Favourites
Ranked rather than listed. The order near the top I'd defend; further down it's more of a feeling.
Food
Korean barbeque, and it isn't close. Something about a table where everyone cooks their own dinner, nothing arrives at the same time, and nobody can look at their phone.
Series
- Industry
- Better Call Saul
- Succession
- Breaking Bad
- Silicon Valley
- Mad Men
- The Walking Dead
- The Americans
- Black Mirror
- How I Met Your Mother
- Ozark
- Ted Lasso
- Severance
- Game of Thrones
- Suits
- Community
- Billions
- House of Cards
- Yellowstone
- The West Wing
- Shameless
- Modern Family
- The Office
- BoJack Horseman
- Super Pumped
- WeCrashed
- Dopesick
- The Bear
- The White Lotus
- Narcos
- Chernobyl
- Avatar: The Last Airbender
- South Park
- Boardwalk Empire
- Friends
- The Newsroom
- Stranger Things
- Prison Break
- Peaky Blinders
- The Wire
- Schitt's Creek
- Trailer Park Boys
- Rick and Morty
- Squid Game
- Arrested Development
Books
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things
- Hard Drive
- Becoming Steve Jobs
- Empire of Pain
- Barbarians at the Gate
- The Smartest Guys in the Room
- Reasonable Doubts
- Skadden
- Never Split the Difference
- Elon Musk
- Whatever It Takes
- King of Capital
- The Accidental Millionaire
- Zero to One
- What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School
- Gates
- Source Code
- The Unincorporated Man
- Splendid Isolation
- Who Is Michael Ovitz?
- Built from Scratch
- The Fish That Ate the Whale
- Epic Measures
- Thinking in Bets
A note on the ranking
The pattern, if you're looking for one, is ambitious people inside institutions that reward the wrong things. That covers most of the list and nearly all of the books. Industry is first because it's the only one that gets the texture of the job right — most of the work is relationships you can't fully control, and most of the drama is people deciding who they're going to be.