Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE.
Weekly Update
A bit of a shorter post this week due to the fact that I generally need about 36 hours per day to get everything done.
Sadly, I think my bike, which I call The Roci (short for Rocinante from Don Quixote and The Expanse), is knackered. I normally cycle a couple of hundred kilometres each week, so it does take some hammer. I had the bike serviced just a couple of weeks ago, and since then it’s been making strange sounds and I can feel some vibrations and grinding in the bike. At the weekend, Oana and I went for a ride and as I hit a small hill, it was like a switch was flipped and the bike felt as though the brakes were being constantly applied.
We couldn’t diagnose the exact issue, and spent a fair amount of time checking the brakes but there was no obvious issue. So it looks like my Roci is going back in for more work.
This Week on The AFI Podcast
Check out the AFI section of this site for links to the pod on the various platforms.
See below for a clip from a recent episode.
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: Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman.
Watching: Widow’s Bay (Netflix).
Reading: Abaddon’s Gate (Expanse Book 3) by James S. A. Corey.
Financial Update
Assets
Premium Bonds: £250.00.
Stocks and Shares ISA: £140,641.31.
Fuck It Fund: £0.00.
Pensions: £128,112.51.
Residential Property Value: £245,790.00.
Total Assets: £514,793.82.
Debts
Residential Mortgage: £173,115.21.
Total Debts: £173,115.21.
Total Wealth
Total Wealth: £341,678.61.
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 (Part 360)
4. Project Blue Beam: When Faking the Moon Landing Just Isn’t Ambitious Enough (Part 361)
3. Climate Change Isn’t Real: The weather has entered the chat…
We’ve reached another entry in my completely unordered tour through the world’s most batshit conspiracy theories. And this one is different.
Flat Earth is funny. Hollow Earth is brilliant, although I remain disappointed there aren’t dinosaurs beneath Doncaster. Project Blue Beam gives us Giant Sky Jesus and fake aliens.
Climate change denial has real consequences. Decisions made today affect people decades from now. That doesn’t mean we can’t have some fun with the arguments. Because fuck me… Some of the arguments…
There are legitimate debates about climate change: how quickly particular effects will occur, which policies work, what governments should spend, and how we balance environmental objectives against energy security and living standards. Science doesn’t magically answer every political question.
But that’s different from saying climate change isn’t happening, humans have nothing to do with it, or scientists know it’s fake but are all lying.
That last one takes us properly into conspiracy territory.
First, is the planet actually warming?
Yes. This doesn’t rest on one thermometer outside NASA. Temperature records show long-term warming, supported by ocean temperatures, melting glaciers and ice sheets, rising sea levels and other measurements.
The evidence doesn’t come from one organisation or country either. Which creates an immediate problem for the conspiracy: who is fabricating it? NASA? Fine. What about everyone else?
Earth has experienced ice ages and warmer periods. Its orbit changes. Solar activity varies. Volcanoes and ocean circulation affect climate. Nobody thinks Earth’s temperature remained perfectly constant until Ford built the Model-T. We know about past climate change largely because climate scientists study it.
The questions are why it’s changing now, how quickly, and what’s driving it.
Saying today’s change must be natural because climate changed before is like saying people have died naturally for thousands of years, therefore murder doesn’t exist. Natural causes don’t eliminate other causes.
It’s CO₂, not Voldemort
Earth receives energy from the Sun and radiates energy towards space. Greenhouse gases absorb and re-emit some infrared radiation. Adding more changes that energy balance.
We’ve known about carbon dioxide’s heat-trapping properties since the nineteenth century. This wasn’t invented by Greta Thunberg’s marketing department in 2018. Burning fossil fuels has substantially increased atmospheric CO₂, and that increase matters.
“But CO₂ is only a tiny percentage of the atmosphere!”
It is. So what? You don’t put cyanide in your tea, calculate that it’s a tiny percentage of the drink and crack on. A substance’s effect depends on its properties, not whether it occupies an impressively large proportion of the mixture.
Then there’s “it’s only a couple of degrees.” Our own bodies demonstrate why small temperature changes can matter. That doesn’t make global temperature and body temperature equivalent; they’re different systems. But dismissing a change because the number sounds small is idiotic. Ecosystems, agriculture and ice sheets operate within particular conditions. Earth doesn’t need to become Venus for a few degrees to be a very fucking big deal.
“It was cold yesterday”
This is the argument that makes climate scientists stare into the middle distance while I facepalm hard enough to leave a permanent handprint.
Weather describes short-term conditions in a particular place. Climate describes patterns over longer periods and larger areas. Global warming doesn’t mean Britain is contractually prohibited from having a cold day.
Snow in Sheffield doesn’t disprove decades of planetary warming. Equally, one hot afternoon doesn’t prove it. Long-term patterns matter more than whether you needed a coat this morning. There are going to be short-term fluctuations. It’s the big picture that matters.
Then someone inevitably summons 1976. Mention a heatwave and a man materialises beside a paddling pool to tell you summers used to be hot too.
1976 was hot. Nobody is debating it. Climate change doesn’t mean hot weather never happened before; it changes the background against which weather occurs. You can roll a six with an ordinary die. Loading it makes sixes more common. An earlier six doesn’t prove the die hasn’t changed.
“They changed the name!”
This is usually delivered as though someone has uncovered Watergate.
Global warming means the long-term rise in Earth’s average surface temperature. Climate change includes that warming and wider changes to rainfall, ice, sea level and other parts of the climate system. Both terms are useful.
It’s not a rebrand to conceal the awkward fact that winter still exists.
“Scientists predicted an ice age!”
Some scientists investigated cooling, and newspapers ran stories about it. But the claim that a scientific consensus predicted an imminent ice age in the 1970s is false. Reviews of the literature found papers anticipating warming substantially outnumbered those anticipating cooling.
Our knowledge has also improved. Better observations, longer datasets and better computers help. Science changing with evidence is the point of science. Refusing today’s findings because researchers knew less fifty years ago is like refusing modern cancer treatment because doctors understood cancer less well in 1920.
“Climate models aren’t perfect”
Correct. Nobody serious claims otherwise.
Models simplify complicated systems and contain uncertainties. Weather forecasts aren’t perfect either, but if torrential rain is predicted, I’m probably not organising a picnic because the Met Office isn’t omniscient.
The questions are whether models are useful, their assumptions reasonable, and their results consistent with observations.
Uncertainty isn’t ignorance. If a doctor is uncertain how quickly a disease will progress, you don’t conclude: “Excellent. Therefore I don’t have it.”
“Scientists just want research grants”
How many scientists? In how many countries, universities and institutions? Using how many independent measurements?
And why wouldn’t convincingly disproving human-caused warming be a spectacular scientific achievement? Produce robust evidence overturning one of the biggest scientific conclusions of the modern era and you’d be fucking famous.
The conspiracy requires researchers to crave advancement enough to fake findings, but ignore the rewards of genuinely overturning them. Interesting incentive structure.
Then there’s the scale. Universities, meteorological agencies, satellite programmes and oceanographic institutes across the world would need to cooperate. Countries that can’t agree on borders, wars or trade have apparently achieved flawless coordination over falsifying atmospheric physics.
Where are the documents? The convincing alternative measurements? The mechanism coordinating the fraud?
Apparently humanity finally achieved global cooperation, and used it to fake the weather.
“But scientists disagree!”
They do: about regional effects, feedbacks, climate sensitivity and consequences. That doesn’t create an equally divided field over whether human greenhouse-gas emissions warm the planet.
Dissent matters. Show the evidence, publish it and let others test it. But if 99 engineers say a bridge is unsafe and one disagrees, that doesn’t automatically create a 50/50 debate. This is a problem with our society in so many ways. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but it doesn’t mean all opinions are equally valid. Expertise, knowledge, experience, and education all matter.
Consensus isn’t proof by itself. Evidence matters. However, dismissing compatible findings from thousands of specialists requires more than “my uncle reckons winters were colder when he was a lad.”
“They’re manipulating temperature records!”
Weather stations move. Instruments and observation times change. Scientists account for known measurement problems. Describe this as “THEY ALTER THE RAW DATA” and it sounds sinister. It’s measurement science.
If I weigh myself wearing a backpack full of bricks and account for its weight, I haven’t joined the New World Order.
Warming also appears across independent observations of oceans, ice and the atmosphere. Faking one dataset wouldn’t explain the rest.
Follow the money. All of it.
Energy involves enormous financial interests. Scrutinise fossil-fuel companies, renewables, governments, researchers and campaigners. Excellent.
But “money exists” doesn’t establish that a scientific claim is false. Conflicts of interest demand transparency and independent evidence, not automatically declaring whoever receives funding you dislike a liar.
“It’s all about control”
Taxes, banned cars, insects for dinner, global government. Pick your favourite.
You can oppose a carbon tax while accepting that carbon dioxide obeys physics. You can consider an environmental policy expensive, ineffective or authoritarian without denying the problem it supposedly addresses.
Otherwise you’re reasoning backwards: “I dislike the solution, therefore the problem can’t be real.” I dislike replacing a leaking toilet. That doesn’t make the bathroom floor dry.
Accepting climate science doesn’t require swallowing every catastrophic headline either. Politicians, campaigners and newspapers exaggerate. Particular predictions can be wrong. None of that automatically overturns the underlying evidence.
There’s space between “it’s all a scam” and “civilisation ends next Thursday at 2:15pm.” Science lives there.
And if you can secretly manipulate scientific institutions worldwide, why choose such a slow route to domination? Surely you don’t need fifty years to persuade people to buy heat pumps.
Scepticism is good. Question scientists, politicians and corporations. But apply the standards consistently. Don’t demand impossible certainty from evidence you dislike while accepting a Facebook meme because it agrees with you.
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:
Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE.
Weekly Update
Our Poppy celebrated her 17th birthday this week, and as tradition dictates we served her meowjasty some chicken that was shaped to read her new age. Now that she’s 17 I think she can learn to drive, but that’s a whole other conversation.
She really is the best cat you could wish for, just like our other cats. They’re all the best.
As I’m typing this she’s curled up on her favourite cushion having a well earned rest after all her hard work doing…. Cat stuff?
This week Oana and I have really pushed it with cycling. We’ve done 150km this week, and believe me we can feel it. Friday was a particularly punishing day. We rode out to Waverley and back with a friend in the afternoon, and in the evening took part in another Sheffield Critical Mass Ride with roughly 40 people going through the city with loudspeakers blasting out cheesy 80s music, some fancy dress, and lots of laughs. Between those two rides we did almost 50k.
My new job is continuing to be a huge change from my last role. Who could have guessed that being treated as a competent and grown up professional would lead to better results?
Anyway, I don’t think I’ve mentioned where I’m working but it’s a business called Elm Tree Mortgages, and I’ll be on their Meet The Team section soon. I did have some fun getting an image together for my profile pic. After taking the standard selfie in a shirt and tie, it was a case of, What If?
So, below is my standard work profile pic and a couple of variations:
In the latest episode, Darren and I tackle a few things: Should autistic people be allowed to drive? We also discuss our experiences with autistic burnout.
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: Not Till We Are Lost: Bobiverse Book 5 by Dennis E. Taylor.
Watching: The Bombing of Pan Am 103 (Netflix).
Reading: Abaddon’s Gate (Expanse Book 3) by James S. A. Corey.
Financial Update
Assets
Premium Bonds: £250.00.
Stocks and Shares ISA: £142,098.98.
Fuck It Fund: £0.00.
Pensions: £129,089.96.
Residential Property Value: £245,790.00.
Total Assets: £517,228.94.
Debts
Residential Mortgage: £173,281.83.
Total Debts: £173,281.83.
Total Wealth
Total Wealth: £343,947.11.
The big news from this week is that I withdrew £12k from my ISA. Having gone so long without a regular wage; since October 2025, a few things had started to look precarious financially. It’s not that much of a concern though, as once I’ve established a pipeline in my new venture I should be able to start investing again.
4. Project Blue Beam: When Faking the Moon Landing Just Isn’t Ambitious Enough
It’s time for another entry in my chaotic tour through some of the world’s most batshit conspiracy theories.
We’ve already established that the Earth is apparently flat while simultaneously being hollow, CERN might have broken reality, Titanic might have secretly been Olympic, somebody apparently invented 300 years of history, and NASA spent the 1960s developing the world’s most elaborate film production. But wait, there’s more…
I would like to introduce you to Project Blue Beam.
I’m going to warn you in advance; this one has fucking everything.
Holograms. Satellites. Fake earthquakes. Mind control. Religion. Telepathy. The New World Order. A fake Second Coming. Oh, and aliens. This is what happens when you mix the “and then” school of comedy with a conspiracy nutjob who doesn’t know when to stop. The theory is obviously bullshit, but I have to just stop and admire the brain that came up with this.
So what actually is Project Blue Beam?
The theory is most closely associated with Canadian conspiracy theorist Serge Monast, who promoted it during the 1990s.
According to Monast, powerful organisations were supposedly working towards establishing a New World Order and a single global government.
To accomplish this, existing religions and national identities would need to be undermined, and apparently the people running the world decided that propaganda, political influence and economic power were all far too straightforward.
Instead, they would stage an enormous technological deception involving the entire planet. The alleged operation would unfold in several stages, ultimately convincing humanity that some kind of supernatural or extraterrestrial event was taking place.
People would panic. Existing belief systems would collapse. Humanity would accept a new global religion and political order. And whoever was running Project Blue Beam would presumably sit back and say:
“Fucking nailed it.”
Let’s go through the plan because it gets considerably better.
Fakequakes
The first stage supposedly involves artificially created earthquakes. Already we’re off to a strong start. I’m thinking 1970s Bond villain in a hollowed out mountain base.
These earthquakes would allegedly uncover archaeological discoveries contradicting established religious teachings.
The idea is that carefully manufactured discoveries would demonstrate that major religions had misunderstood their own histories.
Faith in existing religions would collapse, humanity would become psychologically vulnerable, and the conspirators could move on to stage two.
If I’m being charitable, I would say there are a few minor practical problems here.
Human activity can definitely cause seismic events. Mining, reservoir construction, geothermal operations and injecting fluids underground can all produce or trigger earthquakes under certain conditions.
That’s real. There’s no argument about this in broad terms, but that’s rather different from possessing a machine where someone can point at Egypt and press:
EARTHQUAKE – REVEAL CONVENIENT FAKE ARCHAEOLOGY.
We’re then talking about a level of precision that would cause huge destruction whilst also leaving the “ancient artifacts” intact. Oh, and these artifacts would need to pass examination by the world’s leading scientists, but that’s just detail.
HOLOGOD
Now we get to the bit Project Blue Beam is famous for.
According to the theory, satellites or other advanced technology would project enormous holographic images into the sky. Exactly how this is achieved is, again, just detail, and much like I tell Oana when making outlandish suggestions, I’m just a big picture guy.
Different regions would supposedly see religious figures appropriate to their beliefs.
Christians might see Jesus. Other religions would see something appropriate to their beliefs. How this would appear in a multicultural and multireligious location is just detail. Again, we’re talking about the big picture here, literally and figuratively.
