Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE.
When Sheffield Became One Giant Bike Rave
Last Sunday, several thousand people decided to ride around the city of Sheffield with drum and bass being blasted through a network of connected speakers. It was chaos, and it was brilliant.
If you’ve never come across Dom Whiting before, the basic concept behind Drum & Bass On The Bike is gloriously simple. Dom rides around on a bike equipped with DJ decks and a frankly insane amount of audio equipment, blasting drum and bass while an enormous crowd follows him through the streets.
That’s it. That’s the idea, and somehow, it has turned into an absolutely massive thing.
Last Sunday it was Sheffield’s turn again, with the ride starting at Devonshire Green before heading out through the city.
We went along, and it was absolutely brilliant.
Sheffield On Two Wheels
One of the things I love about mass cycle rides is the sheer variety of people who turn up.
There were serious cyclists. Casual cyclists. Mountain bikes. Road bikes. E-bikes. BMXs. Kids. Adults. People who looked like they cycle thousands of miles a year and people whose bikes probably hadn’t seen daylight since approximately 2019.
There were people skating and people running alongside, and right in the middle of all of it was an enormous mobile rave.
That’s what makes these events so much fun. Nobody really cares what you’re riding, or how fast you are, or even what equipment you have. You just turn up and become part of a mass of humanity.
Taking Over The Streets
There’s also something deeply satisfying about seeing thousands of bikes rolling through roads normally completely dominated by cars.
For a couple of hours, the usual hierarchy gets turned upside down.
Instead of cyclists squeezing themselves into whatever tiny strip of tarmac has been grudgingly allocated to them, suddenly we are the traffic.
Thousands of people are riding through Sheffield together, music bouncing between the buildings, people standing on pavements filming us as we go past.
And the reaction from the public was mostly fantastic. People were waving, dancing, filming, and there was even a few people who were open mouthed in a “wtf is going on” expression.
There was just this overwhelmingly positive atmosphere following the ride around the city.
Obviously, somewhere in Sheffield there was almost certainly a bloke sitting inside a Nissan Qashqai becoming increasingly furious because his journey to Tesco had been delayed by seven minutes.
But you can’t please everyone, like the bus driver on Burton Road who just looked done with everything.
This Is What Cities Should Feel Like
This is what cities should occasionally be allowed to feel like. I’m not talking about depressed bus drivers, but rather the ridiculousness of large crowds having harmless fun.
Not everything needs to involve spending money.
Sometimes it’s nice for thousands of people to just occupy a space together and have fun.
There’s something wonderfully chaotic about an enormous group of people moving through the city with music blasting out, completely ignoring all the usual divisions between age, background and social group.
For those couple of hours, none of that really matters.
You’ve just got to keep pedalling and follow the music.
Sheffield has a huge cycling community, and events like this demonstrate something that gets forgotten whenever cycling is discussed purely in terms of infrastructure, commuting or arguments about whether cyclists should pay “road tax”.
Cycling can also just be fun without it being a way of training for something, or as a way of getting from home to the office. You can just get on a bike, and see where it takes you.
Apparently It Was AI
One of the funniest things to come out of the ride happened afterwards, when photos started appearing online showing the sheer number of people who had turned up.
Some people genuinely thought the pictures were AI-generated.
Which, to be fair, says something about the world we’re living in now. We’ve reached a point where you can show someone a photograph of several thousand people doing something slightly unusual and the immediate response is no longer:
“Wow, look at that.”
It’s:
“Fake. AI.”
I understand the suspicion to an extent. Some of the photos do look ridiculous. There are bikes stretching as far as you can see, completely filling roads that we’re accustomed to seeing dominated by cars. When you see thousands of cyclists packed together like that, it almost doesn’t look real.
Except it was. I know this for two particularly compelling reasons.
Firstly, I’m actually in some of the photos.
Admittedly, given the number of people there, spotting me is basically Sheffield’s version of Where’s Wally?, but I’m there.
More importantly, though:
I was actually there.
I saw the crowds. I rode with them. I heard the music. I watched people lining the streets filming us as we went past. I experienced the occasional bottleneck when thousands of bicycles attempted to occupy the same bit of Sheffield simultaneously.
