Stuff That Interests Me

We continue with my series about gold in pre-history today with one of the earliest and most enduring of the golden myths: Jason and the Golden Fleece. This story, which took place about a generation before the Trojan War, starts out as a hero’s quest, but develops into a story of betrayal and vengeance with, like many a Greek myth, a tragic ending. In Iolcos, Pelias usurped his brother Aeson, the rightful king, to take the throne. He then had all Aeson’s descendents killed. People were ruthless in those days.Aeson’s son Jason, however, survived the massacre, saved by a wheeze: when he was born, his mother had all her servants cry to fool Pelias into thinking he was still-born. She then smuggled Jason away to be reared by Chiron, “the wisest and justest of all the centaurs.” Chiron was the son of Cronos and would count among his high-achieving students Achilles, Odysseus, Hercules, Theseus and Perseus. Meanwhile, an oracle warned Aeson “to fear the man with one sandal”. No doubt feeling guilty about his ill-g

In my late teens and early 20s I was obsessed with beaches. I had always liked them, we all do, but I think it was a trip to Thailand in 1989 that triggered the obsession. Being on Koh Phangan back then when there was barely any power on the island - you had to go to back to Koh Samui for the full moon parties - smoking joints, lounging about in hammocks, philosophising with my mates, talking about our futures, watching the world go by, swimming, snorkelling, playing endless games of frisbee and volleyball on the white sands as sunny days drifted into beautiful sunsets, is a time I will always cherish. After that trip, I used to endlessly contemplate beaches - didn’t matter if they were tropical or Cornish, Mediterranean or in Bournemouth - they all have something to appreciate and enjoy. As a young writer trying to get stuff published, I wrote and wrote about them. Then, in 1996, The Beach was published. Alex Garland’s debut novel caught a zeitgeist and took the world by storm, eventually becoming a film wit

I’m doing a show about gold at the Edinburgh Fringe. If you are in Scotland between August 4th and August 20th, plesase come. It’s at Panmure House in the room in which Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations. You can get tickets here.Thousands of years before the dawn of civilisation, as prehistoric man hunted and gathered his way through the Stone Age, he might have come across six native metals - metals which occur in nature in a relatively pure state: silver, tin, lead, iron, copper and goldHe found gold in river beds - nuggets, mixed in with sediment, relatively easy to find, collect and shape. Gold doesn’t naturally combine with other metals in nature, so it is easy to identify. It shone, it glistened and so man adorned himself with it - as well as with bones, teeth, precious stones and shells. Archaeological evidence from Spanish caves shows that gold was used by human societies as early as 40,000 years ago. This predates agriculture and the development of settled communities. It is the earliest example of

NB My next Best In Class, in which I identify the go-to stocks in the natural resources sector, is out tomorrow. Keep an eye out for that. (Only for paid subscribers).Today, though, gold …I am going to the Edinburgh Fringe this August to do one of my lectures with funny bits. This one is about gold - its history, its fascination, its future. It really is the most amazing metal, not least because it is, as Spandau Ballet famously sung, indestructible. Life may be temporary, but gold is permanent. No other substance is as durable, not diamonds, not tungsten carbide, not boron nitride. You can shape this enormously ductile metal into pretty much anything. An ounce of gold can be stretched into a wire fifty miles long. You can beat it into a leaf just one atom thick. Yet there is one thing you cannot do and that is destroy it. You can change its form by dissolving it in certain chemical solutions or alloying it with other metals. You can even vaporise it. But the gold will always be there. It is theoretically pos

Before we begin today’s piece, a quick reminder for those who might find themselves in the Scottish neck of the woods this August, I am doing one of my lectures with funny bits at the Edinburgh Fringe this year all about gold.It’s from August 4th to 20th at 2pm. Please come if you are in town - you can get tickets here.Plus an added bit of history: it takes place in the room in which Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations. Hopefully, I will see you there.And, if you would like me to speak at your event or to advertise on these pages, please drop me a line. Right, house prices …Despite being built of bricks, a house is, in many ways, a financial asset. This is because, for the most part, we use finance - debt - to buy real estate. Mortgages, aka “death grips”, have been around for hundreds of years. Debt has been around since before human beings settled on the fertile plains between the Tigris and the Euphrates. But mortgages in the UK only hit the mainstream in the 20th century. First, after WWI, following Prime

