Hank Green lets loose on YouTube, billionaires, and algorithms

17:57Hank Green:They lie less. They seem to care more. They seem to have like 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, you know, like 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 uh the the thing that in all of this i think is much more indictable is is like when we outsourced all of our decision making to content recommendation algorithms um 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 So, you know, there's lots of, you know, YouTube's like, I've identified that you enjoy rocket ships.

18:57Hank Green:Have you tried transphobia kind of situation going on? But better than it was 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 much clickbait we want to use, how many tools we want to use to entice you to it, to attract you to our content.

19:32Hank Green: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 cringy 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.

19:47Nilay Patel:There are product design lawsuits occurring right now about those platforms that suggest maybe it will be less than one year.

19:54Hank Green:Oh, are you talking about the infinite feeds being manipulative or something like that? Yeah.

20:01Nilay Patel:To overcome the content moderation First Amendment concerns, the lawsuits are product design concerns. That's a whole different episode. We can do that one some other time because I'm fascinated how you feel about that as a creator. The reason I ask 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 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 capitalistic media companies do.

20:37Nilay Patel:But those are the things that they do.

20:39Hank Green:Really glad we didn't have an investor. pushing us to do all this.

20:43Nilay 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 YouTube is your biggest pot.

20:51Hank Green:No, I mean, you do it no matter what. Why would you, if I was making 20 times more money from YouTube and I had investors behind me, they'd still want me to make 40 times more money, you know?

21:05Nilay Patel:Speaking of advertising, we're going to pause here for a short break. We'll be right back.

21:16Hank Green:This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate C. According to Indeed data, Sponsored Jobs have four times more applicants than non-sponsored jobs. So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply.

21:44Nilay Patel:Support for today's show comes from Upwork. The fastest growing businesses aren't doing more. They're delegating smarter. Upwork helps you bring in expert freelance help fast so you can delegate and keep moving. Upwork is a one-stop platform to find, hire, and pay expert freelancers across web and software development, data and analytics, marketing, business operations, and more. They help grow your business by giving you fast access to specialized talent across 125 plus categories. So you can fill skill gaps, launch projects faster, and scale support up or down without committing to full-time headcount.

22:21Nilay Patel:And with Business Plus, you can access the top 1 % of talent on Upwork. And with AI-powered shortlisting, you'll get matched to the right freelancer in under six hours. No endless searching required. You can visit Upwork.com right now to post your job for free and connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's U-P-W-O-R-K dot com. Upwork.com. Support for the show comes from Shopify. Starting a new business, it could be a lonely endeavor, especially in the beginning. And when you're starting out, it's more important than ever to make sure you have the right tools at hand. Shopify is the commerce platform that millions of businesses around the world rely on to sell their products online.

23:07Nilay Patel:If you're asking yourself, what if people haven't heard about my brand? Shopify helps you find your customers with easy to run email and social media campaigns. And if you get stuck, Shopify is always around to share advice with their award winning 24-7 customer support. Best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world class expertise and everything from managing inventory to international shipping. to processing returns and beyond. It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today. You can sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash decoder. Go to shopify.com slash decoder.

23:50Nilay Patel:That's shopify.com slash decoder.

24:00Hi, everyone.

24:01Nilay Patel:This segment of Decoder Sessions features my boss, Helen Havlock, the Veritas publisher, and L 'Oreal Group's global vice president of tech and open innovation. I think you're going to enjoy this conversation.

24:10Hank Green:We're going to start with a Decoder classic question, Giv. What does tech and open innovation mean at L 'Oreal? 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?

24:44Hank Green: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're 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 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.

25:18Hank Green:So 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 some new clever ideas, too.

25:40Nilay 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.

25:58Hank Green:Yeah. I mean, so like really what we're looking at is like, okay, well, what about the way TV worked? And do you think that – and like the question is, did TV create higher value content? And the answer is yes. It created content that like 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.

