Nick Stoop (43) lives in Hope Cove with his wife and young daughter.

He is the founder of Pangea Impact Investments and part of the Fax Club Experiment, which has just been published as a book available on Amazon.

It does actually involve fax machines as Nick explains: “I remember when I started my career in London in 2005, we were working with a client base in the Middle East which was using fax machines to place important investment orders so I have actually worked with them in the past.”

Nick received an e-mail from the Do Lectures at the end of 2023 that was set up by David and Clare Hieatt.

They hold flagship get together events in the cowshed on their farm and the Fax Club was one of many initiatives they’ve launched through their business The DO Lectures.

Nick told us more: “It was effectively an invite to the first 100 people who wanted to take up the opportunity to buy a fax machine and use it on a completely anonymous basis.

“None of the 100 of us knew anything about any of the other 100 participants.

“Over the next 52 weeks, every Friday the same fax would be sent to all of us in locations in the UK and around the world.

“We each selected an individual number between one and 100 and part of the fun was not to reveal our number.

We wrote a reply to that fax each week anonymously.

“It was designed to really encourage counter-intuitive thinking.”

All of the replies were put on an online portal so that they could see everyone's number and their reply to a specific question each week but they didn't know anything else about that person.

Nick continued: “I was blown away by some of the answers that I was reading and we would then comment if they particularly touched us.

“This sort of camaraderie is really hard to describe, which goes quite a lot deeper than might otherwise have been the case given the perceptions you might draw when you see an individual's photo, hear their voice or know a little bit about their background.

“It was made quite clear that if you drifted off and stopped replying to these questions, you would be dropped off the list.

“There was a sort of a natural reduction in the number of us and at the end, around 32 of us completed the experiment 52 weeks later.

Each week we were encouraged to vote for our favourite answer that had been written by any of the other Fax Club contributors on the online portal.”

This led to the idea of self-publishing a book so that others could the benefit from the self-discovery that the participants all went through and the answers that in many cases are often enlightening and good for the soul.

Everyone was invited to a gathering in London on February 7 as Nick explained:

“It was one of the most incredible experiences for all of us that attended, and there were I think 35 of us by that stage that were still involved and some had flown in from international locations.

To find out more visit: https://thefaxclubexperiment.com/