Before we begin today’s piece, a quick reminder for those who might find themselves in the Scottish neck of the woods this August, I am doing a show at the Edinburgh Fringe all about gold.It’s from August 4th to 20th at 2pm. Please come if you are in town- you can get tickets here.Plus an added bit of history: it takes place in the room in which Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations. Hopefully, I will see you there.And, if you would like me to speak at your event or to advertise on these pages, please drop me a line.Copper, they say, is the metal with a PHD in economics. Gold, eternal and indestructible, will protect your wealth. It might even give you safe passage into the afterlife, at least that’s what the Ancient Egyptians thought. Zinc, on the other hand, stinks.That is the cruel verdict the poets of the investment world have bestowed on zinc, and there is plenty of truth to the maxim. In the spring of 2022, zinc was flirting with $4,500 a tonne. Here we are 14 months on and the price is down $2,000 - $2,40

Before we begin today’s piece, a quick reminder for those who might find themselves in the Scottish neck of the woods this August, I am doing a show at the Edinburgh Fringe all about gold. It’s from August 4th to 20th at 2pm. Please come if you are in town- you can get tickets here.Plus an added bit of history: it takes place in the room in which Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations. Hopefully, I will see you there. So, the pound …An alert just went off in my calendar: “start looking to short the pound”, it says. Why would one short strength?Look at the pound these last few months, it has been very strong, very strong indeed. You wouldn’t know it to listen to many financial commentators, who so often seem consumed with national self-loathing, but against a basket of foreign currencies, the pound actually flirting with six-year highs (it’s got a bit further to go against the euro and the US dollar, though, largely, we tend to think of pound-dollar, aka cable, as the defining measure). Charlie Morris of Bytetree

A must-watch/listen interview with Miami-based, Michael Saylor, Chairman and co-founder of Nasdaq-listed MicroStrategy Inc (NDX:MSTR).Michael is one of the most articulate proponents of bitcoin, having shot to fame in 2020 speaking so passionately about it in numerous interviews. With his company buying over 140,000btc, Microstrategy, effectively, keeps its treasury in bitcoin.In this interview we discuss:* the state of bitcoin* the future of bitcoin* how changes in accounting will enable corporates to purchase more bitcoin* how 7% inflation destroys companies* why Turkey should buy bitcoin* gold vs bitcoin* Lightning, micro-transactions and their likely effect on the bitcoin priceWatch the video version of this interview here.Don’t forget my Edinburgh Show this August, if you are in Scotland.Subscribe to The Flying Frisby for more amazing content.Useful links:Michael on TwitterThe Saylor Academy.Hope.com - bitcoin education site This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers o

Hugh is an author with experience in business, market research, psychotherapy, academia and performance. He has collaborated with Paul McKenna on many best-selling self-help books in UK and USA, and leads workshops in negotiation, qualitative research, hypnosis, performance and presentation skills, practical philosophy and authentic storytelling.​His latest book, which we discuss today, is The Bug in our Thinking. In a world awash with illusion and misinformation this is a guide towards clarity. It has philosophy for non-philosophers, hypnosis for non-hypnotists and stories for hungry hearts. Get the paperback here, or the kindle version here.Here is the video version of this interview. Please subscribe to The Flying Frisby. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

