The Lunch That Changed Everything

It was a Sunday afternoon in April 2013. Nothing special about it — a busy shopping centre food court, families catching up after church, just another ordinary weekend.

I bought lunch and sat down with Azib, an old primary school friend. He’d already eaten, so he did most of the talking.

I didn’t know it yet, but that conversation would change my life.

Two days earlier, the gold price had fallen off a cliff – down more than 4% in a single session. And the worst was still coming after the weekend.

But my portfolio was about 35% weighted to gold stocks. Friday had already hurt. US trading that night looked worse. I was bracing for a beating on Monday.

I wanted one thing from Azib: was this a disaster, or an opportunity?

He never answered that question. Instead, he gave me something much bigger — a crash course in how the financial system actually works. The Federal Reserve. Interest rates. Currency versus money. Why the gold price could be hammered lower even as the case for owning it grew stronger by the day.

I left that lunch with more questions than answers. So, I went looking…

In my spare time I read everything I could find and watched countless videos on the things Azib had described. One documentary stuck with me – Mike Maloney’s ‘The Hidden Secrets of Money’. Its opening line rings in my head to this day:

“The world has been fooled into using currency — a deceitful imposter that is silently stealing your two assets: your time and your freedom.”

I didn’t fully understand it then. But it dawned on me over time. Thirteen years, three full gold market cycles and plenty of hard-earned scar tissue later, it drives everything I do. Sharing what I’ve learned has become a life-long mission.

Not about gold, but who
controls your future

I’m not telling you this story for nostalgic purposes. And I’m not here to peddle the next gold rally, or the stocks that might turn thousands into millions.

It’s bigger than that.

That conversation in 2013 opened my eyes to a system that quietly rewrites its own rules — always in the same direction.

And it hasn’t slowed down or changed course. It’s accelerating.

Back then it was Operation Twist and a gold price manipulated lower by forces I barely understood. Today, it’s a lot closer to home, and much harder to ignore:

• A new minimum tax on family trusts, dressed up as closing a ‘loophole’ — a structure hundreds of thousands of ordinary families have used, legally, for decades.
• Division 296, quietly taxing retirement balances above $3 million — on a threshold that wasn’t even indexed to inflation until public pressure forced a rewrite.
• The 50% capital gains discount — untouched since 1999 — scrapped from 2027 and replaced with a flat 30% floor that doesn’t distinguish a patient investor from a day-trader.
• egative gearing, redrawn by property type and purchase date. The rules changed after people had already made their move.

None of this happened by accident, and none of it happened all at once. The system Azib described at that food court table was setting itself up for years. Back then, they told us they building ‘a new normal’ – creating opportunity, restoring fairness, protecting those left behind through no fault of their own.

Well, now the circle has closed.

If you’ve built something — a share portfolio, a trust, a retirement balance, a family home — you know what I mean. The goalposts keep moving. The rules you played by aren’t the rules being enforced anymore, and nobody asked your permission before changing them. The system now takes what you built through hard work and planning, and hands it to someone else.

You’re standing in the way. The latest changes make that crystal clear.

But pause for a minute. This isn’t just your problem.

It’s your kids’ problem — and it will squeeze them harder than it squeezes you. The income that felt comfortably middle-class to my parents’ generation now buys roughly half what it did. And for most Australians under 35, housing has slipped out of reach altogether:

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The tax take on ordinary wages sits at a twenty-year high, according to the latest HILDA survey. Not because anyone voted for it, but because wages moved and the brackets didn’t.

Whatever Canberra decides this decade about trusts, capital gains, retirement savings — even the shape of money itself — your children will inherit. With even less say than you had.

They’ll work harder, take bigger risks, and lean on their inheritance just to get by. While the government makes it harder for them at every turn.

Battling against the system with all I had

That’s what my mission became. Azib’s rabbit hole led me far enough to see this was never just about whether to buy gold, or which gold stocks. It went beyond protecting what I’d built.

It was about understanding what the system is, how it works, and what it wants. Only then could I build a strategy to stay ahead of it.

You can probably see where this is going. Gold and precious metals assets can address this problem — but it takes a coordinated strategy. Different forms of precious metals assets, each serving a different but complementary purpose.

Three full gold cycles with my own money on the line taught me exactly what I was up against.

Here’s the short version…

When the truth about the monetary system hit me in 2013, I didn’t study it from the sidelines. I committed $170,000 — close to my entire savings — to fighting the system and turning it to my advantage.

I didn’t know if it would work. I dug deeper, applying the skills from my career in insurance risk management, statistics, and finance to investment and life decisions.

It was a brutal start. My knowledge grew while my portfolio shrank. For 18 months, my gold stocks kept falling. At the worst point, I was down by 75%. I sat through an 88% drawdown on a single position, with several others just as battered.

I made mistakes — doubling down too early, holding stocks the system had already abandoned.

Quitting would have been easy.

I refused. I’d done the work. My conviction — built on research, and on the experience of others who’d walked the same road — would see me through.

And it did. By mid-2016, that $170,000 had grown to around $555,000. The insights worked. So, I built them into a framework and tested it through the cycles that followed.

A decade on, the portfolio sits above $1.5 million — roughly three times what the same money would have earned sitting passively in the general share market.

Along the way, I met my wife (a fellow precious metals believer), launched the Australian Gold Fund in 2019, and bought our house last year (mortgage-free).

I’m not telling you this to brag. I’m telling you because thirteen years and three cycles is long enough to know the difference between something that sounds good in a pitch and something that withstands the test of time.

I experienced the full rollercoaster – the fear, the boredom, the anticipation, the excitement. Above all, I lived through years when it felt wrong…before realising my intuition was right.

Your chance to wrestle
control out of the system

Now I’d like to offer you the chance to join me.

I’ve distilled everything from those three cycles — the mistakes, the near-misses, the mechanics that separate a gold stock that returns several hundred percent from one that goes to zero — into a single presentation.

I’m calling it Go Your Own Way.

It walks through exactly what’s changed in this year’s budget, why it matters more than the headlines suggest, and the three-layer blueprint — plus a brand-new fourth layer I’ve never shared publicly — that I’ve used to build wealth outside a system that keeps rewriting its own rules.

This isn’t about abandoning what you’ve built. It’s an invitation to ask the same question I carried home from that lunch thirteen years ago:

What if it doesn’t get better — and what am I going to do about it, starting now?

If that question resonates, watch the full presentation and see whether the Go Your Own Way blueprint is the next step for you and the people you’re building all this for.

Because the biggest financial decision any of us makes isn’t which stock to buy.

It’s deciding whose rules you’re going to live by.

I hope you’ll join me. Thank you and enjoy the weekend ahead!