No generative AI required.
And there’s something slightly depressing about that instinctive disbelief.
We’re already reaching the stage where extraordinary photographs aren’t necessarily evidence that something extraordinary happened. They’re potentially evidence that someone typed an extraordinary prompt into a computer, but this one really happened.
Thousands of people really did turn up in Sheffield, get on their bikes and follow a drum-and-bass-playing DJ around the city.
Poppy
It’s been a little while since I mentioned Poppy, and she’s doing ok. Her thyroid meds are not agreeing with her but the vet has prescribed steroids which are helping. Oana has fashioned her a little fort outside on the balcony from which she can watch the world go by:
We’ve also moved her Ikea box from one Kallax shelf to another as she wasn’t using it much, and now she loves it:
The AFI Podcast Is Now Live
A few weeks ago, I announced something new I’d been working on: The Autism and Financial Independence Podcast.
Well, we’re no longer at the “coming soon” stage.
We’ve now released our first three episodes, and from here on out, new episodes will be released every Thursday.
So, What Is The Podcast About?
The basic idea behind the podcast is to bring together two subjects that might not immediately seem connected: autism and financial independence.
I co-host the podcast with Darren Scothern, an autistic writer and advocate whose work focuses on autism, education, communication and challenging some of the misconceptions surrounding autistic people.
I come at things primarily from the financial side. I’ve spent more than a decade working in financial services, and I’ve been writing about financial independence, investing and money on this blog for years.
We’re both autistic, but we bring different experiences, interests and areas of knowledge to the conversation.
The result is a podcast about autism, money, work, independence and the systems surrounding all of them.
And occasionally us going off on a tangent, because apparently putting two autistic people in front of microphones and expecting them to rigidly stick to an agenda was an optimistic plan.
Episodes Available
Episode 1: Introductions
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/episode-1-introductions/id6802332982?i=1000783888112
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5QjdqftFQOnII8bypSkwJw?si=7d2933ffb90943b7
YouTube: https://youtu.be/Ow8WpMLZGyI?si=NX7KFQMVVuI2wC6i
Episode 2: What Money Is, and Why It’s Hard to Get
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/episode-2-what-money-is-and-why-its-hard-to-get/id6802332982?i=1000784582069
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/25FYcDmysKGVwShbsZavem?si=7287b86272c84d16
YouTube: https://youtu.be/2ubPUZsdEp0?si=z5bgCPm3DQKcwCUI
Episode 3: Follow The Money
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/episode-3-follow-the-money/id6802332982?i=1000785114460
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2j93fWiJC7iIy6AqvtMkMr?si=d7d5451efcef4968
Audible: https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/B0HG5KP525?source_code=ASSGB149080119000H&share_location=pdp
YouTube: https://youtu.be/7bmGeTxXHsg?si=lAk2fxxY5unrVudL
Where We’re Going From Here
We’re still very much at the beginning.
We’re learning about recording, editing, publishing and everything else involved in producing a podcast as we go. I’m sure we’ll look back at these early episodes eventually and find plenty of things we’d do differently.
But that’s part of the fun.
The important thing is that The Autism and Financial Independence Podcast is now properly underway.
Three episodes are already available, with plenty more planned.
We’ll continue exploring autism, financial independence, employment, money, accessibility, independence and the sometimes spectacularly stupid systems people are expected to navigate.
Some episodes will lean more heavily towards autism.
Others will lean more heavily towards personal finance.
Most will sit somewhere in the messy overlap between the two.
And we’ll almost certainly wander into completely unexpected territory from time to time.
New episodes of The Autism and Financial Independence Podcast will be released every Thursday.
If you’ve listened to any of the first three episodes, thank you. Starting something like this from scratch means that every listen, follow, subscription, share and recommendation genuinely helps us get the podcast in front of more people.
And if you haven’t listened yet?
You’ve already got three episodes to catch up on.
No pressure, but there’ll be another one along on Thursday.
If you want to support our efforts, please like, share, subscribe, comment, or rate the episodes. These are the most important things you can do to help a new podcast get off the ground.
What I’m Doing
Listening: Misbelief by Dan Ariely.
