This is approximately what I figured. Whenever I do deeper due diligence, this sort of scam comes up. Literally "whenever."
For the record, Nebula is primarily owned and operated by creators. Those creators are:
* Dave Wiskus
* Brian McManus (Real Engineering)
* Alex (LowSpecGamer)
* Devin Stone (Legal Eagle)
* Thomas Frank
* Sam Denby (Wendover Productions)
The other creators are getting scammed.
This is not an uncommon model. This is almost identical to how edX was structured and the marketing literature is nearly identical too. It was owned and run by universities. Just not the universities who made up the "consortium."
If there were no scam, there would absolutely no reason for the non-public non-answers. If Nebula weren't scamming, they would disclose the "financial and legal wizardry."
None of this prevented me from giving Nebula money. As I said, this kind of issues comes up literally every time I do due diligence. I am disappointed in specifically Brian McManus for being involved in a scam, but this kind of scam is omnipresent with quite literally every organization I've done due diligence on, and usually much worse.
Nebula advertises itself: "Nebula is creator-owned and operated" (implying the creators who publish). A lot of people subscribe in order to support creators, as a sort of alternative to Patreon.
This is not the case. It is owned and operated by the founders and some investors.
If someone donates believing they're supporting Extra Credits, Practical Engineering, or a similar channel, they're likely being misled about how much they're contributing to it. Indeed, they may believe they're supporting a creators' co-op, which they're clearly not. If Nebula sinks, the support is what they expected. If it swims, it's going to be a lot less.
I consider this to be tantamount of fraud. That's as much a statement about myself as about Nebula. My standards for what constitutes fraud are much lower than e.g. the FTC's. However, I (again, personally) believe that if the FTC shared my standards, the economy would be more efficient and the world would be a better place. That is a personal opinion, but researched, and based on the work of David Landes (a well-regarded economist at Harvard, who had nice work about the role of social capital in economic growth).
The accusations of it being a scam are speculative for sure, but they come from a relatable place: the inability to understand why creators would agree to take on "shadow equity" while a small handful of creators get actual real equity.
It sounds like a few creators can sell the equity that is built by many creators at any time, but that all the other creators can only realize their equity if and when the company exits.
If someone bought tickets to a steam ship that stipulated that in the event of an imminent iceberg collision, they can only get on the life-boats after a small group of people ransacked the ship and left on the first life-boat, I might assume that they'd been scammed to. But perhaps they were just desperate or didn't think icebergs were a risk. Regardless, I just know I wouldn't buy that ticket.
I can't really figure out how the stakes of your analogy are supposed to map to the Nebula situation. Nebula is a source of income. If it implodes, everyone still goes home.
And who would be buying shares if the company is sinking so badly? How does the ransacking work in the analogy, and does it even make a difference?
The part that sounds scary is that they're on the "first" life boat and everyone has to wait until "after" they're done ransacking, and that part doesn't sound like it maps to the real world at all.
But backing up to the more general sense, shadow equity is a reasonable way to do the profit sharing but you have to have real equity somewhere. Accepting that there are two tiers makes sense to me. And the reason it's a "small handful" with the realer equity is because those people either built the company or paid lots of money to the people that built the company, that's pretty fair.
>a few creators can sell the equity that is built by many creators at any time, but that all the other creators can only realize their equity if and when the company exits.
That's misleading because an exit (i.e., a sale or an IPO) is usually the only way that owners of real equity in a startup can cash out.
i'm disappointed in brian mcmanus every time i watch a 'real engineering' video and find out that it's full of factual inaccuracies, like all the previous 'real engineering' videos i watched. you'd think i'd learn, but i keep confusing him with 'practical engineering', which is actually real
I find Real Engineering to be pretty good for aerospace, and horrible for everything else. There are errors, but no more so than any other resources I've seen on aerospace.
The problem I have is that it's trying to do electronic engineering, fusion, and now history. The worst is interviews / human interest / travel / behind-the-scenes, etc. My question is always: Why? Why do you think you're at all qualified to do a better job than the people who specialize in this?
If I had a choice, the Nebula-exclusive content would go more into math or deeper engineering: How does a jet engine work? That kind of thing.
But yes, Practical Engineering is very, very good.
I told him not to that unless he has actual knowledge, and he got very angry at me. On the occasion he made a very poor analysis of political and social situation of an African country (that's all I remember).
