After watching his videos every day for months now I am still not sure where on the "technical genius" to "free energy advocate" spectrum I should place him.
I mean most of his builds are technically correct (e.g. most of his generators produce a voltage), but he often glosses over details that in practice make the idea unfeasible (e.g. a voltage does not help you if the generator can not provide enough current).
Other times he is just wrong ... just because whales and "tree-spinning-things" have similar "wings" does not mean that you can blow up the same shape to a wind turbine size. (The reason behind that is that the smaller you get the more viscous air becomes (relatively) ... flies and other small insects literally swim through the air because of that. Imo that could be an explanation why the tree-spinny-things have a similar shape, they are just small enough that they "swim", too.)
Read down until 'similarity of flows'
https://cooperlab.wustl.edu/PracticalAdvice/Purcell%201977.p...
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u8GMcpEN9Z6aQiCvp/rule-think...
In think some of his videos are directly inspired by pages like https://507movements.com/mm_100.html ... So you might like that too :-)
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/11/fans-of-connections-...
> Television is entirely different. I remember walking around the world with a film crew, sometimes 15 people, and pointing at a bush and saying, "What am I doing here?" That's very time-consuming and expensive, and we no longer need that kind of thing. This time, there's no money. [...] Nobody went anywhere, so we didn't get up and catch planes all the time. And nothing got in the way of the story except me. All I did was stand and talk. Because of the structure, the nature of the production style, the story can move more densely and more quickly than ever before.
I don't know if I agree with him that it's a good thing. One of the things I loved about the original Connections was the experiential aspect of it. James Burke in front of a green screen is just James Burke in front of a green screen.
I think that "quality of the recordings" thing is just something you have to learn to get over. They're not actually bad.
I think Robert Murray-Smith would be a great host. He has some of the same energy as Burke and he has some history-related videos on YouTube that has some of the same style of storytelling.
Kathy Joseph would be great for the research side. Her book "The Lightning Tamers" is pretty good at describing some of these weird connections and interesting stories throughout the history of electricity.