I’m not going to go so far as to call him a paid shill, but his information is just inconsistent and borderline untruthful.

He made one video claiming that chrome tan leather is worse than veg tan leather (it’s not by any inherent means) and realized that he can rage bait views by saying controversial stuff. Since then he’ll just randomly flip flop on wether or not a specific component is good or bad, while promoting his own collaborations.

The information you can glean from his videos is good if you know what’s what, but the information he gives you is not well informed. Ironic, given that he also operates a leathercraft business.

He’s a nice guy and all, just not a compendium of accurate knowledge.

My main issue is that he won’t actually correct any of these statements, look into them before he says them, or substantiate them after he puts them out into the world. Meanwhile I’m seeing other business owners have direct negative impact as a result of his misinformation. For someone looked to as an authority figure, I sure wish he respected that position more.

Imma tell you this right now as someone who writes about these types of shoes- look at the guts of the boots, but do not trust anything that comes out of RA’s mouth.

What’s your budget, and your brannock size? If you take those two bits with pictures of your brannock over to r/goodyearwelt and post in their daily questions thread, you’re going to get a lot of answers that’ll vary on your use case.