The Real Truth About fern transcript

Who owns Fern? Who owns their channels? And who owns their name? You're curious, too, right? What? What the [ __ ] >> [music] >> Please hold. Your phone call is not important to us. >> Good boy. Now you can sit down and listen. On the 18th of August [music] at 10:48 in the morning, we got an email. 40 questions, one deadline, 7 days. How is Loom Studio funded? Can you provide an estimate of the total revenue generated by these channels since their creation?

Is it correct that he used a different name on an older VK profile? For a moment, we thought it was from an agency, law enforcement, maybe. Then we checked the signature, a YouTube channel. 5.3 million subscribers, 15 times our size. What does a YouTube channel need that for? We're going to answer every one of those questions, but the answers turned out to be the least interesting part of what we found. Before any of that, we wanted to know one thing.

Who's asking? To find the real reason behind that letter in the film that came after it, we needed one thing to find out who is behind Fern. [music] And they've already said it out loud. in a video about themselves. And that's when we started talking to Electrify. The business model is pretty straightforward. Electrify invests in creators, stabilizes their business, and takes a bunch of operational tasks off their shoulders.

A partner who handles the boring parts. That's the whole description. So, we looked the partner up. Everything that follows comes from public company registers. Not social media, not anyone's holiday photos. These are documents a company is legally required to file so that people can read them. In Britain, that register is called company's house. It's free and it takes about 30 seconds. Electrify Video Partners Limited London registered August 2021.

Nine YouTube channels have passed [music] through it. Firehip, Simple History, Mentor, Pilot, Astramm, Improvement Pill, Fizzy, Veritasium, and Fern, which counts as two because the same founders run the German channel Simplicus. About 40 million subscribers, one company, 2 million shares, 24 names. The biggest 38% belongs to Justin Rises, 15 years at KKR, one of the American firms that buys whole companies, cleans up the numbers, and sells them on.

They manage close to $800 billion. Second, 30%. And this one isn't a person, a holding company in Luxembourg, Metro Luxco. It belongs to a London investment fund called Capital D. Remember that name. It comes back. Third and fourth, 12% each. Electrifies two chief executives. One out of KKR, one out of Disney. Four names, 93% of the company. Now, keep scrolling. Pass the funds. Pass the executives. Eventually, you reach the people who actually make the videos.

Everyone who built these channels. Every founder, every face, every voice owns about 2% between them. And then Fern, the two Dutch companies behind it belong to the two men who started the channel, not [music] 31% each. Between them, less than 1% of the company that owns their work. They say the creators keep full editorial control. We have no reason to doubt [music] that and no document that would let us. That's who owns it.

Owning and running aren't the same thing. Tim Sheay joined the board in January 2025 and was named chairman that spring. He didn't work his way up through the company. Capital D put him there. He's the fund's own operating partner, [music] head of scripted originals at YouTube. Before that, director of YouTube creators and YouTube spaces, the programs YouTube built to grow and fund its biggest channels. And before that, he co-founded one of the first multi- channelannel networks on the platform.

YouTube bought [music] it in 2011. He owns not. 21% less than either of the men who made Fern, but he chairs the board and they don't sit on it. And one more name, not a shareholder, not on this board, Neil Chugani runs the London office of Redbird. Redbird is the firm that lent Electrify its money. Before Redbird, he was chief financial officer of Google [music] and YouTube for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. None of these people are new to this.

They come out of investment funds and out of the corporations that own media. and they're buying YouTube channels with the same playbook they used on everything else. Nobody here is improvising. Why a fund would want nine channels instead of one is a video in itself. And a creator called Jyn already made it playing the private equity firm himself to show the maths from the inside. Because remember, I bought each channel for 3 to five [music] times its earnings.

But after this roll up into my portfolio as a whole, this now sells for 12 to 20 times earnings. So without making any of the channels better just by buying them, putting them under one roof, the valuation is now 20 times more. >> One channel sells for 3 to five times what it makes in a year. Nine channels in one company sell for 12 to 20. Nobody made the videos better. Nobody grew the audience. Nothing changed except the paperwork.

They're in the same box now, and the box is worth four times more than what's inside it. And that isn't us reading between the lines. Capital D calls Electrify an early consolidator of YouTube channels on its own website. Tim Sheay told Forbes he's building the Kai Nast of the creator economy. Hyundai Nast is the publisher behind Vogue, GQ, and The New Yorker. [music] Different covers, one owner. So, it isn't a channel, it's a catalog.

