I never see this mentioned but Darknet Diaries is actually a really informative and entertaining podcast about hacking, the dark web, physical penetration testing (gone wrong), nation-state cyber attacks.
When people talk about “doing your own research,” I think they underestimate how difficult and slow actual research is. For physical and biological sciences it also requires heavy investment in equipment, but you can save money by sharing resources and collaborating with others doing similar research. For social/politics/history/economic research, I would imagine you need access to primary sources, maybe some modeling software, and years of learning to understand the context of anything you’re researching. I think people who say “do your own research” don’t understand the significance of understanding context, which leads to some…interesting ideas.
Pair it with sci-hub so you can actually read the whole articles and not just abstracts.