Can you trust Kurzgesagt videos? To answer this question,
we'll first explain how we research them and then talk a bit about past videos, and what we want to achieve with the channel. Making a Kurzgesagt video
always begins with a question or an issue. For example, after our meat video, many viewers asked about the health effects of meat on humans. We had no idea, and were pretty curious too, so we just decided to work on it. The first step is research. We start by looking for books
and scientific papers to get an overview, and just read a lot. The plan is to find a story worth telling. Is there something surprising to learn? Is there a larger context or a new perspective, or will it be an overview or introduction? Once we have the first readable version, we reach out to experts or scientists, and ask them to fact check and correct us. Often enough, they find a flaw or point us in the direction of contradictory research. At this point, many scripts die. If our idea does hold up, we continue working on it. This process can take weeks or months. Our Loneliness script, for example,
took over a year and a half to finish. The hardest part is being brief,
while not simplifying too much. It's much easier to
write a long script than a short one. When we're finally done, we do another round of research
and show the script to experts again, ideally different ones than the ones we talked to at the beginning of the process. When we express an opinion, we mark it as such. That's not saying that we don't
draw conclusions from the research. Homeopathy does not work,
and meat is really bad for the planet. Climate change is real, but organic food
is not a good way of solving it. If the facts clearly support a conclusion,
it's OK to present it as such. Of course, we can't always make everybody happy. People who know a lot about a topic sometimes get annoyed if we don't mention an aspect they think is crucial, or when we omit technical terms. This is, more or less, unsolvable
because of the nature of our videos. Scripts have around 1,300 words, so there's always some degree of simplification. You will always find a list of our research and sources and further reading material in the video description. Just citing sources doesn't make your work
accurate or your research good though, so we encourage you to use our sources document as a starting point to look at the topic yourself and learn more. But, it would be dishonest to say
that we've always worked this way. Some older videos don't live up
to the standards we set ourselves today. The two that annoy us the most
are the Refugee and Addiction videos. In both of them, we didn't try to present a balanced perspective, but instead chose a take and ran with it. The Refugee video was made with a deep feeling
of angry frustration about the world at the high point of the 2015 refugee crisis. While we argued over quotas,
dead children washed ashore on our coastlines. The script was written on one Sunday afternoon, and illustrated and animated within a week. It was exhausting, stressful, and frustrating. We still believe it was the right thing
for European countries to help, but it was absolutely unnecessary
to be toxic about it. We insulted people, and brushed away their concerns
about real and profound challenges. The video was divisive and emotional, at a time when the debate needed a calm and clear overview. The addiction video was based on only one source that has amassed a lot of criticism over the years. And, unfortunately, we did not reach out to scientists, or do extra research, on the papers
that were the basis for the video's thesis. That, addiction is purely psychological and based
on the life circumstances of the individual. This stance is still held by a number of addiction professionals, and we're not saying it's wrong, but a lot of others disagree, and it's not correct to present it as -the- truth. Addiction is far from solved
and our videos should have reflected that, instead of taking one side. We simplified an idea so much, that it made a great story, but became distorting. Both videos were made over the span of two months, and they're two of our most successful videos to date. We had found a formula that really worked. But we never made anything like them again, and have been discussing how to deal
with them for a long time. It doesn't help that both videos are loved by many people. We want to be proud of our work, and these two videos don't make us proud. So, today, we deleted them. It won't purge them from the Internet, but that's not the goal anyway. Feel free to upload them elsewhere. We're working on a new addiction video that we'll take a look
at the chemical and psychological causes. We'll take our sweet time with it,
so please have patience. The refugee video is not up-to-date anymore,
so we will not renew it. We're also going through our older videos to add sources, further reading, and comments in the next few months. Nowadays, rather than trusting in mainstream institutions, we often look at creators on the Internet
for reliable information. We rely on the fact that they're careful and rigorous, and not led by monetary incentives. And we expect them to acknowledge mistakes
in public, and work to minimize them. So, this is what we're going to do: Trust is not a thing you earn once and then keep forever. You have to constantly work for it. So can you trust Kurzgesagt? You can trust that every video we make
is thoroughly researched and approved by different experts. You can trust that we know that we have biases,
and we try to overcome them. We want to move Kurzgesagt further
towards the trustworthy end of the spectrum. The world is too complex for simple answers,
and we don't want to be the ones giving them. Making these videos over the last six years
has been quite a ride, and we're very grateful for it. We hope you'll be with us for the next few years, too. And join us on our journey to figure out
what this universe and life stuff is all about. Thank you for watching.
That was refreshingly honest and genuine.
so what was wrong with the refugee video?
I will say, their video on meat disappointed me, as did their video on organic food. The meat one failed to look at different scenarios where sometimes, crops can't grow on land and grazing is the only option for some places. This is a bigger deal for developing areas than developed areas, but grass and waste from agriculture- like soybean meal from soybean oil processing- are things we don't eat, and grazing animals do. I also felt that it was a bit preachy about morals and ethics about eating meat, but that's a personal thing.
As for their organic video, they implied that conventional farming didn't use crop rotation and used only synthetic fertilizers, both of which are untrue. Crop rotation is pretty standard now, and animal and slaughter wastes are used in both organic and non-organic farms. I feel it also downplayed the importance of land use. Land use is probably the most important factor as far as environmental stuff, due to just how much more carbon natural habitats sink compared to agriculture lands. Also, natural habitats are more diverse and have less issues with erosion and pollution. Also, less agriculture land means less inputs- which potentially means overall less pesticides and fertilizer. It's important to look at usage per acre, but also overall usage.
I'm on mobile, but I'll dig up sources if people want them!
Some videos made by Kurzgesagt were also sponsored by the Gates Foundation and the Koch institute.
TL;DW: past videos = no; present videos = mostly; they said their refugee and addiction videos were bad so they deleted them; remember to do your own research too
edit: addition > addiction
All this salt is bad for your diet, bois
edit: in reference to the now-deleted comments stating unequivocally no, the posters of whom still have their downvotes lingering down below
Im so high and I laughed at that title for like 10 minutes
The meat is bad for the planet, and organic farming video conclusions were just flat out wrong because they left out a lot of research and a lot of people in their respective fields gave them a bunch of shit about it. Make your videos longer then if your trying to consistently put out videos about complex topics. I think who they have reviewing their information are too biased themselves and aren't considering the totality of research when coming to their conclusions.