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.
List of Tacit Knowledge Videos
(last updated 06-26-2025)
To receive occasional updates with lists of new videos and other assorted links, subscribe to my Substack.
Note that some of the video descriptions are generated by the o3 search feature.
"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).
“Dan dives deep into React's core logic, which is already very interesting, at the same time the videos are pretty simple to watch and following Dan's thoughts can be really exciting. Besides React, he has videos where he recreates Wordle, Snake, Minesweeper games, solves Advent of Code puzzles.”
“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).
Founder of Destroy All Software and author of the famed “Wat” lightning talk; delivers dense 10–15-minute screencasts on Unix, testing, and language design.
Ninety concise episodes cover advanced programming topics, valued for practical demonstrations of professional development practices.
Creator of the 7M-subscriber mathematics channel and original author of the open-source Manim animation engine; taught MIT’s Intro to Computational Thinking.
Demonstrates project structure, scene scripting, and render iteration for producing visual maths explanations.
Associate Professor of Computer Science at Arizona State University and Director of ASU’s Center for Cybersecurity & Trusted Foundations; leads their internationally ranked CTF team.
A 17-video series that solves each level of the pwnable.kr binary-exploitation wargame, narrated step-by-step from vulnerability discovery to exploit.
Channel run by a former Google engineer who methodically “reads” large open-source projects—Linux kernel, Blender, Git—while narrating each investigative step.
Veteran browser/kernel engineer building Ladybird from scratch.
“Andreas livestreams himself working on the ambitious written-from-scratch Ladybird browser all while maintaining a friendly and welcoming attitude, not something that can be said for every programming streamer!”
Yale clinician-researcher known for clear statistical explanations.
“Bite-sized videos explaining how to approach medical research people. Last updated July 30 2020, so hopefully it reached many people during those confusing times and helped them strenghten their intellectual self defense.”
Independent podcaster known for extensive preparation; this episode pairs the finished interview with a publicly released packet of his notes and source documents.
Deep-prep podcaster interviewed by an learning researcher.
“Joe Walker puts extensive effort into researching and studying before his podcast interviews in order to come up with good and not just surface level questions for his expert guests. He also focuses on retaining the information and gaining a deep understanding which helps with subsequent conversations around similar topics.”
"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).
The all-remote DevOps company that went public on Nasdaq in 2021 at an $11 billion valuation shares >12k raw meeting, architecture-review, and demo videos under its “default-open” policy.
Buchheit created Gmail and later became a Y Combinator partner; Altman is co-founder / CEO of OpenAI and was YC’s president at the time of recording.
Two founders present, receive Buchheit’s critique, then hear Altman repitch—an inside look at how veteran investors probe and reframe early-stage ideas.
Founder-CEO of Gumroad and author of The Minimalist Entrepreneur; shares raw board-meeting recordings and work sessions covering product roadmaps and revenue metrics.
Provides a transparent example of lean, remote startup management.
Fully open startup ecosystem sharing notes, budgets, and strategy docs.
“This isn't a video, but it's probably relevantly close. All Manifold-sphere things are public — all meeting notes, budgets/finances, strategy docs, etc. I think that someone could learn a lot of tacit knowledge based on how the Manifold-sphere teams work by skimming e.g. our meeting notes docs, which are fairly comprehensive/extensive.”
"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, arnd a former restaurant worker. I'm also the author of the best-selling children's book, Every Night is Pizza Night" (YouTube).
Intensive fundamentals course that applies across cuisines.
“F-STEP cooking curriculum is a classic to me... first and foremost it taught me the importance of salt and what type to use when, and i think about that every time i'm cooking. goes way beyond that in the series. solid foundational info that applies to all kinds of cooking.”
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."
Dill led design at Airbnb and Lyft before heading Stripe Design; Epstein is a YC Group Partner and co-founder of Creative Market (acquired by Autodesk).
Applies conversion-focused heuristics to early-stage landing pages, highlighting hierarchy, trust signals, and copy clarity.
“Experienced designer breaks down and critiques designs from his employees and course students, showing how certain changes affect the overall layout and how it could be improved, often mentioning the principles he applies throughout. Was really helpful in learning some things about visual balance, contrast, and so on.”
UI designer and co-author of the Refactoring UI book.
“Live breakdowns of how real existing designs/pages/interfaces fail and working through improvements to make them clearer and more usable (and better looking) live and step by step.”
Co-founder and longtime head of design at 37signals.
“Live step by step walkthrough of breaking down and designing a feature for a web app through various stages of fidelity from basic structure to HTML.”
"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).
World’s most-subscribed individual YouTuber (300M+ subscribers), known for large-scale philanthropy and record-setting view counts.
Reviews budget, crew logistics, and set-design choices for a $100 million reality series, illustrating cost control and high-volume production planning.
"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."
“Matt's videos are really informative and his primary goal is to show that DMing is a straightforward thing that anyone can do, not something reserved for certain members of the tabletop RPG hobby. I've tried to pick out a few of his videos that are especially hands-on, but he has lots more which are very useful.”
Grandmaster and top bullet player known for instructive commentary.
“Daniel streams himself playing chess while talking through every decision to a very deep level. He discusses why he makes certain moves and why certain moves feel better than others.”
Five-time U.S. Chess Champion and leading blitz specialist.
“Hikaru streams and comments games, and of course plays himself. For example, in a video ‘How to Crush a 500, Every Step Explained’ he plays different people from 500 to ~2700 Elo for an hour, explaining each move, which is fascinating to watch, and to understand how a mind of a grandmaster works.”
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's Thor: The Dark World. He published a book called The Art of Language Invention (he shares his credentials in this 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.
I like this a lot. Finding good tacit knowledge videos is difficult in the current internet, and this post managed to successfully create a Schelling point in LW for sharing such information.
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:
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:
To make the comments easy to navigate, please format your comment as follows:[2]
List of Tacit Knowledge Videos
(last updated 06-26-2025)
To receive occasional updates with lists of new videos and other assorted links, subscribe to my Substack.
Note that some of the video descriptions are generated by the o3 search feature.
Software Engineering
Machine Learning
Competitive Programming
Game Development
Web Development
Other
Research, Studying, & Problem Solving
Research
Studying
Problem Solving
Business & Business Communication
Construction & Craftsmanship
Cooking
Engineering & Machining
Farming
Finance
Disclaimer, copy-pasting a comment from @Max Entropy:
Housekeeping & Parenting
Media & Arts
Design
Filmmaking
Music
Productivity
Sports & Games
Therapy
Transportation
Writing
Miscellaneous
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.