Any
Tom Scott video. They’re all good and he always researches his videos very well, but the first one that got me hooked was
YouTube’s Copyright System Isn’t Broken. The World’s Is., which is probably the best video about copyright law on YouTube.
Core-A Gaming makes the best videos about fighting games on YouTube and imo his best video is
Analysis: Playing, Fast and Slow. This one in particular is interesting and worth watching whether you play FGs or not.
Other serious/semi-serious long-format channels that I really like include
Abroad in Japan,
Vsauce,
8-Bit Music Theory (<—this one uses more technical language so if u don’t know anything about music theory there r some vids u just won’t understand),
New Frame Plus,
Game Maker’s Toolkit,
Daryl Talks Games (probably better known as Psyche of Play),
Summoning Salt, and
Innuendo Studios. I’ve also been enjoying
Veritasium and
Lowest Percent recently, but I’ve not seen anywhere near enough of their videos to make a fully-fledged recommendation yet.
As for less serious stuff,
kiwami japan is one of those channels that’s just a guy with a very specific, gimmicky hobby (making kitchen knives out of weird materials) that’s really easy to turn ur brain off to. As for channels that take their videos from their streams, the main one I watch when not watching brainless personality streamers is
SmallAnt, who does a bunch of cool challenge runs of Super Mario Odyssey, Pokémon games, BotW etc., and unlike most Pokémon challenge run channels he does actually interesting ones that force him to make plans rather than just over-level. He also speedruns Mario Odyssey Minimum Captures which is inherently interesting, though I probably wouldn’t watch it live unless it was a stream marathon or something.