26:33Hank Green:And they just want to get attention. And they just want to feel 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 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 like a white man. And you're starting to get a lot of negative consequences to the stuff that to posting and putting your face out there. And and then and then you're like, well, I'd like I'd like something in exchange for all of this.

27:13Hank Green:And you're trying to figure that out. And then you're to the two sort of paths that occur is either you figure out a way to make it work by by diversifying across platforms and grading like productizing, et cetera. Make it a podcast is a big one. And then or you burn out. And you know who replaces you? Anybody. Because they all, for six months, they're just like, oh my God, somebody is listening to me. They're laughing at my jokes. They're paying attention. Now I'm the person who I was watching and everybody wants it. But what these platforms have realized is that you can just have them last for six months and then burn through them.

27:52Nilay Patel:There was a time when YouTube would talk about creator burnout and that has all since receded. I have this concept that there are things that we are required to ignore to 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. And every conversation I have with media people, we are required to ignore the overabundance of supply that Instagram has to replace all of a sudden 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.

28:26Nilay Patel: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.

28:36Hank Green:Yeah, I mean I think that – 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 to print because of advertising. Suddenly there was all this distribution, yellow journalism, everybody fighting for attention with the most sensational headlines and following, you know, murders and like just like so. So we're doing that. That's where we're at right now in online media.

29:07Hank Green:And then eventually, you know, something happened. And by 1980, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times had editorial standards in a huge mode and they worked really hard to get things right all the time so that you could trust them, unlike those crappy newspapers. And like, that's just what's happening? And so like you and I are saying like 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.

29:44Hank Green:I'm just watching whatever comes across my feed. And when I'm 30, I type in theverge.com, the last website on earth.

29:50Nilay Patel:We're going to change the domain name. It's getting much longer. That's our new rebrand. Verge.com, the last little site. Verge.com. Oddly, there's two dot-coms embedded in it. It's bold. We're going to do a Super Bowl ad to get people to pay attention to it. The reason I'm starting here instead of like, tell me about the paperwork to be a nonprofit. You've chosen – we've chosen different paths. Like 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.

30:27Nilay Patel: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. Because if you want all the videos to be free, they have to exist on those platforms. Because free and no one watching them is not useful. Free and everyone watching them is useful.

30:56Hank Green:Because the only thing that we want is, the base level thing that we want is, you don't have impact without reach.

31:03Nilay 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.

31:14Hank Green:Yes, I think so. So I think that like a thing 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 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 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 our impact, whether we're actually reaching more people.

31:50Hank Green:And then, I don't know if I should say this, but you know, there's so much money. It kind of infuriates me that, like, you know, for like every year that Crash Course has existed, we've been scraping by. And that's because we create 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 like a better, bigger impact on the world if we had like actually taken on these existing educational media companies and like hired an army of salespeople and tried to do the thing.

32:31Hank Green:That's not for me. So that's part of it. That's not for me. I'm just that was never going to be me. But if what we're talking about is impact and like we're good at that and like 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 like 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, like, we'll make the YouTube money that every other YouTuber makes. And I'm saying this to other educational creators, too. Like, I want them to hear this as well.

33:09Hank Green:Somebody should be giving you money. There should be patronage. It's the year 2026. Income inequality, like, not income inequality, wealth inequality is like Gilded Age level crap going on. There's people, you know, they're like, they were early at OpenAI or they were early at meta. Like 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 a zilch. So I feel like just let me figure it out for you. And that's a little bit how I feel.

33:49Hank Green: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 it could have been done in a way that was worse. I think it could have been done in a way that was better.

34:23Hank Green:um but i but i also think that like it's 2026 and like money is going to weird places and i i think 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 are asking for$50 a month.

