fool us

A short 1999 documentary clip about millionaires featuring a young Elon Musk, including footage of him taking delivery of an expensive car.

Alain de Botton's 2004 documentary based on his book Status Anxiety, running over two hours. It asks why people in rich societies are still unhappy, and examines how worries about success, snobbery and meritocracy drive that anxiety.

Tantacrul's 76-minute deep dive into the history of western music notation and the many proposed replacements, such as piano rolls, colored notes and the jubilate. He explains why none have displaced the current system.

A Bloomberg mini-documentary on how Vienna keeps housing affordable through large-scale public and social housing. It presents the city as a model strategy for others.

Kirsten Dirksen visits retired mailman Russ Finch in Alliance, Nebraska, who grows oranges, figs and pomegranates in a backyard greenhouse without paying for heat. The greenhouse uses the stable temperature of the earth, with underground earth tubes, to heat and cool itself.

The first part of a four-part Channel 4 (UK) documentary series presented by Howard Goodall, this episode covers melody and why tunes affect us so deeply. It explains how melody works in Western music with historical background and music theory.

Channel 4's George Clarke visits a council estate in Vienna and is surprised by amenities such as swimming pools and private TV channels. It showcases Vienna's high-quality social housing.

Kirsten Dirksen visits the Providence Arcade, the oldest US indoor mall, which was converted into 225-square-foot micro-lofts classified as a rooming house.

A BBC Earth clip from The Hunt showing an octopus species from northern Australia that leaves the water at low tide to hunt crabs on land.

A US Air Force film on the Heavy Press Program, which built some of the world's largest metal forging and extrusion presses for aircraft, starting from German presses taken after WWII.

ReasonTV tells the story of Bob Tillman, who spent nearly five years and $1.4 million trying to convert his San Francisco laundromat into apartments. It walks through the permitting, appeals and neighborhood opposition he faced.

Tantacrul walks through how the MuseScore 4 team was built and how design decisions were made for the overhaul of a huge legacy notation app. It covers playback and engraving quality improvements.

A 69-minute documentary on the Polybius arcade-game legend. It examines visual, physical and anecdotal evidence, traces the story's source, and concludes the game never existed beyond one website entry.

Kirsten Dirksen tours the underground ferro-cement dome home of Paula and Bill Lishman, the family behind the geese-led flight story. The skylit earth-sheltered house stays warm below the frost line.

A Business Insider investigation into the US boom in AI data centers, mapping where they are, who owns them, and how much power and water they consume. It looks at the costs borne by communities, with a focus on Virginia.

Fools & Dreamers is a 30-minute documentary about Hinewai Nature Reserve in New Zealand, where botanist Hugh Wilson let gorse grow as a nurse canopy to regenerate native forest. It shows the results after 30 years and the local skepticism he faced.

An NFB documentary about the shipbreaking yards of Alang, India, where about 40,000 people dismantle huge ships by hand in dangerous conditions.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day documents boarding a US Navy nuclear submarine in the Arctic during the ICEX 2020 under-ice exercise. It is the first of a series on life aboard a fast attack submarine.

A Channel 4 Equinox documentary on the NK-33 engines built for the Soviet N1 moon rocket and how they ended up in the USA. It includes rare footage and interviews with veterans of the early Soviet space program.

ADVChina tours Chinese ghost cities and discusses the housing bubble, with speculative buyers purchasing empty apartments as investments.

A short BBC clip narrated by David Attenborough showing crows in Japan using city traffic to crack nuts, dropping them at intersections and retrieving them when the light changes.

A three-minute clip about Ernst Dickmanns' VaMoR and VaMP projects, in which fully autonomous vehicles drove thousands of miles on public roads in the 1980s. It is a brief look at early German self-driving research.

Marques Brownlee walks through Tesla's factory with Elon Musk, showing production lines for the Model S, X and 3.

A 30-minute condensed version of the documentary I.O.U.S.A., which examines the growing US national debt and its consequences.

Official trailer for Eugene Jarecki's 2012 documentary The House I Live In, an investigative look at America's war on drugs and its effect on the criminal justice system. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.

A long video essay on MyHouse.wad, a Doom II mod uploaded by an anonymous user that hides unsettling secrets in its walls. It tells the story of the map, its mystery and its liminal horror.

Ava DuVernay's Oscar-nominated documentary on how the history of racial inequality in the US, from slavery through the 13th Amendment's exception clause, drives mass incarceration. It combines archival footage with testimony from activists and scholars.

Veritasium visits the Micromouse competition, where small autonomous robots race to solve mazes at extreme speed. It covers the competition's technical history, including fans and ground effect enabling very high-g turns.

A NOVA documentary with neuroscientist Heather Berlin exploring the subconscious and what drives our decisions. It uses sleepwalking, anesthesia, improvised rap in an MRI and game theory to probe how much of the brain's work is hidden.

Tom Scott visits the USPS Remote Encoding Center in Salt Lake City, where keyers decipher mail images machines cannot read. It shows the lengths taken to decode bad handwriting.

Tod's Workshop fires full-weight medieval arrows from a 160lb English warbow at reproduced medieval armour. Armour curator Dr Tobias Capwell, an archer and bowyer give historical context and discuss the results.

The final chapter of Rich Rebuilds' saga about buying a used Tesla Model X that went missing, with cameo appearances and the end of the dispute. It is part of a longer series on the problems he had with Tesla.

Asianometry examines how East Germany tried and failed to build a native semiconductor industry despite heavy investment, including the espionage involved in acquiring Western microelectronics technology.

Episode 7 of the Inside Koenigsegg series, where Christian von Koenigsegg demonstrates the camless Free Valve engine technology. It discusses how such innovation could affect the wider auto industry.

Reason TV profiles Elvis Summers, a Los Angeles musician who crowdfunded dozens of tiny homes for homeless people. City officials moved to remove them while pushing a multibillion-dollar housing plan.

A short documentary on the 2015 Yale Halloween costume controversy and the confrontation with Nicholas Christakis. Filmmaker Rob Montz investigates campus free speech and the state of the university afterward.

A Chinese state-TV-produced documentary segment, with English subtitles, about virus sample collection in the field, including scientists collecting live bats. It was published in December 2019.

A Russian-language investigation by Alexei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation into Dmitry Medvedev's alleged corruption network. It documents charities funding palaces, vineyards and yachts, and has English subtitles available.

A long Gamers Nexus investigation into how volatile US tariffs affect the computer hardware industry. It interviews manufacturers and sellers about costs, margins and why moving production to the US is hard.

Norwegian climber Magnus Midtbo spends a day climbing with Alex Honnold on exposed routes, shot as a vlog. The video shows the stark contrast between Midtbo's visible nerves and Honnold's calm.