Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE.
Weekly Update
It was another good week with work, and I’m feeling positive about this new role. Between my mortgage day job, working on the new podcast, and making sure I get in plenty of bike rides whilst the weather is still ok, I’ve not had a lot of time for other stuff. However, I made sure I had time to meet up with a good friend for food during the week.
I may have mentioned that Oana has gone vegetarian, and I agreed to go veggie at home. However, when I dine out, I’m on the look out for burgers. At Kapital, in Sheffield, I had an amazing burger with cheese and bacon. It had loads of toppings, but did not commit the ultimate burger sin of stacking it so high it can’t be eaten. Burgers should be wider, not taller.
Saturday was match day at Hillsborough and for the fourth consecutive home league fixture we had an attendance over 30,000. It’s a far cry from the last days of the Chansiri era. Unfortunately the performance on the pitch was pretty poor but we still came away with a point.
On Sunday afternoon Oana and I went for a bike ride as part of the Sheffield Mass Cycle Ride group. We’ve been riding with them for about a year now, and it feels like we are being accepted into the group proper, as we were asked to come up with a route for the ride. As we created it, we then led the ride. It was a little surreal being at the front of fifty or so riders going around the city.
This Week on The AFI Podcast
Check out the AFI section of this site for links to the pod on the various platforms.
In the latest episode I discuss the different life stages of Financial Independence, and my co-host Darren discusses autism self-diagnosis.
As a new podcast, getting noticed is difficult, so please help us out by sharing the links, and leaving a rating and review.
What I’m Doing
Listening: For We Are Many: Bobiverse Book 2 by Dennis E. Taylor.
Watching: For All Mankind (Apple).
Reading: Abaddon’s Gate (Expanse Book 3) by James S. A. Corey.
We finished our rewatch of For All Mankind ahead of watching the latest season for the first time, and we are now up to date. It’s such a good show; well written and directed, with some great characters. The biggest strength is that the characters feel real, in that they are complex and operate in morally grey areas. I think Ed Baldwin and Margo Madison in particular are such deep and layered people you almost forget they are fictional characters.
Financial Update
Assets
Premium Bonds: £250.00.
Stocks and Shares ISA: £151,131.08.
Fuck It Fund: £0.00.
Pensions: £127,603.91.
Residential Property Value: £245,790.00.
Total Assets: £524,774.99.
Debts
Residential Mortgage: £173,281.83.
Total Debts: £173,281.83.
Total Wealth
Total Wealth: £351,493.16.
In the coming week, I’m going to be making some changes to how my ISA is invested. I’ve recently been made aware of an ETF with a significantly lower ongoing charge than the fund I currently hold. The difference might look fairly small as a percentage, but fees compound just as returns do. Over many years, and with a reasonably large portfolio, even a modest reduction in annual costs can add up to a meaningful amount of money.
The main decision remaining is whether to make the switch in one go or break it down into smaller chunks. There are pros and cons to both approaches.
Switching everything at once would be the simplest and cheapest option. My platform charges £5 for each transaction, so selling my existing investment and buying the new ETF would cost £10 in total. If I split the switch into five chunks, however, I could potentially make five sales and five purchases, increasing the total dealing cost to £50. That still isn’t enormous in the context of a long-term portfolio, but there’s no point paying additional fees unless doing so provides a genuine benefit.
The other consideration is time out of the market. Selling one investment and buying another may leave the money sitting in cash for a short period while the trades and settlement process are completed. Markets could rise during that gap, meaning I would sell at one price and then have to buy back at a higher one. Of course, the opposite could also happen: markets could fall while I’m out, leaving me better off. The problem is that there is no reliable way of knowing which direction they will move over a few days.
Completing the switch in stages would reduce the risk of making the entire move at an unfortunate moment. Most of the portfolio would remain invested throughout, with only one portion being moved at a time. It would also spread the entry price into the new ETF across several transactions. Psychologically, that may feel more comfortable than pressing one button and moving the whole lot at once.
However, breaking the transfer into chunks introduces another form of market timing. I would effectively be betting that gradually moving the money produces a better outcome than simply making the change and getting on with it. The market could rise throughout the process, meaning each later purchase becomes more expensive. There is also the danger of overthinking every movement, delaying the next transaction or changing the plan in response to short-term market noise.
