Saying he's self important is ignoring the size of his audience. If you want to be real about it, he has more reach and clout than about any other media personality in the knife/firearm industry. If anything he's modest about it. Not even people that have a strong following from magazines or cable have been able to tap into the following Nutnfancy has built. Youtube channels get more exposure than any other media outlet in the industry, and Nutnfancy is about the 2nd or 3rd most popular channel related to firearm/knife content. Travis Haley, Hickok45, Colion Noir, MAC, none of them can deliver the consistency in terms of exposure that Nutnfancy can. The only channel I can think of off the top of my head that consistently outperforms TNP is FPS Russia. Manufacturers can't even match the reach that a channel like Nutnfancy gets through Outdoor channels on cable. He puts out 3-4 videos in a week, and routinely those 3 or 4 videos will get twice as many eyes on a product as eyes that view all the pages of this forum in a month. His channel edges out the largest forums in the firearm industry, and those views are spread out over thousands of pages and topics - his topics are concentrated into about a dozen videos.
He had a hobby making these videos, and it has grown into something very valuable to companies that make a lot of coin. It is hard to quantify the media value that Nutnfancy represents, but I can't think of anybody on this forum that has a fraction of the reach TNP has. He's a powerhouse.
Now, I can understand not liking his videos. They're 3-4x as long as what is considered a long YouTube video. He does use a formula though, and usually sticks to that. I can understand not agreeing with some of his philosophy and opinions. He's as knowledeable about the range of topics he covers as anyone here though, and a lot of the rants against him that I have seen are biased and baseless. Some people act like he's inconsequential or that his channel is worthless, and that's far from the case. Was Whitney Houston a blowhard because she knew she could sing? Well, add up the views on TNP videos and you're going to get a number that's larger than WHitney Houston's album sales. I don't know how many orders of magnitude larger, but it's going to be significantly larger. Considering his reach, which is the primary accomplishment of any online media source, he's a humble man with a project that he considers important.
That being said, I like think I would like hanging out with Nutnfancy, but I don't care for his videos or Youtube in general. He's operating at a level of information lower than what I seek out, and it's pretty rare that I ever get anything out of the 45 minute videos he puts up. There's no reason to be a hater though; he puts out regular content that a lot of people enjoy, he's relatively knowledgeable about the products, he's fairly intelligent, he has a plan about what he's doing and where he's going, and he stands up for the industry when there is a need (of course, the fact that Ares Armament was raided by the ATF shortly after a TNP call to action video raises some questions about how helpful such attention is). If you're expecting anything else from a YouTube personality, I don't know what to tell you.
