Sheltering in place for several months has led me to explore the vast caverns of YouTube to find entertaining videos to watch—after all, it feels like I’ve exhausted all my movie and TV options on Netflix, Hulu, and all the other streaming platforms. In my YouTube searches, I’ve come across a few real gems.
Some of these YouTube channels revolve around hobbies that I love, where I can put their tips and knowledge into practice. Others not so much, but they still make some riveting content. These are my favorite YouTube channels that hone in on one particular area of expertise. Happy streaming!
Gardening is a deep rabbit hole and it’s easy to, well, get lost in the weeds when you’re trying to figure out how to keep alive a bunch of complicated organic machines that need exacting levels of sunlight, soil nutrients, watering, and space. Mohit Kumar Singh Rajput has two decades of experience in gardening, and he explains all the nitty-gritty details in videos that usually run under 10 minutes.
Unlike a lot of YouTube gardening hosts, most of his advice doesn’t revolve around having an enormous backyard and a wheelbarrow full of power tools. You can put all his advice into practice whether you live in an apartment or a detached house, like how to grow plants in kitchen waste, how to grow new plants from cuttings of other ones, and how to grow vegetables in pots indoors. My favorite is a primer on growing a corn plant in a container.
Remember when she built the Truckla, a production-looking custom Tesla pickup? Giertz has made a lot of whimsical inventions, like a drone that carries babies and a lipstick-applying robot that made Stephen Colbert pretty when she was a guest on The Late Show. WIRED’s interview wizard Lauren Goode hung out with Giertz throughout the summer of 2019, which is how we learned that Truckla became a turning point for Giertz as an inventor. Look for her creations to become more grand and ambitious as she’s committed to pushing her limits.
Car boots. Home safes. Bike locks. Padlocks. Nothing seems to stop this guy. He won’t reveal his identity, but he claims to be a lawyer from the Washington, DC, area who picked up lockpicking as a hobby. In his videos, he picks open both common and strange locks, from modern ones to the antique kind, and explains how different locks attempt to foil lockpickers (and why almost all of them can be beaten). Sometimes he uses a prop, such as a magnet, a pair of open-ended wrenches, or a Red Bull can. Once he used a Lego astronaut.
He doesn’t water down his words with niceties when the locks are trash, such as in an AmazonBasics bike lock review titled “As Bad As You’d Think” and a Brinks cable lock review titled “A Security Joke“. The takeaway here is that basically all locks are bad if a knowledgeable lockpicker wants your stuff. Some are just crappier than others.
Right now is the best time in history for a guitar player who’s into effects pedals. Everyone’s making a million varieties and doing some really out-there stuff with them that wasn’t possible when we were all kids. For all the juicy tones and valuable guitar gear information, this YouTube channel from Dan Steinhardt, head honcho of pedalboard component maker The GigRig, and Mick Taylor, forme