So, that's what's behind Fern now. More than 50 million subscribers, 93% of it in four pairs of hands. Two men out of KKR, one out of Disney, and a London fund behind a Luxembourg holding company. a chairman who is that fund's own operating partner. A lender whose London office is run by Google's former finance chief for Europe. That's the scale. And here's ours. This started with three people in a city in northern Ukraine about 2 hours from Kiev.

You've never heard of it, and there's no reason you should have. We hired people who couldn't do any of it yet and learned as we went. Today there are 30 of us spread across the country. 300,000 [music] subscribers. They have 5.3 million. And on the 18th of August, 40 questions arrived from them. 7 days to answer. The honest answer is we didn't understand why. This is a channel that spends months on cartels, on Escobar, on pharmaceutical corporations, on the men who ran the Holocaust, and then it spent months on us.

We're not a cartel. Nobody died. There's no crime here. We don't even share their audience. YouTube keeps a list of channels similar to ours based on who actually watches what. Fern isn't on it. You don't spend months on someone 15 times smaller than you. Not unless something makes it worth it. There is an answer to that and it's on this company's own balance sheet. One line filed with the British government. It doesn't cover cameras or offices or people.

It covers how videos get made. We'll come back to what it's [music] worth. But first, the thing they actually accused us of. They said we copy whole videos and they showed one, >> but sometimes they also seem to simply copy and recreate full videos of ours like this one. That's our Pentagon video. In the letter they sent us a month earlier, they were more specific. We found a video by the channel @loom- channel published on September 20th, 2026.

That is a copy of our video, The Kid Who Hacked the Pentagon and Paid with His Life, [music] published on July 22nd, 2025. The video even carries the same title. We suspect AI has been used to copy our work. One example, as of the 3rd of September, 124 videos on this channel alone, more on the other two, and they found [music] one, and presumably the best one. Nobody leads with their weakest evidence. Before we take it apart, one detail.

That letter is dated the 18th of August, 2026. It says, "Our video was published on the 20th of September, 2026. We published it on the 20th of September, 2025, a year earlier. The date in the letter hadn't happened [music] yet. It's a typo. It doesn't change anything. We're pointing at it because this is a document about accuracy [music] with a 7-day deadline attached, and it went through more than one pair of hands before it was sent.

The film has one, too. Contrary to some channels on YouTube, our 3D animations are made by humans. So are ours. Everybody's fingers go through the keyboard sometimes. Now, let's take the rest of it apart, piece by piece. Start with the part that's true. Theirs. The kid who hacked the Pentagon and paid with his life. Ours. How a kid hacked NASA and Pentagon and paid with his life. That bracket is word for word. We're not going to pretend otherwise.

Now, here's the part that wasn't in the letter. The kid who hacked the Pentagon, a channel called OTW Ducks, published the 3rd of November 2024, 261 days before Ferns. The same six words in the same order. OTW docs wrote the sentence, Fern added a bracket, we added NASA. Then there's the story itself. The TWWS [music] channel told it in 2022, 1.7 million views. November 2024 OTW docs with the title Fern would go on to use.

July 2025, Fern, September 2025, US. In 19 days after us, Simplicimus, their own German channel, five videos, one public story about a boy who was named in court [music] records, in press coverage, and in a letter he left behind in 2008. Now, the part that decides it. They said the video is a copy. So, we ran both scripts through Copy Leaks, a commercial plagiarism service. Two files, no account needed. Anyone can repeat this. 4.7%.

Two videos about the same true crime story, the same boy, the same court case, the same final note. And 95% of the words are different. and the 4.7 that did match two quotes. His note published by Wired in 2009 and a hacker's guide from 1998 that he mentions in it. Both public documents, both read out in both videos. Take those two quotes away and the two scripts have nothing left in common. One thing we'll say plainly because it wasn't said about the method used on us.

We compared the automatic YouTube captions of both videos, not the original scripts. We don't have theirs and nobody outside their company does. Both transcripts and the full report are in the description. Run it yourself. So, the same story told five times. Their video is theirs. Ours is ours. [music] Same idea, two films, different scripts, different structure, different pictures, [music] made by different people with different tools.

We never downloaded a frame of their video. [music] We never touched their files and nobody has ever said we did. Not in the letter, not [music] in the film. What they said is that they suspect AI was used to copy their work. suspect. A bracket in a title first written by someone else. A story that was already on this platform 3 years before they told it. 4.7% of a script in all of it quotation. [laughter] That was the strongest case they had.

Which left us with a question. If that's the strongest case, what's the standard here? What actually counts as taking somebody's work? Because there is a standard in that letter. It just got applied in one direction. One thing before we start, everything you're about to see, we think is completely fine. We're not accusing anyone of anything. Nobody stole a title. Nobody should take a video down. >> We're showing it for one reason.

