I Have a Big Hangover… What to Do Next!
By Peter J. Merrick, TEP® and Adrian C. Spitters, CFP®, co-authors of the international bestseller It Starts With Gold™ and the forthcoming book Guns, Gold & Land™
This analysis continues a series of long-form investigations published in The Merrick Spitters Reset Report™
On December 16, 2023, I landed back in San Diego. I was a little weathered and a lot lighter. Emotionally, that is. I had just spent 10 unexpected months in Toronto, the city of my birth. I had left Toronto in 2019 to try out life in California. That trip was only supposed to last three weeks, but life had other plans. When I saw the first sign of snow, I booked a flight south. That was my cue.
Toronto had become a place of both reckoning and restoration. I had not returned in years. Not since the COVID-19 lockdowns. My medical choice not to participate in the worldwide experiment meant I had been effectively locked out of Canadian society. During those two and a half years of rolling restrictions, I would not have been allowed in restaurants, stores, or public spaces. Even more painful, I would not have been welcome in the lives of people I once called friends. Some family members included.
They were not evil. Just spellbound. Under what I now recognize as mass hypnosis. Charles Mackay, in his 1841 book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, wrote about how entire populations can lose their minds together. And when you look back at the COVID-19 era, what else can you call it but madness. A manufactured hysteria so thick, reason had no place to breathe. It was a time when fear ruled the minds of the masses. Reason was treated like rebellion.
When I touched down in San Diego, I had no roadmap. Just a suitcase and a thousand questions. Then the phone rang.
It was Adrian C. Spitters calling from British Columbia. Like me, he had spent more than three decades in the financial services industry. And like me, he had been diving deep into the documents. UN agendas. WEF playbooks. The fine print most people avoid. For the last decades, we had both been following the same breadcrumbs. The truth is, neither of us had much interest in this material before the lockdowns. But something about that global pause ripped the veil. We started asking questions we had never asked before. And what we found changed everything.
During one of our long phone conversations, I asked Adrian how his practice had grown so quickly. He told me something I have never forgotten. Clients were coming to him not just for advice. They were coming because they had also been cut off. They wanted to de-risk their lives. They wanted to rematerialize. And their first step was buying physical gold.
I paused. The phrase came out of me without thinking. It starts with gold. Adrian agreed.
I checked the domain name on my phone right then. It was available. I bought it immediately and told him, we are writing a book.
That was the beginning of It Starts With Gold. We poured in everything we had. Our combined 70-plus years in the financial industrial complex. A decade of deep research. All the truths we had uncovered. We were not reinventing the wheel. We were consolidators. We brought it together in a way people could understand. The systems. The social engineering. The structures that had lulled society into docility. Into obedience. Into numbness.
Docility means being easily led or managed. Passive. Without resistance. And that is what much of society had become.
Over 7,000 hours of writing between us. A full year of relentless focus. We launched the book on my birthday, March 17, 2025. Since then, it has become an international bestseller.
And now?
Now I have a hangover.
Not from wine. From purpose. The kind of hangover that hits you after you pour your soul into something bigger than yourself. Then it ends. And the silence that follows is deafening.
For the past two months, I have been wandering in that silence. Wondering what to do next. What to build. What to say. What to create.
Then the fire returned.
Adrian and I are beginning the next book in the series. The title is The Last Asset Standing. Just the name alone stirs something inside me. This next book is not just about wealth. It is about what remains when everything else is gone. It is about what truly matters.
To everyone who read It Starts With Gold, thank you. To those who are waking up, welcome. And to those still under the spell, we are saving you a seat.
The hangover is lifting. The next chapter begins.
We wrote It Starts With Gold™ to warn humanity about what has been planned for us… it is not good.
To find out more, order your own copy of It Starts With Gold™ from Amazon today. Visit https://mybook.to/GOLD
