He changed his channel name to MrGreen to avoid people thinking it's one of Nigel's official channels. He actually does some pretty insane chemistry on his channel now as well.
"First, we start by breaking down the chemicals on the exterior. I couldn't use hydrofluoric acid because I didn't have a good way to filter that out and I don't really want anything corrosive in my candies. I looked online for alternatives and found a couple like isocyanatomethane. Thankfully because I'm a registered chemist these searches don't put me on a government watchlist anymore."
In starting a chemistry YouTube channel, call it "mummy brown" and dissolve shit in different shit as long as it takes to become literal shit. Business model yes or no?
I'm gonna be honest, he had some interesting videos at first, but I couldn't freaking stand his voice. Now that his shit has started to become more and more sensationalist and catering to the masses, I'm over it.
lol the down votes. Let's have a discussion? I'm simply voicing an opinion. 😄
Which of his videos do you think are overly sensationalised? You need to follow the whims of the algorithm to some degree to survive, but I think most of his videos are fine, maybe with a slightly clickbaity title or thumbnail, but that's to be expected these days.
My opinion of course but he's not going for methodology or hard science. He's doing fun chemistry stuff in a way that lets me watch and understand with zero understanding of chemistry.
Sometimes things can be for fun and he doesn't need to get published for turning lunar dust back into swiss cheese.
He's always been transparent about the fact that his parents helped him get started, and he's been financially operating on his own for years. Many of his videos are every bit as rigorous as Applied Science.
Re: transparency about bankrolling, i believe you since you say so. I’ve seen many of his videos and never heard him say so. I guess I just missed the ones where he did, or perhaps he said so on social media.
As for rigor, I can’t count the number of times he uses an unspecified amount of a chemical in a reaction, referring only to “throwing a bunch in.” But again, perhaps I’ve just watched the wrong videos.
His approach seems to me to be very “by guess and by gosh.” Part of that stems from trying to follow poorly written instructions in an academic paper; applied sciences grapples with that too. And some of it may be less slapdash that it appears, with Nilered using a deliberately casual tone in his scripts so that they’re more relatable, knowing that people aren’t likely to use his videos to attempt to reproduce his results. Even taking that into account though, given the number of attempts it often takes him to get the desired result, I doubt his rigor. Props to him for showing the failures and partial successes, though. And whatever else I say about him, I do generally find him entertaining.
You're watching the wrong videos. A lot of his material manufacturing videos tend to have a lot more trial and error. In the more pure chemical extraction or synthesis videos, he's hyper precise about amounts, timing, temperatures, and safety. In others he's definitely in "making a funny video fucking around mode."
Not gonna lie that's the channel I head to when I've run out of Nilered content. Been following his Cubane synthesis for a while now and it's been a crazy ride.
No, look back at his older videos when he was working out of the garage. Not rich. Decently off but most of the equipment is donated or paid for with channel income.
It's ok to enjoy many different sources of chemistry content.
NurdRage is the best. He's the OG YouTube chemist, and he's actually done some original research in his videos, like pioneering the alcohol-catalyzed magnesium reduction process for making sodium metal. Thanks to him, sodium metal can now be made without a high-temperature electrolysis apparatus.