As a long-term investor, the precise day on which I make the switch is unlikely to determine whether I eventually reach financial independence. Staying invested, keeping costs low and sticking to a sensible strategy will matter far more. Making the switch in one go would minimise both the transaction fees and the amount of ongoing administration, while splitting it into chunks could make the transition feel less dramatic and reduce the risk of one particularly badly timed trade.
I haven’t made the final decision yet, but I’m leaning towards keeping it simple. If I believe the new investment is the better long-term home for the money, there is a strong argument for making the change, accepting that short-term market movements are unknowable, and then leaving it alone.
Top Ten Funniest/Most Crazy Conspiracy Theories
10. Flat Earth (Part 355)
9. Hollow Earth (Part 356)
8. The Mandela Effect (Part 357)
7. Titanic Was Swapped With Olympic (Part 358)
6. The Phantom Time Hypothesis: What If Someone Just Made Up 300 Years? (Part 359)
5. The Moon Landing Was Faked
It’s time for another entry in my completely unordered tour through some of the world’s most batshit conspiracy theories.
We’ve already discovered that the Earth is apparently flat while also being hollow, CERN may have fucked the timeline, Titanic wasn’t really Titanic, and somebody may have inserted almost 300 fictional years into human history.
This week we’re going for one of the absolute classics.
The Moon landing was faked.
On 20 July 1969, Apollo 11’s lunar module Eagle landed on the Moon.
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on another body in space while Michael Collins remained in lunar orbit aboard the command module.
Armstrong stepped onto the surface and delivered one of the most famous lines in history.
Human beings had travelled roughly 240,000 miles from Earth, landed on another celestial body, walked around, collected samples and returned safely.
It was arguably the greatest technological achievement humanity had ever accomplished.
Naturally, it didn’t take long for someone to decide:
“Nah. Film set.”
Why fake it?
Unlike some conspiracy theories we’ve covered, there’s at least an obvious proposed motive here.
The Apollo programme happened during the Cold War.
The United States and Soviet Union were competing for technological, military and ideological supremacy, and initially, the Soviets were kicking America’s arse in space.
First artificial satellite?
Sputnik 1.
First human in space?
Yuri Gagarin.
First woman in space?
Valentina Tereshkova.
First spacewalk?
Alexei Leonov.
The Soviet Union had collected an impressive list of firsts.
Then in 1961, President John F. Kennedy committed the United States to landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth before the decade was out.
That created an enormous national objective.
So conspiracy theorists argue that when NASA realised it couldn’t actually achieve Kennedy’s goal, the United States simply faked it.
As conspiracy motives go, I can at least follow the logic.
Winning the Space Race mattered enormously. American prestige was on the line and billions of dollars had been spent. Failure would have been humiliating.
Okay, we’ve established a possible motive.
Unfortunately, now we have to explain the evidence.
The flag is waving!
Let’s start with probably the most famous Moon landing conspiracy claim.
Footage appears to show the American flag moving.
Flags move because of wind and there’s no atmosphere on the Moon.
Therefore, NASA is lying.
Pack everything up. We’ve solved it, or have we…
Well. the flag wasn’t fluttering in a lunar breeze.
NASA knew perfectly well that an ordinary flag would simply hang limply from the pole in the Moon’s near-vacuum, which isn’t particularly impressive when you’re trying to plant your country’s flag on another world.
So the lunar flag assembly used a horizontal crossbar to hold the flag outward. The astronauts also had to twist and move the pole while planting it into the lunar soil.
Move the pole and you transfer energy into the flag, and because there’s effectively no atmosphere providing air resistance, movement can persist differently from how we’d intuitively expect on Earth.
The flag was also wrinkled and if you put all this together, you get photographs that look like a flag caught in the wind.
Except there isn’t any wind. It’s fabric hanging from a horizontal support after being handled.
Still, I’m glad NASA apparently spent billions faking the Moon landing and then forgot to switch off the studio fan.
Where are all the stars?
Another favourite…
Look at photographs taken on the Moon. Black sky and no stars.
Surely if you’re standing on the Moon with no atmosphere, the sky should be absolutely packed with stars?
Therefore: FAKE.
The problem here is cameras don’t work like human expectations. The lunar surface was brightly illuminated by the Sun. The astronauts’ white spacesuits were brightly illuminated.
So the cameras were exposed for bright subjects and stars are comparatively faint. If you use camera settings appropriate for photographing a brightly lit astronaut, the stars won’t show up.
You can demonstrate the same principle on Earth. Take a photograph of somebody standing beneath bright street lighting at night using an exposure appropriate for the person. The faint stars in the background may disappear.
