I’ve been spending a lot of time on Youtube lately, and I think that there’s some excellent content on there. My favorites tend to be channels that are less productive in terms of numbers of episodes churned out per week, and produce fewer, higher quality videos. That’s not to say that some of the faster-paced production videos aren’t great – many of them are, and I watch them too, even if I don’t list them here. But below is a list of what I consider the highest quality content on Youtube that I specifically enjoy. Maybe readers here will find some content of interest that they weren’t aware of.

3Blue1Brown discusses advanced mathematical concepts with nice visuals and a focus on making them understandable for non-math professors.

Adam Neely is a super-nerd for music theory and has a great way of presenting it.

Cool Worlds covers a fairly wide range of pretty fun astronomical concepts at greater depths than most astronomical fan channels.

Early Music Sources is really for music theory and history nerds. Some dives into what (primarily) Renaissance and other sources about how people in those times thought about music.

Fermilab Quantum physics!

History Buffs reviews historical movies, and specifically covers historical accuracy comparing the film to real history.

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered covers a wide range of subjects, unlike a lot of pop history that only really does military history.

Legal Eagle explains lawyering.

Mathologer discusses advanced mathematical concepts with great care to make difficult concepts digestable to non-doctoral math professors, with great visual aids and humor.

Orchestration Online dives deep into symphonic orchestration techniques.

PBS Eons delves into the deep history of the Earth. Lots of paleontology, but also some geology.

Smarter Every Day is an engineer’s nerd-out. Lots of exploration of physical concepts and experiments.

Townsends focuses mostly on 18th century cooking recipes, although some episodes deal with other aspects of 18th century life. But the recipes (and their historical context) are often quite interesting, and simple enough that non-chefs like me can use them as a basis for ideas, if not outright copying.

Veritasium is a science and engineering-focused channel with very well thought-out, clear explanations.

Vsauce discusses various scientific concepts the author likes – mainly physics and psychology. He has a fun way of throwing around puns, too.

WDR Big Band is one of the finest jazz orchestras in the world, and what they put on this channel is world-class quality and often cutting-edge.