Hank Green lets loose on YouTube, billionaires, and algorithms

Summary

Episode Overview

Title: Hank Green lets loose on YouTube, billionaires, and algorithms
Podcast: Decoder with Nilay Patel (The Verge)
Date: February 23, 2026
Theme:
Host Nilay Patel interviews Hank Green—science communicator, YouTuber, and (now former) co-founder of the educational video company Complexly—about the transformation of Complexly into a nonprofit, the structural pressures of digital media platforms, the role of algorithms and creators, the new economics of online video, burnout, and the changing nature of value and impact in the internet age. The discussion is passionate and wide-ranging, mixing deep analysis of incentives and platform dynamics with practical details about running a modern educational media company.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Complexly Story: From For-Profit to Nonprofit ([03:00] – [10:58])

• Background on Complexly:

  • Founded in 2012 by Hank and John Green, producing educational shows such as Crash Course and SciShow.
  • Company grew to over 70 people but was always essentially invisible: “You might know John Green, you might know Hank Green, but you probably don’t know Complexly.” ([05:30], Hank Green)

• Ownership and Structure:

  • The company was 100% owned by the Greens; no outside investment except for an early YouTube grant.
  • Decision to convert Complexly into a nonprofit motivated by a desire to maintain free, high-quality educational content and resist commercial pressures.
  • “One of the tenets has always been, like, the videos should be free for everyone forever.” ([07:50], Hank Green)

• Core Philosophy:

  • Incentives matter; nonprofits are set up to maximize impact and public value rather than profit.
  • “If we’re going to lead it this way, long term, it can’t just be like Hank and John say so. We have to create an incentive structure that’s like, actually what’s the incentive structure that leads you to always be maximizing the impact rather than the revenue?” ([08:50], Hank Green)

2. The Economics and Incentives of YouTube and Online Video ([10:58] – [21:12])

• YouTube’s Unique Role:

  • YouTube took early steps to support creators, but is now increasingly commercial and algorithm-driven.
  • Green sees educational content as particularly unfunded (“there’s not a way to do that and have brand deals in the middle of it... if you want it to be classroom quality, it’s just impossible”). ([11:50], Hank Green)
  • “It’s not hard to make good money if you have a YouTube channel...as long as you’re not spending a lot of money on the videos.” ([11:50], Hank Green)

• Algorithmic Power and Changing Platform Dynamics:

  • Critique of how platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram structure attention and rewards (“...when we outsourced all of our decision making to content recommendation algorithms, that was a lot more power than we thought we were ceding.” [16:38], Hank Green)
  • “I think in the future we will look back on this era with the most critical lens…everyone in society gave away their choice to select what content they watched.” ([17:55], Hank Green)

• Relative Fairness of YouTube:

  • “YouTube shares a heck of a lot more revenue with me than most platforms… And a lot of people think of the 55% cut as a huge blunder… I think there would be a true creator revolt if they decided that they were going to alter the way that money is split.” ([14:42], Hank Green)

3. Creator Burnout, Platform Incentives & Burn-Through Culture ([26:28] – [31:44])

• TikTok & Creator Burnout:

  • Describes platforms’ implicit strategy of cycling through short-lived creators: “You could just have them last for six months and then burn through them.” ([28:40], Hank Green)
  • The abundance of aspiring creators is a structural reality: “We are competing against an army of teenagers who will work for free on Instagram.” ([28:40], Eli Patel)

• Attention Economy and Brand Value:

  • Media brands as moats in a chaotic attention economy; as users age, their preferences pivot from entertainment to trust and credibility (“when I’m 20, I don’t get that. But when I’m 30, I do… when I’m 30, I type in theverge.com, the last website on Earth.” [30:38], Hank Green)

4. The Nonprofit Transition: Process & Impact ([31:44] – [47:18])

• Insulation from Capitalist Pressures:

  • Becoming a nonprofit offers protection against market/algorithmic incentives that don’t align with educational impact.
  • “You don’t have impact without reach.” ([31:44], Hank Green)
  • “For every year that Crash Course has existed, we’ve been scraping by, and that’s because we create way more value than we capture... I could have sold this company for a lot of money and I didn’t. That’s because the impact matters more to me.” ([32:02] & [34:15], Hank Green)

• Funding and Patronage in the Age of Billionaires:

  • “It's the year 2026. Income inequality, not income inequality—wealth inequality is like Gilded Age level crap going on... There’s people, you know, they were early at OpenAI or they were early at Meta. There’s a lot of them and they have too much. It’s ridiculous... Get the money out of your bank account.” ([34:15], Hank Green)

• Internal Decision-Making and Staff Impact:

  • Considerations for staff in the transition: loss of potential windfall from acquisition offset by the reality that “not very many people at the company were sitting back, waiting, thinking that that was going to happen someday.” ([38:22], Hank Green)

• Why Not Sell or Go Employee-Owned?:

  • Meetings with potential buyers reaffirmed that selling would compromise their mission; employee-ownership complex for their needs.

5. Structural and Operational Details at Complexly ([41:22] – [47:18])

• Team Overview:

  • Over 70 staff; recently restructured to have shared art/editorial/production pools rather than show silos.

• Leadership Transitions:

  • Julie Smith is now CEO (formerly COO); Hank transitioned due to health reasons and preference for strategy/creative work.

• Board Composition:

  • Small board featuring Julie Smith, Hank, and Logan Smalley (TED-Ed founder); plan to add others from media, education, and fundraising backgrounds. ([44:39], Hank Green)

6. Nonprofit Economics: Donations, Write-offs, and the Patronage Class ([51:57] – [55:12])

• Fundraising and Tax Structures:

  • New structure unlocks donations from wealthy donors (including via Donor-Advised Funds).
  • Clarification: tax breaks don’t make donors richer, just let them give more without more going to government.
    • “Just for clarity, they don’t get more money when they give money away…they just are able to give away more money because they’re tax deductible.” ([52:50], Hank Green)
  • Anecdote about a billionaire who refuses tax deductions because he believes in public taxes ([54:06], Hank Green & Eli Patel).

• Changing Incentives:

  • “You’re just in a different zone, right?... There’s a new line of revenue for the company because you have the structure. You’ve created the incentives so that you’re not just rapaciously chasing growth at all ends.” ([54:03], Eli Patel)

• Fighting Slop and Platform Tides:

  • Even as they get donor insulation, must still compete with a flood of AI and low-effort content (“slop”) on the platforms.

7. The Rise of AI, Content Quality, and the Value of “Slop” ([55:12] – [63:39])

• AI-generated Content Concerns:
  • “Every time something big happens with AI, no one thought that it was going to happen…The thing that I’m mostly worried about is that it’s going to be bad in a way that we don’t predict, which is exactly what the social internet did.” ([56:49], Hank Green)
  • Differentiation of “slop” (“it’s easy to make”) from meaningful human work (“there’s a bunch of human decisions that went into it”). ([57:48], Hank Green)
  • Hopes for human discernment: “I do hold out this hope that what is happening right now is not dissimilar from people deciding that they couldn’t enjoy newspapers that lied to them anymore and they sought out structures and companies thrived, building structures that promised a better product.” ([63:55], Hank Green)

8. The Future of Learning: AI Tutoring, Human Connection, and New Pedagogies ([65:45] – [71:47])

• Complementary Roles of AI and Human Teaching:

  • Green believes AI-driven tutors (like Khanmigo) will coexist with human-guided education.
  • “One-on-one tutoring works really well… what is the school but scaling that thing?” ([67:45], Hank Green)
  • Human motivation, care, and connection remain irreplaceable aspects.

• Changing Modes of Engagement:

  • Analogy to the textbook anxiety of the past—new tech causes both promise and disruption.
  • The internet brought massive access—but also more misinformation, with structural harm that’s difficult to regulate or mitigate.

9. The Real Battle: Attention, Salience, and Storytelling ([72:00] – [75:15])

• Attention as the True Currency:

  • “Everything in a world of infinite content, everything is about how easy something is to pay attention to. So how well it captures and holds attention, that’s everything.” ([72:06], Hank Green)
  • Importance of promoting pro-social attention cues and understanding anti-social outrage-bait.

