Training data

“I understand sports really well, really well.”

• 🎵Mr. November (2005). “The English are waiting and I don’t know what to do / In my best clothes / I’m the new blue blood / I’m the great white hope.”⁴

• 📣A mind-bending, reality-warping conversation with John Higgs (2019). If Tommy Tooks can’t unmoor you from your preconceived ideas, let Higgsy have a crack.

• 📝Inside the Interstitium, the Human Body’s Hidden Pathways (2026). The scientific method and modern medicine seem to have missed an entire circulatory system for centuries despite countless learned cultures having been tapping into it for millennia. Stay humble out there.

11 ways the World Cup can help you survive

• 📖Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). Long before algorithmic feeds or AI, Neil Postman observed the televisual age and identified the skyrocketing ratio of total information to actionable information as an existential threat to our sense of agency and the societies built upon it.

• 🎵Through the Roses (2017). “It’s not easy, just being human / And the lights and the smoke and the screens / Don’t make it better / I’m no stronger than you and I’m scared.”¹

• 📝Powerful A.I. Is Coming. We’re Not Ready. (2025). Take a touch.

The World Cup is a random number generator

• 📺The Wire (2002-2008). My US politics tutor, a legend, once assigned this in lieu of a reading list, on the grounds it covered everything we needed to know and we were much more likely to enjoy it. If you haven’t watched it, I don’t know why you’re spending your time reading me.

• 🎵Under Control (2003). “I don’t wanna waste your time / I just wanna say, I’ve got to say / We worked hard darling / We don’t have no control.”³

• 📝The American sports nerd’s advanced guide to understanding soccer ahead of the FIFA 2026 World Cup (2026). As discussed.

Writing is thinking, doing is learning

• 📺The Young Pope (2016). A lot of people don’t know this, but Jude Law was the first American Pope, and he drank Cherry Coke Zero. Superb show on so. many. surreal. levels.

• 🎵The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness (2017). “We’re in a different kind of thing now / All night you’re talkin to God / And I can’t explain it, aha / Any other, any other way.”

• 📝Machines of Loving Grace (2024). Wherein wannabe Zeus Dario Amodei coins “country of geniuses in a datacenter”.

Why isn’t there a shrine to the Unknown Donor at Roland-Garros?

• 🎵“Heroes” (1977). “I, I wish you could swim / Like the dolphins, like dolphins can swim.”⁵

• 📽️Raging Bull (1980). You can imagine how teenage me felt about a sports movie made by Scorsese and de Niro.

• 📖Determined (2024). Bearded Bob Sapolsky goes long on why none of us are the authors of our own destiny, and why it’s worth trying anyway.

• 📖80,000 Hours: How to Have a Fulfilling Career That Does Good (2026). Spend them wisely.

You don’t have to stick to your picks

• 🎵All These Things That I’ve Done (2004). “I got soul but I’m not a soldier.”

• 📖Superforecasting (2015). Philip Tetlock on the art and science of prediction.

• 📺Why “scout mindset” is crucial to good judgment (2016). Julia Galef on why it’s better to be a scout searching for the truth than a soldier defending bad ideas.

• 📝We Haven’t Seen the Worst of What Gambling and Prediction Markets Will Do to America (2026). Derek Thompson on the turn things have taken, and why we can’t have nice things.

It’s a dog eat dog world

• 📖Among the Thugs (1991). American Bill Buford went and became an English football hooligan, up to and including being beaten by Italian police while rioting in their streets, so he and we could try to understand wtf that dishonourable culture is all about. Puts Hillbilly Elegy in the shade.

• 🎵My Number (2013). “You don’t have my number / We don’t need each other now / The creed or the culture / We can move beyond it now.”³

• 📖Behave (2017). Bearded Bob Sapolsky, primatologist and neuroscientist, goes long on our base instincts and how we keep them in check, biologically and culturally. The answer to whether we’re Good or Bad, like the answer to just about everything else, is it depends. (You can also inject his unrivaled nerd-charisma into your veins in lecture series format using video or audio.)

Everything is a tradeoff

• 📺Benitez’s blanket analogy! (2017). 13 years after arriving in England he was still patiently explaining this to people who despite their profession being built around asking questions prefer not to hear an answer more complicated than “just try harder and be better at everything”.

• 🎵Star Treatment (2018). “I just wanted to be one of The Strokes / Now look at the mess you made me make / Hitchhiking with a monogrammed suitcase / Miles away from any half-useful imaginary highway.”⁶

• 📝Luka Doncic Is a Los Angeles Laker, (Un)explained (2025). Shot.

• 📝The Anthony Davis Trade Is the Disaster Dallas Needed (2026). Chaser.