These apparitions would then somehow merge into a single entity that announces a new universal religion.
Basically: God: The Avengers.
Apparently billions of people would immediately accept this without question. No theologians pointing out doctrinal problems. No scientists examining the phenomenon. No bloke on TikTok zooming in and announcing: “You can see the pixels.”
Everyone just abandons thousands of years of religious tradition because a very large Jesus appeared over Stoke on a cold winter night.
Could we actually project a giant hologram into the sky?
This is where the theory often gets muddled with real technology. Humans can create spectacular projected images. We have drone displays, laser shows, projection mapping, augmented reality, Pepper’s Ghost-style illusions and large-scale displays. And we’ve all seen concerts where a dead musician supposedly appears on stage as a “hologram.”
However, creating a convincing three-dimensional image hundreds or thousands of metres high, visible simultaneously across enormous geographical regions and apparently suspended in empty sky is another matter entirely. Light needs something to interact with. You can’t simply point a projector into clear air and create a perfectly solid-looking 20-mile-high Jesus that everyone across Britain sees from the correct perspective.
Atmospheric particles can scatter light, and various projection technologies can create impressive effects under controlled conditions. But Project Blue Beam requires something orders of magnitude beyond that, and not in a laboratory. Across the entire planet. Without anybody noticing the infrastructure beforehand.
We struggle to maintain a fairly simple network of public transport where trains should be able to run east to west and back, yet according to this theory creating a convincing sky wizard is easy.
This is where HAARP inevitably gets dragged in
If you’ve spent enough time exploring conspiracy theories, you’ll eventually encounter HAARP. The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program is a research facility in Alaska used to study the ionosphere. Which sounds technical, and technical things make excellent conspiracy ingredients, because if you don’t understand it, it’s obviously a massive conspiracy.
Over the years, HAARP has been accused of causing earthquakes, controlling weather, manipulating minds and generally possessing whatever superpower a particular conspiracy requires that afternoon. Project Blue Beam discussions sometimes incorporate HAARP or similar technology as part of the mechanism. It’s basically HAARP all the way down at this point.
Need an earthquake? HAARP. Need strange atmospheric effects? HAARP. Need mind control? Probably HAARP. Lost your keys? Check whether HAARP has them.
The problem is that studying the ionosphere doesn’t magically provide the ability to control tectonic plates, manufacture global hallucinations or turn the atmosphere into an IMAX screen. I mean, it would be cool to see a mile high holographic show, but it’s just not possible with the technology today.
God starts talking inside your head
At this point, you’d think enormous holographic deities appearing in the sky would be sufficient. You would be wrong.
The next stage allegedly involved electronic telepathy. Using extremely low-frequency or other electromagnetic technologies, the conspirators would supposedly transmit voices directly into people’s minds. The experience would feel personal. God wouldn’t simply appear in the sky. God would talk to you.
Imagine sitting at home eating your breakfast when suddenly a voice appears inside your head:
“DAVID.”
What?
“THIS IS GOD.”
Fuuuuuuuuck….
“ACCEPT THE NEW WORLD ORDER.”
Hogan, Hall and Nash?
“No, the NEW, NEW WORLD ORDER”
Can I finish my coffee first?
This would supposedly convince people that the religious apparition was genuine. And once again, the theory takes something vaguely connected to real scientific concepts and then launches itself into hyperspace.
Researchers have investigated ways electromagnetic stimulation can affect the nervous system. There are also technologies capable of producing unusual auditory sensations under particular circumstances. But that’s an enormous distance from “a satellite can individually beam a perfectly intelligible personalised voice into billions of people’s brains.”
It’s like claiming just because you can strike a match, you can build a nuke.
And finally: aliens
The final stage of Project Blue Beam supposedly involves creating the appearance of a global extraterrestrial attack or other enormous supernatural event. Humanity would believe Earth was under threat. Faced with an external enemy, nations would unite, people would surrender national sovereignty, a global government would emerge and the New World Order would finally be established.
It’s basically the ending of Watchmen but with considerably more admin. Also, have you met people? There could literally be an Independence Day style attack going on and someone would be claiming it as a False Flag.
I do love the scale of this, though. We have a group of elites who can generate fakequakes, control human thought, and simulate an alien invasion, but they can’t just, you know, subtly control elections to achieve their ends a little more in the background.
Why would anyone believe this?
Here’s where Project Blue Beam becomes genuinely interesting, because individually, some of the ingredients are based loosely on real things.
Governments conduct secret projects. Military deception and propaganda exist. Psychological warfare exists. Holographic and projection technology exists. Artificial intelligence can generate convincing fake imagery. Humans can influence seismic activity in limited circumstances. Governments have researched technologies capable of influencing human behaviour. Satellites exist. Politicians have discussed global governance.
Take each fact separately and none proves Project Blue Beam. But combine them into one narrative and something strange happens: the gaps between facts become invisible.
Holograms exist, therefore giant sky holograms are possible. Electromagnetic radiation can affect biological tissue, therefore satellites can transmit God into your brain. Human activity can induce earthquakes, therefore earthquakes can be precisely manufactured to expose planted archaeological evidence. Governments conduct classified operations, therefore this classified operation exists.
Every step contains a little piece of truth. The problem is the enormous unsupported leap connecting it to the next one, but that’s just detail.
The Problem of Scale
Project Blue Beam isn’t supposedly happening in one city. It’s global.
So let’s think about what would actually be required: satellites, ground infrastructure, energy, engineers, software developers, military personnel, scientists, technicians, manufacturers, intelligence agencies, government officials and religious experts.
Then we need people planting fake archaeological discoveries, people creating artificial earthquakes, people developing mind-control technology, people designing the holograms, people producing the fake alien invasion and presumably someone whose job is to make sure Giant Sky Jesus renders correctly.
How many countries are involved? Who builds everything? Who launches the satellites? Who maintains them? Who tests the system? And how does nobody notice?
Once again, conspiracy theories require humanity to possess an organisational competence that has never been demonstrated anywhere else in recorded history. We struggle to organise roadworks, but apparently a secret international cabal can coordinate a fake supernatural event across every continent without someone leaving the plans on a train or without someone CCing the wrong person in an email chain.
If true, it would be spectacular
Visually, it would be incredible. Imagine looking outside and seeing an enormous spacecraft hanging silently over Sheffield. The clouds light up. Thousands of smaller craft appear. A colossal figure materialises across the sky. A voice suddenly speaks inside your head.
Come on, you know it would be fun.
The genuinely important lesson
There is something useful buried underneath all this madness. Technology is making it easier to deceive people. Deepfakes are improving. Synthetic voices are improving. AI-generated photographs and video are improving. Coordinated disinformation is real. Propaganda is real. Governments and private organisations genuinely do attempt to influence public opinion.
So the sensible response isn’t “Project Blue Beam is real.” It’s “We need to become better at verifying extraordinary claims.”
Where did the image come from? Can it be independently confirmed? Are multiple unrelated sources reporting the same thing? Is there physical evidence? Can experts examine it? Does the proposed technology actually work the way people claim?
Those questions are considerably less exciting than assuming every strange light in the sky is the rehearsal for a fake alien invasion, but they’re considerably more useful.
Because there’s a wonderful irony at the centre of Project Blue Beam. Its believers are worried that powerful organisations might use advanced technology to manipulate people into believing something extraordinary without sufficient evidence.
And their response is to believe an extraordinary story about advanced technology without sufficient evidence.
*chef’s kiss*
So is Project Blue Beam real?
No.
Although if I look out of the window tomorrow and there’s a 30,000-foot Jesus floating above Sheffield while a fleet of alien spacecraft attacks Meadowhall, I’ll happily publish a correction.
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:
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.
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.
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Weekly Update
This week was split neatly into two distinct parts: four days of work, followed by a long birthday weekend.
Monday through Thursday were mostly dominated by work, although we managed to fit in a few bike rides along the way. I’m still settling into the new role, but things continue to feel positive. There’s work to do and plenty to learn, but I’m able to get on with it without feeling as though every waking moment is being consumed by stress and confusion. It’s amazing how much easier a job becomes when communication is clear and you’re treated like a competent adult.
The bike rides helped break up the working week nicely. Working from home has plenty of advantages, but it’s also very easy to finish work and realise that your total movement for the day has involved travelling between your desk and the coffee machine in the kitchen. Getting outside for a ride clears my head and creates a definite dividing line between work and the rest of the evening.
Friday was my birthday, marking another successful orbit of the Sun without being eaten by a bear, struck by lightning or killed by one of the many cyclists in Sheffield who ride at night dressed entirely in black with no lights.
To celebrate, Oana and I went out for an Italian meal with my parents. Unfortunately, the meal wasn’t particularly good. Italian food can be fantastic, but this restaurant appeared to believe that authenticity meant drowning everything in industrial quantities of oil. The food came with oil. The sides came with oil. Even the oil seemed to come with an additional layer of grease. We had to send one plate back because the food was inedible and actively unpleasant.
I’m not necessarily looking for a meal to be healthy when I go out for my birthday. I understand that nobody orders restaurant food because they’re desperate to hit their fibre target. However, for somewhere that markets itself as a high end restaurant, having every dish just have a slimy, greasy, feel is not great. We all felt ill after the experience.
Still, a poor meal didn’t ruin the day. Birthdays are less about everything going perfectly and more about spending time with the people who matter. I had Oana and my parents with me, received some lovely messages and got to enjoy a day away from work. The restaurant may not be getting a glowing recommendation, but the birthday itself was still a good one.
Saturday morning began with another group bike ride. After the excesses of the night before, getting out on the bike probably did me some good, although I’m not convinced it was physically possible to burn through the quantity of oil I’d consumed without cycling directly to Italy and back.
Later, my Dad and I headed to Hillsborough to watch Sheffield Wednesday take on Wigan Athletic. The match finished goalless, which wasn’t exactly the exhilarating conclusion to the weekend I might have ordered. Supporting Wednesday has never really been about receiving what you ordered, though. It’s more like subscribing to a mystery box and discovering each Saturday whether it contains joy, frustration or forty-five minutes of watching somebody repeatedly pass the ball sideways.
A 0–0 draw wasn’t the birthday-weekend fireworks I might have hoped for, but it rounded off a busy and enjoyable few days. Work had gone well, we’d managed several bike rides, I’d celebrated another birthday and Wednesday hadn’t lost. Aside from consuming enough olive oil to qualify as a Mediterranean shipping incident, I’ll take that as a decent week.
This Week on The AFI Podcast
Check out the AFI section of this site for links to the pod on the various platforms. Our latest episode includes an overview of different asset classes, and a discussion around recent comments from Ed Norton about autism.
What I’m Doing
Listening: We are Legion (We are Bob): Bobiverse Book 1 by Dennis E. Taylor.
Watching: For All Mankind (Apple).
Reading: Abaddon’s Gate (Expanse Book 3) by James S. A. Corey.
6. The Phantom Time Hypothesis: What If Someone Just Made Up 300 Years?
It’s time for another entry in my completely unordered tour through some of the world’s most batshit conspiracy theories.
So far we’ve discovered that the Earth is flat, the Earth is simultaneously hollow, CERN may have broken reality, and the Titanic might secretly have been her sister ship wearing a fake moustache.
But this week we’re going bigger.
Buckle up, cowboy, because what if I told you that somewhere around three centuries of human history never actually happened?
Not that we don’t know much about them. Not that historians have got a few dates wrong. Not that some medieval monk accidentally wrote 742 when he meant 743.
No. The years themselves were invented.
According to the Phantom Time Hypothesis, roughly 297 years of the Early Middle Ages were inserted into our historical chronology despite never actually taking place.
The period from AD 614 to AD 911 is supposedly fictional. Which would mean that as I sit here writing this in 2026, it isn’t really 2026 at all. It’s closer to 1729.
So who came up with this?
The Phantom Time Hypothesis is most closely associated with German writer and publisher Heribert Illig, who began promoting the idea in the early 1990s.
His basic argument was that our conventional chronology of the Early Middle Ages contains inconsistencies.
Illig proposed that the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, Pope Sylvester II and possibly the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII were involved in manipulating the calendar and historical record.
Why? Shits and giggles? Well, sort of…
Apparently Otto III wanted to rule around the significant year AD 1000.
Which is one hell of a way to organise your birthday party.
Rather than simply accepting that he lived when he lived, the conspirators supposedly altered chronology so that their own period conveniently landed around the millennium.
And this wasn’t a case of adding a couple of years, they allegedly invented approximately 297 of them. I mean, I’d love to live in the future, but just declaring it’s now 2385 doesn’t really change much.
People complain when somebody lies about being five years younger on Tinder, and these assholes apparently knocked nearly three centuries off human history.
There’s a slight issue with the motive
Let’s start here because it’s wonderful. Imagine you’re Otto III. You’re the Holy Roman Emperor. You’re already one of the most powerful people in Europe. But you’re disappointed.
“What’s wrong, Your Imperial Majesty?”
“I’ve looked at the calendar.”
“And?”
“It’s only 703.”
“Terrible, sir.”
“I want it to be the year 1000.”
“Understandable.”
“Can we just invent 297 years?”
“I’ll speak to the Pope.”
Apparently that’s more or less what happened.
Obviously the actual theory is more elaborate than that, but the proposed motive has never struck me as particularly proportionate to the required effort.
Inventing nearly three centuries isn’t simply changing the date on a few documents. You need to rewrite history.
Think about what 297 years actually means
This is where the scale of the claim starts becoming apparent. Three hundred years is an enormous amount of time. Think backwards from today. Three hundred years ago takes us to the early eighteenth century.
Imagine someone claiming that virtually everything between 1729 and 2026 had been fabricated.
The Industrial Revolution?
Made up.
American Revolution?
Fake.
French Revolution?
Didn’t happen.
Victorian Britain?
Fiction.
Two World Wars?
Fabricated.
Moon landings?
Actually, we’ll save that one for another week.
Computers?
Apparently invented last Tuesday.
You’d immediately ask some fairly obvious questions.
What happened to all the buildings?
The archaeological layers?
The graves?
The coins?
The letters?
The books?
The artwork?
The scientific observations?
The records from countries that weren’t cooperating with one another?
And that’s essentially the problem Phantom Time runs into.
History isn’t one enormous Microsoft Word document stored in the Vatican where the Pope can open it, select three centuries and press:
INSERT → 297 YEARS.
Human history is a gigantic overlapping web of evidence.
But what about the Gregorian calendar?
One of the arguments associated with Phantom Time involves the calendar. This bit initially sounds technical enough to make you think: Ooh. Maybe there’s something here, which is always dangerous, especially if you are a Reform voter.
The Julian calendar, introduced under Julius Caesar, treated the year as 365.25 days long which is impressively close to the actual solar year, but not perfect.
The difference is only around eleven minutes each year. Not much, but leave eleven minutes accumulating for more than a thousand years and eventually the calendar begins drifting relative to the seasons.
By the sixteenth century, this had become significant enough that Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar reform. In 1582, ten calendar days were skipped in countries immediately adopting the reform. Thursday 4 October was followed by Friday 15 October.
