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Comment by bigbubba | Hacker News Reader

This guy sure gets a lot of milage out of his past employer. It's rare to hear him mentioned without NASA being mentioned in the same breath.

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It's pretty common for YouTubers who have a big past employer or specialist career.

Ali Abdaal is one I have seen pop up a lot this year. Every video of his mentions he studied at Cambridge and is a Doctor. Clearly it works quite well for the audience he is targeting as he has over 1.2 million subscribers on YouTube with an highly engaged subscriber base.

His content isn't anything special when you look at it and he plays a lot on his "socially awkward" personality which seems to work well with people seeking out self-improvement advice.

These people sure are excellent at marketing so I guess fair play to them. Ali isn't hurting anyone with his generic advice, probably quite the opposite in fact so I fair enough to him.

On the other hand you have channels like Applied Science where he rarely ever mentions that he's employed by Google, except in rare Q&A videos. His channel is popular because he shows off really neat stuff in good detail, rather than dazzling people with his credentials.

I love Ben's videos however perhaps if he followed the marketing strategy of Mark Rober or Ali Abdaal he would have more than 700k subscribers.

Not that 700k is bad at all, it is just an observation at how many subscribers some of these people can get primarily through name dropping.

However I don't think Ben is all that fussed about chasing every subscriber like Mark and Ali.

It definitely lends credibility; versus the introduction from the other comment - that this is the guy that glitter bombs package thieves on youtube - which makes me take this less seriously.

I'd recommend watching those videos before knocking him for the glitter bombs. They are impressively engineered, with entertaining videos which contain a good deal of detail about how, why, and in the most recent version, how they are working with law enforcement to crack down on package thieves.

Just adding a +1 to this comment. Those glitter bombs were non-trivial, so say the least.

If you’re into this type of engineering check out “stuff made here” or “BPS Space”.

"Stuff Made Here" is amazing. I can't believe how talented that guy is. And he seems much less edited/fake than Rober (who I also enjoy). I watch both of their videos whenever they upload a new one, but "Stuff Made Here" appeals much more to my engineering side, and I appreciate the lack of "showmanship" that is so prevalent in Rober videos.

Rober cuts to the chase. I think it's tuned for a different audience. "Stuff Made Here" guy is willing to show all of the "wrong turns" on the way to a good design. Rober's audience doesn't get a chance to get bored with one of those wrong turns and change the channel. But "Stuff Made Here" will attract an audience that is curious about the process that got him there.

Stuff Made Here guy's workshop is peak envy. The tools he's got there are just incredible.

not to mention he's gotten almost 2m subscribers in less than a year on ~20 purely engineering focused videos.

I hope Joe is doing alright. He just announced he's burned out and taking a break. I'm sure he could use it. He's done some impressive stuff.

> They are impressively engineered

By someone else

Those packages are designed incredibly well, IMO. There's a lot of things that can go wrong and he seems to reliably get footage of it being opened and recovers most of the packages, too.

Hey I'd milk it, too.

Don't forget he also worked for Apple.

Which to me seems way more impressive than working for NASA

Really, what’s your reasoning? I’d rather have NASA on my resume than any of the FAANGs. Especially if I was an engineer. Building spaceship bits? Sign me up.

Not OP, but NASA is very old school and the tech stack is old, not to mention that things move slower than a turtle (so much bureaucracy) and the fear of losing funding. It's just not a great place to work for anecdotally speaking. At best, it's an ok place to work for. Oh and I forgot to mention the crazy low salaries across the board, and yearly raises that are below inflation rate.

He has to differentiate himself from the posters, because he's too good-looking and laid-back-looking for people to not prejudge him before seeing his impressive engineering talent.

Unlike the founders that went to Stanford MIT, or who are ex-Apple/Google/FB etc. Headlines are short, and you have to get a lot done with as few words as possible. NASA is strongly associated with "smart engineering and problem solving" - good branding for a course like this.

I think he just tries hard to market his content to a very broad market unlike many science/engineering Youtubers.

I would enjoy content from him that doesn't have that feeling of being watered down, however.

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