I've just discovered channels with restoration videos on Youtube and these guys are true masters at their craft!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2jNeObHnZY
Any other authentic channels I should check out about the mastery of a skill or craft?
I've been following his woodworking channel for 10 years — and I have no interest in woodworking myself. I've never come across someone who is 1) 99th percentile at the craft, 2) probably better at videography than the craft itself, and 3) will literally walk you through his line of thinking while including all the dumb mistakes he thought along the way.
Hikaru has a similar way of explaining high-level chess and coming off as human, but the quality of Frank's stuff is nearly unparalleled, in my opinion. It's like watching an absolute master of his craft have a beer with you and explain his 4D chess moves in an Explain Like I'm 5 years old format.
Thanks for the recommendations - here's a few of mine that are related:
For woodworking I am a big fan of Paul Sellers - though he is primarily a hand woodworker. His videos are very accessible.
For chess I like John Bartholemew. He's an IM, so lower in the rankings than someone like Hikaru, but has a lot of videos geared towards people looking to improve their overall game.
I like Hikaru, though I find GothamChess easier to watch, and more to my level. Also helps he is absolutely excellent in maintaining viewer attention. He is an excellent story teller.
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned 3Blue1Brown yet, who is perhaps the single most influential figure in popular mathematics today. https://www.youtube.com/@3blue1brown
+1 for Rick Beato. His "what makes this song great" series is lovely. I discovered his video on [Bohemian Rhapsody][1] from the same series and then gradually all of his other content.
Doug has spent over 10 years building a 73ft steel hulled sailing vessel from scratch, to be donated for research use by students. He literally bought steel plates and welded it into a frame. The vessel launched mid last year and the channel follows just about every aspect of its construction. Doug learns and builds just about every component, from its desalination system, casting his own propellers, and just about everything else.
I'm a very mechanically inclined individual, and figured this out when I was about 8 years old. I spend multiple hours a week watching all sorts of DIY content on youtube and have pretty much learned how to fix just about anything. Doug is a huge hero in my book, and I wonder if I'll end up like him one day.
Stuff Made Here - https://www.youtube.com/@StuffMadeHere - He's an engineer that does a lot of zany projects spanning software, hardware, and mechanics. His wife was pregnant, so it looks like he's taking a break from videos right now.
I have a number to share, maybe not all quite perfecting craft, but enjoyable for me! I did try narrowing to ones a bit more relating to learning or improving skills.
Adam Ragusea is a goldmine of well explained recipes that you could actually cook on a regular basis, even for things like weeknight meals. He tends to emphasize understanding and intuition and using your senses over exact measurement, this is how people are able to cook quickly and with lower mental overhead. Often you have to measure the first time you make a dish to get calibrated, and then can just wing it after that.
Adam loves to go into various details and explanations along the way. I'll even see comments from experienced cooks saying they learned something new.
Just one exception to this comment, I've found weight ratios to be very important when baking. Recipes that go by weight tend to be of much higher precision and overall quality.
Lastly, as a beginner, don't be afraid to get things really hot! As long as you don't see smoke (especially from oil, oil should never release any smoke), heat is your friend. I ditched nonstick for stainless, using heavy fats/oil (ghee, tallow, olive oil) + high heat — and never looked back. And don't forget, even as Adam would say, better ingredients make for better results!
j-kenji lopez-alt is great for beginners and experienced cooks alike. very science forward into the why and he generally shows you how to cook what he's going to eat for dinner. https://www.youtube.com/@JKenjiLopezAlt
helen rennie is a cooking teacher and is also good but the recipes can shuffle from esoteric to mundane so you have to pick and choose. https://www.youtube.com/c/helenrennie/videos
https://www.youtube.com/@EthanChlebowski is a solid and practical channel to pick and choose from. though the more recent videos are more of a deep dive into the science. the older videos are more about single recipes with some tangents on technique.
serious eats and americas test kitchen are good reliable recipe factories but require a lot more steps and effort generally. but at the end of them you will have a very well tested and usually tasty dish. so once you have your chops from the above you can branch out a bit with some more complicated dishes.
avoid any of the big recipe aggregators as they are so low quality recipes that aren't worth your time. all recipes etc.
If you're into Chinese cooking, then the Chinese Cooking Demystified channel is excellent. This is not your lemon chicken from the mall food court… They deep-dive into all the regional cuisines and present non-mainland-China-friendly recipes and techniques. It's a real eye-opener.