Illig argued that the amount of correction didn’t match what should have accumulated since the introduction of the Julian calendar, suggesting several centuries were missing.
Sounds interesting. Unfortunately, there’s a perfectly normal explanation.
The Gregorian reform wasn’t trying to return the calendar to its position in the time of Julius Caesar.
It was designed to restore the date of the spring equinox to approximately where it had been around the time of the Council of Nicaea in AD 325; the fan convention where supporters of Jesus decided what was alpha canon and what was beta canon.
Once you use the correct reference point, the supposedly mysterious discrepancy disappears. So one of the major clues that hundreds of years were fabricated essentially comes down to:
Using the wrong starting point for the calculation.
Bit awkward, but let’s move on…
Then we get to Charlemagne
Charlemagne is one of the biggest problems for the Phantom Time Hypothesis because if the phantom period didn’t exist neither did Charlemagne.
Charlemagne, or Charles the Great, became King of the Franks in 768 and was crowned Emperor in 800.
He ruled over a huge area of Western Europe and became one of the most significant figures of the Early Middle Ages.
According to the Phantom Time Hypothesis, however, Charlemagne was essentially fictional.
And this is where I start enjoying myself.
Because inventing a person is easy. I can do it now.
Sir Nigel Fuckington, Duke of Barnsley, conquered Belgium in 943 after defeating an army of 40,000 men using only a trebuchet and an unusually aggressive battalion of geese.
There. I’ve created a medieval historical figure. The difficult part comes when you need evidence. Charlemagne appears in numerous historical sources. There are documents. Coins. Buildings and architectural evidence. Accounts from different places.
Political developments were connected to his reign, including people who came before and after him. There’s also wars, religious changes, administrative reforms, and relationships with neighbouring states.
You don’t simply need to invent Charlemagne. You need to create everything around him. and then somehow make the archaeological evidence agree with you.
Archaeology is an absolute horror show for conspiracy theories
Documents can be forged.
Individual artefacts can be misidentified.
Historians can make mistakes.
But conspiracy theories like Phantom Time need something much bigger.
They need multiple independent forms of evidence to be wrong in exactly the right direction.
Archaeologists don’t dig down through the ground and find:
YEAR 912
followed immediately underneath by:
YEAR 613
with a suspicious 297-year gap between them.
They find layers of human activity, like buildings, pottery, coins, tools, and other relics of civilisation, and these can be compared across enormous geographic areas.
The Early Middle Ages weren’t just happening in one palace in Germany.
People were inconveniently existing all over the place.
Europe wasn’t the entire planet
This might be the biggest problem with Phantom Time.
Even if we somehow accept that Otto III and the Pope could rewrite European chronology, what about everybody else?
During the supposed phantom period, there were established societies and historical traditions across the world.
The Tang dynasty ruled China for much of this period.
The Islamic world expanded dramatically following the rise of Islam in the seventh century.
The Byzantine Empire continued existing.
There were societies across India, East Asia, Africa and the Americas.
You can’t simply insert three centuries into Western European history without those invented centuries colliding with timelines elsewhere.
Unless the conspiracy was global, in which case we’re back to one of my favourite questions:
How many bloody people are involved now?
Did medieval China get the memo?
“Dear Tang dynasty,
We are currently adding 297 fictional years to European history so that Otto can pretend he lives around AD 1000.
Please amend all relevant records accordingly.
Kind regards,
The Pope.”
Seems unlikely.
Astronomy really ruins the fun
This is one of my favourite problems for the theory.
The sky doesn’t give a shit what year humans write on a piece of paper. Astronomical events can often be calculated backwards. Solar eclipses, lunar eclipses, comets, and planetary movements.
Historical cultures recorded some of these events. Those observations can be compared with modern astronomical calculations.
If someone inserted nearly 300 fictional years into the calendar, historical astronomical observations should start appearing in the wrong places.
The heavens should effectively grass us up.
“Sorry lads, that eclipse you’re describing couldn’t have happened in that year because that year didn’t exist.”
Yet historical astronomical records from different cultures broadly fit established chronology.
One particularly useful example is Halley’s Comet, whose appearances have been documented over long periods. Chinese astronomers were especially diligent record keepers and comets don’t care about Holy Roman emperors.
Convincing Halley’s Comet to participate in your calendar fraud would require a level of Papal authority that I don’t remember from history lessons.
What evidence could possibly prove the theory wrong?
If every contradictory piece of evidence can simply be absorbed into an expanding conspiracy, we’ve created something unfalsifiable, and unfalsifiable claims are incredibly resilient.
They’re also scientifically useless.
There’s also an enormous logistical problem
Let’s pretend for a moment that Otto III and Sylvester II really wanted to move themselves into the year 1000.
How exactly do you implement this?
Remember, this is around the turn of the first millennium. There’s no central database, internet, global government, or anything like that.
You’re dealing with kingdoms, churches, monasteries, local rulers, merchants and cultures spread across vast distances.
Some regions don’t even use the same calendar systems.
So you need to alter enough records to manufacture centuries of history while somehow ensuring future historians won’t notice.
Then you need to create fake historical figures, fake societies, fake wars, and so on.
And then you need all these different pieces of evidence to broadly agree with one another for the next thousand years.
At that point, it would genuinely be easier to just wait until the year 1000.
Also, Otto III wasn’t exactly enjoying a long millennium
Here’s another wonderful wrinkle.
If the entire point of this colossal historical fraud was to allow Otto III to reign around the magical year 1000, he didn’t exactly get much mileage out of it.
Otto became emperor in 996 and died in 1002.
He was 21.
So according to this idea, we’re entertaining an enormous manipulation of chronology involving the fabrication of centuries of human history so one bloke could enjoy being emperor around the year 1000 for a few years before dying at 21.
I’ve abandoned projects because they required me to create a new password.
Why does the theory feel appealing?
This is where I think Phantom Time becomes more interesting than simply pointing and laughing.
There’s something psychologically satisfying about the idea that history contains an enormous secret.
Most of us experience history as something fixed but then somebody comes along and says:
“What if the dates themselves are wrong?”
That’s a great hook. Suddenly history becomes a detective story and you’re one of the few people who has realised something is wrong.
Experts haven’t spotted it, but you have, and that’s an incredibly seductive feeling.
The Early Middle Ages provide fertile ground because they’re distant enough to feel mysterious. Most people know relatively little about the period.
Ask someone what happened in 1945 and they’ll probably have an answer.
Ask them what happened in 745 and you’ll probably get: “Erm… Vikings?”
That knowledge gap creates room for extraordinary claims to feel more plausible than they really are.
The Dark Ages don’t help
The phrase “Dark Ages” probably contributes to this as well.
It creates an image of Europe spending several centuries sitting around in a poorly illuminated field waiting for the Renaissance to start.
Nothing happened. Nobody wrote anything down. Civilisation pressed pause.
Then, suddenly, castles appeared.
Modern historians generally use more specific terms such as the Early Middle Ages, partly because “Dark Ages” can create exactly this misleading impression.
The period saw enormous political, religious, cultural and technological changes.
Empires rose and fell. Christianity expanded through Europe. Islam emerged and spread across vast areas.
Trade continued.
Cities changed.
The Vikings appeared.
China experienced major developments under dynasties including the Tang.
People weren’t waiting in darkness for somebody to switch history back on.
They were busy having history.
So what year is it actually?
This is obviously the most important question.
If Phantom Time is correct and approximately 297 fictional years have been added, then:
2026 – 297 = 1729.
Which means I’m currently writing this in the eighteenth century, which is kind of cool as it would demonstrate human scientific advancements happened much more quickly.
The Industrial Revolution is going to be fucking incredible when it finally arrives.
On the downside, I assume my pension access age is now approximately 350.
Let’s deploy Occam’s razor again
We have two competing explanations.
Explanation One:
The conventional chronology of the Early Middle Ages is broadly correct.
Historical records contain gaps and errors because they’re old.
Calendar reforms can be explained by how the Julian and Gregorian calendars actually work.
Archaeology, astronomy, dendrochronology, radiocarbon dating and records from multiple civilisations broadly support the established timeline.
Or:
Explanation Two:
Nearly 300 years of human history were fabricated.
Powerful figures around AD 1000 coordinated the deception.
Huge quantities of historical material were invented or altered.
Archaeological evidence somehow fits the false chronology.
Independent civilisations around the world somehow fit the same false chronology.
Astronomical observations somehow fit.
Scientific dating methods somehow fit.
Tree-ring chronologies somehow fit.
And nobody produced convincing evidence exposing the fraud during the following millennium.
Occam’s razor isn’t just shaving this one.
It’s turned up with a chainsaw and a leather mask.
But I absolutely love this theory
I do. I don’t believe a word of it, but as conspiracy theories go, Phantom Time is magnificent.
Nobody is being followed by black helicopters. There aren’t secret lizard people running the government. There isn’t an ice wall. There aren’t Nazis living inside the Earth.
It’s an argument with a calendar that has somehow escalated into the deletion of Charlemagne.
That’s beautiful.
Imagine if it were true. It would be one of the greatest historical discoveries imaginable. Entire university departments would simultaneously shit themselves. Textbooks would need rewriting. Museums would have to relabel everything. Historians would spend decades rebuilding chronology.
Millions of people would suddenly discover they’d been celebrating their birthdays in the wrong century.
And somewhere in Germany, Heribert Illig would have earned the greatest “I told you so” in human history.
Unfortunately, the evidence doesn’t support it. We have too many independent ways of reconstructing the past. History isn’t based on a single chain of documents that somebody could simply stretch by a few centuries.
Written records overlap with archaeology. Archaeology overlaps with scientific dating. Scientific dating overlaps with tree rings. Human records overlap with astronomical events.
Then, European history overlaps with histories recorded elsewhere.
The whole thing forms an enormous interconnected puzzle. We might have the odd piece misplaced, but on the whole it’s an accurate picture, and removing almost three centuries requires us to throw away an extraordinary amount of mutually supporting evidence.
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:
Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE.
Weekly Update
As I mentioned last week, my output for the blog might slow a little over the coming weeks. This might take the form of slightly shorter posts, or even microblogs from time to time. This week, though, I’ve just about managed to put a sizable post out there.
My second week in my new self-employed venture has been a positive one. I can feel my confidence coming back after a horrific experience in my last place of work. I’m trying to not get too ahead of myself, but I’m feeling pretty optimistic about this new role and I’m hoping I’ve found a home of sorts for the rest of my FI journey.
Another part of life which is pretty positive right now is Sheffield Wednesday F.C. Most readers will know I’m an Owls fan, and we’ve had a tough few years. Under new ownership we are flying, sitting at the top of League One after five matches.
On Saturday Oana and I had a date night, where we went for some food at Peddler Market and then to the cinema to watch The End of Oak Street. The movie was absolutely ridiculous but great entertainment, but that’s what you get when you send families from the 1980s back to the age of dinosaurs.
This Week on The AFI Podcast
In episode five of AFI: The Autism and Financial Independence Podcast, we look at how some seemingly small decisions can have a surprisingly large impact over the long term.
In my financial segment, I explore survivorship bias in investing and why focusing only on the investments, companies or success stories that made it can give us a badly distorted picture of reality.
We then look at wants versus needs through the example of two people starting from almost identical financial positions. Small differences in the choices they make, whether that’s spending more on the latest phone or a more expensive car, or choosing a cheaper alternative and investing the difference, can compound into dramatically different outcomes over the years. It’s not about never spending money on things you enjoy; it’s about recognising the long-term cost of the choices we make today.
On the autism side of the podcast, Darren tackles a deceptively simple question: what is autism? He explores what we actually mean when we talk about autism and helps cut through some of the misconceptions surrounding it.
As always, we bring the two sides of AFI together: understanding autism, understanding money, and using both to build greater independence.
Check out the AFI section of this site for links to the pod on the various platforms.
What I’m Doing
Listening: Life Without Diabetes by Professor Roy Taylor.
Watching: For All Mankind (Apple).
Reading: Abaddon’s Gate (Expanse Book 3) by James S. A. Corey.
Financial Update
Assets
Premium Bonds: £250.00.
Stocks and Shares ISA: £152,412.60.
Fuck It Fund: £0.00.
Pensions: £128,454.09.
Residential Property Value: £245,790.00.
Total Assets: £526,906.69.
Debts
Residential Mortgage: £173,281.83.
Total Debts: £173,281.83.
Total Wealth
Total Wealth: £353,624.86.
Top Ten Funniest/Most Crazy Conspiracy Theories
10. Flat Earth
9. Hollow Earth
8. The Mandela Effect
Titanic Was Swapped With Olympic
It’s time for another instalment in my completely unordered tour through some of the world’s most batshit conspiracy theories.
So far we’ve discovered that the Earth is apparently flat, while simultaneously being hollow, and that CERN may have accidentally transported us into a parallel universe where the Monopoly Man has misplaced his monocle.
This week, we’re heading back to 1912, because apparently the Titanic didn’t sink.
Well, to be clear, a ship definitely sank and more than 1,500 people died.
But according to one enduring conspiracy theory, the enormous passenger liner lying at the bottom of the North Atlantic isn’t actually RMS Titanic.
It’s her older sister: RMS Olympic.
So, what about the actual Titanic?
According to the theory, Titanic and Olympic were secretly swapped as part of an enormous insurance fraud.
At which point I imagine somebody at White Star Line saying:
“I’ve got an idea. Hear me out.”
First, we need two enormous fucking ships
To understand where this conspiracy comes from, we need to go back a little.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, White Star Line commissioned three enormous Olympic-class ocean liners from the Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast.
They were Olympic, Titanic and Britannic.
Olympic was the first, and Titanic followed, and because they were sister ships built to broadly the same design, Olympic and Titanic looked extremely similar.
Not identical, mind you, but similar enough that if you’re looking for the foundations of a conspiracy theory 100 years later, you’ve already got something to work with.
Olympic entered service in 1911 and promptly had an accident.
HMS Hawke enters the story
In September 1911, Olympic collided with the Royal Navy cruiser HMSHawke near the Isle of Wight.
The collision caused significant damage to Olympic and she returned to Belfast for repairs.
This is where conspiracy theorists start rubbing their hands together, because the accident was expensive. Olympic was temporarily out of service and repairs cost money. Also, there were disputes surrounding responsibility for the collision.
The conspiracy theory claims White Star Line therefore found itself with a badly damaged ship representing a major financial problem.
At this point, someone supposedly came up with a solution.
Not: Repair Olympic.
Not: Absorb the financial loss.
Not: Make an insurance claim where possible and continue operating the ship.
No. Apparently the solution was:
SECRETLY SWAP TWO OF THE LARGEST SHIPS ON EARTH AND THEN SINK ONE OF THEM.
I admire the ambition and the escalation of thought. Much like the previous entry on the Mandela Effect. Am I misremembering something? No, we’ve jumped realities. Ok, then.
The Great Switch
According to the conspiracy, Olympic returned to the Harland & Wolff shipyard where Titanic was still being completed and because the two ships looked so similar, White Star Line supposedly switched their identities.
The damaged Olympic became Titanic.