This isn’t evidence that Sheffield City Council has faked the fucking night sky. The good people of Sheffield get uppity when the council spends money on bike lanes. Imagine the outrage if they found out SCC had created a vast dome over the city to fake the night sky.
The shadows aren’t parallel!
Another supposed smoking gun comes from photographs showing shadows apparently pointing in different directions.
The argument goes:
If the Sun were the only light source, all shadows should be parallel.
Some lunar photographs show shadows at different apparent angles. Therefore multiple studio lights must have been used.
Except perspective exists.
Parallel lines can appear to converge or diverge in photographs.
Stand on a straight railway line and look towards the horizon. The rails appear to converge. Nobody concludes Network Rail secretly narrows the track until the rails touch somewhere outside Doncaster.
Uneven terrain also affects how shadows appear. The Moon isn’t a perfectly flat studio floor. Slopes and depressions change where shadows fall.
Perspective, terrain and camera position can therefore produce images that look strange if you’re expecting every shadow to behave like a diagram from a school physics textbook.
Who took the photograph of Armstrong?
This one occasionally appears in slightly different forms.
If Neil Armstrong was the first person on the Moon…
WHO FILMED HIM CLIMBING DOWN THE LADDER?
Checkmate, NASA.
Except a television camera was mounted on the lunar module and it was deployed to capture Armstrong’s descent. Nobody needed to already be standing there with a camera saying:
“Neil, mate, can you do that again? I wasn’t recording.”
Similarly, photographs showing both astronauts don’t require a mysterious third cameraman hiding behind a lunar rock. The astronauts photographed one another. There were cameras attached to their suits and equipment. The mechanics of documenting the mission aren’t particularly mysterious.
What about the Van Allen belts?
Now we reach one of the arguments that sounds considerably more scientific.
Earth is surrounded by regions containing energetic charged particles trapped by its magnetic field, known as the Van Allen radiation belts.
Radiation can be dangerous. Apollo astronauts travelled through these regions. Therefore conspiracy theorists argue they couldn’t possibly have survived.
This is a perfect example of taking something real and attaching the wrong conclusion.
Yes, the Van Allen belts exist. Yes, radiation exposure is a genuine concern for spaceflight, but radiation risk depends on things like dose, shielding, trajectory and exposure time.
Apollo spacecraft didn’t park inside the most intense radiation region for a fortnight while the astronauts had a picnic.
Their trajectories were designed to pass through the belts relatively quickly while avoiding the most intense regions where possible.
The relevant question isn’t:
“Is there radiation?”
It’s:
“What dose did the astronauts receive?”
Those are very different questions.
There’s radiation every time you have an X-ray but that doesn’t mean everyone leaving the radiology department immediately bursts into flames.
Stanley Kubrick enters the conspiracy
And now we arrive at my favourite part.
Film director Stanley Kubrick is sometimes claimed to have helped NASA fake the Moon landing.
The theory usually points towards his 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which featured groundbreaking visual effects and realistic depictions of space.
NASA supposedly needed someone capable of creating convincing lunar footage.
Kubrick had just demonstrated exactly that ability. Therefore Kubrick filmed Apollo 11. The logic is clearly solid.
There are even later claims that Kubrick hid clues about his involvement in The Shining.
Because obviously if you’ve successfully participated in one of the greatest conspiracies in human history, the sensible thing to do is hide hints about it in a horror film.
Apparently secrecy becomes boring after a while.
I also love the implication that NASA looked at 2001 and thought:
“Get me the bloke who did the monkeys.”
There is no credible evidence Kubrick filmed the Moon landings, but the story persists because it’s brilliant. It connects Hollywood, secret government programmes, hidden messages and one of history’s greatest filmmakers.
It’s just a shame about the evidence.
The Soviet Union presents a fairly major problem
For me, this is one of the biggest common-sense problems with the entire conspiracy.
Remember who America’s main rival was.
The Soviet Union.
This wasn’t a friendly competition between two universities building rockets for fun.
This was the fucking Cold War. The United States and Soviet Union had nuclear weapons pointed at one another. They competed militarily, economically, technologically, ideologically, and in space.
The Soviets had their own sophisticated tracking capabilities. If Apollo 11 had remained in Earth orbit while NASA broadcast footage filmed in a warehouse somewhere in Nevada, the Soviet Union had an absolutely enormous incentive to expose it.