For something really out-there, Wilderness Cooking (again, a terrible name) is intriguing. It's this guy living in what looks like a pretty remote village in Azerbaijan doing traditional outdoor feasts. Warning: not even remotely vegetarian-friendly.
Asian (mostly Chinese) film analysis: Accented Cinema (https://www.youtube.com/@AccentedCinema) -- fills the 'Every Frame a Painting'-shaped hole in my life
My favorite part of Essential Craftsman is actually how he shares wonderful grandfatherly wisdom (or fatherly, depending on where you are in life). The actual content is fantastic too
I've really enjoyed Wintergatan on YouTube (you've perhaps seen the viral music video of a steampunk one man band powered by marbles). He is working on the third iteration of the marble machine, and his process is incredibly thorough.
Don't read the comments, half his fans seem to hate him now for turning an art channel into an engineering channel. But that's why I watch!
Interestingly, I didn't have the same experience from the comments, I find it rather good by YouTube standards.
When I followed the MMX saga, I saw a lot of technical criticism that ultimately turned out right. The most criticized idea I remember was about "kinetic fingers", a non-functional "art" part. The rest is mostly unsubstantial and vaguely entertaining comments that make up for the majority of what you see on YouTube comment sections.
Not a technical skill, but in the self improvement genre - Colin Murray’s channel https://m.youtube.com/@colinmurrayYT/videos is great for people who like exercising from home, without investing a lot in equipments and weight. Has helped me exercise more regularly compared to past years.
Florian Gadsby is a ceramicist posting videos that show how pottery is thrown, finished and finally glazed and kiln fired. The videos show the processes behind his work, from the throwing to trimming of tableware and more sculptural pieces. He has a playlist dedicated to teaching basic technics, great for beginners.
Phil's Lab is a really detailed channel covering multilayer PCB design skills. He shares a lot of nuance that would be gained only through years of trial/error or an apprenticeship.
Love watching PhilsLab - I dabble a bit with PCB design on my own YouTube channel and the difference between an amateur tinkerer (me) and someone who is an expert in it is amazing.
Ben Heck helped me through hard times when I was struggling to remember why I ever was interested in engineering in the first place. He reminded me that it's not just about skill grinding and solving hard problems and business applications. There's also fun to be had.
I discovered the channel Inheritance Machining a few weeks ago.
This guy inherited his grandfathers machine shop, in various states of disarray, and has been learning how to get it all working and doing some projects. Well filmed and entertaining.
Videojug's original site is sadly defunct, but their goldmine of masterclass shorts was apparently archived to Youtube with a vast array of critical life skills available to learn, such as "how to moonwalk", "how to determine your hat size", "how to mate chickens", "how to iron a shirt", "how to sound like donald duck", "start your own boyband", "rid your home of ants", "deliver a baby" and so on. Robert Heinlein would be proud. https://www.youtube.com/@videojug
Chris fix is an awesome channel for working on your car. He covers everything from fluid changes to transmission replacements. Great production quality and extremely engaging.
Been working back through his videos but just generally the quality of the stuff he comes up with is amazing to me. Loved the bellows he made for cooling a PC instead of fans, and the desktop PC that fits into a 50mm thick desk.
Very niche, but I think this is a great Ask HN, so Sugarpill Covers - https://youtube.com/@SugarpillCovers - mostly short (usually less than 5 mins) videos on how to produce (/replicate the sound of) classic pop punk. Genuinely clever and great fun.
Not sure if these channels are suitable, but I really love some music theory :^)
I love to watch Adam Neely's and 12Tone's channel about music theory. I don't understand everything they say, but the topics are usually very interesting. I also enjoy 8bitmusictheory and, as you can imagine from the name, it's focused on game music.
These guys in a remote Indian village cook for hundreds of [needy] people at a time. There is no modern cooking machinery involved. Their methods and enthusiasm are fun to watch!
Out of many woodturning channels, my favourites are probably Richard Raffan[1] and Phil Anderson[2], though they are almost polar opposites in some respects.
I don't do metalwork, but have often appreciated Clickspring's videos[3]
Ex-Tesla/Apple automotive engineer who manages to make the realm of working on your own car seem less daunting, with a nice side of witty humor. I love his videos - he has a video series where he's currently fitting a Tesla powertrain into a 70-year old Jaguar, which I find somewhat amusing.