The real Titanic became Olympic.
Then the former Olympic, now pretending to be Titanic, would embark on Titanic’s maiden voyage. Somewhere along the journey, the ship would be deliberately lost, and White Star Line would collect the insurance money.
Problem solved, except for several thousand minor details we’ll come to shortly.
The actual Titanic, meanwhile, would continue operating under Olympic’s identity.
So the conspiracy isn’t simply: Titanic was deliberately sunk.
It’s:
Two gigantic ocean liners were secretly swapped, hundreds or thousands of people either participated or somehow failed to notice, one was deliberately sent towards destruction, the plan somehow involved passengers, and the surviving vessel then continued operating for another couple of decades without anyone conclusively exposing the switch.
Already, Occam’s razor is nervously reaching for a drink.
But they looked identical!
This is one of the pillars of the theory. Olympic and Titanic were sister ships. They looked extremely similar. Therefore, swapping them would supposedly have been relatively straightforward.
Except there’s a slight problem: They weren’t identical, and there were visible differences between them.
One of the most obvious involved sections of the promenade decks. Titanic had portions enclosed that differed from Olympic’s original configuration.
There were also differences in windows, internal arrangements and other details.
Now, could you modify ships? Of course. Ships are altered throughout their lives. In fact, Olympic herself underwent modifications.
But every alteration required to disguise one ship as another makes the conspiracy more complicated, not less.
You don’t just sail Olympic into Belfast on Monday evening, peel off the badge and send her back out Tuesday morning wearing a fake moustache and a baseball cap.
These were enormous machines assembled from millions of components.
And crucially, they were built by people. Lots of people.
Imagine trying to keep this secret in a shipyard
This is where the theory starts becoming hilarious to me. Titanic and Olympic were built at Harland & Wolff in Belfast. Thousands of workers were involved in constructing the Olympic-class liners, including;
And these weren’t people looking at two ships from half a mile away thinking:
“Yeah, they look pretty similar.”
They were building the bloody things.
Imagine working for months fitting part of Titanic. You know where things are and you know what you’ve installed. You know the differences between the vessels.
Then you come into work one morning.
“Morning, Dave.”
“Morning.”
“Just so you know, that’s Olympic now.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”
And apparently nobody thinks this is worth mentioning.
Then there are the construction numbers
Here’s where physical evidence becomes particularly inconvenient.
The ships had yard numbers.
Olympic was yard number 400.
Titanic was yard number 401.
These identifiers weren’t merely names painted conveniently on the side of the hull. Construction numbers were associated with components during manufacture. Evidence recovered from Titanic’s wreck has been associated with the number 401, consistent with the ship at the bottom of the Atlantic actually being Titanic.
Now, committed conspiracy theorists can obviously respond: They changed the numbers!
Fine, but notice what’s happening. Every time evidence contradicts the switch, we add another requirement to the conspiracy.
They swapped the ships, altered visible features, and they changed identifying details.
Workers kept quiet. Documentation was manipulated. Physical components were presumably altered, and we’re still only getting started.
Why deliberately sink it?
The supposed motivation was insurance fraud.
White Star Line allegedly had a financially compromised Olympic and needed a way to recover its value.
So the company supposedly intended to sink the vessel while it masqueraded as Titanic and collect the insurance payout.
There’s a rather significant problem with this.
From what I can tell, Titanic wasn’t insured for more than she was worth.
The vessel was insured for a substantial amount, but losing Titanic wasn’t some magical financial jackpot where White Star Line could destroy an asset and emerge swimming through a vault of gold like Scrooge McDuck.
Even putting that aside, deliberately sinking a huge passenger liner is a spectacularly dangerous way of committing insurance fraud.
You’re risking:
Passengers.
Crew.
The reputation of White Star Line.
Potential criminal investigations.
Government inquiries.
Lawsuits.
The destruction of an enormously valuable vessel.
And the possibility that one of the thousands of people involved opens their mouth.
There must have been easier ways to balance the books.
Ah, but nobody was supposed to die
Some versions of the conspiracy recognise the obvious problem that intentionally murdering 1,500 people is quite a substantial escalation from insurance fraud.
So the theory evolves.
The ship was supposedly meant to suffer an incident that would allow everyone to be rescued.
Perhaps another vessel would be nearby and the damaged ship would sink.
Passengers would transfer safely and White Star Line would receive its insurance money.
Everyone goes home and pats themselves on the back for a job well done. Lovely.
Unfortunately, an iceberg then somehow ruined the carefully planned fake disaster by creating a real disaster.
Which raises another question: If you’re deliberately planning to sink an enormous ship in a controlled insurance scam…
Why the hell are you steaming through an area where ice has been reported?
It’s like planning to fake a minor car accident for an insurance claim and deciding the ideal venue is the middle lane of the M1 at 70mph.
J.P. Morgan cancelled his trip!
Now we arrive at one of the conspiracy world’s favourite ingredients:
Somebody important changed their plans.
J.P. Morgan’s business interests controlled White Star Line through the International Mercantile Marine Company.
Morgan had reportedly intended to travel aboard Titanic but cancelled, and this naturally becomes evidence that he knew.
Except people cancel journeys and rich people change plans.
Plans made months in advance don’t always happen.
If Morgan had boarded Titanic and survived, that would probably be evidence too, but if he’d boarded and died, someone would presumably claim he was silenced.
That’s one of the wonderful things about conspiracy reasoning.
Once you’ve decided somebody is involved, virtually every possible outcome can be interpreted as confirmation.
Cancelled? He knew.
Travelled but survived? He was protected.
Died? He knew too much.
At no point does the theory have to face the terrifying possibility that sometimes people change their travel arrangements.
But what about the people who supposedly knew?
This is where we return to one of my favourite conspiracy questions.
How many people need to keep quiet? The switch couldn’t realistically be known only to a handful of White Star Line executives. People would have to physically modify the vessels.
Then, records would potentially need changing. Shipyard managers would know.
Workers performing modifications would notice. Then, we have the officers, crew, and the engineers.
People involved with insurance might start asking questions.
Then there’s the fact the surviving Olympic supposedly continues sailing until 1935.
That’s more than two decades during which the “real Titanic“, according to the conspiracy, was wandering around pretending to be Olympic.
Yet none of the thousands of people involved conclusively exposes it.
Once again, conspiracy theorists apparently have considerably more faith in humanity’s ability to organise large projects than I do.
The wreck causes another slight inconvenience
Titanic’s wreck was discovered in 1985 and since then it has been extensively photographed, filmed and studied.
The wreckage is consistent with Titanic. Various identifiable features and construction details correspond with the vessel known to have been built as Titanic.
Again, this doesn’t stop the theory.
If you’ve already accepted that White Star Line successfully altered the ships, records and identifying characteristics in 1911, then physical evidence can simply become another part of the cover-up.
Which brings us back to the same problem we’ve encountered repeatedly in this series.
What evidence would actually convince someone the conspiracy was wrong?
If the answer is “nothing”, then we’re no longer investigating a hypothesis.
We’re protecting a conclusion.
The real Titanic story doesn’t need a conspiracy
And this is what I find strange about the Olympic switch theory: The actual story of Titanic is already extraordinary.
One of the largest and most luxurious ships in the world leaves Southampton on her maiden voyage. She receives warnings about ice, and late on 14 April 1912, she strikes an iceberg.
The collision damages multiple watertight compartments and the ship’s design means flooding eventually overwhelms the vessel.
There aren’t enough lifeboat spaces for everyone aboard. Confusion and disbelief affect the evacuation. Titanic sinks in the early hours of 15 April.
More than 1,500 people die.
The disaster subsequently influences maritime safety regulations, lifeboat requirements and ice monitoring.
That’s an incredible historical story and you don’t need to secretly swap the ships.
And the boring explanation actually explains more
Let’s apply Occam’s razor again.
Explanation A:
Titanic was Titanic.
Olympic was Olympic.
Olympic had previously been damaged and repaired.
Titanic subsequently struck an iceberg during her maiden voyage and sank.
The wreck lying on the seabed is Titanic.
Explanation B:
White Star Line secretly swapped two enormous ocean liners.
The company disguised Olympic as Titanic.
Titanic was disguised as Olympic.
Numerous physical differences were modified.
Identifying information was changed.
A large number of workers either participated or failed to notice.
The disguised Olympic was deliberately sent on a voyage where it was supposed to be lost for insurance purposes.
The plan went catastrophically wrong.
The real Titanic then spent more than twenty years operating as Olympic.
Nobody involved produced convincing evidence exposing the operation.
And when the wreck was eventually discovered, identifying evidence conveniently supported the official story anyway.
I’m struggling here.
There’s one thing I genuinely like about this conspiracy
Unlike Flat Earth, I can understand why the Titanic switch theory hooks people.
There was another extremely similar ship.
Olympic was damaged before Titanic’s maiden voyage.
Both ships were owned by the same company.
They were together at the same shipyard.
A powerful businessman associated with the company did cancel plans to travel aboard Titanic.
Those are real ingredients.
Put them together in the right order, leave out inconvenient details, ask enough suggestive questions and suddenly you’ve got the beginnings of something that feels suspicious.
And that’s worth remembering.
Good conspiracy theories rarely consist entirely of invented information.
They’re often constructed from real facts connected by unsupported conclusions.
That’s what gives them power.
“Did you know Olympic was badly damaged?”
Yes.
“Did you know Titanic was incredibly similar?”
Yes.
“Did you know they were both in Belfast?”
Yes.
“Did you know J.P. Morgan cancelled his Titanic trip?”
Yes.
“Therefore they secretly swapped the ships and sank Olympic for the insurance money.”
Whoa, whoa, whoa, we’ve skipped a few steps there, mate.
I almost want this one to be true as well
I’ll admit something.
Like Hollow Earth, there’s a tiny part of me that would enjoy discovering the switch actually happened.
Not because of the tragedy. More than 1,500 people died, and nothing about that deserves to be trivialised.
But purely as a historical revelation?
Imagine discovering that one of the most famous ships in human history wasn’t actually the ship we thought it was.
It would be astonishing.
Historians would lose their minds.
Museums would need rewriting.
Every Titanic documentary made over the last century would suddenly require an extremely awkward sequel.
And somewhere, the ghost of a Harland & Wolff worker would presumably be sitting there thinking:
“FINALLY. I’ve been trying to tell you idiots.”
But wanting a story to be interesting isn’t evidence.
And unfortunately for the Olympic switch theory, the boring explanation fits the available evidence considerably better.
Olympic was damaged and was repaired.
Titanic was built, sailed, hit an iceberg, and sank.
Olympic continued operating until the 1930s.
No elaborate plan involving deliberately sacrificing one of the world’s largest passenger liners. Just one of history’s most famous maritime disasters.
Which, when you think about it, should really be dramatic enough.
But apparently an enormous supposedly unsinkable ship hitting an iceberg on its maiden voyage and disappearing beneath the North Atlantic wasn’t interesting enough for us.
We had to swap the ships as well.
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:
Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE.
It’s been a pretty good week this week. We’ve managed to get a few bike rides in, my new job has started really well, and we got to watch Sheffield Wednesday absolutely batter someone on Saturday. There are definitely worse ways to spend a week.
The biggest thing, though, has probably been starting the new job.
When I was working in my last self-employed role, I don’t think I fully appreciated just how much it had hammered my confidence. When you’re in the middle of something, it can be difficult to see what it’s doing to you. You just keep going, assume you need to work harder, try to figure out what you’re doing wrong, and gradually start questioning whether you’re actually any good at the job in the first place.
I’m only a few days into this new role and already it feels like a weight has been lifted.
There’s still a bit of background nervousness, obviously. Starting any new job comes with that. There are new systems to learn, new processes to get used to, and that nagging little voice wondering whether you’re going to accidentally break something important before lunchtime. I think that’s fairly normal.
The difference is that this time the nervousness feels like new job nervousness, rather than the constant low-level stress of wondering what fresh bullshit is going to land on me next.
My new manager has been great so far and incredibly supportive. More importantly, I’m being trusted to actually get on with the job. I can sit down, work through what needs doing and crack on without being hassled every hour or left trying to decipher confusing, contradictory, or nonexistent communication.
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It turns out that being given clear information, treated like an adult and then allowed to do your job is actually quite an effective management strategy. Who knew?
It’s early days, of course, and I’m not going to declare everything perfect after less than a week, but the difference in how I feel is already noticeable. Looking back, I think my previous experience had chipped away at my confidence far more than I realised. Sometimes you need to step into a different environment before you can properly see how dysfunctional the previous one was.
Away from work, there’s been plenty of cycling this week as well.
On Friday afternoon, we headed out for a smaller group ride before coming home for a couple of hours, getting some food and recovering, and then heading straight back out again for a mass cycle ride in the evening.
By the time we finally got home late on Friday night, our legs were very much aware that we’d been out riding. Between the two rides we’d covered a decent amount of distance and somehow accumulated hundreds of metres of climbing as well. Sheffield has many wonderful qualities, but being flat is absolutely not one of them.
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Then came Saturday.
My Dad and I headed to Hillsborough for Sheffield Wednesday’s second league home game of the season, this time against Bromley.
And we absolutely hammered them.
Wednesday were 7-0 up after 81 minutes and, genuinely, that scoreline didn’t flatter us. If anything, it probably flattered Bromley. Based on the balance of play and the chances we created, we could have been 10, 11 or even 12 goals up without it looking particularly ridiculous.
It was one of those very rare football matches where you can actually relax and enjoy yourself rather than spending the final 20 minutes staring at the clock while mentally calculating all the increasingly stupid ways your team could somehow throw the game away.
At 7-0, even Wednesday would have needed to work quite hard to Wednesday it up.
As the game wore on and the result was obviously secure, we started making substitutions. Some of the players coming on weren’t quite at the same level as those going off, the game became a little more disjointed, and Bromley managed to grab a couple of late consolation goals.
The first came after a mistake from one of the players we’d brought on, while their second was eventually credited as an own goal. That made the final score 7-2, which somehow makes the game sound considerably more competitive than it actually was.
It really wasn’t.
After all that, Saturday evening involved another cycling-related social event, although thankfully without the actual cycling.
Oana and I went to a birthday party for a guy we’ve met through the cycling community. The party was near Bramall Lane which, as a Wednesday fan, presented something of a moral dilemma.
However, I decided to be the bigger person. I went anyway. I didn’t even hold his choice of location against him. Much.
So, all things considered, a very decent week. A positive start to the new job, plenty of time on the bike, a ridiculous Wednesday win and a Saturday night out.
I’ll take more weeks like that.
This Week on The AFI Podcast
Episode four of The Autism and Financial Independence Podcast is out now, and this week we’re tackling two very different subjects.
Darren asks a question that perhaps shouldn’t need asking, but absolutely does: why should people care about autism?He looks at why autism matters not just to autistic people and their families, but to society more broadly, and why greater understanding and acceptance benefits everyone.
On the financial side, I dive into one of the biggest concepts in FIRE: your FI number and safe withdrawal rates.
