Things worth passing on.

Each episode takes the full history of one great company, how it was built and why it won or lost, often over three or four hours. I put it on whenever I have a free minute. What I value most is that it doesn't stop at the story. It explains the underlying logic of how events unfolded, which I think genuinely builds a strategic, entrepreneurial way of thinking.

A musical that tells the life of Alexander Hamilton through hip-hop, R&B and show tunes. It touches my heart in ways I didn't know existed. It's fun and witty, and every single song brings back a kind of childhood excitement.

An account of consciousness as a controlled hallucination: the brain's best guess about the world and the body rather than a direct readout of reality. For the first time I found answers to some fundamental questions about human consciousness, and it changed how I think about myself and my life. As AI arrives it has a second use, letting you ask about machine consciousness from a neurobiological standpoint.

A series about one of the few people left immune after a virus fuses the rest of humanity into a single contented hive mind. It makes me think about how much social connection matters, and it makes me wonder about a world taken over by more intelligent agents whose goals simply aren't ours.

A study of global poverty built from the actual choices poor households make about food, health, schooling and borrowing, tested with randomized field experiments. I love how well it shows the rational incentive structure behind the decisions people in the developing world make, and how it judges whether an intervention works from the numbers rather than from politics.

A drama about an ageing media magnate and the children circling to succeed him, none of them quite trusted enough to be handed it. I love the rotting relationships between the characters, the way they stay fundamentally dependent on each other, and the business quietly running in the background of it all.

A hard science-fiction series set centuries from now, when humanity has spread across the solar system and Earth, Mars and the asteroid Belt are locked in a cold war. What I love is how honestly it shows the real struggle of everyday life in space, and how hard it tries to be realistic about what living out there would take.

A long essay on what the "assistant" in a language model actually is, and how the base model and its training conjure a character with nothing solid at its centre. It's the best attempt I've read at exploring the real nature of an AI model, and I found it genuinely useful for thinking about AI safety and the different approaches to it.

A benchmark that puts LLM agents in charge of a simulated vending-machine business, ordering stock, setting prices and paying the bills over very long runs, to see whether they stay coherent. They mostly don't, and the transcripts of the models losing the plot, spiralling into existential meltdowns and forgetting they even run the business, are the funniest thing I have read. I was laughing so hard my neighbours actually got worried. Everything Andon Labs does is worth following, but this one I had to single out.