I look forward to his videos every 2 weeks. Even when he's low on restoration content, he finds a fun angle for a video.
I really like how he spends time explaining the theory behind something, then goes "yea, but we'll just do this and hope it works". It really helps me understand what he's thinking about and what he's assessing. Super smart guy
I'm too old to switch careers, but for anyone interested in architecture, I recommend Dami Lee. She obviously can't cover everything, but I think it should give anyone interested an idea of what to expect if they decide to go to school for it.
Some highlights are his c&c machines he built and a robotic industrial arm he built. Also covers things like electrical motors, cad design tips, mechanical design.
I'm not sure how I ended up on this channel, but I've been watching all his videos - if you ever wanted to live on a farm and build a huge pond and fill it with aggressive bass, I would check out BamaBass on YT: https://www.youtube.com/@BamaBass
A carpenter who is using hand tools exclusively. He's an enthusiastic user of the "roman workbench" -- essentially, a regular, low bench with holes for "bench dogs" or holdfasts. His instructions on how to build and use are really good, here's a section for these: https://yewtu.be/playlist?list=PL6p4OzXAymr15zd5p-46R71vtEWj...
I also like the laid-back manner in which he speaks. Seems like a nice guy.
I’ll throw a request in here for channels that cover IT fundamentals a la Eli the Computer Guy back in the day. Especially if they cover more modern topics.
It’s hard to sort out the good teachers from the wannabe influencers. I also don’t mind hearing suggestions for video stuff outside of youtube.
Scotty is entertaining and informative, but you gotta be careful with that guy when it comes to actual car repair because he's very opinionated and overly willing to play the algorithm game. It's a true rarity for a car brand to actually be "junk", but Scotty doesn't think so, and it would be a shame if people bought cars based on his opinion. He thinks Hyundais are all bad, but I and countless others love our Hyundais. Relying on the suspension as safety when jacking up a car is also pretty dangerous advice. Even if Scotty got away all these years without using a full set of jack stands, that doesn't mean other people will have the same sense of how to do dangerous things and live.
I do like his occasional presentation style videos, though. Whether you agree with him or not, the ones on electric cars are well made and entertaining.
I think the RestoMod car scene are the true deciders of what is a good car or bad car. Yet to see a really cutting edge, state of the art, loaded with tech restomod though! Something that would give even Tesla and Mercedes a run for their money and the hypothetical Knight Industries.
The tag line is "This is not a fitness channel. This is a skill channel." Kettlebells. Clubbells. Bodyweight exercises. Building functional strength. There are no overt sales pitches.
Mark's instructional style is no-nonsense. Note his use of visual and verbal cues to get you to remember good form. And then there are the "Nerd Math" videos where he whiteboards workout progressions. Great stuff for HN readers!
Not sure if this is the kind of thing you're looking for but I found this channel / series of videos to be a pretty great introduction to poker. I wouldn't call it mastery level but I'd say these videos plus a little practice is enough to become skilled enough to beat tourists in Vegas.
I recently started to improve my cooking skills as well, and here are my favorite YT channels:
I love them because not only they teach you skills and give amazing recipes.
Some of them also get into the chemical / health science which explains why things are happening as they do.
- Adam Ragusea
- Chef Billy Parisi
- Chef Jean Pierre
- Ethan Chlebowski
- Sip and Feast
- J. Kenji Lopez
- Pro Home Cooks
P.S. Cooking really helps me to deal with work related stress and burnout.
Hopefully I'll make it my second profession some time soon.
They focus on French, Middle Eastern, and Chinese cuisines respectively. Chinese Cooking Demystified especially is great, may I suggest their video on wok cooking:
I still cannot explain why I can spend hours watching his videos walk through a solve of a layer-by-layer solution and his Ghost Cube/Ultimate shape shifter explanations are just so easy to follow.
Moritz build audio stuff from scratch, he explains how electric components work together in a nice easy way. The last video about compressor is awesome. Moreover he streamed partially rebuild of TR-808.
Farmcraft101 is excellent for how to do all sorts of things you might find useful on a homestead. From fixing various machines to basic tree work to off grid systems to building fences, you name it.
There are many copy-cats and fake click-bait channels out there now, but this guy pretty much invented the genre of "no talking, guy makes stuff with his bare hands from scratch" videos, and one of the few that's not complete bullshit.