• Algorithms as De Facto Societal Gatekeepers:

  • “We live in the AI age. We are all controlled by AI all of the time already. It’s been that way for 10 years.” ([74:01], Hank Green)

• Storytelling as Core to Human Experience:

  • “Everything is stories. We’re made of stories. Everything is storytelling.” ([74:55], Hank Green)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Changing Ownership and Incentives:
  “...one of the tenets has always been, like, the videos should be free for everyone forever. That’s what we keep saying to people...So we need to actually...create an incentive structure that’s...about how do you...always be maximizing the impact rather than the revenue.” ([07:50], Hank Green)

• On Platform Control:
  “There’s so much money, and they’ve extracted it all from advertising from other creators…every YouTuber gets their wings and realizes that they run a business when they get demonetized for the first time..." ([14:15], Eli Patel)

• On Algorithmic Attention:
  “We live in the AI age. We are all controlled by AI all of the time already. It’s been that way for 10 years. This is it. Your brain has been taken over by recommendation algorithms that decide what you see and what you pay attention to is what just, like, builds your view of the world.” ([74:01], Hank Green)

• On Patronage and Wealth in 2026:
  “It kind of infuriates me that...for every year that Crash Course has existed, we’ve been scraping by, and that’s because we create way more value than we capture...It’s the year 2026. Income inequality, not income inequality—wealth inequality is like Gilded Age level crap going on...It’s ridiculous. And sometimes [the rich] will say to me, they will say, I just don’t know how to deploy it in a way that’s maximal. And I’m like, sir, it’s in your bank account right now doing zilch. So just let me figure it out for you.” ([34:15], Hank Green)

• On Human Value in the Post-AI Age:
  “What you need is to be able to understand people and communicate with each other and have cultural—know what’s culturally resonant, know where we are right now in the history of art and write good copy. And I’m like, you’re just like—so what you’re saying is we should all go to liberal arts school…For the last 20 years…everybody should go STEM. It was a huge mistake.” ([60:12], Hank Green)

• On Structure vs. Chaotic Algorithmic Platforms:
  “If your content is a social good, you’re not going to be a billionaire, so you might as well have, like, a good job. And so maybe the thing you should do is, like, be a charity. If you’re good at it, if you’re actually delivering value...” ([34:15], Hank Green)

• On The Real Work:
  “Everything is about attention. Everything is about salience. Everything is about how easy it is to get somebody to pay attention to something. So that’s the actual leverage point.” ([74:01], Hank Green)

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Important Timestamps

• [05:30] – How people know Hank & John, but not Complexly.
• [07:50] – On making videos free and maximizing impact.
• [14:15] – Critiquing YouTube’s platform economics.
• [17:55] – On society giving up content choice to algorithms.
• [26:46] – The cycle of creator burnout on TikTok/Instagram.
• [31:44] – Insulating against capitalist incentives via nonprofit status.
• [34:15] – The case for more patronage and redirecting billionaire wealth.
• [41:22] – Complexly’s staff structure and leadership transitions.
• [44:39] – Building the board for the new nonprofit.
• [54:03] – Tax write-offs, donation incentives, and new fundraising avenues.
• [56:49] – Concerns about unforeseen AI harms and the current “slop” content wave.
• [63:14] – On whether the audience will rebel against commoditized AI content.
• [72:06] – “Everything is about attention.”
• [74:01] – On storytelling, algorithms, and the consequences of the recommendation economy.
• [75:46] – Plans for expanding science communicator residencies at Complexly.

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Future Plans at Complexly ([76:10] – End)

• New Initiatives:
  • Expanding SciShow residencies for up-and-coming science communicators to experience real editorial rigor and develop storytelling chops.
  • Fostering growth within the science communication and education space to battle both misinformation and the rising tide of low-effort AI content.

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Summary Takeaway

This episode is a revealing and fiery meditation on how internet incentives shape what we learn, see, and believe, and what it means to try and set up an institution that maintains educational quality and integrity despite an environment defined by algorithmic control, platform churn, and wealth concentration. Hank Green’s transformation of Complexly into a nonprofit is both a principled stance and a strategic move to secure impact and insulate from corrosive incentives, even as the landscape of media and education shifts ever faster around him.

Transcript

[Podcast Host (Ad Read)]

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[Hank Green]

The world moves fast. Your workday even faster. Pitching products, drafting reports, analyzing data Microsoft 365 copilot is your AI assistant for work built into wor, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Microsoft 365 apps you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create and summarize so you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn [e-mail] M365Copilot

[Eli Patel]

hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Eli Patel, editor in chief of the Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Hank Green, a longtime friend of Decoder and the co founder and now former owner of Complexly, an online education company he started with his brother John in 2012. I say former owner because Hank and John have just converted Complexly into a nonprofit and given up their ownership of the company in the process. That is some of the purest decoder rate that ever was, because it's all about how you structure a company and how you make decisions about changing that structure. So of course I asked Hank to come on the show and talk all about it. But in addition to being pure decoder bait, the story of Complexly is also about media and how any of us can look at the Internet and video landscape of 2026 and try to do something meaningful and ethical with it while still growing an audience and making enough money to survive. If you've been following Decoder or the Verge. You know that I've been obsessed with all that for quite a while. About two years ago, Hank interviewed me on this show, and he and I talked a lot back then about why I call the Verge the last website on earth and how video has really taken over the world. Regular Decoder listeners have also heard me tell a whole lot of CEOs and media executives that if we were starting the Verge over right now, we' probably be a YouTube channel or maybe a TikTok channel. But starting a business on those platforms means giving up a lot of control over your distribution, and Hank and I spent a lot of time talking about that in this episode. What you're going to hear Hank get particularly passionate about is where the money is, where it should be, and what prevents it from getting there. Because it turns out that there's a whole lot of money sloshing around the world, and it's just maybe not going to the people who are doing the work. This was a really fiery conversation. Hank was really animated for a lot of it. I know I'm always saying you're going to like the episodes, but I promise you are going to really like, like this episode. Okay. Hank Green, former owner of Complexly. Here we go. Hank Green, you are the often guest host of Decoder. You've. I think you've hosted the show more often than I have recently. You are the co founder, the former owner of complexly. You're a TikTok superstar. You're a science communicator. You're everything. Welcome back to Decoder. Hello.

[Hank Green]

It's always great to be here. I'm a big fan of your show.

[Eli Patel]

One time you were the guest, like very.

[Hank Green]

I have been the guest before, but it was a while ago.

[Eli Patel]

Long, long ago. You're the guest. Recently, you've mostly just been the host of the show. Some of our most popular episodes.

[Hank Green]

I mean, you guys did a great job of getting people on with me. Your staff is fantastic at giving me good questions to ask, and then I just try and charm my way through it.

[Eli Patel]

It is plug and play. Almost anyone can do it, which is not a compliment. No. I'm excited to talk to you. I'm excited to have you as a guest. It was wonderful having you as a guest host while I was out on leave. It was fun to listen to my own show as a listener for once. It's a very unusual feeling. But I am thrilled to have you as a guest because you have done some of the most decoder bait stuff in history to talk about, which is perfect.

[Hank Green]

I'm so excited. It was just on another podcast and it was. It was like 100% just like talking about memes and stuff. And I was like, can we talk about business, please?

[Eli Patel]

Oh, no, I gotta delete the meme section. All right. So you and your brother John founded this company Complexly, which I. I actually wonder. I want to start at the beginning. I. People know you. They know John. They know the shows you make. They know your TikTok channel. They know. They know you as Internet personalities, people who make things, creators. Do you think they know Complexly? Is that. Is that foregrounded? It's the company that runs all this stuff.

[Hank Green]

Not as much as I certainly would like them to. So usually people know the shows like, they know Hank and John. And then in addition to that, they know the shows. So there are shows that we make that have a big audience that we are not involved in. We don't host. But the fact that there's like a thing sitting underneath all of it, I think is a little bit mysterious and also in a way, almost anachronistic. Like, that's not how YouTube. That's not how media works anymore. And. But there is, and I want people to know about it. And I think that, like, honestly, like, that's starting to change. But, yeah, it's like it's over 70 people and we make a lot of different shows. So I think it's like, to some extent, it's like, you know, SciShow or, you know, Eons or, you know, Crash Course or, you know, Ask Inc. Anything. But you might not. And, you know, and you might know John Green, you might know Hank Green, but you probably don't know complexly. So really, part of my job right now is just to say the word complexly a lot. So let's.

[Eli Patel]

This is what I mean about the decoder bait. So you have a company. You've had one for quite some time.

