 Welcome to our highly organised and very serious end of year podcast. Happy Christmas! Yeah, merry all the Christmases. Well, we're going to look at some of the things that we've learned this year and some of the favourite books we've read, some of the things we've learnt and some of the things that we would like to do for the year ahead or for next year. So, as our regular podcast host is Bren, and he's way better at this than any of us, although I've hand over to Bren and he can be our host for the most. Okay, thanks Chris. So, happy Christmas to everyone. So, our kind of structure is we're going to talk about three books, three-ish books that we really liked across the year, maybe not released this year, but ones that we enjoyed this year and three things that we've learnt this year. And I think, because Jake is the biggest bookworm among us and learns more than any of us all put together probably, let's start with Jake. So, Jake, what were your book highlights this year? So, it's always so tough to go first. Thank you. Yeah, very difficult to choose three from all the books I've read this year. I think my first one would probably be a book called Richer, Wiser, Happier, How the World's Greatest Investors Win in Markets and Life by William Green. And I enjoyed it because I'd just been trying to educate myself a bit more about investing this year. And I'd read quite a few books on investing, and this was the first book I thought that was actually really, really good. And I think it was because he gave such a good overview of the different ways of approaching investors or investing from all these kind of incredible investing minds. So, obviously, there's more ways to do investing than just one approach. And I love that book because it looked at all the greatest investors and kind of broke down how they operated. And as the book title suggests, there was a lot more in there than just investing a lot of the rules and principles applied to life. Is that a recently released one or it's like a classic text that has principles that you can apply forever? I feel like it was released this year. I'll have to double check that. But I'm pretty sure it was out of all the three I chose. I think that was the only one that was released this year. But yeah, I'm pretty confident it was released this year. But yeah, if you're going to read a book on investing, I mean, I must have read 20 odd or something this year. That was the standout one for me. Okay, so the killer question, does it mention crypto then? Good question. I can't remember if it actually mentions crypto specifically or not. That's a very good question. I can't remember the answer. I don't... If it does mention crypto, it doesn't go into much detail. I mean, if you mentioned crypto in an investing book, it's going to be out of date the minute you publish it anyway. So what's the point? That's true. Yeah, pretty fast moving world. Yeah, for sure. But yeah, that was my first one. What's everyone? Is anyone on the call got cryptocurrency or what's your favourite cryptocurrency? The only cryptocurrency I have is Bitcoin and Ethereum. He bought it in 2005, so he's... That's why I've got such a big smile on my face. Yeah, Jake and I, when we first made that fintech course with Barclays, when we were designing that course, we had to learn all about cryptocurrency and both of us were like, we should probably invest in Bitcoin and at the time it was about $100 or something, and we were like, it's really expensive. And we're just starting the company, so neither of us had any money. Every cent we had went into 42 courses. And we were like, I don't know man, we just can't afford to do it. We were having a chat about it the other day, we were like, oh God, if I only read nine. I mean, the sad thing is we kind of knew that anyway. We both were kind of confident it was going to do well. We just didn't have the capital at the time, which I think is... I wouldn't change it. It's still a bargain now at $50,000. Yeah, depending on who you listen to, it's still potentially going to the moon. I mean, I think I watched one video the other day where the guy was saying it's going to be, Bitcoin's going to be $12 million in the next three years or something stupid, so yeah, it's still early. It's the message. Yeah, as a company, we've invested a tiny bit into Bitcoin and a tiny bit into Ethereum, but we're not Elon Musk levels. I think the one though that seems interesting at the moment seems to be Solana, which is kind of like Ethereum in that it's a smart contract-based one, but it seems to be much easier for developers to work with and much faster. So that's interesting. Yeah, and I think that's only about £140 at the moment. Maybe that's where your... £14 pence at the moment is. It's one of those... When we're recording this, it's one of those moments where it's by the dip. By the time you watch this, it's probably sky-high again or gone down. I read today it's $148 because Melania Trump is selling images of herself for one soul for $148. You can buy them as a Christmas gift today. Oh, wow. Interesting Christmas. There you go. If anyone's boss for ideas for Christmas gifts, there you go. We'll have to get this podcast edited very quickly so people can get them. Melania Trump, Solana image. Okay, I think the way this is going, we shouldn't stick on Jake, but we should go around the table because we're going to run out of time. What do you think? Cool, definitely. So Irene, what's your top book of the year? Oh, so for me, it's always like I love to read nonfiction and fiction. So I really do love to have like a combination. I think probably if I was to go fiction, I would say it would have to be this book that's called 10 minutes and 38 seconds in the strange world. It's beautiful. It's set in Istanbul and it was the first book that made me cry in a very long time. So I think that it was really beautiful. I highly recommend that. And then I would