Watching: Street Kings (Netflix).
Reading: Abaddon’s Gate (Expanse Book 3) by James S. A. Corey
Financial Update
Assets
Premium Bonds: £250.00.
Stocks and Shares ISA: £152,170.05.
Fuck It Fund: £0.00.
Pensions: £128,253.19.
Residential Property Value: £245,790.00.
Total Assets: £526,463.24.
Debts
Residential Mortgage: £173,447.84.
Total Debts: £173,447.84.
Total Wealth
Total Wealth: £353,015.40.
This week I’m starting my new role and I’m hoping to earn some money fairly soon. It’s been a long, long time since I earned any decent money. In that time I’ve managed to not dip into my savings too much, but I’ve not added to those investments in any meaningful way either.
Top Ten Funniest/Most Crazy Conspiracy Theories
10. Flat Earth
9. Hollow Earth
Next up in my increasingly concerning journey through the world of conspiracy theories, we have one that I desperately wish wasn’t complete bullshit.
Hollow Earth.
Let’s be fair here: the Earth being flat would just be disappointing Imagine discovering that scientists had been lying to us for centuries and that the planet really was a giant dinner plate surrounded by an ice wall. Once you’d got over the initial shock, what have you actually gained?
Hollow Earth, on the other hand, is brilliant.
Depending on which version you subscribe to, beneath our feet there could be enormous continents, underground oceans, prehistoric animals, lost civilisations, technologically advanced beings and even an inner Sun illuminating the whole thing.
Some versions have enormous entrances hidden at the poles. Other versions throw in aliens. Naturally, the Nazis eventually turn up.
It’s basically Journey to the Center of the Earth crossed with Indiana Jones, with a sprinkling of The X-Files.
Do I believe any of it?
Absolutely not.
Do I want it to be true?
Hell yes.
Surprisingly, Hollow Earth wasn’t always completely mental
One of the more interesting things about Hollow Earth is that the basic idea wasn’t originally something invented by a bloke on YouTube whose previous video was about curing stupidity with magnets.
Serious scientists once considered the possibility.
In 1692, astronomer Edmond Halley, as in Halley’s Comet, proposed that Earth might contain several concentric shells separated by atmospheres.
Halley wasn’t an idiot.
He was one of the greatest scientific minds of his era, working at a time when humanity knew considerably less about the interior of our planet. He was attempting to explain observations such as variations in Earth’s magnetic field.
That’s how science is supposed to work.
You observe something.
You propose an explanation.
Then you test that explanation against further evidence.
Sometimes you turn out to be right.
Sometimes you turn out to be spectacularly wrong.
There’s absolutely nothing embarrassing about proposing Hollow Earth in the seventeenth century.
Still insisting it’s real in 2026, after another 334 years of geology, physics and seismology, is a slightly different proposition.
Enter the Symmes Hole
The idea continued developing.
In the nineteenth century, an American called John Cleves Symmes Jr. became convinced that Earth was hollow and that enormous openings existed around the poles providing access to the interior.
These hypothetical entrances became known as Symmes Holes. Seriously. Stop Laughing.
Symmes was so confident that he campaigned for an expedition to find them.
I have to respect that.
“There’s an enormous hole at the North Pole leading inside the Earth.”
“Really?”
“Yep.”
“Have you seen it?”
“No.”
“Do you have any evidence?”
“Not especially.”
“So what do you want?”
“A ship.”
The magnificent thing is that Hollow Earth could probably have ended there as an interesting historical curiosity.
Humanity once wondered whether Earth might be hollow. We investigated. We learned more about geology. The evidence didn’t support the idea.
Case closed.
Except conspiracy theories don’t die when evidence contradicts them.
They level up.
What’s actually inside?
This is where things become considerably more entertaining.
There’s no single Hollow Earth conspiracy theory, because apparently once you’ve decided the planet is hollow there’s little point becoming overly concerned with consistency.
Some versions contain enormous habitable regions.
Some have underground oceans.
Some have prehistoric animals.
Some feature ancient advanced civilisations.
Some involve a legendary subterranean kingdom commonly called Agartha.
And some versions even include a miniature Sun inside Earth providing light and warmth.