[Hank Green]

Yeah, 15 years. Yeah.

[Eli Patel]

Yeah. That company had a structure. I'm going to ask you about how you make decisions. This is going to be great. You recently changed the ownership structure of that company. So you and John founded it. You owned 100% of it. Notably, you didn't take any investment. I think there was a YouTube grant somewhere along the way that there was

[Hank Green]

an early YouTube grant. Yeah.

[Eli Patel]

In that period where YouTube was like, does anyone want to make videos? Here's some money. Yeah.

[Hank Green]

And honestly, I think that that program is considered a failure internally, but I think that it was extremely successful. If you Only look at the money they gave to YouTubers. If you look at the money that they gave to like media companies, it was a very bad investment. But if you, if you only look at like Rhett and Link and Phil DeFranco and the fine brothers and Hank and John, there's just like, it turns out there was a lot of good stuff came out of that.

[Eli Patel]

I'm curious about that too. I agree with you, by the way. And Vox Media received some of that money. So it goes.

[Hank Green]

Yeah.

[Eli Patel]

But I agree with you that it kickstarted the creator economy in a very specific way, particularly on YouTube. Complexity was your company was started with some of that, but that was just a grant. They didn't have any ownership. It was just you and John own the whole thing. And now you've turned the company into nonprofit. That's just a big organizational style. Switch ownership structure. Switch. Talk about that for one second. What does it mean to be a non profit?

[Hank Green]

Now there's a big piece of this that is incentive fee. You know, I ultimately like everything in business is incentive fee. And, and there's always been a bunch of like doors open to us that feel very business. You know, we gotta turn this into a freemium product. We gotta create a subscription service. We should go over the top. We like all these different ways that, that you have. Like if you have which one of the things that complexly has is a educational video brand that is used in pretty much every school district in America. I would say probably every school district, probably close to every school. We have a really great relationship with teachers. Teachers love us, students love us. Administrators don't know that we exist because we don't have to sell ourselves to anybody because it's free and the like. And people watch because they want to learn even if they're not inside of school. So we have this thing that we could easily leverage. This is why if you had a normal company, you know, you would turn this into like a, you know, some kind of freemium model or you would be positioning yourself to sell to an edtech company, et cetera. Like that's what you would normally do. We keep not doing that and, but I think that honestly it's like held us back from developing some projects because we don't want to do things that would lead us too quickly or too aggressively into the sort of business shaped direction. And, and so because one of the tenets has always been like, the videos should be free for everyone forever. That's what we keep saying to people. That's what we say to the staff internally. And so this is really a project that is about impact, which means two things. One, you're adding value if you're reaching more people. And so anything that constricts the number of people you reach is decreasing your impact. And then how much good are you doing with the content? Like, how much value is the content itself delivering? And I think that all of our shows are doing that work and we want to keep them all open. We want to continue to compete in the online video space. We don't want to lock ourselves up or lock teachers into using us, because then it's like, oh, we did it. We created the moat and we can invest less in the content and it could be cheaper to make you see this happen in educational media companies. So that's all stuff that we don't think is a good idea. And so we're like, well, we need to actually, if we're going to lead it this way, long term, it can't just be like Hank and John say. So we have to create an incentive structure that's like, actually what's the incentive structure that leads you to always be maximizing the impact rather than the revenue. And that's really a story that's more about how do you. If our job is now to sell ourselves to our crowdfunding or grants or family foundations or, you know, big granting organizations, what are we going to be selling? We're not going to be selling. We're going to be like trying to lock people in. We're trying to like our. The people we're accountable to now are like our audience, and they're people who would like us to deliver value to our audience.

[Eli Patel]

I think about that a lot because fundamentally what we're talking about here is YouTube, right? Like the YouTube ecosystem is a lot is where complexly is like mostly organized and centered. There are other platforms, they have all have big audiences in different ways. But, you know, if you're gonna get value out of one of the videos that we're talking about, you need to watch the whole thing on YouTube, not 15 pirated clips on TikTok with the vertical lines putting it through. I'm very curious about that whole economy, but what we're really talking about here is YouTube, right? And YouTube is just under a lot of pressure all the time in a lot of different ways. And it sounds to me like what you're saying is we should find other ways to make YouTube videos that aren't so commercial because everyone else on YouTube runs into the requirements of being that commercial. And it, as you're saying, the incentives then start to warp the business. And that's, that's where you get freemium and that's where you get this other stuff from.

[Hank Green]

Yeah, and I think also, you know, it's not hard to make good money if you have a YouTube channel that is reaching a lot of people, as long as you're not spending a lot of money on the videos. And you know, I, I, I know that like I have my own personal channel that's just me and I can make enough money to fund my life with that. But if I wanted to be making educational content, that was right all the time. If I needed that infrastructure and if I wanted it to be classroom quality, it's just impossible. There's just not a way to do that and have brand deals in the middle of it. You can't do that if you're making educational videos for classrooms and you can't cut every corner. You have to have them be scripted. Mostly what people are looking at is how do you do, do low budget, long form content? How do you spend less, like less time making stuff that's longer and that's like podcasts. It's like, here we are, here we are. And that's not really what we want to do. So there's like a business model problem there. And then the other is like the attention competition world. And we want to compete in that space, but there's different areas of that. And so we really, we would like people to be using our content because they know that it's good in addition to it being something that grabs your attention. And thus we don't have to be like, you know, what if the aliens made the pyramids and then use that as like the leverage into teaching you about Egypt? No, that's not the world we want to be existing in.

[Eli Patel]

Let me ask you about that kind of altogether. Every time you've come on the show, you and I have talked about how to make money in media and how to support good work in media. And that's been a real theme of our conversations. Regardless of who is interviewing who, which again, you're the only guest where it has been the other way around. I look at YouTube and I hear you say you can't make educational content here at the quality you need to for the classroom, and certainly not without doing brand deals. And I, to me, this just feels like the biggest indictment of this platform possible. Right here's one of the richest companies in the world. They're going to spend another trillion dollars on Data centers to build AI systems, right? Like, they have so much money.

[Hank Green]

Some of those are my dollars, right?

[Eli Patel]

They have so much money and they've extracted it all from advertising from other creators. I mean, I tell the joke all the time that every YouTuber gets their wings and realizes that they run a business when they get demonetized for the first time or they make the video about how mad they are at YouTube. Have you ever had a conversation with YouTube where you're like, hey, at least pay more per view for the good educational content? Or has it always just been, look, you're just like everyone else, regardless of what business you want to be in?

[Hank Green]