say for nonfiction, I would have to say I reread Malcolm Gladwell's Blink book this year. And I just thought it was amazing. I read it years and years ago. And then, you know, I kind of like forgot all about it. And then when I was reading it again this year, I was like, this is brilliant. So it's definitely one of those all time classics that I'll probably return to in the next five years. I'll probably read it again. It's funny how it's like when you reread, you kind of fall in love. Different things. And yeah, so very interesting. Because I literally reread it and finished it two, two nights ago. But just going back to 10 minutes, 38 seconds and the rest of the title. Is it like, so it made you cry. Is it like sci-fi? It's a romance, right? No, so I wouldn't say it's romance either. I would say it's about friendship and how these people in Istanbul, they sort of like outcasts and how they sort of all meet each other and form this like beautiful kind of friendship. That's the same as family because none of them really have family. And basically, I don't want to give anything away, but I don't think I'm giving anything away, but the main character actually dies. And they say that you have... Oh, you're a lot. No, no, no. I think that's like the whole point of it. So it's basically the brain activity that's left in a person after they die. They say it's between eight minutes and 10 minutes and 38 seconds. So it's all the things that she remembers throughout her life. Oh, wow. Very interesting smells. How they trigger like different memories. Is that really a thing? Like when you die, there's about eight minutes of brain activity left. Yeah, supposedly, I didn't... Yeah, so you wonder how do they figure that out? Yeah, I wouldn't like to tell that out. ECG on the screen. Someone died in an MRI scanner or something. Probably, yeah. Yeah, with an ECG or something, yeah. Okay, so we'll put all these books. We'll put links to them in the description as well, so people don't have to write massive notes as we're going through. Okay, so let's move on to the next one. Aliza, what is your topic? A bit like Irene. I read fiction and nonfiction. And in the pandemic, I wanted two things, either to be educated or entertained. I'm going to start with the question of who is the most important person in the world? I want to start with Dostoevsky. I really love this year. It was The Spy and the Trater by Ben McIntyre. If any of you have read that, it's amazing. It is a history book that reads like a thriller. It tells these parallel stories of a Soviet spy who was working for the British and a CIA agent who defected to the Soviets. And it is the most amazing story of how he gets out and all the things he prevented. So highly, highly recommend that one. And another one I did this year, The Tyranny of Merritt by Michael Sandel. I kind of love everything he does. He is just one of those people that's incredibly eloquent. And I think actually with this year as well, the fact that you're talking about the elites in society thinking they're there as a product of meritocracy, I think it has a remarkable resonance. And he makes a lot of valid points about working for the common good, which I find quite reassuring because so many people have come out for whatever cause it is this year. So yeah, those are a couple of my favorites, but like Jake said, it's so hard to choose. Just narrowing this down for this one. It is, yeah, Ben McIntire is fantastic, right? I'm very, very jealous of his talents. And he, I think he wrote that, I mean, he's written quite a few books hasn't he? But he wrote the one that you've got a connection to, Bren, with the name of your dogs. I think it might have been his first one, Operation Mint's Meat, which is a true story from the Second World War. But I read it because my dad was in a film, jumping out of an airplane from a parachute. And it was in the opening credits of the film, The Man Who Never Was, which is the story of Operation Mint's Meat. And in that book, there is a new film coming out of it. Yeah, The Remake. So my dad's looking for a starring role again, obviously. In that book, one of the characters is a real life person called Sir Bentley Purchase. And when I read that, I thought that's just such an awesome name. So I named my dog. Yeah, I think he was the coroner in King's Cross, wasn't he? Yeah. And he was the one that lived in the body. The funny thing is, when Bentley was a puppy, I used to make videos and put them on YouTube and called it, you know, Sir Bentley Purchase. And his grandson contacted me and said, why did you call your dog Sir Bentley Purchase? That's my granddad. Oh, well, I told him the story and he said, that's amazing. He said, because the dog actually looks like, exactly like the dog we had when we were a kid. Oh, wow, we were kids. That's incredible. Yeah, I mean, it's the most incredible story. I don't know if you've heard come across it, Elisa, but if you enjoyed the other book, then you'll absolutely love Operation Mint's Meat. I mean, it's one of the most mind-blowing stories, I think, of World War II in terms of the level of planning and luck and, you know, the role of luck and chance that played its part. Yeah, it's incredible. It's an amazing thing at my street. I'm reading that soon. And Agent Sonia as well is also absolutely amazing. And I think you just can't believe these things happen in real life. Yeah, I mean, particularly that Operation Mint's Meat, I mean, it's just because it's obviously pre, you know, a lot of the technology we have today, like coordinating and making something like that work, you know, required obviously just insane amounts of planning. And yeah, it's just incredible that it even happened. Talking about amazing bits of planning, Chris, have you completed your list? Yes, definitely not last minute dot com. Yeah, it was really hard to choose as well. I mean, I think I read a lot. Again, probably