Hank Green lets loose on YouTube, billionaires, and algorithms

Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore. What we have been seeing, increasingly, is people breaking rules. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? This week on Explain It to Me, how to mind your manners.

New episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Dekoder. I'm Mila Impatel, 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 complexity 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.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (68 minutes, 14,139 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.