We've gotten some of those things and they have done that. They've stopped. But for a long time they did do stuff like that. They were like, we want educational content for this age range and we want, you know, we recognize that it's very. So in particular, like 8 to 12 is a real no man's land in terms of being able to fund content. With younger than that. There's more granting organizations that want to fund it and there's like PBS stuff and then with like older than that, the kids are making their own decisions and they're watching Mr. Beast. But that middle area, there's not a lot to do there, which I think is an interesting problem to try and solve. And so YouTube did that for a while. You know, our show SciShow Kids was created through them giving us some money. I'm like the most biased person you can talk to about YouTube because like I've had a really productive relationship with them over the years. They've responded when I, I've criticized them about things. This has stopped a little bit, honestly. Like, you know, I criticized them about sort of not telling us, not really saying out loud that they're training AI with our content, but doing it and basically saying like, this is a competitive advantage. We can just like pop into our license that now we can do this and everybody's going to agree with the license because it's not like they're going to stop uploading on YouTube. We're going to say not only are we going to use this, we have permission to use this. And unlike all these other companies that trained on a bunch of non consensual data, we trained on consensual data. And by consensual, it's like we put it in the license and then everybody agreed to it because they had no choice and nobody even knew that that was happening. And I made a thing and basically Radio silence. And so I think that in particular this period, it's just so. It feels so ruthless and everybody is having to. In terms of these big tech companies fighting to be the one who create the digital God. It felt like, you know, there's kind of a reason why I maybe didn't hear back about that. But I've had a pretty productive relationship and I, like, honestly, I've always imagined myself to be running a business. And the reality is that YouTube shares a heck of a lot more revenue with me than most platforms. You know, we get 55% of the ad revenue from our videos. And then like, I'm out here on Instagram and they're like, how are we going to build the slot machine today? We're going to change it every two weeks. You're never going to know how much money you make. Sometimes you're going to make a ton, sometimes you're not going to make a lot. It's going to be a real sort of randomized reward situation that's going to make you feel like you're playing a game that's very exciting. And then one day the money will just stop. And now you figure it out. And I think YouTube would probably have structured itself like that if it had figured that out sooner. I think a lot of people think of the 55% cut as a huge blunder on their part that they set this system up and they can't change it. I think there would be a true creator revolt if they decided that they were going to alter the way that money is split. Though they did alter it for shorts. They were like, well, it's a different piece of content and it has a different economy, and so we're going to take a bigger cut. When I think of the indictment of YouTube, I think less about the creator economy, if only because they do at least do better than everyone else. They lie less, they seem to care more, they seem to have some internal systems that are actually about surfacing creator concerns and having true advocates internally. I think that that is less than it once was. Just as all power structures in tech that can sort of hold tech accountable have weakened over the last five years, and that seems to be accelerating. But the thing that in all of this, I think is much more indictable is like when we outsourced all of our decision making to content recommendation algorithms, that was a lot more power than we thought we were seeding. And that's a really tricky thing to do. Well, I think that YouTube did it badly for a long time. Does it Better now, but it's still, you know, there's lots of, you know, YouTube's like, I've identified that you enjoy rocket ships. Have you tried transphobia kind of situation going on, but better than it was when that, When Shorts first launched. I mean, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this, but I think in the future we will look back on this era with the most critical lens of, is that everyone in society gave away the choice, their choice to select what content they watched. And they, you know, on YouTube, you still do make that decision. It decides what to show you, you know, and like people like me are deciding how, how much clickbait we want to use, how many tools we want to use to entice you to it, to attract you to our content. But on TikTok and shorts and Reels, we've given up all decision making and we like it. We prefer that. And I think that we will look back on that as a pretty cringey activity. But I don't know. How long will it be 50 years? Will it be 20? Will it be 100? I don't know.

[Eli Patel]

There are product design lawsuits occurring right now about those platforms that suggest maybe it will be less than one year different.

[Hank Green]

Are you talking about the infinite feeds being manipulative or something like that?

[Eli Patel]

Yeah, to overcome the content moderation First Amendment concerns. The lawsuits are product design concerns. That's a whole different episode. We can, we can do that one some other time because I'm fascinated how you feel about that as a creator. The reason I asked about YouTube and business and rates to start with is when you mentioned the incentives of running the business and what the incentives would lead you to. To. To gain more profit tomorrow than you do today. Right. You mentioned things like freemium models and selling to an ed tech company and building your moats and reducing the cost of your videos, which is stuff that rapacious to media companies do. But that's. Those are the things they do.

[Hank Green]

Really glad we didn't have an investor pushing us to do all this.

[Eli Patel]

Yeah, that's what your investors would push you to do. That all happens if you're not making enough money from the biggest pot. Right. And that YouTube is.

[Hank Green]

You do it no matter what. Why would you. If you. If I was making 20 times more money from YouTube, I'd like. And I had a. I had investors behind me, they'd still want me to make 40 times more money. You know,

[Eli Patel]

speaking of advertising, we're going to pause here for a short break. We'll be right back.

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[Eli Patel]

Hey everyone. This segment of decoder sessions features my boss, Helen Havlak, the writer's publisher and l' Oreal Group's global Vice president of tech and open innovations. I think you're going to enjoy this conversation.

[Helen Havlak]

We're going to start with a decoder. Classic question. What does tech and open innovation mean at l'?

[Eli Patel]

Oreal?

[Helen Havlak]

Who is on your team? What kind of projects do you work on?

Open innovation is all the partnerships that we have in l', Oreal, working with startups outside. And it's really a great time right now to be doing open innovation because we're doing things in vertical farming and sustainable cultivation and biotech. So we do all those partnerships and our team is responsible for them. And the augmented beauty team is all the tech that started 15 years ago when we kind of had a blank page. And now how can we bring beauty and tech together?

How do you decide which projects to invest in?

At the beginning I was trying to push as much as I could to get people to think that beauty was relevant for tech. So we were really tech centric. And then over time we started thinking about how to look more at beauty products that we can upgrade thanks to tech. And so we have a little bit more kind of of process behind how we choose projects. Now we try and kind of do things like upgrading the hairdryer to be able to do three out of four people have a hairdryer at home. And so how can we make it better or this year like the flat irons that we're using and LED masks and stuff like that. So we, we do have a little bit of that kind of process but we leave some space for serendipity and some creativity. So we have scientists all the way to engineers and we let the scientists kind of think of of some new clever ideas too.

[Eli Patel]

Welcome back. I'm talking with Hank Green about the creator economy and why it's kind of a mess. I see how that works. You mentioned Instagram. I see how that works for the Tiktokers and for the Instagrammers right where the platform is paying them no Money. And they've turned themselves into qvc, like, straightforwardly. That's how those economies work. Yeah.

[Hank Green]

I mean, so really what we're looking at is like, okay, well, what about the way TV worked? And do you think that. And the question is, did TV create higher value content? And the answer is yes. Created content that more people spent more money on, made more money making. There were more people involved in the creation. There was a more robust economy, and now there is less. And what we're looking at there is a little bit of. If you take away the gatekeepers, if you say anybody can create, everybody will. And they don't need as much money because they just want to make things and they just want to get attention and they just want, like, to feel, like, important in society. And I watch this. It's much more intense on TikTok, where people come in and they're like, all I want is to be heard. And that works for six months. And then they're like, but I also need to pay rent. And I've got a lot of. There's a lot of parts of being heard that actually suck, especially if you're not aware, like a white man, you're starting to get a lot of negative consequences to the stuff that. To posting and putting your face out there. And then you're like, well, I'd like something in exchange for all of this. And you're trying to figure that out. And then the two sort of paths that occur is either you figure out a way to make it work by diversifying across platforms and gridding, productizing, et cetera. Making a podcast is a big one. Or you burn out. And you know who replaces you? Anybody. Because they all, like, for six months, they're just like, oh, my God, somebody's listening to me. They're laughing at my jokes. They're paying attention. I'm like, now I'm the person who I was watching and everybody wants it. But what these platforms have realized is that you could just have them last for six months and then burn through them.

[Eli Patel]

There was a time when YouTube would talk about creator burnout, and that has all since receded. There. There are these. I have this concept that there are things that we are required to ignore to, like, participate in the information economy. And one of them is that the reality of the media business is we are competing against an army of teenagers who will work for free on Instagram. Yeah. And every conversation I have with media people, we are required to ignore the overabundance of supply that Instagram has to replace. All of us, at the drop of a hat, like, no one has any leverage against these platforms because of the army of teenagers who will work for free. And if you mention it, then all that's left is nihilism. Like, you can't. You have to ignore it so that people can pretend that they have, like, agency in their lives.

[Hank Green]

But, like, I think that you and I are trying to figure out what the business model looks like. It's reflective of the. Like, you know, think about how newspapers did this. You know, there was a time when making a newspaper was extremely cheap. You could give them away for less than the cost of print because of advertising. Suddenly there was all this distribution yellow journalism, fighting for attention with the most sensational headlines and following murders. And just so we're doing that. That's where we're at right now in online media. And then eventually something happened. And by 1980, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times had editorial standards in a huge moat. And they worked really hard to get things right all the time so that you could trust them, unlike those crappy newspapers. And that's just what's happening. And so you and I are saying, Vox. Vox is a brand. The Verge is a brand. And you can trust us in a different way than you trust some guy on TikTok. And when I'm 20, I don't get that. But when I'm 30, I do. And when I'm 20, I don't have money. And when I'm 30, I do. And when I'm 20, I'm not subscribing to anything. I'm just watching whatever comes across my feed. And when I'm 30, I type in theverge.com, the last website on Earth.

[Eli Patel]

We're going to change the domain name. It's getting much longer. That's verge.com, the last. There's. Oddly, there's two.coms embedded in it. It's. It's. It's bold. You know, we're gonna do a Super bowl ad to get people to. To pay attention to it. The reason I'm. I'm starting here instead of, like, tell me about the paperwork to be a nonprofit you've chosen. We have chosen different paths. Like, I. I try to keep us off the platforms. I think the dynamics of the platforms warp us, and that's why we have a website. And we've talked about that at length, and we have a subscription now because I think people paying us directly, it just keeps us away from the influence of algorithms in A way. And it sounds like in watching your announcement video and reading your tweets and some of the coverage of going to be a nonprofit, that being a nonprofit for you is in some way insulation from what an investor would have you do to make more money on these platforms in that way. Right. Because if you want all the videos to be free, they have to exist on those platforms. Platforms. Because free. And no one watching them is not useful. Free. And everyone watching them is useful.