35:02Hank Green:I'll give them$50 a month. You can 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. Like, and who just gave away, you know, most of my net worth, right? Like that's what turning into a charity is. I could have sold this company for a lot of money and I didn't. And that's because like the impact matters more to me. And also, for clarity, I'm also fine. I've sold another company and things are good. So I think that people should be careful about this if they – but, yeah, I don't know. The idea that there's just a lot of free-floating sort of guilty patronage money that you can launder into science content is very powerful.

35:47Nilay Patel:Great business model. Tell me, like, how does this work? You're like, I'm going to call my brother.

35:53Hank Green:If you have a bunch of money, here's my email address.

35:56Nilay Patel:I meant being a nonprofit. You're like, I'm going to call John. We're going to be a nonprofit. I'm going to call the lawyer. They're going to say, was it, did you e-sign it away? Did you have to, was there a ceremony? Did you light a torch?

36:07Hank Green:Like how does it work? 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. Very good. Well, but so 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 lawyer-y. Yeah. And one thing I know about lawyer-y stuff is I don't need to pay that much attention. So like there was a lot of like 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 I was like, which do you want X, Y, or Z? Rather than do you want to do it this way, this way, or this way?

36:50Hank Green:It was sort of like outcome-based. And so that, and like we talked through it and we had to find a lawyer who, it 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 the, you know, the 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, it was about finding the right lawyers who knew how things worked and had done this before.

37:26Nilay Patel:So you execute this decision. I got to ask, I mean, I ask everybody how to make decisions. What was your framework for saying we're going to be a nonprofit? What led you to this decision?

37:34Hank Green:The big thing was how is this going to affect staff? How is this going to affect content? How will this – like how will we communicate this too? Like will this make sense to people? And also will they feel like they're losing something? So, you know, 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 like 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?

38:18Hank Green: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 in 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. 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?

38:53Hank Green:And they're like, no, not that either. And they're like, we don't really want you then. And, you know, they wanted things, but like that was a real limitation on the value. So there's that. And then there was like, you know, what are the different ways you can go here? And so we did, I'll be honest, like we took meetings with people who wanted to buy us just to like get the leg of the land. And, you know, ultimately decided that that was not a path we wanted to explore. And we also looked at like other weird ownership structures, whether like 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 is a nonprofit organization.

39:35Hank Green:Give me an example of some of those signals. Oh, I mean, 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 do a fundraiser for crash course and you know we kept we keep that money internally connected to crash course and we don't uh you know john and i haven't taken profit distributions in over a decade but that money doesn't end up coming to us etc um and so we do these internal fundraisers and uh every year they kept getting bigger.

40:13Hank Green: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 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.

40:33Nilay 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 Complexity now?

40:41Hank 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.

40:47Nilay Patel:And how is that generally structured?

40:49Hank Green:So we have recently done a restructure, actually. So previously we were show siloed. And so 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 may, you know, there's some silos will continue to exist. Maybe. I'm not sure that there that like now we have like an art department that does art across all of the shows. and I think that, you know, the sort of flow between 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.

41:36Hank Green:I think that five, seven, something like that, depending on the week, 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 the marketing end product part of the company.

42:19Hank Green:So we've got art, and then we've got production, and then we've got editorial.

42:23Nilay Patel:You were the CEO. I think the last time you were on the show, you were the CEO. Then you sort of kicked yourself out of that chair and into more of a nebulous role of Hank Green. Do you know the specifics of that story? No.

42:36Hank Green:I got kicked off of that by getting cancer and then getting in cancer treatment. And I was like, somebody's going to 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 like saw how great Julie was doing and also how much I enjoyed not doing the work.

43:11Nilay Patel:Making your first deputy your boss is the greatest move of all time. That's where you get at The Verge. It's like, I can't recommend it enough. Everyone should do it at least once. You know what I mean? Like, go have that experience. It's like, Italy, make your best employee or boss. Like, those are the moves. They're right on the list. So Julia Smith is a CEO now. When you become a nonprofit, is she still the CEO of the charity? How does that work?