This is the standard we were measured by. So, here's what happens when you apply it to the people holding the ruler. We took every video on Fern's English channel, 138 of them. For each one, we searched for earlier videos on the same story by channels with no connection to them. 832 searches. Every date read off the video's own page, not off [music] a search result. Then we went through all 138 by hand. We did not compare scripts.

We did not compare sources. This is titles, topics, and dates. 105 of them cover a story that already had a popular video on YouTube before Fern got there. 76%. The ancient computer that simply shouldn't exist. Seven words straight off a BBC real video with 12 1/2 million views 3 years earlier. How Kim Jong-un travels. Half as Interesting. Got there 4 years and 9 months first. The insane story of Serbia's human slaughterhouse.

The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project called it the chilling story of Serbia's human slaughterhouse 19 months earlier and their video has twice the views of Ferns. 45 of the 138 carry five or more [music] words of somebody else's title in the same order. 33 came back clean. Breaking news, their own investigations, stories nobody else had told. Those are entirely theirs, and we're showing them because we counted honestly.

One of the 33 is a video about themselves. All of it is in the description. A public spreadsheet, all 138 videos, the earlier video we found for each, both dates, both view counts, and a link to every one. The 33 we found nothing for are in there, too, [music] marked clean. Not the five that make our point. all of them, including the ones that don't. That's the difference between showing you evidence and showing you a selection. 105 stories that already existed. 45 titles taken from someone else's. 33 that were theirs alone.

Every single one of them fine. A title belongs to nobody. A story belongs to nobody. A template belongs to nobody. Not for the BBC. Not for OCCRP, not for Fern, not for us, which is exactly why we never sent anyone 40 questions, which leaves the last thing they asked about, the way it looks. Yes, at the start, we made mannequins the way they did. Stand-ins for the people in a story, so you could see every character without hiring actors.

Not the same figures, though. Theirs are matte and smooth where the face would be. Ours were glossy silver with the face [music] actually modeled a nose, eyes, a mouth. We took the idea, we built our own version of it. And they didn't invent that idea either. They've said so themselves. >> And we want to stress that we didn't invent most of this. Let me know have been using 3D in brilliant ways in his videos way earlier.

So had our friend Neo and others. >> Someone did it first. They saw it and rebuilt it in Blender. We saw it and built ours with generative tools. Then we moved and at some point we stopped looking at Fern altogether. Most of us play video games, GTA among others. And the thought was simple. What if there were no mannequins at all? What if the characters had faces? So that's what we built. Not stand-ins for people. People.

Documentaries shot like a game that turns into a film. Fern has never done that. Nobody had. That one's ours. Or to put it the way Fern would, we stole from Rockstar. That's the problem with the word. Once you use it for this, it stops meaning at all. And to be clear, we were inspired by Fern. They make good work. The idea of the figures, the craft standard. We watched their videos and we wanted ours to be that good.

We weren't inspired by the rest of it. Not by the letter with 40 questions and a 7-day deadline sent to a studio a fraction the size. Not by the demand to know how that studio makes its money, who funds it, and what country it's registered in. That's a method, too. It just isn't one we're borrowing. Take our last 20 videos. Not one of them has the thing they're describing. The accusation is about a style we used at the start and left behind.

So, that's the case against us. a bracket in a title, a story, five channels told, 4.7% of a script, all of it quotation, and a style we stopped using. That's what 100 people and months of work produced, which means the reason has to be somewhere else. And [music] it is. It's in the accounts. So, we opened the accounts. Here's what that means if you've never done it. In Britain, every company has to file its finances every year. how much came in, how much it owes, what it owns.

It goes on a government website. It's free and anyone in the world can download it in about 30 seconds. Electrify has been filing since 2021. We read all of it. Investors have put in $31.4 million since 2021. That money stays. Lenders are owed 41.1 million. That [music] money has to come back out. The company owes more than it was ever given. Then there's what it's worth, and that's a number you can work out yourself.

Every time Electrify sold shares, it filed the price. Multiply that by how many shares exist, and you have the value of the whole company. End of 2022, $15 million. End of 2023, about 40. End of 2024, [music] 49.5. end of 2025, 74.7, five times more in 3 years. And here's the part that doesn't fit. That same company has lost money in each of the last 2 years. Since it started, it's $12.5 million down. A business that loses money every year, worth five times more than it was 3 years ago.

Which tells you the price isn't coming from what these channels earn. It's coming from what nine of them sold together in one package will fetch on the day somebody buys them. Which raises the obvious question, what did they pay for Fern? Nobody publishes the price of a single channel. But one day after that letter reached us, the biggest creator in that portfolio sat down for an interview. Derek Mueller, Veritasium, 21 million subscribers.