Imagine the propaganda victory. The United States announces to the world that it has landed men on the Moon.
Moscow responds:
“The fuck you have. We’ve been tracking you.”
It would have humiliated America globally. Yet the Soviet Union accepted the achievement.
For the conspiracy to work, either America’s greatest geopolitical rival somehow failed to notice what happened or the Soviets discovered the fraud and decided:
“Let’s keep this one between ourselves.”
During the Cold War. Very sporting of them.
And other people tracked Apollo too
NASA wasn’t the only organisation capable of receiving signals or tracking spacecraft. Observatories and tracking facilities outside the United States followed Apollo missions.
Radio transmissions could be detected. The spacecraft’s movements weren’t happening inside some sealed NASA information bubble.
This matters because the larger a conspiracy becomes, the harder it is to contain. Faking some television footage is one problem. Faking a spacecraft travelling to the Moon in a way that convinces independent observers and your principal geopolitical enemy is something else entirely.
At some point, actually going to the Moon starts looking easier.
Moon rocks are annoyingly real
The Apollo missions returned hundreds of kilograms of lunar material to Earth and these samples have been studied by scientists around the world.
Lunar rocks have characteristics consistent with formation and exposure in the lunar environment.
They’re not simply unusual stones NASA picked up in Arizona and painted grey, although I seem to remember reading about a guy who was forging rocks somewhere in the US I think. Damnit now I’m going to have to go down a rabbit hole trying to remember this one…
Right, so I did some research, and by that I mean I asked ChatGPT and this is what it told me:
The key figure you may have in mind is Basilio Uschuya, a Peruvian farmer who became associated with supplying supposedly ancient engraved stones to collectors. The stones depicted extraordinary scenes: humans alongside dinosaurs, advanced surgery, astronomy and other things wildly out of place for an ancient civilisation. They became famous through physician Javier Cabrera, who accumulated thousands and argued they were evidence of an advanced ancient culture.
And back to the Moon…
Conspiracy explanations therefore have to expand again. Perhaps the rocks came from meteorites. Perhaps scientists were fooled. Perhaps scientists were involved. Perhaps samples were manufactured.
Again, notice the pattern. Evidence appears. Rather than allowing the evidence to challenge the theory, the conspiracy simply grows large enough to swallow it.
Soon we’re no longer accusing a few NASA executives of faking television footage. We’re dragging geologists and laboratories around the world into it as well.
Welcome aboard, everyone. There are biscuits in the conspiracy break room.
Then there’s the equipment we left there
Apollo astronauts didn’t simply leave footprints and flags. They placed scientific equipment on the lunar surface, including laser retroreflectors that allow researchers to measure the Earth-Moon distance with extraordinary precision.
To be clear, the reflectors aren’t proof by themselves that astronauts installed them. Robotic missions can do that too, and the Soviet Union did exactly that with its Lunokhod rovers.
But that’s the important point with Apollo: no single piece of evidence exists in isolation.
There are samples, photographs, telemetry, independent tracking, scientific equipment and the observations of America’s Cold War rivals.
The conspiracy has to explain all of it.
Why didn’t we go back?
This is probably the question I hear most often.
If we could land people on the Moon in 1969, why haven’t humans been back since 1972? It’s the same as asking why we haven’t built more pyramids like in Egypt.
Technology has improved enormously since Apollo, so surely returning should be easy?
But Apollo wasn’t simply a technological project. It was an enormously expensive political project fuelled by the Cold War and America’s desire to beat the Soviet Union.
Hundreds of thousands of people worked across the programme and its supply chain. Enormous infrastructure was built and huge sums were spent.
Once America had achieved Kennedy’s goal and beaten the Soviets to the Moon, the political motivation changed. Budgets changed. Priorities changed. Some planned Apollo missions were cancelled.
The question isn’t:
“Did humanity forget how to reach the Moon?”
It’s:
“Was anyone willing to continue spending Apollo-level resources repeatedly sending people there?”
Those aren’t remotely the same thing.
We stopped building Concorde too. That doesn’t mean Concorde was CGI. We also don’t build pyramids because, well, there’s no desire for them anymore.
We actually went back five more times
People often talk about the Moon landing as though NASA claims Armstrong and Aldrin went there once before everyone immediately packed up.
Apollo 11 landed in July 1969. Then Apollo 12 landed later that year, followed by Apollo 14, 15, 16 and 17.
