With Finn, we built the number one AI agent for customer service. It solves up to 90% of queries for businesses, tops all the performance benchmarks on the G2U board, and it comes with a million-dollar guarantee. Check it out at Finn.ai. 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 to Hank Green, who, you know, Hank doesn't need an introduction. In fact, came by himself on Decoder. Let's do some history instead.
In October 2006, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. On January 1st, 2007, the brothers Hank and John Green started making videos for each other and shared them publicly on YouTube. That's the same year YouTube rolled out its partner program, which shares ad revenue between YouTube and basically launched the creator economy as we know it today. And there are tons of businesses that have sprung up on YouTube.
We've talked to a number of YouTubers on the show. They will tell you that being a YouTuber is a very specific kind of job. And while some YouTubers make serious additional revenue on the platform by doing branded and sponsored videos, a lot of creators can stay small and sustain themselves on ad money they get directly from the YouTube partner program. There's just enough money flowing through that system to let that happen.
Because of all that money, YouTube is the gold standard for creators. It's something we've heard in every creator conversation we've ever had on Decoder. If you can make it big on YouTube, you can make something of a career. That's not the case on other platforms.
There's no revenue share on Instagram. There's no revenue share on Twitter. There's no revenue at all on Twitter. And most importantly, there's no revenue share on TikTok.
Instead, there's something called a creator fund which shares a fixed pool of money of about a billion dollars among all the creators on the platform. That means as more and more creators join TikTok, everyone gets paid less. You might understand this concept. It's basic division.
Now, as you'd expect from one of the original and most successful YouTubers and creators out there, Hank has very strong opinions about platforms and how they pay creators. In addition to being an individual creator himself, he's also the CEO of Complexly, a 50-person company that makes educational content about science, history, and art across about 20 YouTube channels and podcasts. And if it wasn't for the YouTube ad money, none of those shows would exist and why the YouTube model is still superior. As it happens, that was right around the time I was talking to YouTube chief product officer, Neil Mohan on Decoder.
And I asked him when YouTube would switch from a creator fund to the ad split model on YouTube Shorts, which is its TikTok competitor. Neil confirmed that a new monetization model for Shorts doesn't work. And the creator fund was just a way for the company to develop and refine the metrics it needs to properly attribute the money to creators and videos. It still hasn't rolled out, but that's what he said.
After that episode with Neil came out, one of Hank's friends tweeted at him and said he should go on Decoder and talk about it. So Hank can find himself on the show. This episode long is wheezy. Honestly, it's pretty deep in our feelings about participating in the internet culture economy and the relationship between huge platform companies and the communities that build on them.
But it's a good one and it's important. I think it's not something any of us talk about enough. Okay, Hank Green, creator and CEO of Complexly. Here we go.
Hank Green, we're the CEO of Complexly. That's a very popular internet creator. Welcome to Decoder. Thanks.
I listen all the time. I learn a lot from the conversations you have, so thank you for having me. Oh, get ready for the org chart questions. They're coming.
Oh, I've been thinking about it and I'm like, I don't feel satisfied with my own answer. It is also true that you are our first guest who has effectively invited himself on the show in a tweet, so I appreciate that. In the whole history, it was a friend of mine who was like, Hank, why haven't you been on Decoder? And I was like, please, and it works.
Don't mind if I do. So we interviewed Neil Malone, who's the chief product officer. We talked about his creator fund for YouTube Shorts. TikTok has a creator fund.
You are very opinionated about creator funds. I hate them. There is. That's the whole show, everybody.
It's been two minutes. We're going to run about five ads now and then we'll go to the whole show. Not only do I hate them, they're very bad and everyone should hate them with me. All right, great.
That's how Twitter works, right? Yeah, promo code is Decoder. We'll see you next week. All right, I want to talk about all that stuff, but you are a business person.
You've built a long-standing business, a stable business on the shifting sands of the creator internet over like 15 years. So I want to talk about that too. Okay. Start with Complexly.
What is Complexly? What are your goals with a company like Complexly? Complexly is an educational media company that is focused on making things through the internet and making them available through the internet and thus also available to everyone and available for free and making that media as good as what you might see on television or being sold to schools by bigger educational media companies. And that's tough and there's certainly stuff that those big companies do that we don't do, but the only way that it felt like we could compete in that world was kind of to just like make it, put it out there and if students like it, if teachers like it, they'll use it and if they don't, then they won't and that's the whole thing.
And it's, you know, it's a tricky business to put together and it's very diversified is a nice way of saying we can't make it work without trying like eight different things at the same time. But, you know, it's got a couple of, a few really big YouTube channels and then there are podcasts and that's the majority of what we do and also some, you know, other social media stuff. But it's 10 years on now and it's making it work. There are definitely days when I feel like somebody should just come out of the woodwork and give me $10 million so I don't have to worry all the time but that's not business, I guess.