How much money do you actually need to become financially independent? Where does the famous 4% rule come from? What exactly makes a withdrawal rate “safe”? And perhaps most importantly, why shouldn’t you treat your FI number as some magical, immovable finish line?
We also look at the fact that financial independence isn’t an exact science. Markets change, spending changes and life changes, and you can adjust course along the way.
If either of those subjects sounds interesting, give episode four a listen. And if you’re enjoying the podcast, please consider subscribing, leaving a review, or sharing it with someone who might find it useful. It all helps us reach more people.
Listening: Life Without Diabetes by Professor Roy Taylor.
Watching: For All Mankind (Apple).
Reading: Abaddon’s Gate (Expanse Book 3) by James S. A. Corey.
In preparation for watching the latest season of For All Mankind, we’ve gone back to the beginning and started from the very first episode. It’s such a strong show with some incredible acting, and strong writing and direction. It also melds two of my favourite genres; science fiction and alt-history.
For those who don’t know, the story starts with a simple point of divergence; what if the Soviet Union landed people on the moon first? What follows is an intense ramping up of the space race.
ANNOUNCEMENT
With my new job starting and the podcast taking up time, I’m probably going to scale back the blog a little. I’m not giving up on it completely, but I may revert to posting once a fortnight, or making every other post a bit shorter and simply more of a financial update.
I’d love to make blogging and podcasting a full-time thing, but I still need to pay my mortgage!
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Financial Update
Assets
Premium Bonds: £250.00.
Stocks and Shares ISA: £152,911.98.
Fuck It Fund: £0.00.
Pensions: £129,414.00.
Residential Property Value: £245,790.00.
Total Assets: £528,365.98.
Debts
Residential Mortgage: £173,447.84.
Total Debts: £173,447.84.
Total Wealth
Total Wealth: £354,918.14.
Top Ten Funniest/Most Crazy Conspiracy Theories
10. Flat Earth
9. Hollow Earth
8. The Mandela Effect: No, CERN Probably Hasn’t Broken the Timeline
It’s time for another entry in my completely unordered list of the ten most batshit conspiracy theories, and this week we’re moving away from arguing about the shape of the planet and onto something considerably more unsettling.
What if your memories are wrong? Not forgotten or just hazy.
Not I think it happened on a Tuesday, but it might have been Wednesday.
I’m talking about completely, confidently, absolutely wrong, and what if thousands, perhaps millions, of other people remember exactly the same incorrect thing?
Welcome to the Mandela Effect.
Unlike Flat Earth and Hollow Earth, I find this one genuinely fascinating because the underlying phenomenon is real. Large numbers of people absolutely do share remarkably similar false memories. Where we part company is in explaining why.
Psychologists might point towards reconstructive memory, source-monitoring errors, suggestion, and the fact that human brains are essentially biological computers assembled by evolution with a focus on speed of processing rather than accuracy.
Alternatively, and this is a genuine idea out there amongst some people…
CERN broke the fucking universe.
Let’s investigate.
Nelson Mandela died in prison…
Except he didn’t.
The Mandela Effect takes its name from Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid activist who spent 27 years imprisoned in South Africa before being released in 1990.
He subsequently became President of South Africa. Then, in 2013, he died. This is all extremely well documented.
However, paranormal researcher Fiona Broome discovered that she remembered Mandela dying during the 1980s while still in prison.
This wasn’t simply a vague sense that she’d thought he had died. She claimed to remember news coverage surrounding his death and other details associated with it. More interestingly, she discovered other people apparently shared similar memories.
Right, now, there are two directions we can go from here.
One is to ask why multiple people might independently develop similar false memories about a globally famous political figure who spent decades in prison during an incredibly turbulent period of South African history.
Or…
Maybe they came from another universe.
Obviously we’re going with the latter.
The term “Mandela Effect” eventually came to describe situations in which large numbers of people apparently share the same incorrect memory.
And once you start looking at examples, I guarantee you’ll find at least one that makes you stop and think:
Hang on. What the fuck?
Let’s start with the Monopoly Man
I want you to picture the Monopoly Man.
Don’t Google him; just imagine him.
He’s wearing a suit, and he’s got the moustache and top hat.
He’s also wearing a monocle, yeah?
Except…
He isn’t.
Rich Uncle Pennybags, as the character was originally known, does not traditionally wear a monocle.
Yet loads of people remember him having one.
I’ll admit this is one of those Mandela Effects that feels right. A monocle just seems like it should be there. He’s an absurd caricature of an incredibly wealthy old-fashioned businessman. Of course my dude has a monocle.
Except he doesn’t.
There are several possible explanations. One is that we’re combining him with other characters associated with similar imagery, such as Mr Peanut. More generally, our cultural stereotype of an incredibly rich Victorian-looking gentleman includes things like top hats, canes and monocles.
So when our brains reconstruct the Monopoly Man, they helpfully fill in the blanks.
Top hat? Yes.
Moustache? Yup.
Ridiculous wealth? Yes, please.
Monocle? Well obviously.
And suddenly thousands of people have independently made the same mistake.
Or Hasbro altered reality.
Could go either way at this point.
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“Luke, I am your father.”
This is perhaps the perfect example of how the Mandela Effect can develop without requiring anyone to fire up the Large Hadron Collider.
One of the most famous lines in cinema history is Darth Vader revealing his identity to Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back.
You know the line.
“Luke, I am your father.”
Except that’s not the line.
Vader says:
“No, I am your father.”
So why does virtually everyone know the other version? Because “Luke, I am your father” works better as a quotation.
Imagine you’re doing a Darth Vader impression. You turn to your friend and say:
“No, I am your father.”
Without context, that could mean anything. Add Luke’s name and everyone immediately knows what you’re referencing. So the altered version gets repeated over and over on television and between friends joking around.
Eventually, some of us have heard the incorrect version far more often than we’ve heard the actual line.
Then our brain does what brains do. It remembers the information but becomes slightly confused about where the information came from.
You haven’t necessarily invented a memory out of nowhere. You’ve just added some incorrect material.
Your brain isn’t a hard drive
I think this is where the Mandela Effect becomes genuinely interesting.
We intuitively imagine memory working something like storage on a computer.
Something happens and our brain records it. Then, later, we access the file.
Obviously, some files become corrupted or disappear over time, but broadly we imagine ourselves retrieving a stored representation of what actually happened.
Except human memory doesn’t really work like that.
Memory is reconstructive. When you remember something, your brain rebuilds the experience using stored information. That reconstruction can be influenced by expectations, knowledge you’ve gained subsequently, things other people have told you and countless other factors.
And here’s the really uncomfortable bit: You don’t know when it’s happening.
A false memory doesn’t arrive accompanied pop-up saying:
THIS MEMORY MAY CONTAIN INACCURATE INFORMATION. CONTINUE? Y/N
It feels like a memory. You can be completely sincere, incredibly confident, and vividly picture what you think is real, and still be wrong, like when Oana thinks the Natwest in Sheffield city centre is a fairly new building.
Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus and others have spent decades researching the malleability of human memory. Experiments have repeatedly demonstrated that information introduced after an event can influence how people subsequently remember that event.
Even relatively subtle differences in wording can affect recollection. This has enormous real-world implications, particularly around eyewitness testimony.
But why do we all remember the SAME wrong thing?
This, to me, is the strongest argument made by people fascinated by the Mandela Effect.
If memory is unreliable, fine.
But why don’t we all remember different incorrect things?
Why do so many people remember the Monopoly Man having a monocle?
Why do so many people remember “Luke, I am your father”?
That’s genuinely interesting, but it doesn’t require alternate realities.
Human brains aren’t randomly generated.
We have broadly similar perceptual systems with shared languages and culture. We use similar mental shortcuts, and we’re exposed to many of the same sources of misinformation.
So it shouldn’t be particularly shocking that similar brains presented with similar information sometimes make similar mistakes.
Memories accumulate details and evolve over time. They can merge with other experiences, and every time we retrieve a memory, we’re potentially reconstructing it again.
That’s moderately terrifying; each time we remember something, it changes.
CERN has entered the chat…
Naturally, at some point people looked at all this and concluded:
“particle physics.“
CERN operates the Large Hadron Collider, the enormous particle accelerator beneath the French-Swiss border.
The LHC accelerates particles to extraordinary energies and smashes them together so physicists can study fundamental particles and forces.
It contributed to the discovery of the Higgs boson, and has helped scientists investigate some of the deepest questions in physics. And, according to some corners of the internet, it has also apparently broken reality.
Various versions of the conspiracy suggest that experiments at CERN have somehow altered the timeline, shifted humanity into a parallel universe or merged different realities together.
This supposedly explains why some people remember things differently, and I love the scale of this escalation.
We start with:
“I thought the Monopoly Man had a monocle.”
And arrive at:
“European scientists have accidentally damaged the fabric of spacetime.”
There’s no intermediate step.
To be fair, parallel universes aren’t necessarily nonsense
Here’s where we need to separate legitimate theoretical physics from internet conspiracy theories.
The idea of multiple universes isn’t inherently ridiculous and there are serious scientific ideas that involve some form of multiverse.
The Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, for example, proposes that the universal wavefunction evolves without collapse, with different possible outcomes represented in effectively branching components of the quantum state.
There are also cosmological theories in which inflation could potentially produce regions sometimes described as separate “bubble universes”.
These are fascinating subjects.
We don’t currently know whether the broader multiverse ideas describe reality, but they aren’t inherently the same category of claim as saying the Earth is flat.
The problem is the gigantic leap from:
“Some legitimate physical theories allow for the possibility of multiple universes.”
to:
“Therefore I used to live in the universe where Pikachu had a black tail.”
Those are not the same argument. We’ve crossed several unsupported bridges there. Even if other universes exist, you still need a mechanism allowing people to move between them.
Then you need to explain how, and have evidence that it happened.
Then you need to explain why people’s memories somehow survived the transition.
All this brings us to my favourite question.
Why is reality changing such incredibly trivial stuff?
Imagine for a moment that the conspiracy is correct.
CERN switched our universe and we have moved into a neighbouring reality.
Perhaps two timelines merged. Whatever. We’re talking about possibly the most profound event in human history. Reality itself has changed.
So what’s different?
Does gravity operate differently?
Has the speed of light changed?
Did Germany win the Second World War?
Is there another continent?
Did dinosaurs survive?
No.
Apparently the universe is largely identical except Pikachu’s tail is slightly different and the Monopoly Man misplaced his monocle.
Imagine being responsible for maintaining the simulation and deploying that update.
REALITY PATCH 6.4.2
Removed monocle from Monopoly Man.
Modified Pikachu tail texture.
Nelson Mandela no longer died in prison.
Various bug fixes and performance improvements.
You’d at least expect them to make printers reliable while they were in there.
Occam’s razor is looking increasingly attractive
As with Flat Earth, we eventually reach the point where we have competing explanations.
Explanation One:
Human memory is reconstructive and demonstrably fallible. People share cultural information, expectations and cognitive tendencies, meaning large numbers of people can sometimes develop the same incorrect memory.
Or…
Explanation Two:
Parallel universes exist and humans can somehow move between them.
The universes are almost completely identical except for tiny details involving popular culture, logos and historical events, and a particle accelerator may be responsible.
Occam’s razor doesn’t prove the first explanation correct, as that’s not what Occam’s razor does.
If, however, two explanations account for an observation, generally speaking we shouldn’t start adding enormous unsupported assumptions unless we actually need them.
And “my memory was wrong” requires considerably fewer assumptions than “the universe changed.”
The Mandela Effect is more interesting without the conspiracy
This is perhaps where I differ from some of the other conspiracy theories on this list.
Flat Earth becomes more interesting because of the conspiracy.
Hollow Earth becomes more entertaining because we get mammoths, underground civilisations and Nazi UFO bases.
But the Mandela Effect?
I actually think the conspiracy makes it less interesting.
Because what the Mandela Effect potentially reveals about human memory is far stranger than a Fruit of the Loom logo changing.
Think about how much of your identity depends on memory; childhood, your relationships, holidays, school, work, embarrassing moments you remember during an unbidden mental highlight reel.
Those memories collectively form the story you tell yourself about your life, and we know that memory isn’t a perfect recording system.
That doesn’t mean your entire past is fictional and it doesn’t mean nothing you remember can be trusted. But it does mean the relationship between what happened and what you remember happening isn’t always as straightforward as we’d like to believe.
Two people can experience the same event and remember it differently.
Neither needs to be lying and neither needs to be stupid. They can both sincerely remember their version.
That’s extraordinary.
And that’s why the Mandela Effect belongs on this list
The Mandela Effect starts with something real. People absolutely do share false memories.
Some examples are remarkably compelling. Some make me look at the correct version and think:
Nope. That looks wrong.
That’s precisely why it’s such fertile ground for conspiracy theories. There’s a mystery. There’s an unsettling personal experience. There’s legitimate science involving memory that isn’t intuitively obvious.
Then somewhere along the line we decide psychology isn’t sufficiently exciting and start blaming Switzerland.
Could CERN have transported us into another universe?
I mean, I’m not a theoretical physicist, but I’m going to stick my neck out and say:
“probably not.”
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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:
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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:
Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE.
The Eclipse
Oana and I took a walk up a nearby hill from which you can get amazing views of the city. Many others had the same idea, and so we watched the eclipse with a couple of hundred other people. It was a really chilled atmosphere, and there was only one asshole who tried to ruin the atmosphere by aggressively riding a dirt bike through the people sitting on the grass.
We were fortunate enough to have actual eclipse glasses to watch the event with. Although it wasn’t a total eclipse, it was still pretty amazing. It’s such a coincidence that we happen to have a moon that, with the relative size and distance, is able to almost perfectly cover the sun in the sky.
Our moon is unusually large compared to the size of Earth, and is actually bigger than Pluto. This might be one of the reasons why Earth has life. Our moon helps stabilise our axial tilt and potentially shields us from impact events, in a similar way to how Jupiter acts as a gravitational vacuum by using its huge mass to attract comets and other objects which might otherwise threaten the inner planets.
There were some people online saying the event was disappointing. I mean, that’s a fairly radical interpretation of a celestial event, but who am I to tell people what to feel?
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The Heat
I know there will be people reading this who absolutely love the heat. The moment the temperature creeps above 25°C, they’re outside firing up the barbecue, drinking something fruity and announcing that it’s “just like being abroad.”
I, meanwhile, am slowly dissolving, and before someone inevitably says, “But it’s hotter in Spain!”, yes. I know. I have encountered the concept of other countries.
The problem isn’t simply that Britain gets hot. It’s that Britain is spectacularly ill-equipped for being hot.
We have built an entire country around the assumption that the weather will generally range between North of the Wall and The Fires of Mount Doom.
Our houses are designed to retain heat. Air conditioning in homes is still comparatively unusual. Many workplaces don’t have it. Public transport can become a mobile greenhouse. Even hospitals are struggling with overheating during extreme temperatures.
When you’re somewhere routinely hot, the infrastructure generally acknowledges the existence of heat. Buildings have shutters and shading. Air conditioning is commonplace. Daily life adapts around the temperature.
Britain’s response to 35°C is basically to open a window and hope for the best. Except sometimes opening the window just means inviting the outside inferno into your home.
