This is what one of Edmond Dantes alter egos did in the Count of Monte Cristo. “Lord Wilmore” was an eccentric Englishman who understood French perfectly well, but refused to speak it:

… Lord Wilmore appeared….His first remark on entering was, “You know, sir, I do not speak French?”

“I know you do not like to converse in our language,” replied the envoy.

“But you may use it,” replied Lord Wilmore; “I understand it.”

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.

My problem with him is that he lacks rigor and his methodology is poor.

Also, from the amount of money he throws around buying equipment, I suspect he has wealthy parents bankrolling him.

Applied Science is a far more interesting youtube channel.

There’s a difference between contributing to society by performing productive or helpful labor, and the sort institutionalized wage slavery we currently call “work.”

Most of us are subject to the tyranny of the clock, petty bosses, arbitrary rules about where we work or how we dress. This is what we never opted into and can opt out only after a lifetime of it or at great cost in terms of our ability to provide the necessities for ourselves.

Anarchist Bob Black explores this distinction in his essay, The Abolition of Work. I recommend reading it.