mostly nonfiction, but to read a few fiction things, I think that my three favorite of this year, I've got five listed down here. So I'm trying to figure out what my three favorite were. But I think if you put a gun to my head, it would probably be four of them. How can I take this down to three? I really, really, really liked the No Rules Rules. I think it's an oldish book. I just never got round to reading it until this year, which was the one from Reed Hastings, The Chappie, Started Netflix, and Aaron Mayer. He's brilliant at kind of talking about the differences in culture and where you are in the world and how that relates to how you work and your work processes. And it was, it's just a really interesting book, I think. And I think there's lots of lessons that you can take out of that that are very practical as well. But if you're sort of running a team, whether it's big or small, there's some incredible stuff in there. And it tells lots of fun stories. And it's, she gives you a really interesting overview of how Netflix has grown and how it works. Because it seems like, I mean, I'm not sure. I don't work at Netflix. I know some people who work at Netflix, but it seems like basically you've got to be really, really good at your job. And it's kind of brutal in a way. But at the same time, if you are good at your job, you're given a lot of freedom to kind of make decisions yourself, which I think is what we all want, right? Like everyone kind of wants autonomy in there, in their world. Was it autonomy, mastery, purpose? I think they do a good job at putting their purpose across and I think they give people a lot of autonomy. So yeah, it seems to work. And they seem to try and hire people who are already masters. Yeah, that was a great one. And then the other one, which I, it's done by a guy who actually did my favorite, one of my, well, is it my favorite? Ken Robbins is probably my favorite. But one of my favorite ever talks is from a guy called Aaron Dignan. And earlier in the year, we launched a creative leadership course. And so when we were doing the research for that, one of the books that I read was Brave New Work by Aaron Dignan. And it just was full of so many amazing things. And I think there's a couple of things in the book as well that he had found in his research that we ended up using in the course as well. So there's one great thing which I thought was really valuable was that user manual of me thing. I think I was banging on about a lot at the beginning of the year. So what it is is the brief explanation would be, normally when you work with other people, you don't necessarily know how they like to work. You normally learn by trial and error, which is kind of stupid in a way if you think about it because there's no need for us to do that. If you just ask someone, how do you like getting feedback? What makes you really happy? What really annoys you? So this user manual is basically a document really easy plain English that you can fill out as an individual and then you can share with your team and it tells you the kind of pet peeves and all the things that people really like so that when you wanna say if you're in a massive organization, I would imagine this is very, very helpful in a large organization and a small company like us, it's probably quite easy because if I wanna ask Elisa something, I just say, hey Elisa and then we can have a chat about it. But if you're in a large organization, you've got to get, if Jake was CEO of whatever a massive company, Google and I didn't know Jake, but I wanted to ask him for something, it would be amazingly helpful if I could look up his user profile or that he's filled out and then I would know how to interact with Jake. Does he want the long email or short email? Does he want, what's gonna be my best way of working with him? You'll be able to find that on the blockchain ledger for each individual. Good thing. But yeah, I thought that was really helpful and then the third one, I'm gonna go for my other, my other team were Nudge, which I read again, brilliant. I just, I loved it more the second time. I thought that was like what you were saying, Harry. Bomber mafia, Total Mom Fiction, loved it as my favorite audio book I've ever read or listened to. Very good as an audio book, don't quite the book. And then humankind was my favorite book. So the humankind one was, if you like humankind, there's Rutt, Goodbrenn, Brennan, Brennan. Root Goodbregman. Root Goodbregman, sorry, it's so bad at pronouncing names. Thank you, Dutch. Yeah, Dutch chap. And he became famous I think because he stood up at Davos and said, you're all kind of hypocrites coming here saying that the world is terrible and you flying in your private jets and a lot of the problems in the world would be solved if all of you who are here actually just paid taxes. So he got out of sending evasion for that, I think. But his book is nothing really about that. It's kind of like, it reminded me a bit of Savians in a way and that there's lots of really great stories and it's just sort of talking about how I guess in the world we often think that things are always really bad and that people's behavior is really bad, probably because it's in the news' best interest to say that everything is terrible because that gets our attention much more than happy things. But as someone's literally, we started this company to make learning more enjoyable. So we're all about happy. Reading that humankind book filled me with warm, happy stories because it's basically showing all these examples of how things are actually really nice and good. But the stories are brilliant and the message is lovely in it anyway. I've done a terrible job of reviewing that book but please forgive me. No, no, no. So was it a bit like factfulness then, that hands-rosling one? Yes, yeah, definitely. Definitely, yeah. Factfulness is, I love that book so much. But not as an audio book. That's terrible as an audio book, factfulness, because it keeps saying in the downloadable PDF. