of artisans, merchants, and traders, the aristocracy owned 90+% of the farms and virtually all the large industries of that era, including textiles, shipbuilding, and metalworking.

The “First” Industrial Revolution 

In the 60 to 65 years that followed the publication of that book, the economies of England, America, France, Spain, and Portugal grew rapidly. Buoyed by trade with and investments in their colonies, the middle classes of these countries (merchants, artisans, shipbuilders, textile manufacturers, metalworkers, and traders) grew even more. Along with this growth in their gross domestic product (GDP), PCI (per-capita income) grew as well.

And yet, the gap between the richest and the poorest grew wider. Not because the poorest got poorer (that would have been nearly impossible) but because the middle and upper classes became considerably richer.

Fact: In the years leading up to the 1789 French Revolution, the top 10% of the country’s population held around 90% of the wealth, and the top 1% held up to 60%.

 

The Second Industrial Revolution 

Beginning in about 1880, a second Industrial Revolution occurred. This one lasted only about 40 years. But it was larger than the first one because it was spurred by the advent of modern technology, the availability of natural sources of energy, and the globalization and sophistication of banking, including the expansion of free-market Capitalism, which allowed entrepreneurs and business visionaries to finance their profit-making dreams.

During this Industrial Revolution, the aristocrats and wealthy families that had occupied the highest strata of wealth for hundreds of years were replaced by industry leaders – i.e., the factory owners, oil diggers, coal miners, railroad builders, and bankers that rose to the top of their industries.

The middle classes also grew and prospered during the second Industrial Revolution, as merchants, tradespeople, and small business owners profited from the ever-increasing flow of money that was generated by the now much richer and more populous upper class.

The Working Classes 

Much has been written about the plight of the working classes during the second Industrial Revolution – most of it depicting working 12-hour days, six days a week, for meager wages.

In fact, the working classes saw financial improvements during the second Industrial Revolution. Their incomes and savings went up – not as much as those that employed them, but enough to provide them with slightly more comfortable lives.

What has been talked about considerably less in discussing the economics of the time was a new and fast-growing group of people. I’m talking about the “unemployed.”

These people were largely penniless, like the working classes before them, But one could argue that they were worse off because they were forced to rely on scarce charitable sources (mostly religious organizations) to survive.

There is no doubt that for most people at the time, the two Industrial Revolutions produced more economic opportunity for more people than anything else that had ever happened. But the wealth gap between the richest and the poorest was even greater than it had been in the previous hundred years.

In the 20th Century…

Wealth and income inequality was far higher in some parts of the world than others. Nevertheless, the wealth gap between the richest and poorest within each country did not disappear. In some cases, depending on how you measured it (median vs. mean incomes, for example), it widened.

The Communist revolutions of Russia, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, and some African countries were, in theory at least, an attempt to narrow the gaps. And they succeeded, although not greatly, with the gaps between the middle classes and working classes. But the gaps between the richest and the poorest remained wide.
In the 21st Century… 

In 1989, the total household wealth in the US had been $32.87 trillion.

* The top 10% of Americans owned (67%) of US wealth.
* The next 40% owned less than a third (30%).
* The bottom 50% owned only 3% of the wealth.

In 2016, 27 years later, total household wealth in the US nearly tripled, to $86.87 trillion.

* The top 10% of Americans owned (77%) of US wealth.
* The next 40% owned less than a quarter (22%).
* The bottom 50% owned only 1% of the wealth.

And in 2024, the top 10% of Americans owned 67% of the country’s wealth, while the bottom 50% owned only 2.5%.

Observations on Historical Patterns 

In free-market economies, when countries grow richer, so, too, do their populations. The degree of enrichment is never even.

Those at the top – the entrepreneurs, owners, and leaders of high-growth industries – generally become vastly wealthier, proportionately, than everyone else.

Those that directly support economic growth (bankers, lawyers, CEOs, senior marketing executives, brokers, etc.) are usually next in terms of the disproportionate advancement in net worth.

Next are the high-earning professionals, such as doctors, lawyers, analysts, engineers, real estate brokers, art and collectible dealers, and others who service the wealthy.

Then comes the larger middle and working classes, whose incomes rise at a rate equal to or a bit above the general escalation of wages and products.

And finally, there are classes that, for whatever reasons, are unemployed and/or depend on private charity or public welfare. These people are generally unaffected by the trickle-down growth of the economy. Thus, in terms of relative income and wealth, the gap between them and the rest of the population increases.