43:33Hank Green:Yeah, 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. Okay. And then she reports to the board and then we're making up a board, which is fun. Who's going to be on your board? It's very small right now. I've got a bunch. I've got a list of candidates you want on. Sure. Let's do it.

43:55Nilay Patel:I don't know how to be on a board. I don't know how to be very helpful. I'd be like, is YouTube evil? Like in every board meeting? But yeah. Sure, I'll be helpful.

44:02Hank Green:Yeah. Like the one guy in media who won't post YouTube videos. Yeah. Yeah. So it's me and it's Julie and it's Logan Smalley who is at TED. 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 like usually animated, great, fun, informative pieces of content. And we've been friends with Logan forever. So we sort of like had him because we were like, we need three. So I had a feeling he would be an easy yes. And we're looking around. We're looking for people who understand media, who understand education, who understand leadership and management and people who have contacts with rich people.

44:49Hank Green:So that's the vibe we're going for. And there's a lot of cool people.

44:54Nilay Patel:How big do you want that board to be?

44:55Hank Green:It will either be five or seven.

44:58Nilay Patel:So when you like make this decision and you go to Julie and you're like, well, 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 involved was she in the mix?

45:11Hank Green:Oh, I mean from every piece of the conversation. Yeah. I think that Julie was more involved than John. I mean, 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, I think it's the right thing to do. Push the button, Grandpa. It's funny, like from the day that it made it when it was definitely – so there was a moment where we weren't sure it was possible, you know, like different lawyers telling us different things.

45:50Hank Green:And like there was there's a time when we thought it might cost a bunch of money, not just like like we would have less net worth because we'd give away the value of the company, but like that it would be expensive and not just like lawyer costs, but some kind of like tax consequence. I don't understand. And so there was a moment like that. But once it became clear that we could do it, it just kept being more and more clear. And like to this day, like things will keep happening where I'm like, oh, yeah, we should have done this. This was the right this was the right call.

46:30Nilay Patel:We have to take another quick break. We'll be back in just a minute.

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50:59Nilay Patel:of other worlds. For whatever you love, infinite worlds await at the most magical place on Earth. Walt Disney World Resort.

51:11Nilay 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 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 you're just in a different zone, right?

51:33Hank 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've gotten a bunch of emails that are like, why can't I give from my DAF? And I'm like, well, because we did this a month ago. I don't know. It takes a little while.

51:53Nilay 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 because they need to harvest losses to reduce their... Like there's a whole thing you need to do, right?

52:04Hank Green:Yeah, I mean, 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, it'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 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.

52:47Hank Green:whether we should let people decide where money that would otherwise be going to the government goes. 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 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 is this person european because i don't know oh he is he is american and you know who he is and like yeah and and he's very american he's like the the most american of them um and and not he like likes america we're finally going

53:34Nilay Patel:to do like a viral tiktok clip and it's just gonna be people trying to guess who this person Who's the billionaire that you've heard of?

53:42Hank Green:Who's so American. Who actually likes, not just, who likes America and is kind of in favor of government. Yeah. Very confusing. Very confusing, yeah.

53:54Nilay Patel: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 a new category.

54:02Hank Green:And for clarity, it's mostly people who have like$10 million. Sure.

54:05Nilay Patel:But it's still like it's a new door has opened, 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, right? You're not doing – is the earth flat? 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.

54:25Hank Green:Honestly, I should probably do it. And I should make an – is the 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, it's one of the first I've ever heard. We should shut it down now.

54:43Nilay Patel:No more data centers need you. Actually, I want to come to AI. Because the reason I'm just laying this all out, 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.

55:21Nilay Patel: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'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? 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.

56:00Nilay Patel:How do you think about, OK, now we got to go fight the slot machine?

