Today, I’m talking with Hank Green, a longtime friend of Decoder and the cofounder 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’s 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 had to bring Hank back on to 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.
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If you’ve been following the Decoder or The Verge, you know I’ve been obsessed with all that for quite a while. About two years ago, Hank interviewed me for this show, and he and I talked a lot 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 I had to start over again now, The Verge would probably be a YouTube or TikTok channel. But starting a business on those platforms also 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.
Where you’ll hear Hank get particularly passionate is when he’s talking about where the money is, where it should be, and what prevents it from going there. Because it turns out there’s a lot of money sloshing around in the world. It’s just maybe not allocated 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 say you’re going to like a lot of episodes, but I promise you’re really going to like this one.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Hank 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 and former owner of Complexly. You’re a TikTok superstar. You’re a science communicator. You’re everything. Welcome back to Decoder.
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