So you close the curtains. You close the windows. You strategically position fans around the room like you’re planning a military operation, but inevitably the inside of your home reaches the temperature required to temper steel anyway.
Then night arrives. Lovely. Surely it’ll cool down now?
“Oh, my sweet summer child.” No.
Your walls have spent the previous twelve hours absorbing enough thermal energy to qualify as a small experimental fusion reactor, and they’re now releasing it directly into your bedroom.
So you lie there, sweating through the mattress, with a fan blasting hot air across your face, wondering whether sleeping inside the fridge would be physically possible.
Overheating in British homes is increasingly recognised as a serious problem. In London, for example, research being considered by the London Assembly suggests that without adaptation, nearly 92% of existing homes could be at risk of overheating by 2050. Which brings me neatly to climate change.
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“BUT IT WAS HOT IN 1976!”
Ah yes. 1976.
Every time Britain has a heatwave, somebody on Facebook emerges from the shadows clutching a photograph of a paddling pool from 1976.
“We had hot summers when I was a kid!”
Yes, weather is not a millennial invention or utter woke nonsense. Nobody is claiming that hot weather was invented by Greta Thunberg.
The existence of a hot summer fifty years ago does not disprove climate change any more than the existence of a millionaire in 1932 disproves the Great Depression.
Climate is about patterns, averages, frequency, duration, probability, and extremes, and those things are changing.
The Met Office says extreme heat events are becoming more frequent, longer-lasting and more intense, and that the increase in frequency, duration and intensity seen over recent decades is clearly linked to the warming planet and can be attributed to human activity.
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Even more strikingly, research into the UK’s 2018 summer concluded that a summer that hot was around 30 times more likely than it would have been before the Industrial Revolution.
Thirty times. But don’t worry. Keith from Doncaster remembers eating a Mini Milk in his garden in 1976, so presumably the Met Office can pack everything up and go home.
2026 has been fucking ridiculous.
By July we’d already had three separate heatwaves. Temperatures of 35°C or above were recorded in May, June and July in the same year for the first time in the UK’s observational record. Then August arrived and said, “hold my beer.”
On Thursday 13th August, temperatures reached 38.1°C at Kew Gardens.
Thirty-eight point one. In Britain. I’ve never sat inside an active air fryer, but I’d imagine it’s a decent comparison.
All this considered, there’s another problem. Everything outside is dry. Really dry. Which brings me to the next group of people I’d like to discuss.
STOP SETTING FIRE TO THINGS
This really shouldn’t need saying. If the countryside currently has roughly the same moisture content as a Ryvita, perhaps don’t introduce fire to it.
And yet… here we are. Here we fucking are…
Wildfires in England and Wales have already passed the previous annual record of 1,017 fires set in the entirety of 2025. We’re only in August. The wildfire season is now expected to potentially continue into November.
In Stourbridge alone, a major grassfire spread into residential areas during the extreme heat, with homes destroyed and people requiring hospital treatment.
These aren’t abstract climate models predicting something that might happen in 2080.
People’s houses are burning down, and yet there are still people deliberately starting fires.
County Durham and Darlington Fire and Rescue Service attended 1,043 deliberate fires in just the first six months of this year. They specifically warned that deliberate incidents tend to increase during school holidays and warm weather, and pleaded with young people to understand that setting fire to grass and bins “is not a game”.
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Police in Cheshire have recently investigated a spate of fires where young people were reportedly seen starting them before running or cycling away. In Wiltshire, police investigated an incident where three teenagers were reported to have started a fire in a field which then spread through crops and into bushes.
I’ve also heard claims that there’s some sort of trend among kids to see who can start the biggest fire. I went looking for evidence of this because, frankly, it sounded simultaneously insane and depressingly believable. I couldn’t find reliable evidence that this specific “biggest fire” competition is actually a widespread trend, so I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
But the fact that emergency services are having to warn young people not to deliberately start fires during one of the hottest and driest periods we’ve experienced is already enough to make me stare silently into the camera and reconsider the entire human experiment.
“Do not deliberately set fire to extremely dry vegetation during a heatwave” should be somewhere around “don’t lick electrical sockets” on the list of things humans instinctively understand.
Yet apparently we’ve reached the point where this information needs to be distributed.
This is the bit that annoys me, because none of these things exists independently. That’s what seems to get lost.
Climate change doesn’t mean that every summer will simply be one degree warmer.
Small changes in average temperature shift the probability of extremes. Hot spells become hotter. Heatwaves become more likely. Dry periods dry the landscape. Vegetation becomes easier to ignite. Wildfires become more difficult to control.
That’s not the end of it, though. Infrastructure designed for a cooler climate starts struggling.
Homes overheat. Hospitals overheat. Railways struggle.
Fire services face incidents they historically didn’t have to deal with on anything approaching the same scale.
Eventually adaptation will become unavoidable, and the longer we wait, the more it will cost.
That’s the conversation we should be having. Instead we’re still stuck debating whether climate change exists because someone’s nan remembers the summer of 1976.
It’s exhausting. You don’t have to become an environmental activist. You don’t have to glue yourself to anything. All you have to do is acknowledge observable reality.
The climate is warming. Human activity is overwhelmingly responsible. Extreme heat is becoming more likely. Britain is poorly adapted to it. And when the country has spent weeks being baked until the grass resembles something you’d find at the bottom of a hamster cage, please don’t set it on fire.
That’s it. That’s my environmental manifesto. Maybe next week I’ll write about something more relaxing, like nuclear war.
If anyone would like to donate to my fundraising effort, you can find my Facebook donation page here:
A quick update on the podcast I announced last week: we’ve now recorded Episode One!
Darren and I have officially made the leap from “we should start a podcast” to sitting in front of microphones and actually doing it. The first episode is currently in post-production and, assuming I don’t accidentally destroy it while learning how audio editing works, should be available very soon.
The Autism and Financial Independence Podcast brings together our two main areas of interest: Darren’s knowledge and writing around autism, and my background in financial services and financial independence.
We’re hoping to have the first episode out very soon. More details, including where you’ll be able to listen, will follow. Click the link below to see the Facebook page for the pod.
Reading: Abaddon’s Gate (Expanse Book 3) by James S. A. Corey
We sat down to watch The Last House, having been hooked by the trailer. It started well enough, but made a few mistakes. In the end, it was a disappointing experience. Based just on the trailer, we’d expected something with the tension of something like Signs but ended up more like Mars Attacks.
Financial Update
Assets
Premium Bonds: £250.00.
Stocks and Shares ISA: £153,244.05.
Fuck It Fund: £0.00.
Pensions: £130,399.27.
Residential Property Value: £245,790.00.
Total Assets: £529,683.32.
Debts
Residential Mortgage: £173,447.84.
Total Debts: £173,447.84.
Total Wealth
Total Wealth: £356,235.48.
My pension and ISA balances are now at the highest they’ve ever been. Considering I’ve hardly earned anything in close to a year, that’s incredible.
I’ve got just under two weeks until my new role starts, and hopefully I can hit the ground running and start earning some money quickly. I want to start hammering the investments again, but I also want to be able to spend money without feeling guilty about it.
The Most Important Number in FIRE Isn’t Your FIRE Number
I had an interesting conversation with someone who has just discovered FIRE, and it followed a predictable opening question about what my FIRE number is. This is the question that tends to dominate everything when someone starts on their FIRE journey.
What’s my FIRE number? £500,000? £750,000? A million quid?
It’s understandable as we like tangible targets.
There’s something wonderfully satisfying about having a big number sitting at the end of a spreadsheet that tells us, once I get there, I’ve won capitalism and can finally go outside.
The thing is, your FIRE number isn’t actually the most important number in the calculation.
Your annual spending is. Your FIRE number is ultimately a consequence of how much money you need to live.
Using the traditional 4% rule of thumb (yes, I know it’s not perfect and there’s debate about it being too conservative; please don’t come at me for using an example), the calculation is incredibly simple. Take your annual spending and multiply it by 25.
If you need £20,000 per year, you’re looking at roughly £500,000.
£30,000 per year? £750,000.
£40,000? £1 million.
Obviously, reality is considerably messier. Taxes exist. Investment returns aren’t guaranteed. Inflation exists. Spending changes throughout retirement. The 4% rule itself comes with enough caveats to fill another blog post, as I mentioned a few sentences ago.
As a rough illustration, though, it demonstrates something incredibly powerful.
Every £1,000 of annual spending requires approximately £25,000 of invested wealth to sustain it.
Think about that for a moment.
If you’re spending £100 per month on something, that’s £1,200 per year.
Using our rough 4% calculation, you’d need £30,000 invested purely to support that £100 monthly expense indefinitely.
Suddenly recurring expenditure starts looking very different.
But, and this is important, I’m not suggesting you immediately cancel Netflix, stop buying coffee, and spend your evenings sitting in darkness because electricity costs money.
That’s missing the point of financial independence entirely.
The goal isn’t necessarily to make your spending as low as humanly possible. It’s to understand what your spending is buying you.
If spending £100 per month on something genuinely makes your life significantly better, then fantastic. Maybe it’s worth needing another £30,000 in your eventual portfolio.
But if that £100 disappears every month on something you barely notice, suddenly there’s an interesting trade-off.
You’re not simply choosing between spending or saving £100. You’re potentially choosing between maintaining that expense indefinitely or needing to accumulate another £30,000 before your investments can support it.
This is something I think gets overlooked when people talk about FIRE. Suppose your target expenditure is £30,000 per year.
At 4%, your theoretical FIRE number is: £750,000.
You could spend years obsessing over how to get from £500,000 to £750,000 faster.
Earn more. Invest more. Optimise your portfolio. Chase promotions, and so on.
But there’s another variable. If you discovered that you could live perfectly happily on £28,000 instead, suddenly the calculation becomes: £700,000.
You’ve effectively moved your finish line £50,000 closer without earning another penny.
Reduce sustainable annual spending by £5,000 and the theoretical portfolio requirement falls by £125,000.
Of course, the reverse is equally true.
Perhaps you originally thought £25,000 per year would provide the lifestyle you wanted, but as you get older you realise you’d actually prefer £30,000. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
However, those additional £5,000 of annual expenses potentially add another £125,000 to the portfolio required to support them.
This is why knowing what your life actually costs is so much more useful than picking an arbitrary FIRE number.
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Top Ten Countdown – The Best Financial Advice
We’ve now finished the list of Best Financial Advice, and I’m going to start my new list a little further down. First of all, I just wanted to give people the opportunity to review the full list.
Let’s start this list with one of the absolute titans of conspiracy theory: the Earth is flat.
Not metaphorically flat. Not “it looks pretty flat from my bedroom window” flat. Actually, genuinely, physically flat.
According to my smooth-brained friends who believe in this theory, thousands of years of astronomy, physics, navigation and mathematics have all been leading us up the garden path. The planet beneath our feet isn’t an enormous sphere but, according to the most common Flat Earth model, essentially a giant disc with the North Pole somewhere around the middle and Antarctica forming a gigantic ring of ice around the outside.
And everyone is lying about it, including but not limited to:
NASA
ESA
Scientists
Governments
Airlines
Shipping companies
Satellite operators
Meteorologists
Universities
Astronomers
The conspiracy required to hide the shape of the Earth would be immense. Just thinking about NASA, ESA, and airline pilots, we’re talking approximately 400,000 people. Taking into account all the other space agencies, like China’s, India’s, even North Korea’s, and all the other industries, professions, and so on, we’re talking millions of people needing to be involved in this conspiracy.
What’s that joke? Something like two people couldn’t keep a blowjob in the Oval Office secret?
The first slight problem: we’ve known the Earth is round for a very long time
One of my favourite things about Flat Earth conspiracy theories is the obsession with NASA.
“NASA lies!”
“NASA photographs are fake!”
“NASA uses CGI!”
Okay.
Let’s pretend NASA is lying about everything.
NASA was founded less than a century ago. Humanity worked out that the Earth was spherical more than 2,000 years earlier.
The ancient Greeks weren’t merely sitting around saying, “Looks a bit ball-shaped to me, lads.” They were making observations and using mathematics to test the idea.
Around the third century BCE, Eratosthenes famously compared the shadows cast by objects in two different Egyptian locations. By knowing the approximate distance between them and measuring the difference in the angle of the Sun, he was able to estimate the circumference of the Earth with remarkable accuracy.
Eratosthenes was also the Chief Librarian of the Library of Alexandria, which is insanely cool but I digress.
He had no satellites, electronic computers, CGI, or anything like that. He had two sticks and his brain.
More than two thousand years later, some bloke on Facebook has watched a seventeen-minute YouTube video and decided Eratosthenes didn’t know what he was talking about.
Some of the finest minds in human history -> The Earth is a sphere.
Bubba from Facebook -> BULLSHIT
Just look at the damn horizon
There are countless everyday observations consistent with living on a spherical planet.
Watch a ship travel away from you. It doesn’t simply become smaller and smaller until it’s too tiny to see. The bottom disappears below the horizon first, followed progressively by the rest of the vessel.
Go higher, and you can see farther. Right, it’s time for a little tangent, so everyone climb aboard the Tangent Train.
Years ago Oana and I were in York. We went to the top of the Minster, and the views were spectacular. It was busy up there, as you’d expect, but fairly quiet. Then, an American voice yelled across the roof, “Can we see London from up here?” Well, if the Earth was flat you should be able to with a powerful enough telescope.
This is precisely what you’d expect if you were standing on a curved surface.
Flat Earthers naturally have explanations for this involving perspective, atmospheric refraction and various other phenomena. And this highlights one of the fundamental problems with Flat Earth.
There isn’t really a Flat Earth model in the same sense that there’s a scientific model of a spherical Earth.
There’s a collection of individual explanations designed to deal with individual problems.
Explain the horizon and something else breaks.
Explain the Sun and something else breaks.
Explain seasons and something else breaks.
Explain Australia and the entire thing catches fire.
Australia is particularly inconvenient
The most commonly depicted Flat Earth map places the North Pole at the centre with the continents spread around it and Antarctica forming a giant ring around the outside.
At first glance, you might think, “Well, that looks vaguely map-like.”
There’s a reason for that; it’s basically a projection of the globe.
The problem comes when you start looking at distances in the Southern Hemisphere.
On this map, places like Australia, South America and southern Africa become increasingly stretched apart compared with their actual relationships on a globe.
Yet people fly between these places. We know how long those flights take. We know how fast commercial aircraft travel.
So now the airlines have to be involved as well. Not just pilots, but the people who design the planes, and the capabilities of these planes in general.
Presumably pilots take off from Sydney, disappear behind a curtain for fourteen hours, perform some elaborate aerial sleight of hand whilst playing Candy Crush and then land in Santiago hoping nobody brought a stopwatch or looked out of the window.
Then there are time zones Right now, somewhere on Earth it’s daytime while somewhere else it’s night.
On a rotating spherical Earth illuminated by the Sun, this is extremely easy to explain.
One side faces the Sun.
One side doesn’t.
Done.
Flat Earth requires something considerably more elaborate.
