Ten Reasons to Love YouTube.

By Karen and Erica

We are aficionados of life long learning, especially about things of which we are completely ignorant. (There are oh so many of those…) We are pleased to be at a stage in life where we have at least a little time to learn. So, we wrote a post about several good ways to continue your education.

But we neglected to mention YouTube. We only recently realized that YouTube is a fantastic source of information about … anything. (Of course, you need to use your judgment as to whether a particular segment makes sense—but you’re good at that!). We were scolded by our digital native children, and other young friends, so we are fixing our mistake now by shining a light on YouTube.

Here are ten sites we have recently enjoyed. We’ll have more.

1. Artificial Intelligence. We all know AI or machine learning is here, and will likely change our lives—but what is it? We were introduced to a fascinating video, How Far is Too Far? | The Age of A.I., that explains it all in entertaining, accessible detail.

2. YouTube Original Stages. From the AI video we learned about YouTube Original Stages, a series of videos about all kinds of things, like how do our own brains work. Check them out.

3. Supertalls and The Burj Khalifa. Neither Karen nor her son Adam is an engineer, but both love extremely tall buildings, and both are fascinated by how they are built. The taller the building, the more engineering challenges it presents and the more interesting are the solutions. Adam found several YouTube videos about some of the these challenges with regard to the Burj Khalifa, one of their favorites, including the two here and here, and many more about other supertall building.

4. Makeup. We have mentioned before that neither of us knows a things about makeup—except that it’s OK to use some, now and again, so we would like to know how. Here are two excellent tutorials, both pretty lighthearted but also pretty expert—at least compared to us. First, How to Do Classic Makeup on a Mature Face, by someone who seems to know. Second, Drugstore Makeup for Older Women, since we probably don’t want to forego lunch just to look good. There are about a trillion makeup tutorials in YouTube—some of them pretty crazy—but a some of them are like these, quite useful.

5. WeWork. We work at WeWork, and have been astonished at what happened to the company and its founders—very very quickly. We wanted to get the big picture. Where? Check out The Spectacular Rise and Fall of WeWork. Business Week puts it in context.

6. History. You cannot escape politics this year, so you probably do not need YouTube to find yet more dreary stuff from various press sources. (Of course, Randy Rainbow is not dreary, exactly…) But maybe you would like to dive more deeply than you can in a sound bite, to understand where a specific idea comes from. There are many historical resources available on YouTube, including a series of talks from the US National Archives. Here is a fascinating talk about national identification documents, which seem to spark any number of political views.

7. Home Design. We both love home design and Erica is really good at it, having learned a lot from Daniella. We also love seeing other people’s abodes. Dwell magazine has great YouTube videos that allow for both design and voyeurism. Here’s just one.

8. Designing Your Life. We’ve written before about Debbie Millman, an artist and designer who has an amazing historical perspective. See how she designs her life.

9. TED Talks. Do you like TED talks? You can find them on YouTube. Here’s one we found intriguing—in a slightly scary way.

10. Style. Have you heard of Ari Seth Cohen? He is a very astute observer of women like us. Here, he interviews the Style Crone, who fights agism with style (as do we all). It may give you ideas. If the ideas are a little too out there for you, look elsewhere. Maybe this will be more accessible (though we don’t believe in the concept of “age appropriate”). And if you have specific questions, there are also lots of tutorials about things like how to tie a scarf.

What are your YouTube favorites?