Six YouTube videos I recommend because they kept my attention this month. Some are quick, some are deep dives.
Trading on Catastrophe
This VPRO documentary explores catastrophe bonds—financial instruments that let investors bet on disasters. They exist because traditional insurance often won’t cover certain catastrophic risks, leaving cities and governments to find alternatives. As climate change increases the frequency of wildfires, floods, and hurricanes, Wall Street has found a way to profit from the uncertainty. The film examines how risk itself became a commodity and what happens when finance meets climate catastrophe.
The Mars Rover Suspension
GearSkeptic talks about his dad Don Bickler, the engineer who invented the rocker-bogie suspension system in his garage. It’s now on every Mars rover NASA has built since 1997, from Sojourner to Perseverance. The design lets rovers climb obstacles twice the wheel’s diameter while keeping all six wheels on the ground. A deep dive into mechanical engineering that started with one person prototyping in their spare time.
Inside Lucasfilm’s Art Department
Adam Savage interviews Doug Chiang, who led Lucasfilm’s art department for the Star Wars prequels. Chiang inherited Ralph McQuarrie’s legacy and built the visual language of a new era. The conversation is full of insider details—like using an early beta of Photoshop for digital painting on Terminator 2, working frame by frame, and the tricks they used to cover up imperfections they couldn’t fix. The sheer output from both of them is inspiring—sketches, models, concepts, iterations.
Watching this makes me want to develop my sketching skills. The marker renderings look great, and the line work in the concept sketches is beautiful. Maybe I should have gone to Art Center College of Design for industrial design—or at least taken more of their night classes.
Surveillance Without Security
Benn Jordan’s investigation into Flock Safety cameras reveals something worse than a privacy violation—it’s a security disaster. These license plate readers, deployed across American cities, store footage on public IP addresses with no authentication. Anyone can access them. The cameras track vehicles everywhere, and the company claims the data is secure while Jordan downloads footage from their supposedly “inaccessible” cloud.
His channel has other good deep dives: The Art of Poison-Pilling Music Files on corrupting AI training data with inaudible noise, I Saved a PNG Image To A Bird on encoding data into a starling’s song, and LRADs and Sound Cannons on how to protect yourself from sonic weapons.
Container Ship Tetris
Half as Interesting explains why loading a container ship is harder than Tetris. Weight distribution affects stability. Hazardous materials can’t sit next to each other. Refrigerated containers need power access. Containers destined for the first port must be accessible without moving others. The logistics puzzle involves balancing dozens of constraints—and getting it wrong can sink a ship.
The creators are prolific YouTubers—they also run Wendover Productions and Jet Lag: The Game, a travel competition show worth checking out not just for entertainment but for how they design their own game mechanics.
Open Source Voice Cloning
Jeff Geerling demonstrates Qwen3-TTS, an open-source text-to-speech model that clones voices from a ten-second sample. It matches ElevenLabs quality—for free, running locally. AI voice cloning has been around, but open-source options like this lower the barrier. More tools, more possibilities.