[Hank Green]

Because the only thing that we want is the base level thing that we want is you don't have impact without reach.

[Eli Patel]

Yeah. And the platforms offer you reach. And then there's just a series of incentives the algorithms create that make people do bad things. And being a nonprofit provides you some insulation from those things.

[Hank Green]

Yes, I think so. I think that a thing that. That I want to, you know, I'm moving over to being a board member rather than an owner. And I think that, like, a big thing that, that, like, that board will be constructed for is to make sure that we don't let the incentives go too far in the other way where, like, Reach doesn't matter anymore. As long as we're making content that feels really good to make. I think that that is a. That's a thing that you have got to be careful about. So, you know, we want to structure it so that when we're talking about our impact reports, we're looking at whether we're growing, we're actually reaching more people. And then. I don't know if I should say this, but, you see, there's so much money. It kind of infuriates me that, like, you know, for all. For, like, every year that crash course has existed, we've been scraping by, and that's because we create way more value than we capture. Like, we could easily have been a company that was extremely profitable, and that, like, is, you know, potentially taking on Pearson. And maybe that would have been the thing that would have a better, bigger impact on the world if we actually taken on these existing educational media companies and hired an army of salespeople and tried to do the thing. That's not for me. So that's part of it. That's not for me. That was never going to be me. But if what we're talking about is impact, and we are good at that, and we're good at making videos that make people curious, that capture people's attention, that get them oriented on a thing that's going to provide them value in the short and long term, then we should, like, I Don't know, just give us money to do it. I don't like, we'll make the YouTube money that every other YouTuber makes. And I'm not saying this to other educational creators, too. I want them to hear this as well. Somebody should be giving you money. There should be patronage. It's the year 2026. Income inequality, not income inequality. Wealth inequality is like Gilded age level crap going on. There's people, you know, they were early at OpenAI or they were early at Meta. There's a lot of them and they have too much. It's ridiculous. And sometimes they will say to me, they will say, I just don't know how to deploy it in a way that's maximal. And I'm like, sir, it's in your bank account right now doing zilch. So I feel like, just let me figure it out for you. And that's a little bit how I feel. I'm like, YouTube has created a pretty healthy economic ecosystem for a certain kind of content. It's not Game of Thrones, it's not Mr. Rogers, but a certain kind of content is thriving. I know a lot of YouTubers who are professionals and they have small businesses that are really great, and they've slapped a lot of money into the economy one way or the other. And a lot of that has gone to, like, creative professionals. And it's like a new thing to be. And it's weird. And I think that it's good. I think that they could have been done in a way that was worse. I think it could have been done in a way that was better. But I also think that it's 2026 and money is going to weird places. And I would like, honestly, for more people to follow our lead here. And if your content is a social good, you're not going to be a billionaire, so you might as well have, like, a good job. And so, like, maybe the thing you should do is, like, be a charity. Like, if you're good at it, if you're actually delivering value, don't be a charity just so that you can, like, make stuff. And it's not like getting any reach or anything. Like, look around for people like me and support. And also, you don't have to, like, look at their patreon and going, well, they're asking for $50 a month. I'll give them $50 a month. You can then send them an email and be like, I'd like to give you $50,000. Get the money out of your bank account. I say this as A rich person who does this and who just gave away most of my net worth. That's what turning into a charity is. I could have sold this company for a lot of money, and I didn't. That's because the impact matters more to me. And also for clarity, I'm also fine. I've sold another company and things are good. I think that people should be careful about this if they. But yeah, like that to get. Yeah. I don't know.

[Eli Patel]

Yeah. But the idea that there's just a lot of free floating, sort of like guilty patronage money.

[Hank Green]

Yeah.

[Eli Patel]

You can launder into science content is very powerful. Great business model. Tell me, like, how. How does this work? You're like, I'm gonna.

[Hank Green]

Anyway, anyway, call my brother if you have a bunch of money. Here's my email address.

[Eli Patel]

Yeah, no, no, I meant being a nonprofit. You're like, I'm gonna call John. We're gonna be a nonprofit. I'm gonna call the lawyer. They're gonna say, was it. Did you e. Sign it away? Did you have to. Was there a ceremony? Did you light a torch? Like, how does it work?

[Hank Green]

The crazy thing is that I did print out and sign the paperwork, but after I E signed it just because I wanted to have a copy.

[Eli Patel]

Very good.

[Hank Green]

Well, that's how I feel like I should. Every time a big thing happens like that, there should be some physical manifestation of it. It's as you might imagine, it's really lawyery. And one thing I know about lawyer Y stuff is I don't need to pay that much attention.

[Eli Patel]

So

[Hank Green]

there was a lot of, if we do it this way, then X. If we do it this way, then Y. If we do it this way, then Z? And it was like, do you want X, Y, or Z rather than do you want to do it this way, this way, or this way? It was sort of like outcome based. And we about talked talk through it, and we had to find a lawyer who. Turns out there's not a lot of people who do this. And also people often do it in ways that are about tax evasion. And so figuring that out to do it in a way where the IRS wouldn't be like, are you doing tax evasion was important and slow. I think it's been a year since we made this decision. But ultimately was about finding the right lawyers who knew how things worked and had done this before.

[Eli Patel]

So you execute this decision. I gotta ask. I mean, I ask everybody how they make decisions. What was your framework for saying we're a nonprofit? What led you to this decision.

[Hank Green]

The big thing was how is this going to affect, how is this going to affect staff? How is this going to affect content? How will this, how will we communicate this too? Will this make sense to people? And also will they feel like they're losing something? So at complexly, we have a pretty robust profit sharing system. We've always said that if we're acquired, that will be then reflected in the acquisition, even though we don't have equity. But there would be a sort of similar share as our profit distribution that would go out. And so is that something that would feel like a loss to people? Is there a way to compensate people for that loss? Because in the same way that the equity is no longer me and John's, in the same way, we can never sell and people will never get a big windfall because of that sale. And ultimately it turned out that not very many people at the company were sitting back, waiting, thinking that that was going to happen someday. It's not really a tech startup vibe because it's a media company money, it's educational media in particular. And also we had placed a lot of constraints on the content. So I think when people look at us as an acquisition target, they were like, oh, you won't put any of it behind a paywall. What if we made new stuff? And they're like, no, not that either. And they're like, we don't really want you. Then they wanted things, but that was a real limitation on the value. So there's that. And then there was what are the different ways you can go here? And so we did, I'll be honest, we took meetings with people who wanted to buy us just to get the lay of the land and ultimately decided that that was not a path we wanted to explore. And we also looked at other weird ownership structures, whether employee ownership was a thing that we could try. And it just seemed like there was too many signals that, like actually the thing that this thing should be as a nonprofit organization.

[Eli Patel]

Give me an example of some of those signals.

[Hank Green]

Like, oh, I mean, yeah, it will make it. Yeah, it's not complicated. Like we kept offering people chances to give us money and they took them, you know, like even though they knew they were giving money to a for profit corporation, they would be like, oh yeah, we want you to make Crash Course. We think it's really good. And we'd do a fundraiser for Crash Course. And you know, we kept, we keep that money internally connected to Crash Course and we don't, you know, John and I haven't taken profit Distributions in over a decade, but that money doesn't end up coming to us, et cetera. And so we do these internal fundraisers and every year they kept getting bigger. So that's a big one. We also get money from granting organizations that usually only give to nonprofits, but they were giving to us because they were like, well, there's not really any other way to reach the kind of people that we want to reach. And so we're going to get. Give money to you, even though we tend to not do that. And they were giving us signals that they'd give us more if we were a nonprofit.

[Eli Patel]

The money's out there. The real theme of this is the money is out there, if only you can catch it. How many people is complexly now?

[Hank Green]

I wish I knew exactly. So I have not been the CEO in a couple of years. I would have that exact number, but it's definitely over 70.

[Eli Patel]

And how is that generally structured?