56:03Hank Green:We have to compete with what exists. I find myself not that worried about it. Not about the slot. Like I'm worried about AI. I'm worried about AI in a bunch of, you know, a bunch of different ways. Like the biggest thing I'm worried about AI is that every time something big happens with AI, no one had no one thought that it was going to happen. Like 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. You know, like nobody, nobody predicted AI psychosis, like sycophancy induced psychosis. And and, you know, that keeps happening.

56:41Hank Green:And so I think that like we're focused on the wrong 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 will be a surprise. But whatever it is will be surprising. So I'm worried about society. 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. Like 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.

57:24Hank Green:They didn't go into like the lines of code, but they went into the design and to imagining the user interface and to imagining user behavior and to imagining like how to best get an idea into my head. This was a tool used to aid human creation.

57:42Hank Green:and then when I think about what Slop is, it's like, oh, you know, you like 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.

58:22Hank Green: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, you know, I guess what we know is that plumber's jobs are safe. But then he started inarticulately listing a bunch of things.

59:04Hank Green: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 like understand people and communicate with each other and like understand behavior and have like cultural, like 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. That was a huge mistake. It was a huge mistake. And like what everyone should be doing.

59:41Hank Green:You know, like I happen to live in a town where there's like 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, ah-ha, we're going to get them. Those bobcats are in trouble now. It's time to be English majors once again. So, like, there's a piece of me that thinks that, like, we get it. Like, 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.

1:00:16Hank Green:And it turns out, like, the, you know, like, figuring out how to structure your database wasn't that important. What was important was, you know, making something beautiful and useful. And that will still, like, 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.

1:00:52Hank Green:You know, when stuff becomes commoditized, it's a commodity and we don't love it anymore.

1:00:58Nilay 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. 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 ceded control.

1:01:38Nilay Patel: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 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.

1:01:57Hank Green:And it's hard to institute that choice. 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, 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 swipable platforms. Yeah. 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 to be like a little brain rotted to watch two of those.

1:02:43Hank Green:You know? You watch one of them and you're like, would I actually want somebody with a perspective who's making something with an understanding of what compels me?

1:02:53Nilay 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 going to go away. They're just going to make more and more of it. That's slop in its way. It's like it is a different brand slop.

1:03:10Hank Green:There is a vibe there that is also like, oh, somebody had a clever idea. And so this is what I think. I think that we will actually be, as humans, uniquely good at being able to tell when somebody had a good idea and used 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 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.

1:04:03Hank Green:I think maybe one, maybe five. And I think that newer organizations will build up in their place and figure out how to make that promise in a way that people will believe.

1:04:19Nilay 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. Oh, no. You are correct. Right. And the process is actually the thing that you buy from us. The outcome of the process is actually kind of secondary.

1:04:34Hank Green:Yeah. I think even people who make content in that space don't understand what journalism is. Some of these TikTok journalist type people, they don't understand what journalism is. They think that news comes from the AP and that's where it comes from. Yeah. It's an ever-present fire hose. Yes. And that like there's like a news plug that the AP plugs into and then it delivers them the news and then people say the news.

1:04:58Nilay Patel:Let me – I said there was going to be a third way that I would complicate this for you. The third way that I think all this gets complicated is I watch my own seven-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.

1:05:33Nilay Patel: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 CellCon from Khan Academy on the show. So 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 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?

1:06:12Nilay Patel: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 Johnny Ive 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.

1:06:24Hank Green:Yeah, my hot take is that we're going to be using phones in 500 years.

1:06:28Nilay Patel:Okay. And I think people are going to watch videos. I think the reason you have phones in 500 years is people looking at stuff on screens as proven out. But next to this is this other idea, right? 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 you that like piques you to learn more. Right. How do you think about that?

1:06:58Hank Green:I think that they're complimentary. I there will be people in the pedagogy space who will maybe yell at me for this take. But I think that there is I think that you can learn from these things. And I think that like following – like a person following their curiosity, like your daughter arguing with Gemini, is a good use case. It's like – and I think that probably – it would be interesting to see how it goes, but probably the Conmigo tool will be able to do its job and help understand what students are getting wrong and be something of a distributed tutor that like what we know is that like one-on-one tutoring works really well.