He was asked directly what Electrify paid for his channel. >> I don't know if I can explain exactly, but it was many years of profit. >> H is it a profit sharing? >> Uh the the way they valued the company was based on how much profit we make in a year. So it's a multiple of that. >> Got it. Got it. >> The interviewer suggests 5 to 10 times earnings, the way small online businesses trade. Mueller says that's roughly the zone, but not the high-end.

He never gives [music] a number. He agrees with somebody else's. That's how this company prices a channel. Not by what it is, by what it earns in a year times a number. Fern was bought by the same buyer with the same method a year later. Then the filings get closer. The word fern doesn't appear in the British accounts at all. What appears is this. In 2024, a subsidiary called Electrify Video Partners, Ops Limited, acquired 100% of a Dutch company, A&E [music] Enterprises, BVA, Dutch company registered in Amsterdam, run by two directors.

[music] The same two men who started the channel. And a year later, two Dutch companies appear in Electrify's [music] shareholder list, not 31% each. The same accounts say what was spent on acquisitions that year. $13.2 million for two companies. Fern's parent and Simple History. They don't split them. Nobody is obliged to. So, the most we can say is this. Fern cost less than 13.2 million. That's a ceiling, not [music] a price.

We wrote and asked for the exact figure. No answer came. We could give you a number. We're not going to because we'd be making it up. But the borrowing is a different story. That one is on the record in full and it's the part that changes what all of this is about. In September 2025, Electrify borrowed money, a lot of it. On the 22nd, five companies in the group signed the same document. It's called a charge. And the idea is simple.

You borrow and if you can't pay it back, the lender takes what's on the list. Everything that follows is that list. First, who lent it? The British Register names a firm called GLAS. But GLAS isn't the lender. It's a security agent, a company hired to hold the paperwork. So, the lender's own name never has to appear. One company in this group is Dutch, though, and the Dutch register doesn't allow that. RBE VPO aggregator, Redbird, $15 billion under management by their own count.

And their London office is run by Neil Chugani, who before this was chief financial officer of Google and YouTube for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The loan is $44.75 million. Their total debt across everything is 41 million. Most of it never goes near a channel. 32 million goes straight back out to repay the lender before them. The old debt swapped for a bigger one. And it's expensive money. Interest paid goes from $2.9 million to $8.5 million in a single year against an operating profit of 1.18 million.

The rate itself was withheld from the public file. 8.5 12 million on roughly 35 million of debt works out at about 24% a year. That calculation is ours. [music] The two numbers are theirs. None of this was announced anywhere. No press release, no article, nothing said to 40 million subscribers and none of it would be our business except for what's on the list. shares in every company in the group, the bank accounts at Revolute and City Bank under the lender's control, and the trademarks, the registered names and logos of the channels themselves.

We checked those mentor pilot, [music] simple history, improvement pill, Veritasium, every one of them registered to a company inside the group, [music] not to the people who make those channels. Then there's one more line in the registars's own wording. A floating charge covering all the property or undertaking of the company. All the property. For a company that owns almost nothing you can drop on your foot. No cameras worth speaking of.

No buildings. That means the rights, the names, and the catalog. And one more line on the list. every insurance policy the company holds including in the document's own words any present or future keyman policies handed to the lender too Stefon Lobmier of Capital D to Forbes on the 18th of August 2026 the day the letter reached us whatever the creator does if they get hit by a bus or decide to do something else we could be very vulnerable to that so $41 million of debt secured against the names of the channels and the rights to the videos, which leaves one question.

If that's the collateral, what is it actually worth? They answer that themselves. It's one line in the accounts, and it's the number this whole thing has been leading to. So, if the names of the channels and the rights to the videos are what secures $41 million of debt, what are they worth on paper? The company answers that itself. In 2022, everything Electrify physically owned came to zero. No cameras, no computers, no desks.

By 2025, $180,000 of equipment and $54 million of property with no physical form. One line inside that is worth $27,66,778 filed as patents, copyrights, and design rights. And page 13 says what goes in it in their own words. Copyrights all video content, scripts, voiceovers, animations, sound effects, music, design rights, the visual style of animations, characters, graphics, thumbnails, set layouts, and user interface elements, scripts, voiceovers, music, the way the animation looks.

Thumbnails. $27 million. not for the videos, for how the videos get made. So, here are three things, and we're going to leave them next to each other. A company carrying $27 million of how videos get made on its balance sheet, the same property pledged against a $41 million loan. And in the letter they sent us, question five, how are thumbnails created for your channels? Are existing thumbnails from other creators used as inputs, references, or training material during this process?