[Hank Green]

So we have recently done a restructure, actually. So previously we were show siloed and so we crash course would have its own graphics department and its own editorial department and its own production department. And now we have more. This is not entirely done yet. And there's some silos will continue to exist maybe. I'm not sure that now we have an art department that does art across all of the shows. And I think that the sort of flow between different. Different areas of production is more open so that people aren't always on one show forever and ever. Which can kind of be, you know, SciShow in particular can be. Which is basically seven days a week. I think that five, seven, something like that, depending on the week is. Can be just kind of a grind, you know, and it's not like we have seasons where we take two months off, like we take two weeks off at Christmas so that, you know, getting a little more flow around. And then, yeah, we've got a chief development officer who is in charge of money, who oversees both brand deals and grants and also has a crowdfunding component to it. We've got marketing, a little tiny marketing department that also does merch. So that's how big the marketing department is. It's like with the marketing end product part of the company. So we've got art and then we've got production and then we've got editorial.

[Eli Patel]

You were the CEO. I think last time you were on the show, you were the CEO. Then you sort of like kicked yourself out of that chair and into more of a nebulous role of Hank Green.

[Hank Green]

Do you know the specifics of that story?

[Eli Patel]

No.

[Hank Green]

It's that I got kicked off of that by getting cancer, then getting in cancer treatment. And I was like, somebody's gonna have to be the CEO while I do this. So first, for like a couple of weeks, my brother took over, which is desperately not something he wanted to do, but he did a great job. And then eventually our COO moved into that position, and I was like, very on the fence at first about whether I would come back in. And then I saw how great Julie was doing and also how much I enjoyed not doing the work.

[Eli Patel]

Making your first deputy your boss is the greatest move of all time. That's what he did at the Verge. It's like, can't recommend it enough. Everyone should do it at least once. You know what I mean? Go have that experience. It's like Italy. Make your best employee your boss. Like, those are the moves. They're right. They're right on the list. So Julie Smith is CEO now, when you become a nonprofit, is she still the CEO of the, the charity? How does that work?

[Hank Green]

Yeah, she's. She is, I think that she stays on as the CEO. So sometimes a nonprofit has an executive director rather than a CEO. It's the same job. So, yeah, she's still CEO.

[Eli Patel]

Okay.

[Hank Green]

And then, and then she, she reports to the board and then we're making up a board, which is fun.

[Eli Patel]

Who's gonna be on your board?

[Hank Green]

It's very small right now. I've got a bunch of. I've got a list of candidates you want on.

[Eli Patel]

Sure, let's do it. I don't know how to be on a board. I know that'd be very helpful. I'd be like, is YouTube evil? Like every board meeting? But yeah, I mean, sure, I'll be helpful.

[Hank Green]

Yeah, yeah. Like the one guy in media who won't post YouTube videos.

[Eli Patel]

Yeah.

[Hank Green]

So it's me and it is Julie and it's Logan smalley, who is Ed. He created Ted Ed, which is a very popular Ted based YouTube channel where they take little TED talks and they make them into really usually animated, great, fun, informative pieces of content. And we've been friends with Logan forever, so we sort of had him because we were like, we need three feeling it would be an easy yes. And we're looking around, we're looking for people who understand media, who understand education, who understands leadership and management, and people who have contacts with rich people. So that, that's the, the vibe we're going for. And there's, there's a Lot of cool people.

[Eli Patel]

How big do you want that board to be?

[Hank Green]

It will either be five or seven.

[Eli Patel]

So when you, like, make this decision and you, you, you go to Julie and you're like, oh, so you're the CEO of the company? I own. I've just done a docusign. I no longer own any of it. It's a. Do you want to be like, how does that work? How she, how, how involved was she in the mix?

[Hank Green]

Oh, I mean, from the everybody piece of the conversation, yeah, I think that Julie was more involved than John. I mean, Julie, she definitely was, but even in the decision making process, you know, ultimately, of course, John and I had the ability to pull on the cord, but it was kind of like John's hand had me and Julie's hand on it. You know, he was like, whatever you guys think is the right thing to do.

[Eli Patel]

Push the button, grandpa.

[Hank Green]

It's funny, from the day that it made it, when it was definitely so. There was a moment where we weren't sure it was possible. Different lawyers telling us different things. And there was a time when we thought it might cost a bunch of money. Not just we would have less net worth because we'd give away the value of the company, but that it would be expensive and not just lawyer costs, but some kind of tax consequence. I don't understand. And so there was a moment like that, but once it became clear that we could do just kept being more and more clear. And to this day, things will keep happening where I'm like, oh, yeah, we should have done this. This was the right call.

[Eli Patel]

We have to take another quick break. We'll be back in just a minute.

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[Helen Havlak]

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[Eli Patel]

Welcome back. I'm talking with Hank Green about the real decoder stuff. Structure. There's a structure and you're in it now and it's a charity and people can donate it to it. They can write off the donations that they make to complexly, a lot of people, a lot of rich people are always in the market for tax write offs of this kind. So like you're like, you're just like in a different zone, right?

[Hank Green]

Yeah. Yeah. Though if you're in the donor advised fund world, which, if you know, you know, kind of thing, we're not inside of the DAF companies yet. It takes a little while to update. So I'm like, I've gotten a bunch of emails that like, why can't I give from my daft. Well, because we did this a month ago. I don't know. It takes a little while.

[Eli Patel]

Right. But you're just in a class of people who can subsidize the company or give to the company and that they have incentive to do it it because they need to harvest losses to reduce their. Like there's a whole thing you need to do.

[Hank Green]

Yeah, I mean it's, it's, it's interesting. There's kind of a sense and I think that this is just how we work as people. But there's a sense that like, oh, if people are giving away, if rich people are giving away money, that's because they get some kind of benefit from it. And just for clarity, they don't get more money when they give money away. You know, like they just are able to give away more money because they're tax deductible. So. So like if, if, if I give away $50,000 and I'm paying a 30% tax rate, then I otherwise would have been able to give $38,000. I can't do the math. And this way I can give more without that money going to the government, which is, you can question that whether we should let people decide where money that would otherwise be going to the government. Government goes. I know, I actually know a billionaire who is like, I will not take tax deductions on my charitable contributions. Because I don't think that I should decide. This is crazy. He has plenty of money, but I don't think that I should decide whether or not my tax dollars go to the government. I think that the government should decide what to do with my tax dollars. And that's a fascinating way of looking at it, but that's not. How much people.

[Eli Patel]

Is this person European? Because I don't know.

[Hank Green]

He is American. And you know who he is. And, like, yeah, and he's very American. He's like the most American of them. And he, like, likes America.

[Eli Patel]

We're finally gonna do, like, a viral TikTok clip. And it's just gonna be people trying to guess who this person, billionaire that you've heard of, who's so American that

[Hank Green]

they're like, actually likes, not just who likes America and is like, kind of in favor of government.

[Podcast Host (Ad Read)]

Yeah.

[Eli Patel]

Very confusing. The structure of the company can now accept this new income stream, right? From billionaires who want to give you the money that takes you into an income.

[Hank Green]

And for clarity, it's mostly people who have, like, $10 million.

[Eli Patel]

But it's still. A new door has opened. There's a new line of revenue for the company because you have the structure. You've created the incentives so that you're not just rapaciously chasing growth at all, at all ends.

[Hank Green]

Right.

[Eli Patel]

You're not doing is the earth flat? Like, which is a thing you can do on YouTube to make a lot of money. It's a thing you can do on every platform.

[Hank Green]

Honestly, I should probably do it and I should make an is there earth flat? And I should just be like, here's all the reasons why. I had an AI researcher tell me that they can't convince AI that the earth is flat. And I was like, that actually made me feel good. Yeah.

[Eli Patel]

It's one of the first ever heard. We should shut it down now. No more data centers needed. Actually, I want to come to AI because the reason I'm just laying this all out, you have a new. You have a new source of revenue that changes your incentives. It changes who you are, quote, unquote, working for. Right. It's those people who want to see this work in the world. You still have this idea that you need to go get reach on the platforms because you want to have impact. And right next to that is, like, not only the army of Instagram teens who will work for free, but the enormous tidal wave of slop that these platforms are creating themselves. Yeah, right. Like, YouTube launched songs on YouTube shorts yesterday, I watched a clip of my own interview with the founder and CEO of Ring. And YouTube just made a song about, like, surveilling dogs. Like, I pushed a button and there was a song about surveilling dogs. And then I could just publish it to YouTube. And I. I'm still emotionally processing this experience. Right? Like, I don't know what just happened to me. I don't know what kind of creator I am anymore. And I know that that song about surveilling dogs is kind of hot. Like a lot of feelings all at once. How do you think about that? Right? If you want to have all this impact and now you have a little bit of insulation, both from the incentives of capitalism and from the need to make money because there's a new donor class unlocked. How do you think about, okay, now we got to go fight the slot machine.