The Sun is generally described as a much smaller object circling above the disc, illuminating particular areas as it travels.
Except now we need this model to explain not only day and night but sunrise, sunset, the changing apparent position of the Sun, seasons, different lengths of daylight throughout the year and the extreme variations experienced near the poles.
This is a recurring theme. The globe doesn’t need a separate mechanism for each observation. They’re consequences of the same model.
Flat Earth continually has to bolt another piece onto the machine.
Occam’s Razor argues that the explanation that requires the fewest unnecessary assumptions is most likely to be correct, i.e. the simplest explanation is generally correct.
Considering how simple you have to be to believe Flat Earth, it’s bizarre that the theory requires such a complex house of cards to exist.
The Stars
Look at the night sky from different parts of Earth and you’ll see different things.
People in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres observe different celestial poles, with the stars appearing to rotate in opposite directions around them.
Again, this makes perfect sense if we’re standing on different parts of a sphere.
It’s considerably harder to explain if everyone is standing on the same side of a giant dinner plate.
At this point we’ve already implicated governments, NASA, scientists, sailors, airlines and probably half the telecommunications industry.
Now the heavens are in on it.
Gravity
Gravity presents another entertaining problem.
Some Flat Earth proponents reject gravity and instead talk about density and buoyancy.
Except density and buoyancy don’t actually explain why things fall down.
Buoyancy describes forces within fluids in a gravitational field. Saying something falls because it’s denser than the surrounding air doesn’t explain why the direction it moves is towards the floor rather than towards Birmingham.
Historically, some Flat Earth explanations have gone in another direction: perhaps the entire disc is accelerating upwards.
Constantly.
At approximately 9.8 metres per second squared.
Which certainly is one way of solving a problem. Unfortunately, it’s rather like explaining why your kitchen light won’t turn on by proposing that your entire house is being attacked by mini Cthulu monsters.
You’ve replaced a well-understood phenomenon with something vastly more extraordinary while explaining considerably less.
Forget astronomy, gravity, Eratosthenes, and flight paths.
Forget eclipses, seasons, stars, satellites and the fact that humans have literally travelled into space and looked back at the Earth.
I have one question: Why?
Why are they hiding it?
Suppose tomorrow somebody produces incontrovertible evidence that the Earth is flat.
What happens?
If the theory is true, millions upon millions of people would already have to know.
What’s more, all these people, spread across countries that have spent significant portions of history actively trying to kill each other, have apparently agreed that there’s one thing more important than geopolitics, ideology, religion or national interest:
Nobody tells the public about the disc.
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Not one disgruntled NASA employee has walked out with the photographs. Not one Russian cosmonaut has blown the whistle. Not one airline pilot going through a particularly bitter divorce has decided, “Fuck it, I’m telling everyone about Antarctica.”
Millions of people would potentially have to participate in, accommodate or somehow remain oblivious to the greatest deception in human history.
Yet Brenda from Essex managed to crack the case because the horizon looked suspiciously flat on her holiday in Tenerife.
I’m convinced that some Flat Earther’s are in on the joke. I’m also convinced that some people out there are true believers. I need a drink.
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:
Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE.
Weekly Update
The big news from this week is that I’ve accepted a job with a mortgage brokerage. This is a self-employed position, and there are some real positives from this offer. First off, the owner and I hit it off quickly, and he was really keen to bring me on board. The set-up, commission split, and existing client bank all ticked the boxes I wanted ticking, so it was an easy decision to accept the offer.
I should be starting towards the end of August once all the standard checks are complete.
We’ve continued to collect the lions, lionesses, and cubs as the Pride of Yorkshire rolls on. Oana hit her fundraising target for the Sheffield Children’s Hospital, and I’m lagging a little behind. I’m mega proud of Oana for hitting her target so quickly, as I know she’s put some proper effort into it.
If anyone would like to donate to my fundraising effort, you can find my Facebook donation page here:
A New Chapter: Introducing The Autism and Financial Independence Podcast
I’m excited to announce a new project that has been in the works for a little while.
Over the past few years, this blog has explored financial independence, investing, and the idea that money is about far more than simply accumulating wealth. At its heart, financial independence is about creating greater security, more choices, and the freedom to live life on your own terms.
Following my own autism diagnosis, I’ve also become increasingly interested in how those ideas apply to autistic people. Work, money and financial planning can present very different challenges when you’re navigating sensory overload, burnout, anxiety, communication differences and a world that isn’t always designed with neurodivergent people in mind.
That’s why I’m delighted to be co-launching The Autism and Financial Independence Podcast.
I’ll be co-hosting the pod with my dad, Darren Scothern, an autistic writer and advocate whose work has focused on autism education, communication and challenging common misconceptions about autistic people.
Together, we’ll be combining our different areas of expertise. Darren will bring his knowledge of autism, the latest research and lived experience, while I’ll focus on financial independence, investing, personal finance and the practical steps that can help people build greater financial security.
Our aim isn’t to tell people how to become millionaires or retire at 40. Instead, we want to explore how financial independence can give autistic people something that is often far more valuable: choice; over where and how you work, as well as a safety net for when things like burnout happen.
The podcast is aimed at anyone with an interest in autism, personal finance or financial independence. Whether you’re autistic yourself, a family member, a friend, or simply curious about FIRE, we hope you’ll find something useful in our conversations.
Our first episode will introduce the fundamentals of FIRE; what it is, what it isn’t, and why we believe it has particular relevance for autistic people. Future episodes will cover everything from budgeting, investing and pensions to burnout, workplace challenges, executive functioning and the psychology of money.
We’ll be sharing more details, including where you can listen, very soon, and we expect to have Episode One ready in a week or so.
I genuinely can’t wait to share this with you, and I hope you’ll join us for the journey.
To make sure you don’t miss a thing, please check out the Facebook page for the pod:
I want to start with a fairly substantial disclaimer: I am not a quantum physicist. I have, however, watched enough science fiction, read enough about quantum mechanics to be dangerous, and spent enough time thinking about completely unnecessary philosophical questions to have developed a theory.
This theory leads to a conclusion that some may view as controversial, but we have quite a long way to go before we get there.
The Many Worlds Problem
One of the interpretations of quantum mechanics is the Many-Worlds Interpretation. The massively simplified version, and physicists are welcome to start getting angry-mad now, is that when different quantum outcomes are possible, reality doesn’t necessarily select one outcome and discard the others. Instead, all of those outcomes continue to exist in different branches of reality.
This often gets condensed in popular culture into the idea that “everything that can happen, does happen.” Whilst that’s not really an accurate description of the physics, it’s useful enough for the thought experiment I’m interested in.
Suppose we take that idea to its logical extreme and imagine an effectively infinite branching multiverse containing every physically possible version of events. Immediately, I think we have a philosophical problem.
Free will.
Let’s say I’m presented with a choice between A and B. I choose A. Except, somewhere in the multiverse, presumably there’s a branch in which I chose B.
So did I actually choose anything?
Take this beyond trivial decisions, and things become much more uncomfortable. Imagine someone has the opportunity to do something morally terrible and decides not to do it. We’d normally consider that decision morally significant. They had the opportunity to cause harm, exercised their free will and chose not to.
However, Many Worlds means there is another branch in which they did commit the terrible act; we have a problem. Which version of that person is morally responsible?
If both versions are equally “them”, then one behaved morally, and another behaved immorally.
Extend this across an entire lifetime, and there could theoretically be versions of the same individual who lived radically different lives. Somewhere you’re a saint. Somewhere you’re an arsehole. Somewhere you’re a sensible, rational person. Somewhere, though, you’re a Reform UK supporter.
This becomes even more interesting if you introduce religion.
What Happens to the Soul?
Many religions contain some concept of moral judgement. The details vary enormously, but the basic structure is familiar: we live our lives, make choices, and those choices have consequences that extend beyond our physical existence.
But how does that work in a branching universe?
If every version of me possesses the same metaphysical claim to being me, then which one gets judged?
Perhaps they all do. But that raises another question: where did all the extra souls come from? Before the universe branched, there was one David. Afterwards there are two. Branch again and there are four. Keep doing this, and you’ve potentially got an astronomical number of Davids wandering around the multiverse, all believing themselves to be the original. The numbers become insane very quickly.
For example, let’s look at my morning routine. I wake up and choose between toast or cereal for breakfast. Then I choose between coffee and tea. I then decide whether to watch TV or listen to a book whilst having my breakfast. Do I play a game on my phone or doom scroll for a bit? Do I open Facebook or Reddit?
That’s just a few seconds worth of decision making. It’s perfectly reasonable to assume that by the time I have finished my breakfast, I’ve made upwards of fifty decisions. For simplicity, I’ve assumed each decision has two possibilities, but in the real world there are many more options available. If we stick with just two options for each decision, and fast forward to the conclusion of the fiftieth choice, there would be over one quadrillion versions of me in branched timelines.
Do they all have souls?
If they do, the traditional relationship between free will and moral responsibility starts becoming very strange indeed. Somewhere there’s potentially a version of me making almost every possible decision available to me.
It therefore seems unfair to reward one David and punish another when the existence of both was apparently required by the structure of reality itself.
Unless we’ve got the relationship backwards.
What If the Soul Doesn’t Branch?
Suppose there is such a thing as a soul, and suppose it doesn’t duplicate when the universe branches. Reality reaches a fork. I can choose A or B.
Both physical outcomes exist because that’s simply what the universe does, but I choose A.
My soul therefore continues along the branch in which I chose A. The other branch still contains David-B. He has my DNA. He has my memories. He has my personality. If you ask him whether he’s David, he’ll say yes. As far as the physical universe is concerned, he’s completely indistinguishable from me. There’s just one difference. Nobody is home.
This David-B is effectively an NPC.
This gives us an interesting way of reconciling Many Worlds with free will. The universe doesn’t care what I choose. It produces both outcomes. But my conscious experience only follows one of them.
In other words: Physics creates the branches. Free will chooses the path. The soul is what travels along it.
Suddenly moral responsibility makes sense again. Somewhere there might be an NPC version of me committing some horrible act, but I didn’t choose that branch. My life consists of the continuous sequence of branches selected through my own decisions.
Therefore, I’m accountable for that path. There are two problems, though.
Firstly. there are other people. Secondly, most choices have many possible outcomes; not just two.
Eight Billion People Choosing Different Universes
Imagine that everyone has a soul operating according to the same rules. You and I are currently occupying the same reality. Then we encounter separate decisions.
I choose A. You choose B.
My soul follows the universe corresponding to my decision. Your soul follows the universe corresponding to yours.
There’s absolutely no reason those have to be the same universe. In my branch, there would still be a version of you. They’d talk like you, behave like you and remember everything you’ve experienced, but your conscious experience might have gone somewhere else.
Likewise, the version of me in your universe might simply be an NPC. Now multiply this process by eight billion people making countless decisions every day. The chances of everyone’s souls continuing along exactly the same branch would presumably become infinitesimally small.
Eventually, almost every branch of reality might contain billions of humans but only a tiny number of actual conscious observers. Take the process far enough and perhaps every soul effectively ends up in its own personal universe surrounded entirely by NPCs.
Which raises a slightly disturbing question: How would you know?
The NPC Problem
An NPC version of someone would presumably behave exactly like the original.
Ask them whether they’re conscious and they’ll tell you they are, and ask about their childhood and they’ll remember it.
Question whether they love their partner and they’ll say yes. Examine their brain and presumably everything would look completely normal, unless they’re anti-vax in which case they will have a nice smooth brain.
There would be no test capable of distinguishing between someone with a soul and someone without one because, by definition, the soul is the only difference.
Philosophers have actually played with something remarkably similar to this idea through the concept of the “philosophical zombie”: a hypothetical being physically identical to a conscious human being that behaves exactly like one but has no subjective inner experience.
From the outside, there’s no difference. Which means there is only one consciousness you could ever be absolutely certain exists. Your own.
For all I know, everyone reading this is an NPC, and, more importantly, from your perspective, I’m the NPC.
Then There’s Quantum Immortality
This gets even stranger when we introduce another speculative idea: quantum immortality.
The basic thought experiment goes something like this. Suppose an event has two possible outcomes: In one, you survive, and in another, you die.
If both branches exist, there is still a version of you alive in one of them.
The controversial leap behind quantum immortality is that perhaps subjective experience can only continue along branches in which the observer remains alive.
You can observe yourself surviving, but you can never observe yourself being dead.
Combine that with our hypothetical soul and things become interesting.
Maybe conscious experience simply keeps following branches in which the physical body survives.
An accident that should have killed you somehow doesn’t. A disease you were statistically unlikely to survive unexpectedly disappears.
You keep travelling through increasingly improbable branches because those are the only branches in which there remains a functioning version of you for your consciousness to inhabit.
Perhaps what we call death only occurs when there is simply nowhere else to go.
And perhaps, if we’re going to take this speculative rabbit hole as far as possible, that’s the point at which whatever we call the soul finally leaves the physical universe.
Maybe that’s where an afterlife begins.
I should emphasise again that I’ve now travelled an extremely long distance from established physics. Many Worlds is a genuine interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Quantum immortality is a highly speculative philosophical extrapolation from it. Souls are metaphysics. And the idea that your soul is essentially hopping between universes like someone desperately changing trains at Birmingham New Street is entirely my own thought experiment.
But there’s something about it I rather like.
It preserves the idea of free will in a universe where every physical possibility might occur. It provides a continuous definition of the self. It potentially allows moral responsibility to coexist with a branching multiverse. It even provides a mechanism connecting quantum immortality with traditional ideas about the soul and an afterlife.
There is, however, one final piece of evidence that I think deserves consideration.
The Cycle Lane Problem
Imagine a pavement, and next to the pavement is a clearly marked cycle lane.
There are bicycles painted on it, and it has signs and is also a different colour than the pavement.
In short, it’s blatantly obvious there are two distinct paths for different uses.
Yet someone will inevitably decide that the optimal place to walk is directly down the middle of the cycle lane. Sometimes they’ll wear headphones. Sometimes they’ll stare at their phone. Sometimes they’ll walk four abreast.
As you approach them, you’ll ring your bell repeatedly, and they’ll eventually turn around wearing the bewildered expression of someone who has just materialised on Earth and has not yet been briefed on bicycles.
I’ve spent ages trying to understand this behaviour, but perhaps I’ve been looking at the problem incorrectly.
Maybe, after billions upon billions of quantum branches, most conscious souls have simply wandered off into their own universes.
Maybe this particular branch is largely populated by philosophical zombies: convincing physical simulations of human beings that can talk, work, shop, drive cars and operate smartphones but lack the final spark of conscious awareness necessary to think:
“Hmm. Perhaps I shouldn’t walk down the bit of pavement with a fucking bicycle painted on it.”
Suddenly everything makes sense. Quantum mechanics hasn’t just provided us with a possible explanation for the fundamental structure of reality. It has finally explained people who walk in cycle lanes.
What I’m Doing
Listening: The Artist by Lucy Steeds.
Watching: nothing currently.