> On the occasion he made a very poor analysis of political and social situation of an African country
Cultural sidenote:
I do the same (although in personal conversation; I would obviously never do that on Youtube). I am very happy to espouse on topics I have little knowledge of, as did most of the community I spent time in when I was in grad school. This is looked down upon in most mainstream cultures, but it's actually very helpful. If I espouse something incorrect, someone can correct me. I learn something. It's a form of constructive / interactive learning which I find hyper-productive, and we did that all the time.
It's also helpful in social situations. The point isn't to convince you of something, so much as to communicate the state of my brain to you. That makes it much easier for us to debug who is wrong where.
Of course, that's completely incompatible with:
> he got very angry at me
Conversations got heated but never angry. There's a distinction:
What I struggle with is that in mainstream Western culture, this mode of communication comes off as arrogant, and conveys many subtexts which I don't want to convey. Part of that is that we expressed too much confidence when making those statements, but that's maybe 10% of the problem; even expressed with modesty, it mostly breaks in mainstream Western culture (and 90% of the other cultures I've been in; parts of Eastern Europe tolerate this a little bit better).
The problem with this approach, which yes can be productive, relies on cases of extremely high complexity. I had a friend who acted this way all the time, but sometimes all I could answer was "You need to read a few books", and then he thought I was the arrogant one, didn't read any book, and continued promoting his false, absurd and nazi-friendly ideas. Not a friend anymore...
When it came with specific book recommendations, it was extremely helpful in some cases (and in a few others, I didn't have time to read the books, so I shut up until such time will come).
yeah, i agree that that's a very productive mode. if i'm wrong about something, i'd much rather be corrected because i said what i thought instead of remaining wrong because i kept my mouth shut. it's embarrassing but worthwhile to realize how wrong i was
a big part of the problem is the nature of the youtube medium, which is effectively a 10-minute monologue desperately begging for mass attention. if it turns out something you said was wrong, you can't go back later and add a correction in the middle of the video. the best you can do is add a pinned comment or delete the erroneous video. people correcting you in the comments will only ever be seen by a tiny fraction of viewers. previously there was an option to add a "card" that overlaid the video at a given timepoint with text, but youtube removed that some years ago
maybe he has personality problems that make it hard for him to interact with people more knowledgeable than himself; that would explain why his videos are so filled with errors stated with absolute conviction
if you were running real engineering, you could maybe pay a team of fusion energy postdocs, unemployed electrical engineers, or middle-eastern-studies grad students to review your draft script and offer suggestions for improvement before you record the episode
if you want to know how a jet engine works i think your best bet (other than library genesis and google scholar obviously) is integza
Thank you for the pointer to integza. I have not watched the videos yet, but from the high-level, that's exactly what I was looking for (albeit for slightly different reasons; for a different project).
Was going to say… I love the practical engineering channel but that channel doesn’t really dive deep enough into any one topic to encounter any factual inaccuracies.
but that's not really a difference between the two channels; real engineering manages to pack plenty of misstatements into videos that are equally superficial
You used the word "scam" six times in your comment. That is a bit exaggerative of the actual company structure. Creators are getting paid to put various forms of exclusives on the platform. Just because the company uses a disingenuous term to market itself doesn't mean that said creators are all victims here.
I don't know whether creators are victims (although I suspect they are), but I do know people who pay for altruistic reasons are victims. It's not billing itself as Disney Plus but specifically as a way to support creators and support a service for-creators/by-creators.
That, it's not.
As a footnote, this also explains why channels like Wendover are promoted so strongly by Nebula over, quite frankly, better content.
For the record, Nebula is primarily owned and operated by creators. Those creators are:
* Dave Wiskus
* Brian McManus (Real Engineering)
* Alex (LowSpecGamer)
* Devin Stone (Legal Eagle)
* Thomas Frank
* Sam Denby (Wendover Productions)
The other creators are getting scammed.
This is not an uncommon model. This is almost identical to how edX was structured and the marketing literature is nearly identical too. It was owned and run by universities. Just not the universities who made up the "consortium."
If there were no scam, there would absolutely no reason for the non-public non-answers. If Nebula weren't scamming, they would disclose the "financial and legal wizardry."
None of this prevented me from giving Nebula money. As I said, this kind of issues comes up literally every time I do due diligence. I am disappointed in specifically Brian McManus for being involved in a scam, but this kind of scam is omnipresent with quite literally every organization I've done due diligence on, and usually much worse.