Before we begin today’s piece, if you should happen to be in the Scottish neck of the woods this August, I am doing one of my lectures with funny bits at the Edinburgh Fringe this year.This one is about gold. It has got Greek gods, interstellar collisions, heists and Nazis. What more you could want in a show? It’s from August 4th to 20th at 2pm. Please come if you are in town- you can get tickets here.Plus an added bit of history: it takes place in the room in which Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations.Hopefully, I will see you there. So cycles …‘The wheel is come full circle,’ commented Shakespeare’s Edgar on the carnage that surrounded him at the end of King Lear. The notion of a wheel of fortune is one that has pervaded since antiquity. There are good times and bad times. There are bull markets and bear markets. There is boom and bust, something Chancellor Gordon Brown said he was going to eliminate.Whether it’s the seasons of the year, the moons, or the inevitable ageing process and the cycle of life - what

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theflyingfrisby.comPlease do not share, copy, reproduce or distribute any part of this report without the express permission of the author.I am going to do something I don’t often do today, and that is tell you about a silver mining company. The reason? I think it could rally by 50%, and quickly. I make no secret of my ambivalence towards silver. On the one hand, there is no metal with as much potential. It’s a monetary metal and we are in an inflationary environment that wiser heads than me are comparing to the 1970s. Silver was the “bitcoin of the 1970s” going from below $2 to $50, with the silver mining companies rising thousands of times over.Then there are silver’s multiple industrial uses. Silver is to modern technology as sugar and salt are to modern food: it is in just about everything.  If ever there was a metal that had so many uses, I’d like to know what it is. I could write a tome about uses of silver. It might not be that readabl

A number of people I know have started using Ozempic. This is the drug, otherwise known as Wegovy, beloved by the likes of Elon Musk and Jeremy Clarkson, that suppresses your appetite, so enabling you to lose weight. Not only does it suppress your appetite, it actually turns you off food. I’ve been overweight in the past. I get how hard it is to shed pounds. It takes a lot of time, effort and persistence. It can be deeply demoralising, and you can become quite desperate, so I get why many are taking the apparently easier Ozempic route. But I worry about it. We don’t yet know for sure what the side effects are, but I’d wager that in a few years time, as so often is the way, we are going to discover all sorts of nasty unintended consequences. What is more, on the company’s own site it reads:Ozempic® may cause serious side effects, including:Possible thyroid tumors, including cancer. Tell your health care provider if you get a lump or swelling in your neck, hoarseness, trouble swallowing, or shortness of breath.

Sometimes I look at what is happening in the world around me, both at home and abroad, and I feel like I’m watching some kind of slow-motion car crash. It’s so obvious what is happening, what is going to happen, and yet the protagonists are oblivious. At school we learnt about dramatic irony: when the audience sees what the characters in the play don’t. That’s how I feel when I watch what Western Europe is careering towards. From energy to fiat money to mass immigration, we don’t seem to realise what we are doing to ourselves, nor what the long-term consequences of some of these decisions, if you can call them that, are going to be, never mind the sheer stupidity of many of the arguments that are taking place. I suggest that pretty much everything that “isn’t” working has some kind of state action at its heart, yet the solution always seems to be more state. When will people realise that the state itself is the problem? I’m not holding my breath.“Our political economy is broken,” says right-leaning commentato

Tom Haynes wrote an interesting piece in the Telegraph the other day to mark the 40th birthday of the pound coin. “The pound in your pocket is now worth just 30p” ran the title, followed by the subhead “Some 40 years after the first pound coins were minted, their relevance is waning”. I’ll say!But the pound has actually lost a lot more than 70% of its value, and the article’s own statistics demonstrate that. “The average house cost £27,386, compared to £290,000 today,” says Haynes. I make that a fall of over 90% in purchasing power.A first-class stamp was 16p. Now it’s £1.10. That’s a fall of over 85%.A pint of London Pride cost 58p. Good luck finding it below a fiver today outside of Wetherspoons. Another c90% loss of purchasing power.A pack of fags was £1.02. Those same B&H will cost you 14 times that today. A 93% loss of purchasing power.A Mars Bar was 15p. Today it’s 65p. That’s a 77% loss of PP.In general terms, as covered before in this piece on inflation, items we buy with debt, such as houses, hav

