I feel like I should start this post by confessing to the three lies committed by its title and description. While I bill this as a collection of top five lists, I don’t believe any of the lists I have here contain five entries. I’ve adopted the practice from the YouTuber YMS wherein the lists are “spiritual” top fives. That is, the 2-7 entries that are top five worthy.

Secondly, while this is the “best of 2025” many of the entries weren’t created in 2025. These were the best of media which I experienced in 2025… well… mostly… Since I had not done this in year’s past, I also included two to three entries from 2024 but that rounds out the three lies!

How am I valuing media? Well, I tend to value things which are thoughtful, have novel presentation, and/or have novel information. I feel like most media I come across fail in all three respects. Though, you only need to excel in one of them to be worth the time spent on it. I also try to rate things based on personal impact and whether they are worth sharing. None of these top fives are ordered.

This is the first in three installments of 2025 reviews just for YouTube content. The next will be on textual media, and I’ll round it out with a top five math YouTube channels of 2025.

EDIT: A friend reminded me that I should organize all of these into a single playlist link: here it is.

YouTube Videos

BOOKSTORES: How to Read More Books in the Golden Age of Content by Max Joseph.

This video convinced me of the unique value of reading books. I had always been endlessly curious about more or less everything — so it seems like I should have always been a reader. However, I found reading onerous. My eyes would skip lines, I’d read extremely slowly, and I didn’t find it necessary. I was told “reading books is how you learn things” but I grew up in the internet age with science YouTubers, and MIT OCW and the like.

However, the very last section of this video convinced me by the following point: Books are a rare single-focus, somewhat meditative (but not the same as meditating), activity in a very noisy world. That was enough.

Defending Canadian YouTubers from Canadian bureaucracy (C-11 saga continues) by J.J. McCullough.

This might be the first video I’ve seen exhibiting how a citizen can meaningfully engage with their government. It follows J.J. McCullough as he travels to Ottawa to give comments to a government committee about the implementation of Bill C-11: a new bill that would regulate Canadian online streaming services. In my entire life, “political engagement” has been ever-present yet mostly vacuous. Discussions about governance—i.e. implementation/details of policies—are eclipsed by culture-war nonsense and ideological debates. I’m past tired of it and in the wake of our current political culture, I’d like us to make one that looks more like this.

Nature’s Incredible ROTATING MOTOR (It’s Electric!) by SmarterEveryDay.

Biology will be remembered as the most interesting science of the early 21st century. The early 20th century belonged to physics. We made many fundamental discoveries that would lead to things like nuclear energy (and the nuclear bomb). Throughout the 20th century, our understanding of chemistry and chemical engineering would lead to countless advances in medicine and materials science. With the recent advances in CRISPR, computing, and mRNA vaccines, we have passed through the looking glass with biology. We’ve graduated from a primarily observational science to being able to engineer biological mechanisms towards our goals.

While most of my areas of expertise don’t touch on biology, a few do. I am very interested in biological models of computation. Anything physical which maps inputs to outputs is a computational model, and I am very interested in what complexity theory looks like for biological models. This video is just one interesting example in modern biology among many. It exhibits the process by which we discovered and described an electric motor in bacteria.

This new type of illusion is really hard to make by Steve Mould.

The coming out party of AI (really LLMs and diffusion models) has been nothing if not controversial. And the majority of the critiques I agree with. I’m concerned with economic unfairness from not compensating those for their training data. I’m concerned with the potential AI bubble the world economy is riding on right now. I am very concerned about huge learning losses due to cheating with AI. And I am most concerned with a world where a large percentage of the population is dependent on a handful of corporate-controlled chatbots for their thoughts, opinions, and even companionship. The AI revolution has given us a lot to reckon with.

That being said, there is a lot of good that can come from AI. This video even does AI-art in a non-slop way. Diffusion models (those used for image generation) work by inverting the image-classification problem. Given a bunch of well-labelled image data, we can add some random noise to it and then given the label, the noisy image, and the original we can train a model that given a label and a noisy image can produce a negative noise vector to “clean up” the image. To do image generation we simply start with a label and pure noise and then ask the model to iteratively “de-noise” in steps according to that label. You slowly get a recognizable image.

In this video, they use the de-noise trick with two different labels and apply them both one after another after transforming the image in different ways. One way might be overlaying a few images, another could be two different arrangements of a bunch of blocks of pixels (i.e. like two different solutions to a puzzle). This lets you generate one of those two-images-at-once illusions in a very flexible way. Any bijection between two pixel-grids will allow you to do this.

I Spent 30 Days in a Dead MMO (and it was amazing) by Bind.

This was a lovely video that reminded me of a bright-spot in the most difficult time of my life. In the Fall of 2014, during freshman fall of high school, I slowly became more and more sick until the point where I was bedridden, doing very little, and only left the house to go to the hospital. Needless to say it wasn’t the best of times.

Around then, I went back to this Minecraft server I used to play on a few years ago. It had gone from a player base of tens of thousands regulars to just one to two hundred regulars in the intervening years and this had a magical effect. It made it so that I saw all the same people every time I went online. I made friends with a few. Some became very close friends. There was even the “familiar-stranger” phenomenon of people I would see online a lot but never interact with — something common in IRL communities but very rare online.

In this video, the protagonist also joins a small online community that one could describe as “dead” like the Minecraft server I was on. It follows him as he gets to know the people there and make real connections.

Captcha by videogamedunkey.

This is just a high-quality meme.

YouTube Channels

Rekrap1

rekrap1 is technically the B channel for the early twenty-something Minecraft YouTuber “rekrap2” but for me, it is the A channel. This channel follows a very common format: a monologue about life over footage of gameplay. Thus, the value of it comes almost entirely in the character of the speaker. In rekrap1’s case, I see a modern model for masculinity.

In my time in mostly-liberal circles, I noticed that there was rarely a presentation of a positive male archetype. I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard someone who would identify as liberal associating a positive trait to masculinity. It does not take long to hear (usually rightly) negative ones though. However, I do think this has been a big mistake.

The void of positive male archetypes has been filled by some of the most noxious and toxic messaging about masculinity one could imagine. Through “The Manosphere” we have seen a redoubling of the most toxic forms of masculinity: Defining value through superficial strength and domination of others.

For a while I did not understand why we needed male/female archetypes for people to emulate in the first place. Why could we not just be people and have shared values that help us work and grow together? But I learned over time that many (perhaps most) people deeply identify with their gender and need a model for it to emulate. Some people feel so deeply about their gender, that even if it doesn’t match their sex, they will go through the physical work of transitioning and then the even more difficult work of living in a world hostile to their existence.

In rekrap1’s videos, I feel like I see the spirit of what young men can be. He provides a model that is open, unabashedly enthusiastic, and humbly thoughtful. In this, I think we can redefine masculinity as a responsibility to better one’s community. Although I haven’t heard people on the liberal side of the spectrum discuss positive male traits explicitly, there has been an evolution here. One that I hope we start to discuss more openly and explicitly. If we don’t, other’s will.

Three videos:

Dr. Mike

Dr. Mike’s channel is easy to recommend and easy to explain. It is well-produced, factual, fairly thoughtful, and varied content on medical topics. I particularly like his podcast where he often interviews different experts in medicine or medical policy.

Three videos:

Memoria

Memoria’s channel is also easy to explain but less easy to recommend due to its subject-matter. It is in the “lets-play” genre wherein someone plays video games and provides colored commentary. Memoria specifically plays quirky, atypical games and is very funny. For me, she is a kind of comfort-food video content and I have probably watched more of her videos than either of the other two mentioned here combined.

Three videos: