NUTSTUFF THOUGHTS:
Jeremy Clarkson is a Nutstuff recipient, and his cancer news is another tragic reminder (too damned many recently!) of something markets periodically forget: health comes before everything. (See the latest Shingles vaccine news on effective Dementia treatment, wow!).
Before politics, before wars, before Bitcoin, before AI, before stock prices and before wealth. You can own Ferraris, farms, hedge funds, rockets or half the internet, but the moment a doctor walks into the room with bad news, every other number on the balance sheet suddenly becomes irrelevant. It is also a reminder that whilst investors spend their days obsessing over artificial intelligence, perhaps the biggest opportunity of all remains human intelligence applied to keeping people alive longer and healthier. The real battle for civilisation is not whether ChatGPT beats Anthropic or whether Bitcoin reaches $1 million. It is whether people like Clarkson are still around twenty years from now, annoying bureaucrats, and reminding us that life is supposed to be lived rather than optimised. Which is perhaps why the news hit so hard, because unlike almost everyone else in public life, Jeremy appears exactly as advertised. No filter, no consultants, no focus groups, no strategic authenticity workshops. Just Clarkson. And perhaps that is the key lesson for markets too here: Everyone is staring at AI presentations while life keeps reminding us that the things which matter remain stubbornly physical. Elon Musk is now worth more than Bitcoin, which tells you civilisation still places a higher value on people building rockets, satellites, robots, power systems and factories than on digital scarcity alone. OpenAI increasingly resembles a Michelin-starred restaurant selling £100 of culinary delight for £30 and wondering why profits remain elusive. The technology is extraordinary; the economics resemble a particularly enthusiastic bonfire of capital. Meanwhile Russia appears perfectly happy to remind Britain that gunboat diplomacy did not entirely disappear with the Empire, Ferrari has somehow convinced wealthy collectors to spend €550,000 on an electric car they do not want in order to buy a Ferrari they do want, Labour increasingly resembles a Venetian oligarchy where the same surnames endlessly circulate around Westminster, and governments across the West have simultaneously discovered that anonymous citizens talking freely to one another online are apparently a greater threat than debt, energy shortages, migration or national decline. Then there is Iran, don't get me started on Qatari “back door deals” with Iran sanctioned by the US and where what began as demands for total surrender appears to be ending with wider sanctions relief, oil exports, foreign investment and hundreds of billions of dollars flowing back towards Tehran. Which leaves one wondering whether anyone actually won at all. As ever, the more Nutstuff looks at markets, the more convinced we become that reality leaks physically before it leaks financially. The important stories are still healthcare, energy, shipping lanes, power grids, infrastructure and security. Everything else is mostly noise. The older we get, the less convinced we are that AI will be the defining investment story of the next twenty years. The defining story may simply be keeping human beings alive long enough to enjoy them.
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2June 17, 2026 254 2