Following on from my piece last week Tyranny of the Midwits, I was having dinner the other day with a friend who is a big cheese behind the scenes in government. I won’t say his name. Discretion is everything. In any case, his name doesn’t really matter to what I’m about to say.I was busy moaning, as we all do, about the state of the country, and at the fact that there are so many things that, it seems to me, could be quite easily remedied with some reasonably ballsy decision-making by those in power. Yet, from planning to tax to energy to immigration, nothing seems to change. We seem to be having the same arguments we were having decades ago, arguments that I thought had long since been won. Something, in particular, that drives me nuts is when a politician or public servant in an influential position stands down, then goes to the media and says what needs to be done. And you’re thinking: you were literally just the person who could’ve done something, you were in charge, why didn’t you do anything? I remembe

A one-hour interview with private investor Danny Solomon, discussing which markets we like and which we don’t … and a bit about Chelsea too. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

In 2004 James Turk and John Rubino published The Coming Collapse Of The Dollar And How To Profit From It: Make A Fortune By Investing In Gold And Other Hard Assets. I discover from Amazon that I “purchased this item on 18 Feb 2006”. Isn’t digital record keeping amazing?It remains one of the best books about gold and gold investing that I have ever read, beautifully articulating the anti-dollar, anti-fiat, anti-money printing, pro-gold narrative. Those that followed the advice of the book will have made good money – as long as they got out in 2011.There’s just one thing: the dollar never collapsed. Sure, its purchasing power has steadily eroded. Each year it buys you 10%-15% less house, less S&P 500, less good or service than the previous, so that if you compare 2004 prices with today the dollar buys less than half as much house or S&P 500 as it did then.Have US wages more than doubled by way of compensation? No. They have gone from $60,000 to $75,000. The taxes you pay on them have gone up too. Sterli

Comedian Simon Evans joins me for a video interview in which we discuss the re-writing of Wodehouse and the nature of slippery slopes.If you prefer the video version, it is here.I share a flat with Simon at the Edinburgh Festival most years and I will say that Simon is one of the most well-read and well-informed people I have ever met. He seems to spend every spare moment he has listening to audiobooks on double speed with the result that he is bursting with knowledge. In another, fairer life he would carry the same intellectual status as Stephen Fry. This interview is well worth an hour of your time - if you happen to have any of that precious commodity.Simon’s show is superb and if you are interested in going to watch him on tour, you can find out more here. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

The other night I did that thing on Substack: you follow one writer you like’s recommendations onto another’s and onto another’s and, before you know it, you’re down a rabbit hole. While down there I came across the term “midwits”. It really made me laugh. I know I’m late to it, but my finger is not on the cool kids’ internet jargon pulse.But I love it. Instead of the dimwit for the stupid, we have a pejorative term for those of average or even above-average intelligence, who do not share the same worldview. According to the internet, a midwit has an IQ score between 85 and 115. This is probably most of us. (I once did an IQ test and scored 136, but I think it was a fluke. I’m never doing another one, as I do not want to put that score in jeopardy). A midwit is probably university educated, has reasonable qualifications, is of slightly above average ability, but who is in no way exceptional. (Me in a nutshell, probably you too, but, as I say, not with the same worldview). Because midwits occasionally read, th

Before getting started today, I just wanted to flag that Kisses on a Postcard won silver at the New York Festivals Radio Awards for best serialised podcast.We beat off competition from major production houses, including Lionsgate, the BBC and MediaHuis (Ireland’s largest media group), which is good.If you haven’t already listened, load it onto your favourite podcast app and play it while you are cooking/walking/driving/ironing. This podcast with music about two boys in WWII will make your life better.In other news, wearing my comedy hat, there are still about 10 seats left for the Crazy Coqs gig on May 3rd. Some new songs, and plenty of old favourites, these nights are really good fun. Please come.So to today’s piece …I've said it before and I'll say it again - the US dollar is the most important price in the world.The dollar is the global reserve currency, the international money of default. Global commerce thinks in dollars. It’s the pricing mechanism for essential materials. Oil, copper, wheat - energy, me