The best stuff we’ve read in the last 12 months

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Most people live their life like this. They build a well and they start to pump water. And at the end of their lives, after a lifetime of pumping, they see they are still thirsty. They spent their whole life pumping rather than drinking, which was the reason they started pumping in the first place.
What up, Sam? I wanted to do something a little different today, end of the year. I was doing a little slack clean out, and I was looking at, I had this one channel for the best stuff I read this week. I call it my content diet channel. It's basically, what were the vegetables? What were my whole foods that I consumed? Because I consumed a lot of junk, but this stuff was actually good. I was just browsing through what really stood out or resonated with me, and I have a couple. I wanted to know yours, because you read a lot more than me, and I think we read totally different things. I'm curious if anything comes to mind for you on that topic.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:54)
Yes. For me, it's a lot of books. For example, the topic that I got obsessed with this year was presidential assassinations. I went deep on the four different presidents who were assassinated, and that interested me. But I'm a huge history fan, and so I could talk to you all about history, which I can say some of the most amazing stuff that I learned.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:16)
I feel like we did a whole bit when the Trump assassination thing happened on presidential assassinations. There's some crazy stories, right? There's the guy who had his speech in his pocket that blunted the blow, and so he got shot.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:27)
And he survived.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:27)
Yeah, Roosevelt, and he gets shot by his car on his way to his speech, doesn't die because the speech is so thick in his pocket, gives the speech while bleeding.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:37)
Yeah, that was Roosevelt. There's only been four presidents that have been successfully assassinated, and three of them happened between 1865 and 1905 And pretty much up until Andrew Garfield was assassinated, which I think was around 1904, any human, any American, it was customary, you can just go to the White House and schedule an appointment with the president. And the idea here was that they were supposed to be like a man of the people. And I think that's ridiculous. And the Secret Service, even up till 1963, 64, 65, when JFK was shot, it was only like 300 people. And so like basically was non-existence. And so I'm like obsessed with that, about how like something became an institution, even after four years or sorry, four deaths happened. And so I've been obsessed with that. I've also been obsessed with leadership and the idea of speeches. Have you ever studied any of the great speeches of American or world history?

**SPEAKER_1** (2:27)
Not in particular. Well, what you got?

**SPEAKER_2** (2:29)
So in particular, Winston Churchill. Have you ever seen the movie Dunkirk? You've never seen it, right?

**SPEAKER_1** (2:33)
No, I have not.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:34)
The idea is like early in the war of England, this was when like the Nazi Germany had just invaded France. And it was like clear that Nazi Germany was officially bad. Before it was like, yeah, they're horrible, but like they're going to stay themselves. They started evading other countries and people start freaking out. They go through France and everyone's like, oh my God, I can't believe. You know, imagine today. Imagine like France getting taken over.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:54)
To France, yeah.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:55)
Yeah, it's just like insane. And so England, which is nearby, they were like, oh my gosh, now they are coming to us. And so they start officially getting into a war and have squirmish in Dunkirk, where the Nazis surround a part of England and they surround, I think it was like 50,000 or even 100,000 soldiers. And basically if those people died, the war would have been over. And it was a magical moment where hundreds of ships that were just fishermen, but also the British Navy, they raced over and they grabbed these guys off this island and they saved hundreds of thousands of lives, whatever. Whatever. But that's not the important part of my story. But up until that point, England was fearful. They were very fearful. They were like, this is horrible. They were imagining all the worst things that was gonna happen. Winston Churchill, who was in power, was a very fearful person and he was very nervous. But then he goes, screw it. We're not gonna take this. We're gonna get after it. And he gave this speech. And at the end of the speech, he does this in like, I forget what they're, I think it's the House of Parliament. It's like their physical setting where everyone's watching him. And he was like, we're gonna fight in the beaches. We're gonna fight in the trenches. We're gonna fight in the land and we will never ever give up. And he gave this amazing speech that basically changed the entire morale of the country. We're talking about tens of millions of people. And it just like, I've always been very fascinated when there's one person who can exert a relatively small amount of energy and get everyone else to change their energy. So like, have you ever been to a concert? I used to love watching these Oasis concerts. They'll be literally, they're famous.