Reading: Caliban’s War (Expanse Book 2) by James S. A. Corey
The Artist isn’t the sort of book I would normally read or listen to. Set in 1920s Provence, the plot follows a young journalist tasked with writing about a reclusive painter who lives with his young niece. It’s a well-written story, and it kept me engaged, but I think it would have benefitted from being a bit more ambitious or daring. There were plot threads that could have been explored in more detail, and my only major criticism comes from the random insertion of a character, which felt like it belonged in a different story.
I’m glad I read this, as it’s always good to branch out into different genres and settings, but I don’t think I’ll ever go back and reread it. It feels like the sort of book you’d pick up on a cruise or in a hotel, read it and enjoy it, and then leave it behind when you return home.
Financial Update
Assets
Premium Bonds: £250.00.
Stocks and Shares ISA: £153,537.15.
Fuck It Fund: £0.00.
Pensions: £129,385.62.
Residential Property Value: £245,790.00.
Total Assets: £528,962.77.
Debts
Residential Mortgage: £173,447.84.
Total Debts: £173,447.84.
Total Wealth
Total Wealth: £355,514.93.
I’m fairly happy with how my finances are holding up at the moment. Despite not being able to invest for the last few months, my investments have continued to steadily grow. With my new job starting soon, I’m hopeful I’ll be able to start putting money into my ISA, pension, and other investments.
When I started putting this list together, I had a fairly good idea of what would end up at number one. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that no other piece of financial advice has had a greater impact on ordinary people quietly building wealth over the long term.
Pay yourself first.
It’s a simple idea, but it’s one that completely changes the way you think about money.
Most people approach their finances in the same order every month. Payday arrives, the bills go out, they buy the shopping, treat themselves here and there, perhaps make a few impulse purchases, and then, if there’s anything left at the end of the month, they’ll put it into savings.
The problem is that there usually isn’t anything left.
Money has a funny habit of disappearing. There’s always another birthday, another takeaway, another Amazon parcel that seemed like an excellent idea at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday evening, another subscription you forgot you were paying for. Before you know it, payday has rolled around again and saving has been pushed into next month’s problem.
Paying yourself first simply reverses that process.
Before you begin spending on the nice-to-haves, you put money aside for your future. That might mean transferring money into an ISA, contributing to your pension, topping up your emergency fund or overpaying your mortgage. Whatever your goals happen to be, they are funded before discretionary spending gets a look in.
Now, before anyone starts firing angry emails at me, let me make something absolutely clear.
Paying yourself first does not mean ignoring your financial commitments. I’m not suggesting you skip your mortgage payment so you can buy shares in a global index fund. Your rent, mortgage, council tax, utility bills, food and other essential commitments still come first because, rather inconveniently, becoming homeless tends to derail most financial plans.
Think of it like this.
There are three broad categories your income needs to cover.
First come your essentials; the things that keep a roof over your head, food on the table and the lights on.
Second comes paying your future self.
Only then comes everything else.
It’s that third category where many of us quietly lose hundreds of pounds every month without really noticing.
One of the reasons this approach works so well is that it removes the need for constant willpower.
Willpower is overrated. It’s brilliant for a few days. A few weeks if you’re particularly motivated.
But life gets in the way. You have a stressful day at work. The washing machine breaks. The cat needs to see the vet. You decide you’ve earned a little treat. Suddenly the money you intended to save has disappeared into everyday life.
Systems are far more reliable than motivation, and that’s why I love automation.
Set up a standing order for the day after payday so your savings or investments happen automatically. After a few months, you stop thinking about it altogether. You simply adapt to living on what’s left.
Humans are remarkably good at adapting their spending to the money available. If your employer accidentally reduced your salary by ten per cent, you’d notice immediately. Yet if you quietly diverted that same ten per cent into long-term investments before you ever saw it, chances are you’d adjust surprisingly quickly.
Over time, those automatic contributions become habits. Those habits become years. Those years become wealth. And that, ultimately, is why this advice sits at number one. Not because paying yourself first will make you rich overnight. It won’t. In fact, like so much of the advice in this countdown, it’s almost boring in its simplicity.
But if you consistently prioritise your future self over impulse spending, something remarkable starts to happen. Your emergency fund grows. Your investments grow. Your pension grows. Your financial resilience grows.
Most importantly, your options grow.
The real purpose of money has never been to own the biggest house or drive the flashiest car. It’s to create security, freedom, and ultimately choice.
Every time you pay yourself first, you’re buying a little more of all three.
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:
Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE.
FIFA
FIFA announced plans to create a new commercial company, FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE), and sell a minority stake to outside investors. The stated aim was to unlock billions of dollars that could then be invested back into football around the world through increased development funding.
On paper, that sounds like a noble objective. More grassroots facilities, more coaching, more opportunities for developing nations to grow the game.
The proposal lasted only a matter of days before football’s governing bodies pushed back so hard that FIFA withdrew it. UEFA, CONCACAF and others criticised not only the proposal itself but the way it had been developed, arguing there had been insufficient consultation and transparency over what was, potentially, one of the biggest changes to the governance of world football in decades.
In short, FIFA put forward a crazy idea and the footballing world responded as one by stating, abso-fucking-lutely not.
My first question is a simple one. Why?
The 2026 World Cup has just been described by FIFA itself as a huge commercial success, with revenues expected to exceed US$15 billion during the current cycle. If the organisation is already generating record amounts of money, why is outside investment suddenly necessary?
Whenever someone says they need billions more, it’s reasonable to ask what problem they’re trying to solve. I might be missing something, but I can’t see an immediate funding problem with the World Cup.
The second issue is transparency.
FIFA insisted that investors would not influence the rules of football, the Laws of the Game or sporting governance. That’s reassuring as far as it goes. But large institutional investors don’t part with billions of dollars simply because they enjoy watching football. They expect a return on their investment.
That’s where I become uncomfortable. Football should not be held to account by investors or shareholders.
The thing is, investors don’t need to interfere with referees or decide who wins matches to change the direction of the sport. Influence can be far more subtle.
Should the international calendar become even more crowded?
Should more tournaments be created?
Should kick-off times prioritise television audiences over supporters attending the match?
Should commercial considerations begin to outweigh sporting ones?
None of those decisions directly alter the outcome of a game, but every one of them changes what football becomes.
Then there’s another uncomfortable question. Not every football match has the same commercial value.
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A World Cup quarter-final between Brazil and Germany will attract vastly larger audiences than Denmark against Andorra in a qualifier.
If investors are looking for growth and maximising returns, there will inevitably be pressure to create more of the fixtures that generate the biggest audiences, the biggest sponsorship deals and the biggest television rights.
Football has always had commercial pressures, of course. But there’s a difference between football making money and football existing primarily to make money.
The beauty of international football has always been that, at least in principle, every nation starts the qualification campaign with the same dream. Once financial returns become another stakeholder in the room, you begin to wonder whether some competitions become more valuable than others, not because of their sporting significance, but because of the revenue they generate.
Perhaps the most encouraging aspect of this entire episode was the response.
For once, organisations that often disagree with one another were remarkably united. The proposal was challenged, difficult questions were asked, and within days FIFA withdrew it.
That suggests football still has people willing to defend the game’s long-term interests, even when billions of dollars are being discussed.
I’m not opposed to investment. Investment builds businesses, infrastructure and innovation.
However, some things shouldn’t be viewed primarily through the lens of shareholder returns.
The World Cup isn’t just another financial asset. It’s part of football’s heritage and is worth protecting.
Zip Line Fun
Back in 2008, when Oana and I were still a fairly new couple, I bought her a little gift from The Deep in Hull. It’s a stuffed rabbit toy which, creative people that we are, we named Bunny.
Over the years we’ve accumulated a number of other stuffed toys, and it’s just part of who we are. Anyway, a few weeks back we saw an advert for an event at Sheffield Cathedral; a zip line for toys.
Obviously, we had to go. It was £5 to book, and it ended up being one of the best £5 we’ve spent. It was hilarious, and great fun. Also, we were not the only adults who brought a toy to the event.
The first stop for Bunny was to get his passport photo taken. Once this was done, we had to fill out his passport and stick his photo inside.
The second stop was to have his medical, or “fit to fly” exam. The nurse examined his ears, and his heartbeat (it was a little fast apparently). She also gave him some vaccinations and sun screen. He also received a little paw massage. Fortunately, he was deemed fit to fly.
We then placed him in the box which raised him to the Cathedral roof. He did a little dance on the ledge, and was hooked up to the zip line. He came racing down the cable and was presented with his bravery certificate.
I was in pieces throughout the whole event. It was absolutely hilarious, and the staff all properly committed to their roles.
The event was for a good cause, to raise money for Sheffield Children’s Hospital.
When Fun Stops Being Fun
Friday evening should have been one of the highlights of the week. Oana and I joined one of the big city bike rides that takes place every so often. Around fifty riders roll through Sheffield together with music pumping from portable speakers, lights flashing, and generally spreading a bit of joy.
It’s difficult to explain just how much the public gets into it if you’ve never seen one. People stop to wave, cheer, dance, film us on their phones, and children absolutely love it. For a couple of hours the city feels just that little bit more alive. It’s impossible not to smile when an entire tram stop starts dancing as you ride past. Normally, I come home buzzing.
This Friday was different. I wasn’t feeling 100% before we even set off, but one rider managed to turn what is normally a fantastic evening into something I honestly couldn’t wait to escape.
He’d fitted his bike with multiple air horns and various squeakers. I’ve ridden with him before and, while I’ve always found the occasional blast a little irritating, it had never really crossed the line.
This time it absolutely did. Imagine standing next to a car alarm going off continuously for an hour and a half. Not every now and then. Not as a joke at a junction. Literally almost non-stop for around ninety minutes. One hand on the handlebars. One hand permanently hammering the air horn.
You couldn’t hear the music that everyone else had brought along. You couldn’t chat with the people riding beside you. You couldn’t simply enjoy cycling through the city because every few seconds another deafening blast would cut through everything else.
By the end of the ride I had a pounding headache.
The frustrating thing is that I don’t think I’m alone. I’ve seen and heard other riders mention it after previous rides, so it clearly isn’t just me being a grumpy old man shouting at clouds.
There’s a difference between adding to an atmosphere and dominating it.
The music creates an atmosphere. The lights create an atmosphere. Hundreds of people smiling, dancing and cheering create an atmosphere. One person repeatedly blasting an air horn for ninety minutes doesn’t create atmosphere. It simply drowns everything else out.
Being the loudest person isn’t the same as making something more enjoyable.
As someone who’s autistic, I know I’m probably more sensitive to sensory overload than many people. Loud, unpredictable noises become mentally exhausting far quicker than they might for someone else. But even putting autism to one side, I struggle to see how anyone could enjoy ninety minutes of relentless air horn blasts just a few feet away.
Sometimes consideration for other people is simply recognising when your own fun is starting to come at everyone else’s expense.
Fortunately, Saturday provided the perfect antidote.
After getting home late on Friday, eating dinner at around 11pm and finally collapsing into bed, we somehow managed to drag ourselves up for another ride the following morning. This one couldn’t have been more different.
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A much smaller group. No constant noise. Just good conversation, plenty of hill climbing to remind us our legs still existed, and a much more relaxed pace.
Afterwards, Oana and I grabbed a little lunch before returning home for what felt like one of the most well-earned afternoon naps we’ve had in a long time.
What I’m Doing
Listening: The Artist by Lucy Steeds.
Watching: nothing currently.
Reading: Caliban’s War (Expanse Book 2) by James S. A. Corey
If I could only give one piece of financial advice to someone starting their journey, this would be it: Spend less than you earn.
That’s it. No complicated formulas or detailed fund allocations. Just spend less than you earn.
This one simple principle has created more financial security than almost any other.
The reason it’s so powerful is because almost every other piece of financial advice depends on it.
You can’t build an emergency fund if every pound you earn is already spoken for.
You can’t invest consistently if you’re spending everything that comes into your account.
You can’t become financially independent if your lifestyle expands to match every increase in income.
Living below your means is the engine that powers everything else.
Without it, the rest of the advice in this countdown becomes incredibly difficult to follow.
One of the biggest misconceptions is that living below your means means living a miserable life. People imagine surviving on instant noodles, refusing to turn the heating on, and wearing shoes until the soles give out.
That’s not what it means at all. It simply means creating a gap between what comes in and what goes out.
That gap is where your future is built. Every pound that isn’t immediately spent gives you options. It can:
become part of your emergency fund.
be invested.
overpay your mortgage.
pay for a holiday.
allow you to reduce your working hours.
buy you freedom.
The size of that gap matters far more than the size of your salary. This is something that often surprises people.
A person earning £35,000 and saving £500 a month is usually in a much stronger financial position than someone earning £80,000 who spends virtually all of it.
Income is important, but your savings rate is often even more important.
I’ve met people with excellent salaries who were permanently stressed because they had built a lifestyle that required every penny they earned. I’m talking about people with six-figure salaries, with no savings and lots of unsecured debt.
I’ve talked about the difference between being wealthy and appearing wealthy before. Expensive car finance for a specific brand of car, over something much cheaper that does the same job. Or, spending thousands on an expensive watch that they are then too scared to wear. If you can afford these things without any concern; you’re very fortunate. For most people, they will get into debt to buy these things.
It’s not just the big, expensive, purchases that bite. The regular monthly payments for things that are no longer used all add up. Things like a monthly gym subscription you don’t use, or an enhanced TV package which you ignore in favour of Netflix.
From the outside, people can look wealthy. Behind closed doors they couldn’t afford for a single payslip to arrive late.
That’s not wealth. The more accurate term is dependency. You can’t have freedom if you depend on a payday coming around every month.
On the other hand, I’ve also met people with fairly ordinary incomes who quietly saved and invested year after year.
They weren’t trying to impress anyone; they simply spent less than they earned.
Fast forward twenty years, and they often found themselves with something far more valuable than an Audi or a Breitling:
Freedom.
That’s what living below your means really buys. Not deprivation. I’ll say it again;
Freedom.
There’s another reason I love this advice. It works regardless of your income.
Whether you earn £25,000 or £250,000, the principle remains exactly the same.
Of course, someone on a lower income faces greater challenges, and it would be naïve to pretend otherwise. Rising housing costs, energy bills and food prices have squeezed many household budgets to breaking point.
But whenever your circumstances improve, whether through a pay rise, a new job, or paying off an existing commitment, you have a choice.
You can allow every extra pound to disappear into a bigger lifestyle. Or you can allow at least some of it to improve your future.
Those small decisions, repeated over years, become life-changing. In many ways, living below your means is an act of delayed gratification.
You’re choosing a little less today in exchange for considerably more tomorrow. That might not sound particularly exciting and it certainly won’t go viral on TikTok.
Nobody is posting videos titled “I quietly maintained the same standard of living after my pay rise and increased my ISA contributions.” But it’s exactly the sort of behaviour that quietly creates financial independence.
Let’s just bottom line this for the avoidance of any doubt:
You will almost certainly never become wealthy because you found the perfect investment or created an amazing business.
You are far more likely to become wealthy because, for years or even decades, you consistently spent less than you earned.
Everything else is just detail.
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:
