Tacit knowledge is extremely valuable. Unfortunately, developing tacit knowledge is usually bottlenecked by apprentice-master relationships. TacitKnowledgeVideos could widen this bottleneck. This post is a Schelling point for aggregating these videos—aiming to be The Best Textbooks on Every Subject for Tacit Knowledge Videos. Scroll down to the list if that’s what you’re here for. Post videos that highlight tacit knowledge in the comments and I’ll add them to the post. Experts in the videos include Stephen Wolfram, Holden Karnofsky, Andy Matuschak, Jonathan Blow, Tyler Cowen, George Hotz, and others.
Tacit knowledge is knowledge that can’t properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction, like the ability to create great art or assess a startup. This tacit knowledge is a form of intellectual dark matter, pervading society in a million ways, some of them trivial, some of them vital. Examples include woodworking, metalworking, housekeeping, cooking, dancing, amateur public speaking, assembly line oversight, rapid problem-solving, and heart surgery.
In my observation, domains like housekeeping and cooking have already seen many benefits from this revolution. Could tacit knowledge in domains like research, programming, mathematics, and business be next? I’m not sure, but maybe this post will help push the needle forward.
For the purpose of this post, a Tacit Knowledge Video is any video that communicates “knowledge that can’t properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction”. Here are some examples:
Neel Nanda, who leads the Google DeepMind mechanistic interpretability team, has a playlist of “Research Walkthroughs”. AI Safety research is discussed a lot around here. Watching research videos could help instantiate what AI research really looks and feels like.
GiveWell has public audio recordings of its Board Meetings from 2007–2020. Participants include Elie Hassenfeld, Holden Karnofsky, Timothy Ogden, Rob Reich, Tom Rutledge, Brigid Slipka, Cari Tuna, Julia Wise, and others. Influential business meetings are not usually made public. I feel I have learned some about business communication and business operations, among other things, by listening to these recordings.
Andy Matuschak recorded himself studying Quantum Mechanics with Dwarkesh Patel and doing research. Andy Matuschak “helped build iOS at Apple and led R&D at Khan Academy”. I found it interesting to have a peek into Matuschak’s spaced repetition practice and various studying heuristics and habits, as well as his process of digesting and taking notes on papers.
For information on how to best use these videos, Cedric Chin and Jacob Steinhardt have some potentially relevant practical advice. Andy Matuschak also has some working notes about this idea generally. @Jared Peterson, who “researches and trains tacit knowledge” recommends the book Working Minds“which teaches how to do Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) which is a major interviewing technique for uncovering tacit knowledge.”
How to Submit
Share links to Tacit Knowledge Videos below! Share them frivolously! These videos are uncommon—the bottleneck to the YouTube knowledge transfer revolution is quantity, not quality. I will add the shared videos to the post. Here are the loose rules:
Recall a video that you’ve seen that communicates tacit knowledge—“knowledge that can’t properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction”. A rule of thumb for sharing: could a reader find this video through one or two undirected YouTube searches? If not, share it.
Post the title and the URL of the video.
Provide information indicating why the expert in the video is credible. (However, don’t let this last rule stop you from sharing a video! Again—quantity, not quality.)[1]
To make the comments easy to navigate, please format your comment as follows:[2]
Why: Blow livestreams himself coding games and creating a programming language. I imagine people who do similar things would find his livestreams interesting.
“He is the co-founder of fast.ai, where he teaches introductory courses, develops software, and conducts research in the area of deep learning. Previously he founded and led Fastmail, Optimal Decisions Group, and Enlitic. He was President and Chief Scientist of Kaggle” (Wikipedia).
“[S]ophomore at MIT [...], IOI 2020 Winner, Codeforces Max Rating 2931 (International Grandmaster), CodeChef Max Rating 2916 (7 stars)” (YouTube About).
“He is known for developing iOS jailbreaks, reverse engineering the PlayStation 3, and for the subsequent lawsuit brought against him by Sony. From September 2015 onwards, he has been working on his vehicle automation machine learning company comma.ai. Since November 2022, Hotz has been working on tinygrad, a deep learning framework” (Wikipedia).
Has worked in roles dealing with computer graphics at Pixar Animation Studios, Oculus Story Studio, Oculus+Facebook, Adobe, and other places since 2003 (Website).
“He is Professeur titulaire of the Combinatorics chair at the Collège de France, and director of research at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1998, he received the Fields Medal for research connecting the fields of functional analysis and combinatorics” (Wikipedia).
“Evan is a math PhD student at MIT, and a math olympiad coach. In addition to helping train the United States team, Evan runs his own training program [...] Evan was an IMO gold medalist and a winner of the 2014 USA math olympiad, [...] He also wrote the popular textbook Euclidean Geometry in Math Olympiads while in high school, which was published in 2016” (Website).
Holden Karnofsky. “Director of AI Strategy (formerly CEO) of Open Philanthropy and Co-Founder of GiveWell” (Website).
Elie Hassenfeld. Co-Founder and CEO of GiveWell (LinkedIn).
Timothy Ogden. Chief Knowledge Officer at Geneva Global, Inc.; founding editor of Gartner Press; founder of Sona Partners; chairman of GiveWell (Aspen Institute).
Rob Reich. Political Science professor at Stanford for 26 years (Stanford).
Tom Rutledge. Has worked in finance since 1989 (LinkedIn).
Brigid Sliplka. Director of Philanthropy at ACLU (LinkedIn).
Cari Tuna. President at Open Philanthropy and Good Ventures (Wikipedia).
Julia Wise. Community Liaison at Centre for Effective Altruism (LinkedIn).
“Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. […] founder and CEO of the software company Wolfram Research where he works as chief designer of Mathematica and the Wolfram Alpha answer engine.” (Wikipedia).
Sam Altman. CEO of OpenAI; former President of Y Combinator (Wikipedia).
Paul Graham. Co-founder of Y Combinator (Wikipedia).
Other YC employees.
Ray Dalio, “case study” recordings of business meetings and interviews with employees at Bridgewater on App Store app Principles In Action; I do not know of a way to access these through a web browser.
“Consultant, Business Coach, and Co-Author of The Chairs Are Where The People Go.”
Testimonials: Mark Surman, President of Mozilla; Shenda Tanchak, Registrar & CEO of Ontario College of Pharmacists; Michael Bungay Stanier, Author of The Coaching Habit; others (Website).
“He has no legible success that I know of, except that he’s wealthy enough to afford many machines, and he’s smart enough that the house he designed and built came out stunning (albeit eccentric).”
“Construction contractor, DIY living off-grid in Alaska and Michigan.”
“He and his wife bootstrapped themselves building their own cabin, then house, sell at a profit, rinse and repeat a few times. There are many, many videos of people building their own cabins, etc. Dave’s are simple, clear, lucid, from a guy who’s done it many times and has skin in the game.”
“Advoko has a site in the woods near Lake Ladoga in Russia where he films himself building various improvements by hand with local materials. Very competent craftsman, professional touch with no hype.”
“I’m the author of the James Beard award-winning books The Food Lab and The Wok, a New York Times columnist, and a former restaurant worker. I’m also the author of the best-selling children’s book, Every Night is Pizza Night” (YouTube).
Systems Engineer at Juniper Networks for ~9.5 years, Group Engineering Manager at Khan Academy for ~7.5 years, and YouTuber with 1.2M subscribers (LinkedIn, YouTube).
“an anonymous retired doctor who i suspect worked on something classified. incredible lecturer in engineering topics. every video is great, ignore the clickbait titles and thumbnails and click anyway. lasers, rockets, refrigeration, acoustics, high voltage”
Founder of a business that “created prototypes and small production runs of MRI-compatible computer peripherals”. Hardware Engineer since 2011, working at companies such as Valve and Google (LinkedIn).
“Dan Gelbart has been Founder and CTO of hardware companies for over 40 years, and shares his deep knowledge of tips and tricks for fast, efficient, and accurate mechanical fabrication. He covers a variety of tools, materials, and techniques that are extremely valuable to have in your toolbox.”
“No legible symbols of success, other than speaking standard American English like he’s been to college, owning a large farm, and clearly being intelligent.”
“[A] seasoned gardener with over 40 years of experience”, owns a farm. (Quoting the YouTube video).
Finance
Disclaimer, copy-pasting a comment from @Max Entropy:
[...] I’m skeptical of your recommendations (DeepFuckingValue and Martin Shkreli). The former made his money pumping-and-dumping meme stocks, and I get the impression the latter has been selected for fame (like recommending Neil deGrasse Tyson to learn physics).
In general, I think finding good resources in finance requires a much stronger epistemic immune system than nearly any other field! There’s so much adverse selection, and charlatans can hide behind noisy returns and flashy slide decks for a very long time. I’ve worked at a top quant trader long enough to spot BS, and the KL-divergence between what competent looking YouTubers say and what actually works is extreme.
“American financial criminal and businessman. Shkreli is the co-founder of the hedge funds Elea Capital, MSMB Capital Management, and MSMB Healthcare, the co-founder and former CEO of pharmaceutical firms Retrophin and Turing Pharmaceuticals, and the former CEO of start-up software company Gödel Systems, which he founded in August 2016. [...] In 2017, Shkreli was charged and convicted in federal court on two counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy for activity unrelated to the Daraprim controversy. He was sentenced to seven years in prison and up to $7.4 million in fines.” (Wikipedia).
Anecdote from an experienced finance friend: “I haven’t watched his videos, but remember a couple of (reasonable) people expressing surprise that they’re legit introductions to financial modeling.”
“Professor of Finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University, where he teaches corporate finance and equity valuation. [...] Damodaran is best known as the author of several widely used academic and practitioner texts on Valuation, Corporate Finance and Investment Management as well as provider of comprehensive data for valuation purposes” (Wikipedia).
Anecdote from an experienced finance friend: “Damodaran is an NYU prof who’s super credible and well regarded for his practical tutorials on valuations and corporate finance, I used to refer to his blog often.”
Held a $53,000 investment that turned into a $50 million in Gamestop. Seems he got into some regulatory trouble. I’m not sure about the specifics of this (Wikipedia).
“She is a mom of 8 with a successful YouTube channel (successful enough that her husband quit his job and now helps with the channel and homeschooling).”
“Christian mom who homeschools her 8 children [...] I know less about any metrics of success, except that she reports that her family is easy to run and enjoyable for her.”
“Watch some of the best SOLIDWORKS, OnShape, Fusion 360 and Inventor users Speedrun some challenging models while going head to head and sharing their screens” (YouTube).
“Sofia Bue is a professional SFX sculptor; she works at Weta Workshop which is the most well-known special FX company in the world; they were responsible for SFX on Lord of the Rings. She also won the SFX category at the world Bodypainting championships at least once so I think she’s pretty indisputably world-class at it.”
“Over 20 years of making media”; “David has created content for many Fortune 500 brands as well as creative agencies and television networks” (Winters Media Group, Inc.).
“They have lots of high-profile guests from Seth Rogen to Adam Savage.” Host backgrounds were not readily available (if someone finds their backgrounds, feel free to comment and I will edit into the post).
“A co-founder of Studio Ghibli, he has attained international acclaim as a masterful storyteller and creator of Japanese animated feature films, and is widely regarded as one of the most accomplished filmmakers in the history of animation” (Wikipedia).
“He has won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Musical three times, making him the first actor to have three wins in that category. He is perhaps best known for his role as Inspector Javert in the stage musical Les Misérables and in the Les Misérables: The Dream Cast in Concert” (Wikipedia).
“Pianist and composer, performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Adjunct Associate Professor of Music and Music Education at New York University.”
“Tonebase (a paid music learning service) recorded a number of free to watch conversations with Bernstein while he plays through or teaches a piece. Bernstein is about 90 years old at the time of recording and shares an incredible amount of tacit knowledge, especially about body mechanics when playing piano.”
Guitarist who has contributed to albums like Thundercat’s “Drunk” and John Mayer’s “Paradise Valley.” Has toured with Jonny Land and John Mayer (Website).
Tyler Cowen. Economist at George Mason University, host of Conversations with Tyler, administrator of Emergent Ventures (Wikipedia, Emergent Ventures).
Nathan Labenz. AI R&D at Waymark. Founder of a couple of companies. (LinkedIn).
David Parell. Hosts a podcast, blogs, and runs an online writing course (Website).
Won two international beach volleyball tournaments (bvbinfo).
SpeedRun.com, video game speedruns (to find the videos, click on ‘Player’ names on individual leaderboards, and you will find a YouTube recording of the speedrun). (h/t @Algon)
Each game has leaderboards from which you can determine speedrunner believability.
“Sylvie shows herself learning with her ‘Muay Thai Library’ videos. She narrates how she explores learning someone’s technique or strategy. More than any particular technique, these videos show someone’s learning process. This is applicable to all combat sports.”
Carl Rogers. Founder of person-centered psychotherapy; one of the founders of humanistic psychology (Wikipedia).
Frederick Perls. Developed Gestalt therapy with his wife, Laura Perls (Wikipedia).
Albert Ellis. Founder of rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) (Wikipedia).
Everett Shostrom. Put together the film. “He also produced well known tests and inventories including the Personal Orientation Inventory, Personal Orientation Dimensions, the Pair Attraction Inventory, and the Caring Relationship Inventory ” (Wikipedia).
Arnold Lazurus. “Authored the first text on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) called Behaviour Therapy and Beyond” and won various awards including two from the American Psychological Association and the American Board of Professional Psychology (Wikipedia).
Aaron Beck. “He is regarded as the father of cognitive therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)” (Wikipedia).
6 years as a private psychiatrist; 6 years as a Clinical Fellow and Instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard; 5 years doing psychiatry at McLean Hospital (LinkedIn).
“It is rare to get access to a recorded therapy session, and she is at least world-renowned as a relationship therapist (although that doesn’t necessarily prove that she’s good at it).”
“My job as a bush pilot is to fly missionaries, medical flights, and cargo into mountain and jungle airstrips throughout all of [Papua New Guinea]” (YouTube).
Author of Feel Good Productivity. Studied medicine for 6 years at Cambridge University; Junior Doctor in the UK National Health Service; YouTuber (Website).
He’s been creating languages for fun since 2000 and creating languages professionally since 2009. He’s done work for shows like HBO’s Game of Thrones, Syfy’s Defiance, Syfy’s Dominion, The CW’s Star-Crossed, The CW’s The 100, Showtime’s Penny Dreadful and the movie Marvel’sThor: The Dark World. He published a book calledThe Art of Language Invention(he shares his credentials inthis video).
“Meehl was a philosopher of science, a statistician, and a lifelong clinical psychologist. He wrote a book showing that statistical prediction usually beats clinical judgement in 1954, and a paper on the replication crisis in psychology in 1978. He personally knew people like Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, etc. and brings their insights to life in these course lectures.”
Me: I was hesitant to add a lecture series to this list at first. I changed my mind after listening to the first video, where Meehl provides interesting details (gossip, almost) about the life of an academic and the various personalities of his successful academic peers.
“Kenneth Folk is an instructor of meditation who has received worldwide acknowledgement for his innovative approach to secular Buddhist meditation. After twenty years of training in the Burmese Theravada Buddhist tradition of Mahasi Sayadaw, including three years of intensive silent retreat in monasteries in Asia and the U.S., he began to spread his own findings, successfully stripping away religious dogma to render meditation accessible to modern practitioners” (Website).
What valuable project did they ship? How many years have they worked for their prestigious company or university? How many papers have they published? What awards have they won? What other domain-relevant metric did this person perform well on? You could also give your feedback based on your expertise. Ideally, these are proxies for the knowledge and expertise of these practitioners being good.
The Best Tacit Knowledge Videos on Every Subject
TL;DR
Tacit knowledge is extremely valuable. Unfortunately, developing tacit knowledge is usually bottlenecked by apprentice-master relationships. Tacit Knowledge Videos could widen this bottleneck. This post is a Schelling point for aggregating these videos—aiming to be The Best Textbooks on Every Subject for Tacit Knowledge Videos. Scroll down to the list if that’s what you’re here for. Post videos that highlight tacit knowledge in the comments and I’ll add them to the post. Experts in the videos include Stephen Wolfram, Holden Karnofsky, Andy Matuschak, Jonathan Blow, Tyler Cowen, George Hotz, and others.
What are Tacit Knowledge Videos?
Samo Burja claims YouTube has opened the gates for a revolution in tacit knowledge transfer. Burja defines tacit knowledge as follows:
In my observation, domains like housekeeping and cooking have already seen many benefits from this revolution. Could tacit knowledge in domains like research, programming, mathematics, and business be next? I’m not sure, but maybe this post will help push the needle forward.
For the purpose of this post, a Tacit Knowledge Video is any video that communicates “knowledge that can’t properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction”. Here are some examples:
Neel Nanda, who leads the Google DeepMind mechanistic interpretability team, has a playlist of “Research Walkthroughs”. AI Safety research is discussed a lot around here. Watching research videos could help instantiate what AI research really looks and feels like.
GiveWell has public audio recordings of its Board Meetings from 2007–2020. Participants include Elie Hassenfeld, Holden Karnofsky, Timothy Ogden, Rob Reich, Tom Rutledge, Brigid Slipka, Cari Tuna, Julia Wise, and others. Influential business meetings are not usually made public. I feel I have learned some about business communication and business operations, among other things, by listening to these recordings.
Andy Matuschak recorded himself studying Quantum Mechanics with Dwarkesh Patel and doing research. Andy Matuschak “helped build iOS at Apple and led R&D at Khan Academy”. I found it interesting to have a peek into Matuschak’s spaced repetition practice and various studying heuristics and habits, as well as his process of digesting and taking notes on papers.
For information on how to best use these videos, Cedric Chin and Jacob Steinhardt have some potentially relevant practical advice. Andy Matuschak also has some working notes about this idea generally. @Jared Peterson, who “researches and trains tacit knowledge” recommends the book Working Minds “which teaches how to do Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) which is a major interviewing technique for uncovering tacit knowledge.”
How to Submit
Share links to Tacit Knowledge Videos below! Share them frivolously! These videos are uncommon—the bottleneck to the YouTube knowledge transfer revolution is quantity, not quality. I will add the shared videos to the post. Here are the loose rules:
Recall a video that you’ve seen that communicates tacit knowledge—“knowledge that can’t properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction”. A rule of thumb for sharing: could a reader find this video through one or two undirected YouTube searches? If not, share it.
Post the title and the URL of the video.
Provide information indicating why the expert in the video is credible. (However, don’t let this last rule stop you from sharing a video! Again—quantity, not quality.)[1]
To make the comments easy to navigate, please format your comment as follows:[2]
List of Tacit Knowledge Videos
(last updated 08-25-2024)
To receive ~monthly updates with lists of new videos, subscribe to the ‘Tacit Knowledge Video Updates’ Substack.
Software Engineering
Machine Learning
Andrej Karpathy, Neural Networks: Zero to Hero.
10+ years: Stanford PhD, research scientist at OpenAI & Tesla. (Website)
Jeremy Howard, fast.ai live coding & tutorials.
“He is the co-founder of fast.ai, where he teaches introductory courses, develops software, and conducts research in the area of deep learning. Previously he founded and led Fastmail, Optimal Decisions Group, and Enlitic. He was President and Chief Scientist of Kaggle” (Wikipedia).
Competitive Programming
Neal Wu, competitive programming.
CS at Harvard; SWE 1 year at startup; 4 years at Google (LinkedIn).
Errichto Algorithms, competitive programming.
Peak rating of 3053 (legendary grandmaster) on Codeforces.
William Lin, competitive programming.
“[S]ophomore at MIT [...], IOI 2020 Winner, Codeforces Max Rating 2931 (International Grandmaster), CodeChef Max Rating 2916 (7 stars)” (YouTube About).
Game Development
Jonathan Blow, programming livestreams.
Creator of Braid and The Witness.
Casey Muratori (Molly Rocket), ongoing project [...] to create a complete, professional-quality game accompanied by videos that explain every single line of its source code.
“[P]ast projects include The Granny Animation SDK, Bink 2, and The Witness” (Website).
Gareth Murfin, looks at some reverse engineered GTA Vice City code.
He was a programmer on the project. He now has 20 years of mobile development experience (LinkedIn).
Freya Holmér, explaining math / shaders and coding. (h/t @talelore)
Co-founder of an indie game development studio since 2012 and game developer since 2020 (LinkedIn).
Web Development
Matt Layman, “How To Build SaaS with Python and Django”. (h/t roshan_mishra/X)
Software Engineer since 2006 at Lockheed Martin, Storybird Inc., Serenity Software, Doctor on Demand, and Included Health (LinkedIn).
Hrishi Olickel, creating a proof-of-concept Web App using LLMs.
CTO at Greywing (YC W21) (GitHub).
Dennis Ivanov, doing web development.
Dev for 5 years at a company whose name I don’t recognize (LinkedIn).
Other
George Hotz, programming livestreams. (h/t @RomanHauksson)
“He is known for developing iOS jailbreaks, reverse engineering the PlayStation 3, and for the subsequent lawsuit brought against him by Sony. From September 2015 onwards, he has been working on his vehicle automation machine learning company comma.ai. Since November 2022, Hotz has been working on tinygrad, a deep learning framework” (Wikipedia).
Inigo Quilez, computer graphics programming. (h/t @Robert Diersing)
Has worked in roles dealing with computer graphics at Pixar Animation Studios, Oculus Story Studio, Oculus+Facebook, Adobe, and other places since 2003 (Website).
Tim Ruscica, Tech with Tim livestreams.
3 years SWE; Microsoft Intern (LinkedIn).
Alex Denisov, low-level programming.
17 years of research, 10 years of web dev (LinkedIn).
Jon Gjengset, implementing a BitTorrent client in Rust.
PhD at MIT; 3 years SWE, some at Amazon (LinkedIn).
Shashank Kalanithi, Day in the Life of a Data Analyst.
Software/data stuff for 3 years at companies I’ve never heard of (LinkedIn).
Dave’s Garage, exploring Windows 11.
Former Microsoft shell developer.
Joel Grus, solving Advent of Code problems.
Software Engineer since 2008 at companies such as Microsoft, Google, Allen Institute for AI, and Goldman Sachs (LinkedIn).
Scott Chacon, “So You Think You Know Git” (Part 2). (h/t @Max Entropy)
Co-founder of GitHub and author of Pro Git (introduces himself at the start of the talk).
René Rebe, live streaming Linux, open source, and low-level programming hardware and software projects.
CEO of ExactCODE GmbH since 2005 (LinkedIn).
Research, Studying, & Problem Solving
Research
Neel Nanda, Mechanistic Interpretability Research Walkthroughs. (h/t @RomanHauksson)
Leads the Google DeepMind mechanistic interpretability team; worked at Anthropic with Chris Olah; interned at Jane Street and Jump Trading (Website).
Andy Matuschak, researching live.
Crowdfunded researcher. “[H]elped build iOS at Apple and led R&D at Khan Academy” (Website).
JoVE, a “Peer Reviewed Scientific Video Journal”.
“18,000+ videos of laboratory methods and science concepts”, though most are paywalled and seem to require an institutional subscription.
Steven Kenneth Bonnell II (Destiny), doing research for debates (and his research Obsidian).
“[L]ive-streamer and political commentator” (Wikipedia). Has debated/talked with, eg, Jordan Peterson, Lex Fridman, Bryan Caplan, and Ben Shapiro.
Studying
Andy Matuschak, studying Quantum Mechanics with Dwarkesh Patel.
Crowdfunded researcher. “[H]elped build iOS at Apple and led R&D at Khan Academy” (Website).
Justin Sung, Study With Me.
Learning coach and YouTuber (Website).
Problem Solving
Tim Gowers, thinking about math problems in real-time. (h/t @jsd, @depressurize)
@depressurize specifically liked this series.
“He is Professeur titulaire of the Combinatorics chair at the Collège de France, and director of research at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1998, he received the Fields Medal for research connecting the fields of functional analysis and combinatorics” (Wikipedia).
Evan Chen, solving Math Olympiad problems. (h/t @jsd)
“Evan is a math PhD student at MIT, and a math olympiad coach. In addition to helping train the United States team, Evan runs his own training program [...] Evan was an IMO gold medalist and a winner of the 2014 USA math olympiad, [...] He also wrote the popular textbook Euclidean Geometry in Math Olympiads while in high school, which was published in 2016” (Website).
Tom Crawford taking Oxford Admissions Interview.
Math communicator. Oxford math tutor for 6 years; Cambridge math PhD; Oxford math undergrad (LinkedIn).
Blackpenredpen, solving 100 integrals.
Struggling Grad Student, doing math.
Current math PhD.
Mark Goodliffe, Simon Anthony (Cracking The Cryptic); solving puzzles like Sudoku, Crossword, Wordle. (h/t @Jared Peterson)
Mark Goodliffe. “12 times winner of The Times Crossword Championship” (Cracking The Cryptic (YouTube), “About”).
Simon Anthony. “[F]ormer record holder for consecutive Listener Crossword solves” (Cracking The Cryptic (YouTube), “About”).
Business & Business Communication
Elie Hassenfeld, Holden Karnofsky, Timothy Ogden, Rob Reich, Tom Rutledge, Brigid Slipka, Cari Tuna, Julia Wise: GiveWell’s Public Board Meetings (2007–2020 have audio).
Holden Karnofsky. “Director of AI Strategy (formerly CEO) of Open Philanthropy and Co-Founder of GiveWell” (Website).
Elie Hassenfeld. Co-Founder and CEO of GiveWell (LinkedIn).
Timothy Ogden. Chief Knowledge Officer at Geneva Global, Inc.; founding editor of Gartner Press; founder of Sona Partners; chairman of GiveWell (Aspen Institute).
Rob Reich. Political Science professor at Stanford for 26 years (Stanford).
Tom Rutledge. Has worked in finance since 1989 (LinkedIn).
Brigid Sliplka. Director of Philanthropy at ACLU (LinkedIn).
Cari Tuna. President at Open Philanthropy and Good Ventures (Wikipedia).
Julia Wise. Community Liaison at Centre for Effective Altruism (LinkedIn).
Stephen Wolfram, “Live CEOing”.
“Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. […] founder and CEO of the software company Wolfram Research where he works as chief designer of Mathematica and the Wolfram Alpha answer engine.” (Wikipedia).
Sam Altman, Paul Graham, others; live Y Combinator office hours.
Sam Altman. CEO of OpenAI; former President of Y Combinator (Wikipedia).
Paul Graham. Co-founder of Y Combinator (Wikipedia).
Other YC employees.
Ray Dalio, “case study” recordings of business meetings and interviews with employees at Bridgewater on App Store app Principles In Action; I do not know of a way to access these through a web browser.
Founder of Bridgewater Associates.
Tegus, a library of expert interviews for finance professionals. Unfortunately, its price seems to start at $20-25,000 per user and year.