• 📝My simplistic theory of the left and right (2026). Simple, but effective.

Give my Blog a name

• 📖The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds (2013). If you thought the Sapiens chapter about money being a construct was eyebrow raising, this book will melt your face off.

• 🎵One Point Perspective (2018). “Singsong Round the Money Tree” / This stunning documentary / That no one else unfortunately saw / Such beautiful photography / It’s worth it for the opening scene / I’ve been driving round listening to the score.”⁷

• 🎙️‘Mad Men,’ S4E7: “The Suitcase” | Best TV Episodes of the 21st Century (2018). When Don says to Peggy, “I give you money, you give me ideas,” I think what he means is, “I give you money, you give me ideas and the money to people who need it much more than either of us.”

• 🎙️How to Do the Most Good (2021). Ezra Klein and Holden Karnofsky walk the streets from GiveWell to preventing catastrophic risks from AI.

• 📝⏜ Our radical plan to replace the NBA draft ⏜ (2026). Maybe everything should be an auction? OK, except healthcare. And access to your regulator maybe? Taylor tickets, though, why wouldn’t you auction those?

Nerd Blog Power Rankings

• 📖Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). The medium is the message. Twas ever thus.

• 🎵Four Out Of Five (2018). “Cute new places keep on popping up / Around Clavius, it’s all getting gentrified / I put a taqueria on the moon, The Information-Action Ratio / It got rave reviews, four stars out of five.”¹³

• 📝The Astros stole signs electronically in 2017 — part of a much broader issue for Major League Baseball (2019). Yes, they were found thoroughly guilty by the league’s investigation. And no, they were not stripped of their 2017 World Series title.

• 🎙️What everyone is missing about Anthropic vs The Pentagon. And: The Meta leaks are worse than you think (2026). From the excellent 80,000 Hours Podcast, who regrettably took the excellent name of their organization and just added Podcast to it.

• 📝Why Anthropic’s new model has cybersecurity experts rattled (2026). And me. I’m rattled.

With McIlroy at the Masters

• 📖The Golf Omnibus (c. 1920). Wodehouse on the Great Mystery is an unbridled joy.

• 📖Chaos (1997). It’s not the theory I thought it was, and it explains so much more about how cause, effect, and randomness coexist.

• 📝The Secret History of Tiger Woods (2016). Wright Thompson’s shocking-and-surprising insight into what intense pressure can do to even the steeliest mind. My favourite piece of sportswriting, and best enjoyed paired with Charles P. Pierce’s Tiger Woods, the Man. Amen. (1997).

• 🎵Batphone (2018). “I want an interesting synonym / To describe this thing / That you say we’re all grandfathered in / I’ll use the search engine / We’ve got much to discuss / Too much to discuss over a bucket of balls.”⁵

• 📺The Final Five Holes (2025). Best paired, if you’re a sicko, with Rory Meltdown (2011). Drink it in.

My counterfactual fantasy

• 📖Moneyball (2003) and 📺 He Gets On Base (2011). Michael Lewis x Brad Pitt. The rest is history.

• 🎵American Sports (2018). “Can I please have my money back? / My virtual reality mask is stuck on “Parliament Brawl” / Emergency battery pack just in time / For my weekly chat with God on video call.”¹²

• 📝How Data (and Some Breathtaking Soccer) Brought Liverpool to the Cusp of Glory (2019). Amazing how nerds get cooler when they win at the jocks’ own game.

• 📖Noise (2021). You no doubt know the OG, Thinking, Fast and Slow. The sequel contains all sorts more insights relevant to building better prediction models in Fantasyland and in “real life”, including developing the leg-break provision: only override your model if information it’s missing is as obvious and consequential as a player being seriously injured.

• 📝Against Malaria Foundation (via GiveWell). Why not?

Being right is not enough

• 📺Analytics are just some crap some people who were really smart made up just to get in the game because they had no talent (2015). This, to me, is Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

• 📝Stephen Curry is the Revolution (2015) and The Case For Stephen Curry, MVP (2017). The prophets didn’t stop posting just because Steph was incarnate, and these from Benjamin Morris at fivethirtyeight.com (rip) are gospel.⁹

• 📺Steph Curry Drains the Game Winner vs Oklahoma City (2016). The single most memorable moment of Steph’s ascension. The pursuit of 73 wins, the last second of overtime in a game he’s already hit 11 threes, the sheer audacity of pulling from that deep, the double bang, the shimmy.

• 🎵Science Fiction (2018). “I want to make a simple point about peace and love / But in a sexy way where it’s not obvious / Highlight dangers and send out hidden messages / The way some science fiction does.”¹⁰

• 📺Why Steph Curry might be the best offensive player ever (2021). Preach.