Which is convenient, because otherwise the interior of a planet would suffer from the minor drawback of being really fucking dark.
Unfortunately, putting a Sun inside the Earth raises one or two additional questions.
What’s it made from?
How did it form?
What powers it?
Why doesn’t its gravity cause problems?
How does a star exist inside a planet considerably smaller than actual stars?
Where exactly is this thing floating?
But those are exactly the sort of tedious questions Big Geology wants you to ask.
Stop worrying about physics and look at the dinosaurs.
Obviously the Nazis are involved
There seems to be a rule with conspiracy theories that if you follow one for long enough, eventually you’ll encounter either aliens, the Nazis or both.
Hollow Earth does not disappoint.
Various stories have claimed that Nazi Germany explored entrances into the Earth’s interior, established secret facilities in Antarctica or encountered advanced subterranean civilisations.
Some versions then combine this with UFO mythology, suggesting advanced Nazi technology survived after the Second World War in hidden bases.
At which point we’ve got:
Hollow Earth.
Antarctica.
Secret Nazi bases.
Advanced civilisations.
Flying saucers.
This isn’t a conspiracy theory anymore.
This is a Jeremy Robinson novel.
Admiral Byrd and the secret diary
American polar explorer Rear Admiral Richard Byrd also gets dragged into the story.
A supposed secret diary attributed to Byrd describes an extraordinary flight into Earth’s interior, where he allegedly encountered lush landscapes, animals resembling mammoths and an advanced civilisation.
The obvious problem is that there’s no credible historical evidence that Byrd made such a journey, and the sensational “secret diary” isn’t accepted as an authentic record of his expeditions.
But I absolutely love the idea of Byrd keeping two diaries.
Official diary:
Weather difficult. Visibility poor. Returned safely to base.
Secret diary:
Flew inside the fucking Earth today. Met some mammoths. Aliens seem nice. Ate a unicorn steak.
And nobody thought this information was worth mentioning for several decades.
Unfortunately, earthquakes ruin everything
I’d genuinely love Hollow Earth to be true.
Unfortunately, science has once again arrived to urinate on everyone’s chips.
One of the biggest problems for Hollow Earth is seismology.
Whenever there’s a significant earthquake, seismic waves travel through the planet.
Different types of waves behave differently depending on the material they’re travelling through. P-waves can pass through solids and liquids. S-waves can’t travel through liquids.
Scientists can measure when and where these waves arrive at monitoring stations all around the world.
Essentially, earthquakes allow us to perform something vaguely analogous to an enormous scan of the planet.
And what do we find?
Crust.
Mantle.
Liquid outer core.
Solid inner core.
What don’t we find?
Secret tropical paradise.
Mammoths.
Nazi UFO dealership.
Tiny Sun.
Mantle again.
The seismic waves don’t behave as though they’re travelling through a gigantic empty cavity.
Because they’re not.
Gravity isn’t helping either
Then there’s Earth’s mass.
We know roughly how large Earth is.
We can measure its gravitational effects and therefore determine its mass.
That allows us to calculate its average density, which is around 5.5 grams per cubic centimetre.
That’s significantly denser than most of the rocks we encounter at Earth’s surface.
Which tells us something fairly obvious.
There’s some really dense stuff down there.
And there is.
Earth contains enormous quantities of dense material, including an iron-rich core.
If much of the planet were actually empty space containing forests, oceans, dinosaurs and an underground branch of Starbucks, we’d have a rather substantial discrepancy between the mass Earth should have and the mass we actually observe.
And then there’s the heat
The deeper humans have travelled into the Earth, the hotter things generally become.
We’ve measured this.
Deep mines require serious ventilation and cooling systems because temperatures become increasingly unpleasant.
The deepest boreholes humans have drilled have encountered extremely high temperatures.
Yet the Hollow Earth scenario requires us to imagine that if we just keep going, eventually something rather surprising happens.
1 kilometre down: Getting warm.
3 kilometres: Fucking hell.
10 kilometres: This is unbearable.
100 kilometres: Magma and unimaginable pressure.
A bit further: Pleasant meadow. 22°C. Mammoth grazing beside a lake.