[Hank Green]

We have to compete with what exists. I find myself not that worried about it. Not about the slop. Like, I'm worried about AI. I'm worried about AI in a bunch of different ways. The biggest thing I'm worried about AI is that every time something big happens with AI, no one thought that it was going to happen. Everybody thought we were going to fall in love with AI, but nobody thought that it was going to be so nice to you that you'd go crazy. Nobody predicted AI psychosis, sycophancy induced psychosis, and that keeps happening. And so I think that we're focused on the ROM problems. And so the thing that I'm mostly worried about is that it's going to be bad in a way that we don't predict, which is exactly what the social Internet did. So that won't be a surprise, but whatever it is will be surprising. So I'm right about society.

[Helen Havlak]

I.

[Hank Green]

Okay, here's what I think coming into it from the side. Why is slop slop? I think it's because it's easy to make. When I look at a website that was made with lovable and it's like a good functional website, I don't think that's slop. And the reason is because there's a bunch of human decisions that went into it and there's a bunch of hard work that went into it. They didn't go into the lines of code, but they went into the design, into imagining the user interface, into imagining user behavior, into imagining how to best get an idea into my head. This was a tool used to aid human creation. And then when I think about what slop is, it's like, oh, you know, you typed a prompt in and then you posted it. And now there's a video of a baby saving a cat from a bear. And if people think that's real and you know all you did is say, make a video of a baby saving a cat from a bear, make it look like it came from a ring cam, and then you've got 10 million views on reels. Like, that's slop. Because it's low effort and one of the craziest. So remember when OpenAI first launched its image generator and it was making these like, it was always using the same font and it was kind of yellow and the characters all look the same. You became able to identify what those looked like three in. You know, like you saw three of them and you were like, now every time I see one of those forever, I will know what it looks like. I don't know if digital God is coming, but until he does, I think that that's going to be kind of true. I was just listening to some AI guys who are in the coding world talking about this on a podcast, and one of them was like, what do you think that is a thing to be doing now if you're in tech? And they were like, well, what we know is that plumbers jobs are safe. But then he started inarticulately listing a bunch of things and he was like, I don't really know what to call this. What he was describing was the liberal arts. He was like, you need to be able to understand people and communicate with each other and understand behavior and have cultural. Know what's culturally resonant, know where we are right now in the history of art and write good copy. And I'm like, you're just like. So what you're saying is we should all go to liberal arts school and like, for the last 20 years of like, everybody should go stem. It was a huge mistake. It was a huge mistake. And like, what. What everyone should be doing. I happen to live in a town where there's a university system that's mostly in Montana. Two schools. And there's the liberal arts one, which has been suffering. It's the University of Montana, where I am. And there's the more tech one, which is Montana State, which has been thriving. And I'm like, aha, we're gonna get them. Those bobcats are in trouble now.

[Eli Patel]

It's time to be English majors once again.

[Hank Green]

So there's a piece of me that thinks that we get it, we get human labor, and when there are great Products that are made with AI, they will be great products because a lot of attention was poured into them by humans. And it turns out figuring out how to structure your database wasn't that important. What was important was making something beautiful and useful. And that will still. They still won't be able to do that. And I feel like they might. And I feel like that might be a somewhat stable circumstance. I'm not saying, like, 100 years from now, but, like, for a while, I think that will be a somewhat stable circumstance where we're actually making something good. That this is the other thing. If it's cheap and easy to make, everyone will be making it, and we will immediately rebel against it, because that's how art works. You know, when stuff becomes commoditized, it's a commodity and we don't love it anymore.

[Eli Patel]

All right, I'm going to complicate this in three distinct ways. Well, first, I'm going to agree with you. The number of CEOs who come on the show and they're like, yes, I'm a billionaire because I made a view of a publicly available database that you could look at on your phone. And I'm like, yeah, what are you going to do when the AI reads the database for you? And they're like, good question. And that's almost every other episode of the show at this point. Right. So I agree with you there. There's something about that where we're changing how that whole economy works. Works. The part where everyone is going to just understand that they're looking at the AI slop and then, like, make another choice is complicated by your own thesis at the beginning of the show, which is that we have seated control. Right. I can't tell TikTok, don't show me the slop. I absolutely cannot tell Instagram. But every minute that someone spends watching the. The cat doing the Electro breaker dance, and I've spent a lot of those minutes, my man, is a minute I'm not watching you. Yeah, right. Like, that is zero sum, and it's hard to institute that choice.

[Hank Green]

I don't think that there will be none of it. I think that it will be a kind of content, and I think that it will not be the kind of content that people will want to. Want to watch. They will watch it sometimes in the same way we watch dash cam videos and car accidents. You know, like, we'll watch it and we'll like. And sometimes we won't. You know, maybe most of the time we won't even know that we're watching AI and in particular I think that this will happen on short form swipeable platforms.

[Eli Patel]

Yeah.

[Hank Green]

I think that when it comes to like a video that's like an AI voice reading an AI script with AI like slow zoom photos on top of it, I think that you have, you have to be like a little brain rotted to watch two of those. You know, you watch one of them and you're like, what? I actually like, want somebody with a perspective who's making something, with an understanding of what compels me.

[Eli Patel]

Have you seen the videos where Moses is a vlogger crossing the Red Sea and he's like, what's up? That stuff is not gonna go away. Right. They're just gonna make more and more of it. Yeah, well, that's slop in its way. It's like it is a different slop

[Hank Green]

in its way, but there is a vibe there that is also like, oh, somebody had a clever idea. And so like this is what I think. I think that we will actually be as humans uniquely good at being able to tell when somebody had like a good idea, like, and use a tool to create a thing that otherwise wouldn't be possible. I do think, I do hope, I do hold out this hope that what is happening right now is not dissimilar from people deciding that they, they couldn't enjoy newspapers that lied to them anymore and they sought out structures and companies thrived, building structures that promised a better product. And I think that a very select few of old legacy institutions will make it through that transition. I think maybe one, I think maybe five. And I think that like, you know, newer organizations will build up in their place and figure out how to make that promise in a way that like people will believe.

[Eli Patel]

I mean, there's a reason I'm always yapping about our ethics policy. I literally think the kids don't know that we make things according to a process.

[Hank Green]

Oh no, you are correct.

[Eli Patel]

Right. And like the process is actually the thing that you buy from us. Even the outcome of the process is actually kind of secondary.

[Hank Green]

Yeah. I think even people who like make content that in that space don't understand what journalism is. Some of these like TikTok journalist type people, they don't understand what journalism is. They think that like news comes from the AP and that's where it comes from. And like ever present fire hose. Yes. And that like there's, there's like a news plug that the AP plugs into and then it delivers them the news. And then people say the news.

[Eli Patel]

Let me, let Me, I said it was gonna be a third way that I would.

[Hank Green]

Yeah, sorry for you.

[Eli Patel]

The third way that I think all this gets complicated. You know, I watched my own 7 year old daughter argue with Google on our Google home hub about space. And I think that she wants to prove to Google, to Gemini, that she knows more about space than it does. And I'm like, this is the best use of AI that has ever existed. Like, this is what I want. Right. Like she's in a fight with a machine that will never get tired. It's the Terminator for space facts. And she's motivated to prove to it that she knows more about space. And like sometimes she learns things about space, sometimes she does. Like who knows what's happening? But it's like a totally different approach to learning. There are other companies that are chasing that approach. Actually, when you hosted the show, you had Sal Khan from Khan Academy on the show. This is their big bet. They've also organized a nonprofit, but this is their big bet on a new way of meeting people where they are. That's the other thing that's going to take time away from these platforms. Right. How do you, how do, how do you think about that? Like, you know, the platform shift that so many CEOs come on. The show is on the one hand it looks like maybe no one's ever going to write software again. Right. You're just going to say to a computer, it's going to write its own code and cloud code is going to do whatever. On the other hand, it's, maybe we won't have screens at all. And Jony, I've is going to make a shoe and you just like talk to your shoes all day. It's like whatever he's going to do.