Misha Glouberman, Recorded Coaching Session. (h/t @Misha Glouberman)
“Consultant, Business Coach, and Co-Author of The Chairs Are Where The People Go.”
Testimonials: Mark Surman, President of Mozilla; Shenda Tanchak, Registrar & CEO of Ontario College of Pharmacists; Michael Bungay Stanier, Author of The Coaching Habit; others (Website).
Construction & Craftsmanship
Andrew Camarata, small business, heavy machinery operation, and construction. (h/t @Carl Feynman)
“He has no legible success that I know of, except that he’s wealthy enough to afford many machines, and he’s smart enough that the house he designed and built came out stunning (albeit eccentric).”
Dave Whipple, building a “[s]imple off grid Cabin that anyone can build & afford (and many other builds on his channel). (h/t @Vitor)
“Construction contractor, DIY living off-grid in Alaska and Michigan.”
“He and his wife bootstrapped themselves building their own cabin, then house, sell at a profit, rinse and repeat a few times. There are many, many videos of people building their own cabins, etc. Dave’s are simple, clear, lucid, from a guy who’s done it many times and has skin in the game.”
Scott Wadsworth (Essential Craftsman), “[i]nformational videos related to blacksmithing, general construction, safety & productivity, and various other trades”. (h/t @Zahima)
His channel started “in 2007 as a blacksmithing ‘hobby’ business” (Website).
Primitive Technology, “build[ing] things in the wild completely from scratch using no modern tools or materials.” (Quoting YouTube desc.) (h/t @arrrtem)
20M+ YouTube subscribers, published a book.
Max Egorov, “[b]ushcraft and off-grid craftsmanship”. (Russian narration) (h/t @TANSTAAFL)
“Advoko has a site in the woods near Lake Ladoga in Russia where he films himself building various improvements by hand with local materials. Very competent craftsman, professional touch with no hype.”
Shannon (House Improvements), “How to build a deck” (6 Part Series).
Has been in the construction industry for decades. Runs his own renovation business. 925K YouTube subscribers (Channel Trailer).
Me: A friend of mine successfully built a deck using this playlist as a guide.
Steven Ramsey, 200 days of woodworking projects during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
Hobbyist woodworker turned woodworking content creator (1.9M YouTube subscribers); formerly a professional graphic designer (Website).
Cooking
“Mise En Place”, “[i]nterviews and kitchen walkthroughs with the head chefs at Michelin-star restaurants.” (h/t @Freya)
“[H]ead chefs at Michelin-star restaurants”
J. Kenji López-Alt; casual cooking videos, often filmed using POV camera. (h/t @lincolnquirk)
“I’m the author of the James Beard award-winning books The Food Lab and The Wok, a New York Times columnist, and a former restaurant worker. I’m also the author of the best-selling children’s book, Every Night is Pizza Night” (YouTube).
Engineering & Machining
Ben Eater, “Build a 65c02-based computer from scratch”.
Systems Engineer at Juniper Networks for ~9.5 years, Group Engineering Manager at Khan Academy for ~7.5 years, and YouTuber with 1.2M subscribers (LinkedIn, YouTube).
Tech Ingredients, working with “lasers, rockets, refrigeration, high voltage”. (h/t @taygetea)
“an anonymous retired doctor who i suspect worked on something classified. incredible lecturer in engineering topics. every video is great, ignore the clickbait titles and thumbnails and click anyway. lasers, rockets, refrigeration, acoustics, high voltage”
Ben Krasnow, “[I]nteresting applications of science and technology. You’ll see how an electron microscope was built in a home shop, how an X-ray backscatter system works, how to make aerogel, and many other hi-tech projects”. (Quote from Krasnow’s YouTube) (h/t @Carl Feynman)
Founder of a business that “created prototypes and small production runs of MRI-compatible computer peripherals”. Hardware Engineer since 2011, working at companies such as Valve and Google (LinkedIn).
Dan Gelbart, Building Prototypes (18 Part Series). (h/t @Adrian Kelly)
“Dan Gelbart has been Founder and CTO of hardware companies for over 40 years, and shares his deep knowledge of tips and tricks for fast, efficient, and accurate mechanical fabrication. He covers a variety of tools, materials, and techniques that are extremely valuable to have in your toolbox.”
Farming
FarmCraft101, farming and operating heavy machinery. (h/t @Carl Feynman)
“No legible symbols of success, other than speaking standard American English like he’s been to college, owning a large farm, and clearly being intelligent.”
Lance, “Permaculture Garden In The High Desert”. (h/t @Freyja)
“[A] seasoned gardener with over 40 years of experience”, owns a farm. (Quoting the YouTube video).
Finance
Disclaimer, copy-pasting a comment from @Max Entropy:
Martin Shkreli, Finance Lessons.
“American financial criminal and businessman. Shkreli is the co-founder of the hedge funds Elea Capital, MSMB Capital Management, and MSMB Healthcare, the co-founder and former CEO of pharmaceutical firms Retrophin and Turing Pharmaceuticals, and the former CEO of start-up software company Gödel Systems, which he founded in August 2016. [...] In 2017, Shkreli was charged and convicted in federal court on two counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy for activity unrelated to the Daraprim controversy. He was sentenced to seven years in prison and up to $7.4 million in fines.” (Wikipedia).
Anecdote from an experienced finance friend: “I haven’t watched his videos, but remember a couple of (reasonable) people expressing surprise that they’re legit introductions to financial modeling.”
Aswath Damodaran, “Reading a 10K”.