We're not going to join those three together for you. We don't have a document that does it, and we're not going to pretend we do. They're just all true at the same time. These channels regularly appropriate our thumbnails. They rip them and then likely let AI change or add elements. Attached to the letter was a sheet. Five of our covers next [music] to five of theirs. Appropriate. RIP. Those are their words and they're the wrong ones.

We looked at Fern's thumbnails and we built our own, which is exactly what Fern did. 16th of January, 2023. A channel called Neo. How the CIA found Osama bin Laden. A corkboard, red string, a photograph pinned to it, the words [music] most wanted. Fern's first one came seven months later, then eight more across 17 months. the same corkboard, the same string, the same pinned photograph. To be clear, we think that's fine.

We're only noting that a corkboard with red string appears to be a remarkably durable idea, and they've said so themselves twice. Title and thumbnail for this one are inspired by River Wand. Make sure to check him out. Riverw's video came out 10 months earlier. Title and thumbnail both. That's the right thing to do. a line in the description, a name, a link. It costs nothing. >> We actually got the inspiration for the first B thumbnail from his bin Laden video and asked him if he'd be chill with us creating our own version.

They asked Neo. We didn't ask them. Sorry, Fern. That one's ours. But the word they use for their own version of this is inspired by. The word they use for ours is appropriate. Same corkboard, different verb. So, we ran the same check on them, and it's harder than it sounds. A composition travels between subjects, so there's no way to search it properly. All you can do is look at earlier videos on the same story and compare.

That's what we did. Vega, October 2023, 414 views. Fern February 2024, 127 days later. Both a cartoon character screaming, mouth wide open against a wall of fire. Both with German across the top in enormous white capitals cropped by the frame. In the title is word for word, 414 views. Now look at this thumbnail. A channel called Spectator, 123,000 subscribers, 2nd of January, 2025. Black background, room number and huge white letters across the top.

A body in red. Blood running along a red grid on the floor. A handprint in it. It's a good thumbnail. 94 days later. Black background. Room number and huge white letters. A body in red. Blood on a red floor grid. A handprint. The bathtub is a bed. Oops. Here's the timing. On the 18th of August, Fern sent us a letter. Question five was, "How are thumbnails created for your channels? And do you use other creators thumbnails as references?" The next day, the very next day, they published that.

We hadn't even answered them yet. One thing about that one, YouTube let you run several covers on the same video and shows different ones to different people. Everybody does it. We do it. So, the cover you saw isn't necessarily the cover somebody else saw. and YouTube doesn't keep the old ones. This is what that video showed on the 25th of August. We screenshotted it and recorded it because covers don't stay. Now, we're not calling that appropriation.

By our standard, it isn't. Somebody looked at something and made their own version, which is what everyone here does. But by the standard in that letter, it is. Take the elements, change one, publish. We don't know whether anyone at Fern has ever seen that video. We're not saying they did. We're saying that nobody wrote them a letter about it, which is correct. Nobody should have. There's a second sheet in that letter.

Mr. Beast, Hoo, Mark Robber. We looked at Mr. Beast's thumbnails. He saw ours. Did they literally just swap me on my thumbnail for a red guy and get 1.8 million views? What the hell? LOL. He said LOL and got on with his day. Then there's the actual question they asked. Are existing thumbnails from other creators used [music] as inputs, references, or training material? The answer isn't complicated. We have designers.

Sometimes they generate an element and build the rest around it. Sometimes they generate a rough version and take it apart in Photoshop until it works. Sometimes there's no generation in it at all. We don't hide from these tools. We use them on purpose because they're the tools that exist now. And this is how Fern described their own process on camera in the [music] film about us. In rare cases, we use generated imagery as a basis for compositions in Photoshop if no comparable stock images are available. >> Generated imagery as a basis finished in Photoshop.

That's our process word for word. So, here's the question. We'd genuinely like answered a little bit of AI or a lot of AI. What exactly is the difference? Nobody has ever said there's no number in the letter. There's no number in the film. There's no number in YouTube's rules. There's just a feeling that somebody else used too much. But the word in that letter is appropriate. The word in the film was copy. So, it's worth working out what that word has meant to everybody who used it before us, not on YouTube.

This argument is older than the platform, older than film, older than photography. Van Gogh painted from millet, not from the originals, from black and white prints of them. Same figures, same composition dozens of times. He wrote to his brother about it because he knew how it looked. He said it wasn't copying. He said he was translating, taking something that existed in one language and putting it into another, the language of color.