In countries whose economies are agrarian or oligarchical or centralized and controlled, there is usually little or no advancement in personal wealth among any of the classes except for the government officials and bureaucrats that tax the GDP growth and take most of it for themselves.

In short:

* In agricultural economies, the richest are those who inherit power or seize it.

* In Socialist economies, the richest are those that garner the most political power.

* In Capitalist economies, the richest are those that create industries.

However, this is not the whole story. What is more interesting for the purposes of this book is that within all countries with free-market economies, there is always a significant disproportionality between cultural groups.

And that is because some cultural groups are already positioned, in terms of where they are in the hierarchy of income and wealth, to enjoy the disproportionate increase in the growth of their economy’s overall increase in wealth.

This book is about those cultural groups. Why is it that they are almost always positioned to see their individual incomes and rates increase over everyone else’s?

And why is it that even if they emigrate from a middling economy to a strongly growing one, they move quickly into higher positions in the wealth hierarchy and almost always rise faster than others at the same higher levels?

My research suggests that there are certain groups of people in the world – ethnic, religious, and cultural – that have ingrained values and habits that give them a significant advantage to not only get into superior positions of wealth advancement, but also move up the ladder of income and wealth accumulation faster.

Thus, my thesis is that by learning what these values and habits are, and by adopting them into one’s own values and habits, anyone can have the same wealth-accumulation advantages as those at the top of the hierarchy, regardless of their race, ethnicity, religion, or the financial position they’re in at the beginning of their income and wealth-building transformations.

In the first chapter of this book, I will identify the cultural groups that are predisposed to building wealth. I will provide data to support the conclusions of my research – that these values and habits are the essential factors in capturing higher incomes and accumulating wealth.

In the second chapter, I will identify what I believe those values and habits are and provide evidence to support my claims.

And in subsequent chapters, I will attempt to create a template that can serve groups of people, large and small, as well as individuals to move rapidly up in the income and wealth hierarchy, regardless of where they begin.

 

A Quick Video Course on Economics in 8 Lessons 

The ABCs of John Maynard Keynes and Keynesian Economics

John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman were the two most important and influential economists of the 20th century. I published my first quick video course on economics – on Friedman – in the Nov. 1 issue. This one is about Keynes.

But before we get to the videos, let me give you a brief history of the man and an explanation of why his ideas are necessary if you want to understand how the world works today.

Who Was John Maynard Keynes?

John Maynard Keynes was born on June 5, 1883 in Cambridge, England, into a well-to-do academic family. His father was an economist and a philosopher; his mother became the town’s first female mayor. He excelled academically at Eton College and then at King’s College, Cambridge, where he studied mathematics.

After graduating, Keynes worked in the civil service, joining the Treasury when WWI broke out. In 1919, following signing of the Versailles peace treaty, he published The Economic Consequences of the Peace, in which he criticized the exorbitant war reparations demanded from a defeated Germany and predicted that it would foster a desire for revenge among Germans. The book became a bestseller and made him world famous.

Keynes amassed a fortune from the financial markets. He became a prominent arts patron and board member of several companies and was part of the Bloomsbury group of intellectuals. In 1926, he married Lydia Lopokova, a Russian ballerina.

In 1942, he was made a member of the House of Lords, and in 1944 he led the British delegation to the Bretton Woods conference in the United States. At the conference, he played a significant part in the planning of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

He died on April 21, 1946.

“Keynesian economics,” as his theory is called, has become a cornerstone of modern economics theory and undergirds the structures of most advanced economies in the world.

Keynes’s best-known book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, was published in 1936. In it, he challenged what economists call Classical Economics Theory, a philosophy derived from the ideas of David Hume and John Stuart Mill and realized in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776.

The core tenets of Classical Economics Theory were:

1. The concept of private property
2. The establishment of laws to protect private property
3. The establishment of free markets absent of government interference or regulation
4. The employment of private capital to fuel economic growth through industry and trade

Keynes believed in three of those ideas, but not the third. He believed that there was a role for government in smoothing out market fluctuations and preventing massive economic downturns.

“For my part I think that Capitalism, wisely managed, can probably be made more efficient for attaining economic ends than any alternative system yet in sight, but that in itself is in many ways extremely objectionable. Our problem is to work out a social organisation which shall be as efficient as possible without offending our notions of a satisfactory way of life.” – John Maynard Keynes

And now for the video lessons…

Lesson One: An Introduction to Keynesian Economics

Part 1
Watch Time: 11 min.
Watch it here.