1:07:41Hank Green:Like 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. Like 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?

1:08:22Hank Green:I think that we are going to be in a similar situation. Will Conmigo 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 Conmigo 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. um maybe yeah and like fine and and also will there be a place for a video tool uh and a textbook and some vibe coded weird thing that helps you like you know figure out how gdp is affected by the the genie in index like sure all of that i think that i think that we're always going to be creating new tools.

1:09:16Hank Green: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 illegal and we're going to get our market share by just doing absolutely anything. It's just with no thought whatsoever.

1:10:04Nilay 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 with your brother.

1:10:11Hank Green:There's a lot of kinds of information at turn.

1:10:13Nilay Patel:There's an awful lot of kinds of information out there. But it made a career for you. It made a career for me. It made a career for lots of people who traffic in good information. Also, it made careers for a lot of people to just tell horrible lies. Horrible lies that have started measles epidemics in our country. In this next turn, both for Complexity is a company that's a nonprofit now that has to compete against that. And as you see, OK, 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.

1:10:45Nilay Patel: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?

1:11:00Hank 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.

1:11:13Nilay Patel:I think a lot of people would vote for you, Hank. It's a compelling personal story.

1:11:20Hank 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.

1:11:57Hank Green:And they are like curiosity and like human interest and cute stuff and like the good ones. and we can recognize them as being pro-social and which one are the anti-social 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 like the love that we have for each other as a species. No, actually the government's poisoning your children.

1:12:31Hank Green:that like those are anti-social and they are outrage bait and they are, you know, like can we program these platforms to distinguish between those things? I don't know if we can because then instead, like it's wild. We're like 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 like, I don't like to post, like I'd like to promote stuff that's about like pro-social behavior and not anti-social 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.

1:13:08Hank Green: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. 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 our brains into a system that is all about attention and holding on to attention. And so that's the number one thing I'll say. Everything is about attention. Everything is about salience. Everything is about how easy it is to get somebody to pay attention to something.

1:13:46Hank Green:So that's the actual leverage point. Everything else is just arguing in the most salient way possible. like it's like it's like doing it's like acting out activism in a way that is purely about like whether or not we're getting attention and not at all about whether or not you're changing anything and then uh and then the other thing i'll say is that like it's all stories everything is stories we're made of stories everything's storytelling and uh and those two ideas are very closely tied to each other so what is what does that what does that mean like how do we how do we use that knowledge to do better.

1:14:20Hank Green:I don't know, but I'm trying. I just say that. And that's what, and that, when I say I'm the chief strategy officer, that's what I mean.

1:14:28Nilay Patel:I was going to say, I don't know that I've ever met the chairman of the board of a nonprofit educational foundation that's ever taught quite the way that you talk. Yeah, they all talk exactly

1:14:42Nilay Patel:But I'm glad it's getting shaken up. It's going to 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 you're able to let loose in a different way now that you're a nonprofit. I can feel that it's different. Yeah. I mean I probably should let loose a little less. No. No, no. Come back under Coder. Maybe have a couple drinks next time.

1:15:09Hank Green:The PR people aren't in the room, unfortunately.

1:15:12Nilay Patel:So we'll see what they thought about this one. What should people be looking at for? What's the next turn besides you just asking rich people for money? Is there something going to change that you can see? Ecomplexly?

1:15:23Hank Green:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that we've got 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 the – 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, like that particular program more.

1:15:56Hank Green: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. Yeah. That's the fight.

1:16:21Nilay 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. Yeah, thank you. 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 at theverge.com. We really do read all the emails or you can hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky.

1:16:50Nilay Patel:We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at DecoderPod. That's the same address for our TikTok and Instagram, which are a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is a production of 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 Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.