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I noticed that. There's so many charts and data that it must be very hard to explain. But at the end it's really nice because they do have, it's read by his daughter or his son or something, I think. And then at the end you've got his kids saying, what happened? Because he died just after the book was finished so he did get to see what it was like. And I was in tears at the end of that book, listening to his kids talk about her dad. Not a bit remarkable. Yeah, I think he passed away a similar time to Sir Ken Robinson or... Yeah, both last year, I think. Yeah, I think both last year, which was really sad because they are both hugely influential people. Yeah, for us, hugely influential as well. I mean, I don't know whether I would have got into education stuff if I hadn't listened to that. Ken Robinson talking whatever 2014 or... Yeah. It's hugely influential. Yeah, anyway. Okay, so going from a little bit of sadness to happiness, my top pick of the year. Yeah, so my favorite book of the year is actually an audio book and it's called Absolute Pandemonium and it's by someone who's a very famous person in the UK but maybe not outside. It's by Brian Blessed who has had an incredible life. He is a son of a miner in a Northern mining village almost living in poverty and he's just done everything in his life. He's been on every stage around the world. He's been in so many amazing films and he's been up Everest and he's an explorer and he has a very large on life personality and he narrates the book and it's like hugely enjoyable. It's a riot, in fact. I read it too. It's so, oh, listen to it too. It's absolutely incredible, brilliant. Yeah, I mean, every single sentence is just filled with like, what? What was the most surprising thing that you discovered he'd done? Well, he starts the book and this tells you the vibe of the book as well. He starts the book with a story about him taking a poo on Everest. Oh, wow, okay. But it's incredibly funny. It sounds vulgar but it's incredibly funny the way he describes it. So yeah, I mean, it's just like that the whole way through. It's just like your jaws are aching from smiling and laughing and stuff. It's so funny because he's met so many other famous people, worked with so many other people, famous people, so he just tells you all these incredible stories about other people. And then the favorite thing, I think from that book, which I think I was telling Ejake the other day was he said that there was a big difference between actors and musicians. He said that actors go crazy but never normally full crazy because they're surrounded by normal people at a film set who lead regular lives whilst musicians are kind of totally surrounded and in their own little bubble. So they're never really around normal people. They don't need to do anything with the public too much whilst actors generally do. So that's why he said that musicians are normally batshit crazy or can be batshit crazy. Yeah, maybe it helps us to understand Kanye West a bit more. Yeah, I mean, because you're all influenced by the people that we spend the most amount of time with. So if we're incredibly crazy and we spend all our time around other crazy people in a way we shield ourselves off from the public, which is kind of what a lot of them do, then no wonder they seem to be slightly eccentric often, it's such a brilliant book. I love that one too, great, great choice. And my other books, so I have two dogs and I run a lot. So I consume a lot of audiobooks. So it's more audiobooks than reading books but so a great book for running. If anyone's a runner out there, 26.2 miles to happiness by Paul Tomkinson. He used to be a comedian in the 90s and he has got a real way with words just fantastically constructed descriptive sentences. Really brilliant and describing the journey that you go through when you're training and actually doing a marathon, really great. From a work perspective, how not to plan. It's really for marketing and advertising people by Lesmanet and Sarah Carter. It's so accessible the way the book is set out. It's like little chapters and you get a quote and then you get the thinking of Lesmanet and Sarah Carter. Then you get a checklist of what you should be doing about this particular topic and the case study. And it's just very deep, in a ball and out of a ball and it's like, it covers everything you shouldn't need to know about strategy and planning in the marketing field. Super book. And from doing the podcast actually, which has been a real joy over the year, Simon Lancaster. Well, I had to read like three or four books almost every time for each guest. But Simon Lancaster's books really stood out to me because they are about leadership and the words that you use. And Winnie Mind's Secrets of the Language of Leadership is a fantastic book, great audio book read by Glenn McCready. Fantastic voice. And this one I actually read the next one. How words kill, you are not human. Which is all about how metaphors are used by mainly politicians. But it's really insightful. And if you are interested in humans or you're interested in the humans that are leading you, the politicians, you should read that book because it shows how words can be extremely manipulative. Very important book, I think. And Invisible to Being Valuable, Unleashing the Power of Midlife Women from Jane Evans and Cara Russell. We had those, we had Jane and Carol on the podcast. Really blew my mind about the history of black women in America and England. I mean, it's not entirely about that, but that's a part of the initial part of the book and really extraordinary stuff. And then if you listen to the podcast with Carol and Jane, they are absolutely a hoot. And the audiobook of that is, they just have so much fun doing it as well. So that was a stand-up book for me as well.