Part 2
Watch Time: 10 min.
Watch it here.

Part 3 
Watch Time: 12 min.
Watch it here.

Notes: 

* Keynes’s economic theories existed in the space between the theories of Adam Smith and the ideology of Marx and Engels.

* Keynes believed that government should play a role in managing its economy to avoid major recessions and depressions and to smooth out the smaller economic ups and downs.

* The government tools for limited intervention that Keynes recommended were industrial and business regulation and stimulating the economy by borrowing and spending money to increase demand.

Lesson Two: Key Distinctions Between Keynesian and Classical Economics Theories

Watch Time: 13 min.
Watch it here.

Notes: 

* Keynesian Economics is not a refutation of Classical Economics, but an addendum.

* Classical Economics (Adam Smith) argued that economies work best if governments leave them alone and that any attempt to regulate or manipulate an economy will only make matters worse. Keynes believed this was wrong and that there was a place for “judicious” limited involvement.

* “The invisible hand” is a metaphor for the unseen forces that move a free-market economy. Because of flexible prices and wages, it naturally correct itself. As consumption increases, inflation takes place and prices rise. Consumption slows and prices go down (deflation). Aggregate demand slows and the economy decreases. Prices get lower and, because prices are lower, consumption increases.

* Keynesian Economics says that during a deflation, some point prices “stick” and won’t go down. The same is true of wages. If they go too low, they stop falling. The GDP may decrease but prices and wages won’t move.

 

Lesson Three: Keynes’s Supply & Demand Theory

This video lesson comes from the Kahn Institute. The approach here is technical. Other lessons in this course cover the same material, but this one provides extra value in acquainting you with some of the easy-to-understand-but-fancy phrases used by economists.

Watch Time: 12 min.
Watch it here.

 

Lesson Four: Demand-Side Economics in 60 Seconds

The same information as Lesson Three… but in only one minute!

Watch Time: 1 min.
Watch it here.

 

Lesson Five: The Aggregate Supply Curve (The Keynesian Curve) 

Watch Time: 13 min.
Watch it here.

 

Notes: 

* Why it is that when there is an economic recession or depression costs don’t increase as you grow out of it?

* A difference between Classical Economics and Keynesian Economics explained through “the silly story of a young couple.” The lesson is about spare capacity vs. full capacity and undercapacity.

Lesson Six: Keynesians vs. Monetarists on Macroeconomy

From Enhance Tuition, a brief lesson on the difference between Keynesian and Monetarist theories.

Watch Time: 5.5 min.
Watch it here.

Notes:

* Classical Economics Theory (Milton Friedman) believed that the financial markets would adjust themselves to economic irregularities naturally in time because of the natural fluctuation of interest rates and the decisions of individual economic actors pursuing their best interests.

* Keynes believed that sometimes – during stubborn recessions and depressions – the free-market solution can take too long. And that government spending can speed up that process and thus obviate the worst conditions.

 

Lesson Seven: Problems with Keynesian Economics in Action 

From The Kahn Academy: In this video, the narrator identifies the primary weaknesses of “Keynesian Thinking.” You may find it, as I did, a bit too technical. B ut it has the advantage of identifying the problems with specific and pragmatic examples.

Watch Time: 8 min.
Watch it here.

Notes: 

* When governments spend large sums of money to stimulate a stagnant economy, the rise in wages and prices that follows is nearly impossible to reverse.

* Over the long run, priming the economic pump can work. But when that government spending is fueled by debt, the long-term result is almost certainly bad – a choice between high inflation or a crushing recession.

 

Lesson Eight: Other Schools of Economic Thought 

From Crash Course Economics, a brief summary of different economic theories from Malthus to Friedman to Hayek to Marx and Engels to Keynes.

Watch Time: 10 min.
Watch it here.

Notes: 

* Thomas Robert Malthus: Predicted world population growth would lead to inevitable global famine. He was wrong. He didn’t factor in technological advancements.

* Adam Smith: A person following their own self-interest will produce a greater common good.

* David Recardo: Free trade is better for everyone.

* Marx and Engels (Communism): A natural conflict between workers and capitalists.

* Principles of Economics by Alfred Marshall (published in 1890): introduced the concepts of supply & demand and the diminishing marginal utility of income and wealth.

* Keynes: Governments needed to interfere by using monetary and fiscal policies.

* The Great Depression was caused by bad monetary policy.