Come to think of it, we had the exact thing you describe (not that I would bother to watch a youTube video on a perpetual motion machine topic) back in the 1950s in Electrical Engineering Lab. It was called a “motor-generator set,” and it was, at the time, of some utility only because transistors could not then be economically made (if at all) which would convert significant power wattage from AC to DC or vice versa.The machines in that lab were not new, must’ve been around for a decade or so by the time I saw them. The conceit that a simple pair of such machines could generate positive net power output ex nihilo - and that only now, human generations after I saw them, has thought to try it and succeeded strains credulity far past the breaking point. In reality the torque required to turn the generator will inevitably exceed the torque produced by the motor which turns the generator at any nonzero RPM.
You could start your system - at any RPM you choose - from an external power source, with the generator electrically disconnected) and that system would continue to rotate, accomplishing nothing but not slowing down, after you disconnect the the external power source. Also neglecting friction, if you adjust the voltage output of the generator to equal the back emf (electromagnetic force) of the the motor at the given RPM, you could connect the generator electrically to the motor and the system would continue at the same RPM. But no current would flow. The instant you put a load (say, a toaster) in parallel with the generator to produce actual output power, the torque required to turn the generator at that RPM would exceed the torque output of the motor - and the RPM of the system declines exponentially towards zero.
Theoretically never reaching zero, not that you could tell the difference.
Cranking an electric generator is work, which promoters of schemes to us an electric motor to turn an electric generator as a way to create energy want to gloss over.
There are ways to collect energy and make it available to do work all around us. “The fusion reactor in the sky,” as Elon Musk describes the sun, is the prime example. There is also geothermal heat, which is mostly “too hard” to economically access. Wind. Tides. Hydro.
The thing to understand is Moore’s Law - which accurately predicts progress as a function, not of time, but of the logarithm of the total quantity which has been produced.
In my lifetime solar panels started out as so inefficient and expensive as to be worthless for any earthbound application. But in space, all you had was sunlight (or nuclear power), and so solar panels were made in (relative to today) trivial quantities to power satellites. But precisely because the past quantities made was so low back then, it didn’t take a whole lot of utility discovery to create enough demand to induce the production of double the quantity ever made in the past. That process has continued to accelerate the quantity which has been produced and, concommitantly as Moore’s Law would predict, each doubling of production has produced the learning and the investment in economies of scale to reduce the cost of a given quantity of kilowatts worth of solar panel by a constant percentage.
And what with laptops and cell phones and, lately, electric cars, the quantity of production of rechargeable batteries has been following a similar path.
The upshot is that solar panels combined with rechargeable batteries are getting so cheap and so good that fantasies of perpetual motion machines are moot. And we wouldn’t need to pave a major state with solar panels to get all the electricity we need.
But AI supercomputers are coming - and we’re gonna need all AI’s smarts to figure out how to power them and dispose of the heat they’ll dissipate.