If you're into Chinese cooking, then the Chinese Cooking Demystified channel is excellent. This is not your lemon chicken from the mall food court… They deep-dive into all the regional cuisines and present non-mainland-China-friendly recipes and techniques. It's a real eye-opener.
For something really out-there, Wilderness Cooking (again, a terrible name) is intriguing. It's this guy living in what looks like a pretty remote village in Azerbaijan doing traditional outdoor feasts. Warning: not even remotely vegetarian-friendly.
I have really appreciated this bodybuilding channel by Igor Opeshansky AKA Vitruvian Physique, who makes peer-reviewed research/evidence-guided fitness and training and nutrition videos. And also makes it very clear when the suggestions are anecdata. There is a lot of broscience and "tradition" based fitness and training suggestions when you try to find information. He is the first creator I found that takes a zero assumptions approach to fitness, breaking down his reasoning and evidence regardless of how "obvious" something is.
He also makes an effort to only promote science backed advice, in a video titled "the only 3 supplements you need", he lists creatine, protein, and pre-workouts (mostly the caffine). He's goes on to elaborate the positive and negatives each, and even goes on to say essentially that if your sleep is bad, no amount of creatine or protein is going to make a meaningful positive difference in your muscle growth. His channel is a great resource for bodybuilding and even if that's not your ultimate goal, it's a fantastic and realistic resource for fitness in general.
His videos really helped me avoid serious body dysmorphia. He has a great series on natty or not, where he describes who is likely taking steroids, what kind of physique is healthy to keep, and how common it is for people that show up on under fitness tags to be on steroids. This leads to a lot of struggles with body dysmorphia, especially at the age when kids become interested in fitness, and how it's struggling is not limited to any gender. There are similar creators like Jeff Nippard, Stephanie Buttermore but Virtuvian Physique is my favorite creator. I also really enjoy his humor. He has placed multiple times over many years at body building competitions and he has a BSc with a double major in Human Physiology and Economics from the University of Western Ontario.
I also really enjoy Adam Neely who exists in the music sphere on youtube, a educational music creator/composer. His approach to music is founded on jazz, he has a BA from Berklee in Jazz Composition, and a Master's in Jazz Comp from The Manhattan School of Music. He discusses music theory of more mainstream songs and trends in music. I really enjoyed his breakdown of the music theory of the song Castaways from the children's show Backyardigans, a bossa nova song inspired by Samba de Orfeu, and his deep dive into the the history of the song as well as the genre. The budget for the children's show was way more than I imagined, for one of the Rossini songs, they used 25 musicians and the show also had a dedicated choreographer, Beth Bogush to help create the dance/choreo seen in this animated kids show. Adam Neely breaks down the chrods and tempo and fun key change used for the song Castaways, with the song being in 2/2 time. The idea of a descending bass line being an analogy of a sinking ship they are singing about.
Nahre Sol is also one of my favorite music creators. She is a respected composer [2] who makes content about different genres of music as well as how she processes them as a classically trained musician. She makes an effort to explain the more nuanced things in music but doesn't oversimplify the music or process in any way. It feels like a musician talking to other musicians while still being understandable without formal music theory training. She's been a guest host of NPR's Performance Today and I really enjoyed her videos PBS Digital's youtube series Sound Field. It was really interesting to watch how a classically trained composer approaches music in a relatively new genre like lofi hiphop, which in my opinion was created by the internet. She has a Bachelor's in Piano Performance from the Juilliard School.
Writing this list, I noticed I value educational content over anything else. In my opinion the ultimate mastery of a skill or craft can be judged based on how easily someone can teach it to a novice. I really enjoy watching a deep dive videos about something I'd incorrectly assume is very simple. There's something really charming about a passionate person sharing the hidden complexity of something. I also really enjoy all of their humor, which some would call sometimes "gen-z" sometimes "nerdy".
I've been following his woodworking channel for 10 years — and I have no interest in woodworking myself. I've never come across someone who is 1) 99th percentile at the craft, 2) probably better at videography than the craft itself, and 3) will literally walk you through his line of thinking while including all the dumb mistakes he thought along the way.
Hikaru has a similar way of explaining high-level chess and coming off as human, but the quality of Frank's stuff is nearly unparalleled, in my opinion. It's like watching an absolute master of his craft have a beer with you and explain his 4D chess moves in an Explain Like I'm 5 years old format.
Highly, highly recommend watching him.