Twelve people walked on the Moon, which creates another problem for the conspiracy.
You’ve successfully pulled off the greatest propaganda fraud in history. You’ve beaten the Soviet Union. Kennedy’s promise has been fulfilled. Take the win.
Instead, according to the conspiracy, NASA apparently thought:
“That gigantic fraud involving thousands of people went surprisingly well. Shall we do it another five times?”
They even threw Apollo 13 into the mix, where an oxygen-tank failure nearly killed the crew.
If you’re making the whole thing up anyway, why give yourself that storyline?
What about modern photographs?
Later spacecraft have photographed the Apollo landing sites from lunar orbit, showing features associated with the missions, including descent stages and tracks.
The obvious conspiracy response is:
NASA took those pictures too.
Once more we’ve reached the usual problem. If every piece of evidence produced by NASA is automatically rejected because NASA is part of the conspiracy, no NASA evidence could ever disprove it.
But again, NASA photographs aren’t all we have. There are lunar samples, independent tracking, Soviet observations, scientific equipment, mission records and physical hardware.
At some point, dismissing the evidence requires a conspiracy almost as complicated as Apollo itself.
The number of people involved becomes ridiculous
Apollo involved a vast workforce across NASA, universities and private contractors.
Engineers, mathematicians, computer scientists, technicians, astronauts, geologists, mission controllers, radio operators, manufacturers and countless others.
Now, not everyone would need to know.
The bloke manufacturing a valve doesn’t necessarily know exactly where the finished spacecraft goes.
But the closer you get to mission operations, tracking, communications and engineering, the harder it becomes to explain how nobody produced decisive evidence of the fraud.
More than half a century has passed, yet there’s never been credible insider evidence demonstrating that the Apollo landings were staged.
Apparently NASA achieved something even more impressive than landing people on the Moon:
Getting thousands of human beings to keep their damn mouths shut.
Occam’s razor goes to the Moon
So let’s compare our options.
Explanation One:
During the Cold War, America spent an enormous amount of money developing rockets and spacecraft. NASA progressed through Mercury, Gemini and Apollo before landing humans on the Moon in 1969.
Five further missions landed there.
The Soviet Union and independent observers tracked Apollo. Astronauts returned lunar samples and deployed scientific equipment. The programme generated huge quantities of telemetry, photographs, documentation and physical evidence.
Or:
Explanation Two:
America faked it. The footage was secretly produced on Earth.
Astronauts lied. Mission controllers were deceived or complicit.
Tracking information was fabricated. Independent observers were fooled.
The Soviet Union somehow failed to expose its greatest rival.
Moon rocks were fabricated or obtained elsewhere.
NASA then repeated the fraud another five times.
And more than half a century later, nobody involved has produced convincing evidence proving it.
At some point, building the Saturn V starts sounding easier.
And that’s what I love about the Moon-hoax conspiracy
It takes one of humanity’s greatest engineering achievements and replaces it with an engineering achievement that might actually be harder.
NASA supposedly had to launch enormous rockets, convince observers they were travelling towards the Moon, fake communications and trajectories, create convincing lunar footage with 1960s technology, produce believable lunar geology, fool scientists, fool tracking stations, fool the Soviet Union and keep the relevant people quiet for decades.
Then do it repeatedly.
All without somebody eventually leaving on a train a folder marked:
MOON LANDING – FAKE – DO NOT RELEASE
Frankly, if NASA managed all that in 1969, give them the medal anyway.
The reality is better
This is what frustrates me about Moon-landing conspiracy theories.
The real story is so much better.
Humans spent thousands of years staring at the Moon.
It appeared in mythology, religion, calendars, navigation, art and stories. It hung in the night sky impossibly far away.
Then, within a few generations of the first powered aircraft flight, we built a machine powerful enough to throw human beings away from Earth.
We crossed hundreds of thousands of miles of space and landed on another world.
People walked around, collected rocks and performed experiments before launching from the lunar surface, meeting another spacecraft in orbit and falling back towards Earth at enormous speed.
And they survived.
That’s absolutely incredible, and that’s why I find the conspiracy almost disappointing.
Humanity actually did something astonishing, and instead of looking at it and saying:
“Holy shit, look what we’re capable of.”
some people looked at the photographs and said:
“The shadows seem a bit funny.”
Still, if Stanley Kubrick really did film the Moon landing, there’s only one explanation for why it looked so convincing: He probably insisted they shoot it on location.
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.
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