How One Company Secretly Poisoned The Planet
Derek Muller
An investigative deep-dive into PFAS 'forever chemicals' and the corporate cover-up that contaminated the planet.
Why we picked this
Won an AAAS Kavli award for science journalism. Three million views in 24 hours. This is Veritasium at its most ambitious.
Derek Muller’s Veritasium channel is known for making physics intuitive, but this hour-long investigation goes somewhere different entirely. It’s the story of PFAS — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, the “forever chemicals” that are now detectable in the blood of virtually every person on Earth — and the company that knew about the dangers for decades.
The reporting is meticulous. Muller traces the chemistry, the corporate decision-making, the regulatory failures, and the human cost with the same rigor he brings to explaining quantum mechanics. The result is something closer to investigative journalism than a typical YouTube science video, and it earned him an AAAS Kavli Foundation award for Science Journalism.
At nearly an hour, it demands your attention. It earns every minute of it.