[music] He wasn't hiding it. He was learning the way everybody learns. Some of those hang in the Van Go Museum, some in the Metropolitan. Nobody calls them copies. [music] Quinton Tarantino took the ending of Reservoir Dogs from a Hong Kong film called City on Fire. He took the yellow tracksuit from Bruce Lee. He has never hidden either of them. Two Oscars and a palm deour. And in Hollywood, there's a book called Save the Cat. 15 mandatory plot points, each tied to a specific page of the screenplay.

[music] Which page the hero gets the call, which page he hits bottom. Thousands of films are written to it, literally page by page. How do you respond [music] to concerns that some of your videos closely mirror the titles, structure, storytelling, and presentation of existing creators work? Structure. In an industry where structure is printed in a textbook with page numbers and taught as a trade. And look at these blue and orange.

A head in the sky above a landscape. A man walking away from an explosion without looking [music] back. Every studio every year for decades. That's not an accusation. That's the [music] industry. The formula works. So it gets used again. Nobody has ever called it theft. And every cheap new form gets called garbage first. In 1954, the [music] United States Senate held hearings on whether comic books corrupt children. A psychiatrist testified that they did.

Publishers were driven out. Whole genres disappeared. The complaint wasn't only about morals. It was that the stuff was cheap to make and the market was going there. Today, they're the biggest thing in cinema. The most successful film studio in the world is built on them. Nobody starts from an empty place. There is no empty place. So if everything is built on something else and always has been, what exactly was this?

They called it an investigation. Months of work, 100 people, a letter with a deadline. An investigation starts with a crime. Someone did something and someone hid it. We've been through what they had. A bracket in a title. A story. Five channels told 4.7% of a script. All of it quotation thumbnails that look like other thumbnails the way everyone's do. So what's left? That we have a course. Courses are legal. That there's an Instagram with holiday photos, not a crime.

That our channels are connected to each other. Every studio in the world has connected channels. No stolen file, no lawsuit, no copyright claim, no broken platform [music] rule. They call it theft. >> It's time to stop. >> Industrialized plagiarism. Creative theft. 28 minutes and not one file, not one line, not one frame. That's our page and two buttons. Join weight list. Join VIP weight list. There is no course. There has never been a course.

Nobody has ever bought one because there is nothing to buy. That's a landing page put up to see whether anyone would sign up. So, they couldn't buy ours. Nobody can. Instead, they bought a different one in $25 from a man called Gary. Then another 67 to get into his community. We've never met Gary. He isn't a client, a partner, or an employee. They watched his course and then they told you how we work. I couldn't afford the Pepsi, so I bought donkey piss.

It tastes bad, therefore Pepsi tastes bad. Now count how many times that film says seems. They seem to generate quite some revenue. That [music] could equate to $11,000. He's probably from Ukraine. And then this went on screen. >> Ago and Loom seem to generate quite some revenue. $ 39,000 to $108,000. That's a range of nearly 3 to1. If someone told you a company earns somewhere between 39 and 108,000, you'd understand immediately that they have no idea because they don't.

That figure comes from a third-party estimator with no access to anyone's earnings. Not ours, not Ferns, not anyone's. We're not going to publish our numbers to disprove it. We shouldn't have to. We'll say one thing only. We have never had a month at the bottom of that range. We could have done it their way. Instead, we opened their accounts and read what's printed in them. Writers working on your channels are expected to produce one script per day.

And two writers are responsible for producing content across three channels. Stop on that sentence. Two people every day writing scripts. That's their own source describing human beings doing work in a film whose entire argument is that a machine does it instead. They found the humans and printed it as evidence against us. And one more thing about that letter, which isn't in any of the 40 questions. On the 22nd of July, Fern published a film about themselves. >> Copies of our 3D something and style would go on to become a defining feature of AI slob content. 27 days later, the questions arrived.

You ask for comment to test whether the thing you believe is actually true. That's the entire point of asking. If the conclusion is already published, [music] an answer can't change it. And then they told everyone who he is, not the company, the person, the country, the region in the north of it. The surname he used on an older profile printed in the letter in writing photographs from his holidays. A lot of people appear in that film.

A man selling courses. Another channel they investigated. Two AI companies who never replied. Out of all of them, one private individual was identified by name. Before this, Fern investigated a pharmaceutical company that made money from an opioid painkiller. They did not publish where anyone lived. They did not show anyone's holiday photographs. The difference is that a corporation has lawyers. Pardon often [music] posts pictures of the citations >> and about those photographs.

Look at when they were posted. They predate the channel. Some of them predate the company. They were put on screen next to a revenue estimate and nothing was said out loud. Nothing had to be. Two images sit beside each other and the viewer joins them up. Except the dates don't allow [music] it. The money they're pointing at didn't exist yet. We could show you theirs, where they go, what they drive, what they earn. We're not going to.

