Hi !

Welcome to the email that makes you think "has it really been a month since the last one of these? Urgh, my life is flashing past me and what have I accomplished?"

That's how I feel when I realise it's time for me to write it, at least – maybe you have a healthier relationship with time. In any case, coming up:

• The strangest evening I've ever had
• Why it isn't easy being green
• How we chose the surname of my son's teddies
• And the best of what I've been reading, watching and listening to

(Remember: If you don't enjoy receiving these emails, there's an unsubscribe link at the bottom.)

Stop everything: Do you want to help make my new book 100% solid amazing?

I've been working on a book about money and the economy since what feels like pre-decimalisation, and I finally have a decent draft finished!

Now, I'm looking for suckers for punishment unpaid labour enthusiastic readers who'd like to read the whole book before it's published, and offer suggestions to improve it before it goes on sale.

In return, I can offer...not much. You'll get your name in the credits and a signed copy when it comes out, but that's hardly compensation for slogging through an entire book in a couple of weeks. So this is really something to do only if you'd find it fun.

Just use this form to let me know if you're keen.

(By the way, don't feel like you need any knowledge of economics: the book is aimed at total beginners, so if anything your feedback will be more valuable if you're starting from nothing.)

💒 This month in marriage

I once met a wise man who told me that the key to building a popular and influential blog is to maintain a publishing cadence of roughly once every two months, and be sure to cover a mix of subjects so disparate that literally no-one other than yourself will find more than 25% of it interesting.

Now I come to think of it maybe he was pulling my leg, but I'm in too deep now. So two months to the day after my last article about the role of debt in real estate investments, here's an article about why changing your name when you get married is a strange thing to do when you think about it.

Winner.

📉 This month in investing

One of my unpopular opinions could be summed up as "everyone cares about polar bears until it personally inconveniences them". In other words: you'll respond to a survey saying how worried you are about the environment and you'll take the easy actions that you kind of want to do anyway (electric cars are pretty cool), but will you skip a foreign holiday? Will you move out of your beautiful but rather draughty Victorian house?

(Maybe you will, you paragon of virtue, but I'm talking about people in general.)

Similarly, at a political level, interest waxes and wanes depending on what else is going on. You may remember David Cameron posing with huskies on the front of all the papers in 2007, then Northern Rock went bust and we heard very little about the environment for another 10+ years.

It's been back in vogue for the last five-ish years, but now I sense another shift. Posturing at international summits about who's going to reach "net zero" fastest is good harmless fun until oil is trading above $100 per barrel and you realise a nutter in Russia can turn the lights out on you at any time.

The relevance to investing? A lot of companies involved in the exploration and mining of metals and fossil fuels seem undervalued to me: partially because funds have been offloading them to make themselves look more "green", and partially due to the belief that the political drive towards renewable energy will reduce demand for their products.

If you believe that we've reached another peak in environmental consciousness and we'll spend the next decade or so slipping back the other way, companies in this sector could be worth a look. But this isn't investment advice, and it isn't moral guidance either.

☯ This month in woo

Following on from the course about having better conversations that I talked about last time, this month I tweaked the weirdness dial up another couple of notches by attending an "authentic relating" event.

The general concept of authentic relating is to perform various structured exercises (called "games") that are designed to build deeper, more meaningful connections and be more "present" in our interactions – rather than, as we all usually are, either barely paying attention or thinking about what we're going to say next. (This article has a good general write-up about authentic relating.)

Thus I started my Wednesday evening by spending a minute holding silent (and rather awkward) eye contact with a guy I'd just met, watched two ladies holding the ankles (I'm still not sure why) of a man dressed all in white who looked suspiciously like Jesus, and reached a point after a couple of hours where hearing someone say "I'm feeling like I'm noticing the 5-year-old you, who's just been given his birthday cake" didn't strike me as in the slightest bit strange.

Did I find it useful? Yes and no. The "games" themselves I often found overly introspective for the sake of it, over-analysing tiny details of how we were feeling. The best part was the more "normal" chats I had with people during breaks – which were much deeper and less hi-what-do-you-do than your average interaction. It felt safe to initiate those more personal conversations because we'd all self-selected by attending this weird event...but perhaps the point is to just break the social script and do the same thing in everyday life anyway.

All in all, I got to meet an odd (very odd in some cases) assortment of people I'd never otherwise interact with, and quite possibly encountered the messiah – so that's not a bad Wednesday in my book.

🍿 This month in media

🎧 To my constant annoyance, I'm only the third most popular podcaster in my family. That's partially the fault of my wife's cousin, Andrew Gold, whose podcast "On The Edge" has featured interviews with Amanda Knox, David Baddiel and Richard Dawkins among others. Just to rub it in he's also charming, good-looking and speaks at least four languages, so I have no idea why I'm promoting his stupid show.

♠️ Because my wife comes up with all the content for these newsletters and I basically just ghostwrite it, I need to recommend a book that she discovered (which I also read and loved): Amoralman by Derek DelGaudio. It's the memoir of a magician turned card cheat, and as well as being a great story is just supremely well written.

👮‍♀️ One of my favourite books of all time is American Kingpin, about the founder of darknet marketplace The Silk Road. I was reminded of it by this article in Wired, which covers how law enforcement used Bitcoin transaction records to bust a child abuse website. Disturbing and highly compelling.

That’s it for April! Feel free to write back and let me know what you've been up to.

Cheers!

Rob 

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