[Hank Green]

Yeah. My hot take is that we're going to be using phones in 500 years.

[Eli Patel]

Okay. And I think people are going to watch videos. I think the reason you have phones in 500 years is people like looking at stuff on screens, as proven out. But next to this is this other idea. You're just going to ask questions into the ether and digital God will provide you the answers. And that seems far away from. We will engage your curiosity. We will write a narrative in a video that tells you a story about a fact that piques you to learn more. How do you think about that dynamic?

[Hank Green]

I think that they're complementary. There will be people in the pedagogy space who will maybe yell at me for this take, but I think that you can learn from these things and I Think that a person following their curiosity, like your daughter arguing with Gemini is a good use case. And I think that probably be interesting to see how it goes. But probably the Khanmigo tool will be able to do its job and help understand what students are getting wrong and be something of a distributed tutor. That what we know is that one on one tutoring works really well. A thing that actually understands what you're getting and what you're not getting is valuable. And it's hard to. I choked on this as I said it hard to scale because of course what is education but scaling that very thing? What is the school but scaling that thing? And so in the same way that I think that we have to figure out how all of these things plug into each other and also new things. Textbooks used to be a technology. They are a technology, but they used to be a brand spanking new, hot off the presses. Nobody had ever seen it. Technology and teachers were scared that textbooks were going to take away their jobs because why would you need a teacher if you had the book that has all the information in it? I think that we are going to be in a similar situation. Will Khanmigo be able to provide the human connection? I hope not. The human connection of motivation, of care of connection that a human teacher does? No, I don't think that it will and I don't think that it should. Will Khanmigo be able to say, oh, I see how you misunderstood the shape of this triangle or whatever. I don't know how math teaching works. Maybe. Yeah and fine. And also will there be be a place for a video tool and a textbook and some vibe coded weird thing that helps you figure out how GDP is affected by the Ginny Index? Sure, all of that. I think that we're always going to be creating new tools and so the question really is like how do we make this transition in a way that is minimally harmful because we won't know what we're doing for a while. And I think that so far if we're talking about AI's impact on pedagogy, we've not been doing a good job of that because it's been, you know, Sam Altman made it a cheating bot and thought to himself, you know, well, YouTube got successful by uploading Family Guy clips. And that was not, that was illegal. And we're going to get our market share by just doing absolutely anything. It's just. With. No, with.

[Eli Patel]

Yeah.

[Hank Green]

No thought. No thought whatsoever.

[Eli Patel]

The Internet has been a revolution in education. Right. More people have more access to More information than ever before you were able to start a company.

[Hank Green]

And there's a lot of kinds of information at turn.

[Eli Patel]

There's an awful lot of kinds of information out there. But, you know, it made a career for you. It made a career for me. It made a career for lots of people of traffic and good information. Also made careers for a lot of people to just tell horrible lies. Horrible lies that have started measles epidemics. Right. Like in our country in this next turn. Both for, you know, complexity as a company that's a nonprofit now that has to compete against that. And as you see, okay, there's a platform shift. There's new ways to access information. There's new ways kids are going to learn. How do you reduce the harm? It doesn't seem like the industry knows. It doesn't seem like our regulators know. You've been in it right from the very beginning. YouTube grant to start the thing. You've seen all the mistakes. How would you navigate this turn to make sure people are getting is actually good educational information?

[Hank Green]

I don't think I can give you guidance there in terms of what we actually need to do. And I think if I did, if I could, then I would be like running for president.

[Eli Patel]

I think a lot of people would vote for you. Hank, I gotta ask. It's a compelling personality story,

[Hank Green]

but here's what I will say. I won't give you what we should do, but I'll give you the way that I think about it. Everything in a world of infinite content, everything is about how easy something is to pay attention to. So how well it captures and holds attention, that's everything. And so with any way that we can, both in our own heads when we're making our own decisions, and also when we're making things or when we're talking to people about how they consume stuff, anything we can do to be like, here are the good things that when you feel like those strings are being tugged on, you should go in that direction. And they are like curiosity and human interest and cute stuff and the good ones and we can recognize them as being pro social. And which one are the antisocial ones? Where it's like, ah, you feel superior to someone else. You feel like a victim. You feel like, you know, you're being manipulated by nefarious things. You're being told that something that everybody thinks is good is actually bad. And like, oh, you thought vaccines were like one of the most amazing technologies, that a physical manifestation of the love that we have for each other as a species. No, actually, the government's poisoning your children. Those are antisocial, and they are outrage bait. And they are like, can we program these platforms to distinguish between those things? I don't know if we can, because then instead, it's wild. We're fine saying, as long as you're doing everything with the sole goal of making the most amount of money possible, that's fine. But the moment you're saying, I don't like to post, I'd like to promote stuff that's about pro social behavior and not antisocial behavior, it's like, well, you got your finger on this scale, buddy. Now you're trying to be God. And it's like, no, they are God. We did it. We live in the AI age. We are all controlled by AI all of the time already. It's been that way for 10 years.

[Eli Patel]

Years.

[Hank Green]

This is it. Your brain has been taken over by recommendation algorithms that decide what you see and what you see and what you pay attention to is what just, like, builds your view of the world. It builds your values. It builds what you think about everything. And we've plugged into it, like, plugged our brains into a system that is all about attention and holding on to attention. And so that's like the number one thing I'll do. Say everything is about attention. Everything is about salience. Everything is about how easy it is to get somebody to pay attention to something. So that's the actual leverage point. Everything else is just arguing in the most salient way possible. It's like acting out activism in a way that is purely about whether or not we're getting attention and not at all about whether or not you're changing anything. And then. And then the other thing I'll say is that it's all stories. Everything is stories. We're made of stories. Everything is storytelling. And those two ideas are very closely tied to each other. So what does that mean? How do we use that knowledge to do better? I don't know, but I'm trying. I just say that when I say I'm the chief strategy officer, that's what I mean.

[Eli Patel]

I was going to say, I don't know that I've ever met the chair of the. Of the board of a nonprofit educational foundation that's ever talked quite the way that you talk.

[Hank Green]

Yeah, they all talk. Exactly.

[Eli Patel]

But I'm glad it's getting shaken up. It's gonna be great. Hank, as always, incredible pleasure talking to you about all this stuff. I wish you well. I'm excited for this next turn. I feel like. I feel like you're. You're. You're able to let loose in a different way now that you. You're not. That you're a nonprofit. I can feel that it's different.

[Hank Green]

Yeah. I mean, I probably should let loose a little less. No, no, no.

[Eli Patel]

Come back onto coder, maybe have a couple drinks next.

[Hank Green]

The PR people aren't in the room, unfortunately, so we'll. We'll see what they thought about this one.

[Eli Patel]

What, what. What should people be looking out for? What's the next turn besides you just asking rich people for money? Is there something going to change?

[Hank Green]

You can see complexly?

[Eli Patel]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Hank Green]

I mean, I think that

[Eli Patel]

we've got

[Hank Green]

a lot of leverage points that we would like to use. One of the things that we'd really like to do, and I don't know how this is shaped yet, we have a thing called. We have a SciShow residency where we bring in like a science communicator who's up and coming or doing interesting things, and we have them sort of like experience our newsroom or our editorial room anyway and write some scripts and get through our fact checking process, see how it all works. And then they come to Missoula and they record some episodes. We're going to want to do that more. More like that particular program more. But we also want to do more stuff like that. We just like to foster that growth inside of the science, communication and education space so that we can hopefully be an engine for making more and more people who are good at both accurately representing reality and capturing attention, which is. Yeah, that's the. That's the fight.

[Eli Patel]

All right, well, we'll have to have you back soon to check in on how things are going and so that you can continue your slow burn coup of taking over my show someday. Seems happening. Hank, this has been great. Thank you so much for being on.

[Hank Green]

Yeah, thank you.

[Eli Patel]

I'd like to thank Hank Green for taking the time to join Decoder and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at decoder the Verge 2. We really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on threads or Blue sky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at Decoder Pod. That's the same address for our Tik Tok and Instagram, which are a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. Decoder is a production the Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Stat and edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder Music is by Break Master Cylinder. We'll see you next time.

[Helen Havlak]

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