It wouldn't prove anything. It didn't prove anything when they did it. >> You guys can never come close to Fern >> fraud and content thief. >> Get a job, Artm, and stop stealing [music] content. >> Those started arriving the day the film went up. When Fern investigates McDonald's, does [music] McDonald's get messages like that? When they investigate a cartel, does the cartel? A pharmaceutical corporation doesn't have an Instagram [music] account.

A cartel doesn't read its comments. We do. I get Fern's point, but I don't think the end consumer cares or should care. It's entertainment. If people like it, who cares where it came from? Fern builds on others people's work, too. They aren't the journalists getting the scoop. They aren't the owners of a specific story. If the storytelling can be commoditized, then so be it. >> That's under their film, not ours. 40 questions. how we're funded, what share of our revenue comes from AI, what country we're registered in, how our thumbnails are made, what our channels have earned since they started, whether a channel we've never mentioned is a client of ours, and what about whether the facts in our videos are correct?

If the concern was misinformation, the entire letter would have been that. The video includes several inaccurate claims and visuals about the Holocaust, including an incorrect number for how many people died in Awitz. They're right. Three things in that film were wrong. The first is a number 1,765,000 standing without the modern figure beside it. It wasn't invented and it wasn't generated. It's Rudolph Verba's count. a prisoner who counted the transports with his own eyes from inside the camp where being caught counting would [music] have killed him.

He escaped in April 1944 with Alfred Vetsler to carry that count out. Their report reached the Allies and is credited with saving tens of thousands of lives. Historians working from documents now put it at around 1.1 million. Both numbers should have been on screen. Ours had one. The second is a shot. Prisoners burning a pile of toys. Their experts said it didn't happen that way, and she's right. Belongings were taken, sorted, and stored, not piled up and burned.

That scene was meant to carried grief through an object. It shouldn't have been in a film about Awitz. [music] There's no version of that subject where you invent an image, however you mean it. The third is a line that nobody had ever escaped Awitz to tell the world. That isn't true and we knew it wasn't. We'd made a film about Vtold Pitky who went into the camp deliberately and escaped in 1943. What made Verba and Vetsler different is what they carried out.

A report in time to be acted on. That's what the line should have said. We can't change a published video. Nobody can. What we could do is put the corrections underneath it. And we have all three with a link to the Awitz Burkanal Memorial. On that film, the factchecking wasn't good enough. That's ours. And we're not dressing it up. So, here's the answer to their question. Two writers, they find their own topics, write their own scripts, and check their own work.

When something's uncertain, they ask each other because there's nobody else to ask. [music] That's the whole process. It's not much. Then we ask the same question back. We watched [music] 17 of their films and checked what we could against primary sources and against the source lists they publish under their own videos. >> Soviet fighter jets scramble into the sky. One of them flown by Major General Gennady Bosapovich.

Asapavich was a major or a lieutenant colonel depending on the source. He was never a general. The general in that story is Cornikov, the man who gave the order. Their own source 31 calls him major. Their own source 27, the New York Times calls him Lieutenant Colonel. A journalist, two editors and chief, a third pair of eyes, a factchecking team, and a general who was never a general got through all of them. To be fair, they fixed it.

One line in the description. Asapavich was only a major, not a major general. That's [music] fine. That's how it's supposed to work. You get something wrong, somebody notices, you write a line under the video. Everybody makes mistakes. We made three, so keep going. The sources are right. The script didn't read them. And then there's their film about the architect of the Holocaust. 5 million views. Before anything else, Ikeman organized the deportation of more than 1 and a half million people to the death camps.

A court found that he and the camp commonant jointly decided to use Cyclon B and that his office ordered the gas. Nobody here is making him smaller than he was. But in 40 seconds, that film gives him three things he never did. He has the cremation process optimized so that each corpse is reduced to just two handfuls of ash. He even sets up belt conveyors to speed up the process of removing the bodies from the ovens. Ikeman didn't give the green light to anything.

Hitler decided. Goring signed the authorization. Hydrickch chaired the conference. Himmler gave the orders. Ikeman wrote the minutes and ran the trains. Their own source says it in one sentence. At no point in his career was Ikeman a senior decision maker. That's Yad Vashim, number 11 in the list under their own video. Two handfuls of ash. No source says that. Not one of the 68 in their list, not anywhere we could find. and the conveyor belts.

There was one conveyor belt crematorium in the history of the Third Reich. It was a patent application filed in October 1942. It was never built. Conveyor belt is a metaphor Hannah Arent used for his paperwork. Somebody read the metaphor and built a machine out of it. A viewer told them all of that under the video. 11 months ago. Patent 1942. Never built a rent. No reply. No note in the description. Nothing changed. >> We still make mistakes, but we try to correct them as best we can. >> They do.

