Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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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 bait 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'd 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 this episode. Okay, Hank Green, former owner of Complexly.
Here we go. Hey, Green, you are the often guest host of Decoder. 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. It's always great to be here. I'm a big fan of your show. One time you were the guest.
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Chapter 2: What led Hank Green to convert Complexly into a nonprofit?
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. I'm so excited.
It was just on another podcast and it was like 100% just like talking about memes and stuff. And I was like, can we talk about business, please? Oh, no. I got to delete the meme section. All right. So you and your brother, John, founded this company, Complexly, which I actually wonder – I want to start at the beginning. People know you. They know John. They know the shows you make.
They know your TikTok channel. They know you as internet personalities, people who make things, creators. Do you think they know Complexly? Is that foregrounded? It's the company that runs all this stuff. Not as much as I certainly would like them to. So usually people know the shows. They know Hank and John. And 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 and also in a way almost anachronistic like that's not how youtube that's not how media works anymore and um but there is and i want people to know about it and i think that like honestly like that's starting to change um but yeah it's like it's over 70 people and it we make a lot of different different shows um
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 my, like, part of my job right now is just to say the word Complexly a lot. So let's do that.
This is what I mean about the decoder bait. So you have a company. There is. You've had one for quite some time. It's true. Over 12 years. Yeah, 15 years. Yeah. 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.
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Chapter 3: How does Hank Green view the future of media and education?
I think there was a YouTube grant somewhere along the way. There was an early YouTube grant, yeah. In that period where YouTube was like, does anyone want to make videos? Here's some money. Yeah, 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 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. I'm curious about that, too. I agree with you, by the way. And Vox Media received some of that money. Yeah.
So it goes. But I agree with you that it kickstarted the creator economy in a very specific way, particularly on YouTube. Complexly, it was your company. It was started with some of that, but that was just a grant. They didn't have any ownership. It was just you and John owned the whole thing. And now you've turned the company into a 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 nonprofit now? There's a big piece of this that is incentive fee. Ultimately, everything in business is incentive fee. And there's always been a bunch of doors open to us that feel very business. We got to turn this into a freemium product.
We got to create a subscription service. We should go over the top. All these different ways that you... If you have, which one of the things that Complexly has is an 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 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 would turn this into some kind of freemium model, or you would be positioning yourself to sail to an ed tech company, et cetera. That's what you would normally do.
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Chapter 4: What challenges do educational content creators face on platforms like YouTube?
We keep not doing that. And I think that honestly, it's like held us back from developing some projects because we don't wanna do things that would lead us too quickly or too aggressively into the sort of business shape direction. And so, because one of the tenets has always been like this, 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 like really a project that is about impact, which means two things. Like one, you got to like you're adding value if you're reaching more people. And so anything that that that constricts the number of people you reach is decreasing your impact. And then and then like how much good are you doing with the content?
Like like what 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 can be cheaper to make. You see this happen in educational media companies. And 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, 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 that that leads you to always be maximizing the impact rather than the revenue? And that's really a story that's more about.
You know, like how do you like if our job is now to sell ourselves to our like crowdfunding or grants or like, you know, 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 trying to lock people in. We're trying to like our the people we're accountable to now are like our audience.
And there are people who would like us to deliver value to our audience, right? I think about that a lot because fundamentally what we're talking about here is YouTube. The YouTube ecosystem is where Complexly is mostly organized and centered. There are other platforms. They all have big audiences in different ways.
But if you're going to 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. 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 as you're saying, the incentives then start to warp the business.
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Chapter 5: What impact does AI have on the creator economy?
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Hi, everyone. This segment of Decoder Sessions features my boss, Helen Havlak, 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.
We're going to start with a Decoder classic question, Guy. 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?
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. So we do have a little bit of that kind of process, but we leave some space for serendipity and some creativity.
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Chapter 6: How does the ownership structure of Complexly affect its operations?
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, 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. 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? Yeah.
Chapter 7: How can nonprofits navigate funding and audience engagement?
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. I'm just watching whatever comes across my feed.
And when I'm 30, I type in theverge.com, the last website on earth. We're going to change the domain name. It's getting much longer. That's our new rebrand. Earth.com. Oddly, there's two .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.
We've chosen different paths. 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. 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 because free and no one watching them is not useful. Free and everyone watching them is useful. Yeah, the only thing that we want is like the base level thing that we want is, you know, you don't have impact without reach.
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. Yes, I think so.
I think that a thing that I'm moving over to being a board member rather than an owner, and I think that a big thing that 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.
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Chapter 8: What are the ethical considerations in content creation today?
I think that that's a thing that you've 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. And then, I don't know if I should say this, but there's so much money.
Yeah.
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 with 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 had 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. 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 a 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 not saying this to other educational creators, too. Like, 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, like, not income inequality. Wealth inequalities. Like, gilded age level inequality. crap going on.
There's people, you know, they're like, they were early at open AI 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 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, and, and a lot of that has gone to like creative professionals and it's, it's like a new thing to be and it's weird. And I think that it's, it's good. Like, 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.
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