“Professor of Finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University, where he teaches corporate finance and equity valuation. [...] Damodaran is best known as the author of several widely used academic and practitioner texts on Valuation, Corporate Finance and Investment Management as well as provider of comprehensive data for valuation purposes” (Wikipedia).
Anecdote from an experienced finance friend: “Damodaran is an NYU prof who’s super credible and well regarded for his practical tutorials on valuations and corporate finance, I used to refer to his blog often.”
Roaring Kitty (DeepFuckingValue), trading livestreams.
Held a $53,000 investment that turned into a $50 million in Gamestop. Seems he got into some regulatory trouble. I’m not sure about the specifics of this (Wikipedia).
Housekeeping & Parenting
Lisa (Farmhouse on Boone), “walk[ing] through her house and discusses what items she keeps where and why, and how she avoids clutter”. (h/t @Freyja)
“She is a mom of 8 with a successful YouTube channel (successful enough that her husband quit his job and now helps with the channel and homeschooling).”
Abiding Home, “Large Family Homeschool Day in the Life”. (h/t @Freyja)
“Christian mom who homeschools her 8 children [...] I know less about any metrics of success, except that she reports that her family is easy to run and enjoyable for her.”
Media & Arts
Design
Various skilled CAD users and instructors, CAD vs. CAD Speedrunning Tournament. (h/t @zookini)
“Watch some of the best SOLIDWORKS, OnShape, Fusion 360 and Inventor users Speedrun some challenging models while going head to head and sharing their screens” (YouTube).
Sofia Bue, SFX Sculpting. (h/t @Freyja)
“Sofia Bue is a professional SFX sculptor; she works at Weta Workshop which is the most well-known special FX company in the world; they were responsible for SFX on Lord of the Rings. She also won the SFX category at the world Bodypainting championships at least once so I think she’s pretty indisputably world-class at it.”
MDS, live UI design.
Here’s his Dribble.
Andy Matuschak, live design stream on his Patreon (paywalled).
Crowdfunded researcher. “[H]elped build iOS at Apple and led R&D at Khan Academy” (Website).
Filmmaking
Taran Van Hemert, 4 hours of editing a Linus Tech Tips YouTube video.
“Editor, Camera Operator, Writer, Host at Linus Tech Tips” for ~10 years (Website).
David Winters (Cranky Cameraman), [l]ife and business as a working independent Director of Photography & Broadcast Photojournalist.
“Over 20 years of making media”; “David has created content for many Fortune 500 brands as well as creative agencies and television networks” (Winters Media Group, Inc.).
Corridor Crew, “VFX Artists React”. (h/t @talelore)
“They have lots of high-profile guests from Seth Rogen to Adam Savage.” Host backgrounds were not readily available (if someone finds their backgrounds, feel free to comment and I will edit into the post).
Hayao Miyazaki, documentary detailing his creative process. (h/t roshan_mishra/X)
“A co-founder of Studio Ghibli, he has attained international acclaim as a masterful storyteller and creator of Japanese animated feature films, and is widely regarded as one of the most accomplished filmmakers in the history of animation” (Wikipedia).
Thought Café, “How Crash Course is Made—Tutorials!”
Thought Café does animation/graphic design for Crash Course’s 15.6M subscriber Educational YouTube channel (Wikipedia). Here’s Thought Café′s reel.
Music
Jacob Collier, music composition, arrangement, production. (h/t @bertrand russet)
“6-time (at 29 yo) Grammy-winning multi-instrumentalist.”
Philip Quast, masterclass in singing Les Mis (full interview). (h/t @Yoav Ravid)
“He has won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Musical three times, making him the first actor to have three wins in that category. He is perhaps best known for his role as Inspector Javert in the stage musical Les Misérables and in the Les Misérables: The Dream Cast in Concert” (Wikipedia).
Seymour Bernstein, teaching piano. (h/t @lfrymire)
“Pianist and composer, performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Adjunct Associate Professor of Music and Music Education at New York University.”
“Tonebase (a paid music learning service) recorded a number of free to watch conversations with Bernstein while he plays through or teaches a piece. Bernstein is about 90 years old at the time of recording and shares an incredible amount of tacit knowledge, especially about body mechanics when playing piano.”
Zane Carney; composing, recording, and producing music live.
Guitarist who has contributed to albums like Thundercat’s “Drunk” and John Mayer’s “Paradise Valley.” Has toured with Jonny Land and John Mayer (Website).
BNYX, Olswelm, and other indie (?) music producers; music production livestream VODs.
Unsure of credibility. A friend into music production recommended some of the videos on this channel. He specifically liked BYNX and olswel.
Productivity
Joel Spolsky, You Suck at Excel (notes from the video).
Program manager responsible for the launch of VBA in Excel 5.0; co-founded Fog Creek Software; blogger (Website).
Alexey Guzey, walkthrough of his computer setup and productivity workflow.
Founder of New Science. Popular blogger (eg, author of Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors).
Note: Alexey changed his mind about the productivity benefits of the computer setup in this video: “My 2022 self (I don’t know them) was very wrong about meditation, huge monitors, and… sleep.”
Tyler Cowen, Nat Eliason, Nathan Labenz, David Perell; How Do You Use ChatGPT? (h/t goldplatesteaks/X)
Tyler Cowen. Economist at George Mason University, host of Conversations with Tyler, administrator of Emergent Ventures (Wikipedia, Emergent Ventures).
Nathan Labenz. AI R&D at Waymark. Founder of a couple of companies. (LinkedIn).
David Parell. Hosts a podcast, blogs, and runs an online writing course (Website).
Nat Eliason. Writer and influencer (Website).