A pilot's rank fixed one line. Three invented facts about the Holocaust flagged by a viewer 11 months ago. Nothing. We got three things wrong in a film about Awitz. We fix them the same way. One line under the video. So, the rule is they're allowed to make mistakes and fix them. We are not. Interesting logic. It's so important to be accurate about this. Holocaust deniers often exploit outdated or imprecise numbers to cast doubt on the Holocaust as a whole.

That's them, about us. 17 films. There are 121 we never opened. And that's not because we [music] didn't want to. We had a letter to answer, a deadline attached to it, and a company to keep running while we did both. The corrections, the registers, the source lists, the transcripts, all of that took every hour we had. And we still only got through 17. So, if you want the rest, every video, every date, [music] every number checked against every source they publish, tell us in the comments.

We'll make the second part. Then, the main journalist covering the story writes the script under the supervision of an editor-inchief. Yet another editor-inchief provides a third pair of eyes, and every video gets a fact check by our dedicated fact-checking team. a journalist, two editors and chief, a third pair of eyes, a dedicated fact-checking team, a hundred people against two writers who check their own work, and a machine that helps them search.

That's the thing this film says is killing documentary >> because all of this is endangering educational content on YouTube. >> Under their video about the night the world nearly ended, a pilot's rank was wrong. They fixed it in the description under their video about the Holocaust. Yad Vashim says he was never a decision maker. In the video, he gives the green light. So, who exactly is endangering it? We don't call ourselves journalists.

We're a studio. We make videos we hope people want to watch, and we're still learning how. Nobody invested millions in us. We don't owe anyone anything. There's no fund that needs us sold within 5 years. But if you do call yourself a journalist, the word comes with a procedure attached. You ask before you conclude, not 27 days after you've published the conclusion. You check what you print, including the date on your own letter.

You read your own source list before you put a number on screen. And when a viewer tells you you're wrong, you answer. And you don't publish a private person's home region and his surname when you'd never do that to a corporation. Afghanistan was journalism. They say it won four awards. We believe them. This wasn't that. Although maybe we've got the standard wrong. Maybe a journalist can put three documents on screen, highlight the lines he needs, and read out one sentence from the rest.

Because that's what happened to our answer. They showed our letters, all three of them on screen, and they highlighted the parts they wanted. Here they are without the highlighter. The first is three sentences. We've never re-uploaded another creator's video. Never used another creator's footage. Never reused another creator's thumbnail. Our content is made by our own team from scratch. Everything in this film is that sentence.

Checked. The second says, "AI is a tool and everything still gets made by hand. Every prompt, every picture, every animation." And it asks why you'd investigate a channel that isn't your competitor. And the third, the one they quoted from says half of it is fictional and 30% [music] is wrong. It also offers a call. That line didn't make it in. Out of all of it, here's what did. >> Lastly, life is like a boomerang. Okay. 8 million people heard that one.

There's a list of what this channel has covered. The hunt for the architect of the Holocaust, a pharmaceutical corporation that made money from opioids, prison camps in North Korea, an FBI agent inside the Ku Klux Clan, Afghanistan, journalist in Gaza. That's the work Fern is respected for and it deserves to be. And then a studio 15 times smaller appears on that list. So, here's everything we know and nothing we don't.

A company that has lost money 2 years running. $12.5 million down since it started. 41 million owed at a rate we calculated at roughly 24%. 27 million on its balance sheet for how videos get made. Scripts, voiceovers, animation style, thumbnails pledged against that debt along with the names of the channels. That number is worth what it says for exactly as long as making videos stays expensive. We make ours for a few thousand dollar.

We're not going to tell you what that means. We said at the start we wouldn't, and we have no document that would let us. You've seen everything we have. Draw your own line. A year ago, this looked like a cartoon. Today, it looks like a frame. A year ago, these shots were impossible on our budget. Now they cost a few thousand dollars. That's the whole change. It's the only thing this film is really about. Cinema was available for a hundred years to people with [music] billions.

It's now available to people with time, stubbornness, and a few thousand. Most of what gets made that way will be bad. Most films made for billions are also bad. This is where our money goes. All of it. We're making films, not videos about films. Films. That's what the channels pay for. And it's why there's nothing left over. Three people started this in a city you'd never heard of an hour ago. There are 30 of us now.

We don't know what this turns into either. We're using [music] it to make the thing we always wanted to make. And finally, we've got one more thing to say. And no, it isn't a desk ad. First, subscribe. Watch what we build next. And second, life is like a boomerang. This is the boomerang.