Apparently there’s a geological Center Parcs somewhere between the mantle and the core.
The magnetic field would also like a word
Earth’s magnetic field provides another problem.
The leading scientific explanation is the geodynamo: movement of electrically conducting molten iron in Earth’s liquid outer core helps generate the planetary magnetic field.
This isn’t some minor feature of Earth that nobody has noticed.
Compasses have been exploiting it for centuries.
We’ve measured it extensively.
So if we’re replacing Earth’s interior with a massive empty world, we’re going to need another explanation for where the magnetic field comes from.
Perhaps the mammoths are magnetic.
At this point, why not?
Then we have the entrances
Remember those enormous openings at the poles?
There’s a slight issue.
We’ve been there.
Humans have explored both polar regions.
Aircraft fly across the Arctic.
People travel to Antarctica.
There are scientific research stations across Antarctica operated by numerous countries.
There are satellites observing the poles.
There are tourists.
And nobody has stumbled across an enormous entrance into the centre of the planet.
Which means, you guessed it, there must be a cover-up in both the literal and figurative sense.
Because the beautiful thing about conspiracy theories is that evidence disproving the conspiracy merely demonstrates how effective the conspiracy is.
Can’t find the entrance?
They’re hiding it.
Satellites don’t show it?
The images are altered.
Scientists say it isn’t there?
They’re involved.
People visit Antarctica and don’t see it?
They’re not allowed near the real entrance.
And once you’ve reached that stage, the theory becomes indestructible.
Not because there’s overwhelming evidence supporting it.
But because you’ve created a belief system where no possible evidence can prove you wrong.
But once again, I have to ask: why?
This was my biggest problem with Flat Earth, and it’s a problem here too.
Suppose Hollow Earth really exists.
Suppose somewhere beneath our feet there’s another habitable world.
Why the hell would we hide it?
It would be the greatest geographical discovery in human history.
Scientists would be queuing around the block to study it.
Every university on the planet would want research funding.
Governments would immediately start arguing over who owned which bits.
Elon Musk would announce plans to colonise it before we’d even finished measuring the entrance.
And property developers would have submitted planning permission for Agartha View: an exciting collection of two and three-bedroom new-build homes starting from £325,000 by lunchtime.
Human beings cannot keep exciting things to themselves.
Yet we’re expected to believe that governments, scientists, explorers, militaries and countless other people have discovered AN ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD INSIDE OUR WORLD and collectively agreed that nobody should mention it.
The annoying thing is that I really want this one
And that’s why I feel differently about Hollow Earth than I do Flat Earth.
Flat Earth is just rubbish.
If tomorrow somebody conclusively proved Earth was flat, I’d mostly be annoyed about having to update all the maps.
But Hollow Earth?
If scientists announced tomorrow that they’d discovered an enormous entrance beneath Antarctica leading to a hidden ecosystem inside the planet, I would lose my fucking mind.
Imagine it. An entire unexplored world beneath us. Species that evolved completely independently. Underground oceans. Unknown ecosystems. Ancient creatures. Perhaps even another intelligent civilisation.
It would completely transform our understanding of Earth and our place on it. It would be one of the greatest discoveries our species had ever made. I would absolutely love it.
Unfortunately, wanting something to be incredibly fucking cool doesn’t make it true.
Everything we’ve learned about Earth’s mass, density, gravity, seismic waves, temperature, magnetic field and internal structure points towards the considerably less exciting conclusion that beneath our feet lies thousands of kilometres of extremely hot rock and metal.
No dinosaurs, or secret civilisations. No inner Sun or Nazis flying UFOs around Agartha.
Just geology, and that’s perhaps the greatest tragedy of Hollow Earth.
Of all the conspiracy theories I’m going to cover in this list, this might be the first where I’m genuinely disappointed that the conspiracy theorists are talking bollocks.
Come on, science. Just one underground kaiju would have been nice.
DISCLAIMER
The views and opinions in this blog are my own, and do not represent the views or opinions of my former, current, or future employers, nor should they be considered advice.
If you want personalised financial advice, seek an appropriate professional. If you are in financial difficulty, seek advice via the resources below:
Biolink
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bio.link/davidscothern.