Sports & Games
NBA players, watching themselves play basketball.
Various NBA stars.
Andy Benesh, talking about his beach volleyball offense.
Won two international beach volleyball tournaments (bvbinfo).
SpeedRun.com, video game speedruns (to find the videos, click on ‘Player’ names on individual leaderboards, and you will find a YouTube recording of the speedrun). (h/t @Algon)
Each game has leaderboards from which you can determine speedrunner believability.
Anthony Gato, complete practice session at the British Juggling Convention 2000. (and here’s a decent juggler commenting on it). (h/t @Morpheus)
“Anthony Gato holds several juggling world records. This routine is infamous in the juggling world.”
Sylvie Von Duuglas-Ittu, Muay Thai Library. (h/t @raydora)
“Muay Thai fighter with over 200 fights.”
“Sylvie shows herself learning with her ‘Muay Thai Library’ videos. She narrates how she explores learning someone’s technique or strategy. More than any particular technique, these videos show someone’s learning process. This is applicable to all combat sports.”
Therapy
Carl Rogers, Frederick Perls, Albert Ellis, Everett Shostrom, Arnold Lazurus, Aaron Beck: Three Approaches to Psychotherapy—recorded therapy sessions.
Carl Rogers. Founder of person-centered psychotherapy; one of the founders of humanistic psychology (Wikipedia).
Frederick Perls. Developed Gestalt therapy with his wife, Laura Perls (Wikipedia).
Albert Ellis. Founder of rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) (Wikipedia).
Everett Shostrom. Put together the film. “He also produced well known tests and inventories including the Personal Orientation Inventory, Personal Orientation Dimensions, the Pair Attraction Inventory, and the Caring Relationship Inventory ” (Wikipedia).
Arnold Lazurus. “Authored the first text on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) called Behaviour Therapy and Beyond” and won various awards including two from the American Psychological Association and the American Board of Professional Psychology (Wikipedia).
Aaron Beck. “He is regarded as the father of cognitive therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)” (Wikipedia).
Dr. Alok Kanojia, “interviews” with influencers.
6 years as a private psychiatrist; 6 years as a Clinical Fellow and Instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard; 5 years doing psychiatry at McLean Hospital (LinkedIn).
Esther Perel, live couples’ therapy session[s] with a guest couple. (h/t @Freyja)
“It is rare to get access to a recorded therapy session, and she is at least world-renowned as a relationship therapist (although that doesn’t necessarily prove that she’s good at it).”
Transportation
RegLocal, advanced driving. (h/t @masasin)
“former police driving instructor; he has a book, but the videos themselves are so helpful”
Ryan Farran (Missionary Bush Pilot), flying small aircraft in Papua New Guinea. (h/t @masasin)
“My job as a bush pilot is to fly missionaries, medical flights, and cargo into mountain and jungle airstrips throughout all of [Papua New Guinea]” (YouTube).
Writing
Paul Graham, website with a replay of his writing process for an essay. (h/t sameersismail/X)
Here’s the final essay. Here’s the blog post describing the site (though the link to the site in this blog post is dead).
Co-founder of Y Combinator.
Ali Abdaal, writing a chapter for his book.
Author of Feel Good Productivity. Studied medicine for 6 years at Cambridge University; Junior Doctor in the UK National Health Service; YouTuber (Website).
Miscellaneous
David J. Peterson, “The Art of Language Invention” (30-episode series on language construction: ‘conlang’). (h/t @Jonathan Sheehy)
He’s been creating languages for fun since 2000 and creating languages professionally since 2009. He’s done work for shows like HBO’s Game of Thrones, Syfy’s Defiance, Syfy’s Dominion, The CW’s Star-Crossed, The CW’s The 100, Showtime’s Penny Dreadful and the movie Marvel’s Thor: The Dark World. He published a book called The Art of Language Invention (he shares his credentials in this video).
Paul Meehl, Philosophical Psychology 1989 course lectures, “deep introduction to 20c philosophy of science, using psychology rather than physics as the model science—because it’s harder!” (h/t @Jonathan Stray)
“Meehl was a philosopher of science, a statistician, and a lifelong clinical psychologist. He wrote a book showing that statistical prediction usually beats clinical judgement in 1954, and a paper on the replication crisis in psychology in 1978. He personally knew people like Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, etc. and brings their insights to life in these course lectures.”
Me: I was hesitant to add a lecture series to this list at first. I changed my mind after listening to the first video, where Meehl provides interesting details (gossip, almost) about the life of an academic and the various personalities of his successful academic peers.
Kenneth Folk, Guided Tour to 13 Jhanas and pranayama breathing.
“Kenneth Folk is an instructor of meditation who has received worldwide acknowledgement for his innovative approach to secular Buddhist meditation. After twenty years of training in the Burmese Theravada Buddhist tradition of Mahasi Sayadaw, including three years of intensive silent retreat in monasteries in Asia and the U.S., he began to spread his own findings, successfully stripping away religious dogma to render meditation accessible to modern practitioners” (Website).
Keith Johnstone, teaching improv.
Author of Impro.
“A pioneer of improvisational theatre, he was best known for inventing the Impro System, part of which are the Theatresports” (Wikipedia).
What valuable project did they ship? How many years have they worked for their prestigious company or university? How many papers have they published? What awards have they won? What other domain-relevant metric did this person perform well on? You could also give your feedback based on your expertise. Ideally, these are proxies for the knowledge and expertise of these practitioners being good.
Feel free to leave out the ‘Background’ and ‘Why’ sections.