Business is where you're at, man. There's like billionaires floating around. They've got to listen to this podcast, right? Yeah, I mean, that's the whole idea.
Yeah. And then they want to be on it and talk about their work. It's all bait. The whole podcast is bait.
So you have actually flipped a company for you. You started VidCon with your brother. It was the conference for creators. You flipped it to Viacom.
What was that Russell's like for you? Is that something you do again? I mean, weirdly, it was the second company I sold. The first one was Subbable which we sold to Patreon.
It was basically the exact same thing so we had no tech. So I was like, just find out if you had to email someone and be like, can I pick my platform? And that was wonderful. A wonderful, easy project to merge those two companies together.
Glad we did it. The VidCon thing was much bigger and more complex and I had to be really thoughtful about it. And it's always been something that I, like in the moment, I was ambivalent about, remain ambivalent about, even, I mean, less ambivalent now that there's been two years of pandemic and I probably would have gone bankrupt eight times during that period if there hadn't been a larger company behind it. And that was one of the reasons why we so badly wanted to do it.
We felt very vulnerable to the world and not, I wasn't thinking of pandemic specifically but just any instability when you base your entire business on three days in the summer, that's scary. So we initially thought, I initially thought we were going to sell to a conference company. I was like, some company that runs conferences will run this conference. But then I realized that if we did that, that company would be trying to run the conference to make it the most profitable thing.
Whereas a media company is going to be running it to make it the coolest thing so that they look cool because we're not like a big piece of Icons budget over at VidCon. That is the game for events in media companies. That's why I do it. Yeah.
And that seemed like a way better outcome than having somebody trying to squeeze every penny instead of trying to create a really cool event where they look good and they make connections and they get to put their executives up on the stage. But ultimately, you have to make the conference really good in order for it to do the... That's your actual objective. It's a good conference rather than profit.
But having gone through the sales two companies, are you like, you just said everyone gives me $10 million. Are you like, are you going to sell at some point and walk off in the sunset? No, I don't like the sunset. Sunsets are terrible.
Have you ever looked at one really? It's so ugly. Yeah, I'm a worker and I like to do stuff. Now, there's oftentimes I have feelings where I wish I had time to do other work that I don't currently have time to do.
So I do think about that and I think about like, how do I create these businesses so that they have great leadership and am I doing enough of that mentoring or enough of like the systematizing my own brain instead of like being like, it's all much easier if I just do the work and I don't have to help other people do the work. But I really like what both of my companies are doing right now and I feel really good about them and it's hard, but I certainly don't think about acquisition for those companies. I think about, you know, how do I get great leadership to support me? So here they are.
Here's going to be a good question. How many people at these companies? DFTBA, which is a company that helps creators create great products and sell those products to their communities is about 50 and the majority of those are on the warehouse side and then there's like a support and then product development and client support and then Complexly is about 50 people too, which is spread across a bunch of different shows. People are mostly focused on individual shows at Complexly.
There's some people who sort of jump between teams. Let's focus on Complexly. I think we do a whole episode on merch and logistics and print-out advantage. How the heck did I, why do I know so much about any of that?
That's not my intent, but I do now. I think after this goes, I think that our merch store is DFTBA. Yeah, Vox does work with us, yeah. Yeah, so go buy an email's t-shirt and it'll help us with that.
The promo code is together. It's the best shirt that we all make together. But let's focus on Complexly. 50 people, you said most people are focused on individual shows.
How's the structuring role? A lot of our editorials, the words that come out of people's mouths is contract-based. So with Crash Course specifically, we'll be teaching a course on chemistry and so you're going to be making a course over the course of the year. On chemistry, you don't need to hire a chemistry writer who you're going to have to hire at the end of that year.
So it's a lot of expert contractors who are doing fact-checking, syllabus stuff, course design, and the actual writing of the thing. And then we have an editorial team that knows how to turn smart people's words into Crash Courses. And that's similar to how it works over on SciShow, similar to how it works over on Eons, which is our prehistoric world life podcast and YouTube show. And so those shows live in their worlds.
They usually have a person who's in charge of editorial who's not necessarily writing most of the stuff but who's doing the management of contract people. And then there's a production team that is in charge of actually turning into something pretty. And at Crash Course, the graphics are actually outsourced to another company called Block Afe in Canada who are amazing. So we don't have to figure out how to do all that.
So it's a lot like, we look at our pie chart and the second biggest piece of the pie is contractors after employees. And then we have a person who is in charge of the content for the whole company and the person who's in charge of the editorial for the whole company. So like all of those editors who are on different shows report to a person who's in charge of the editorial and then all the production people report to the content head. And it's, you know, it's pretty clutch together.
I didn't think hard about how work structure works. I didn't listen to enough decoder honestly before I started running a business. If you listen to enough decoder you realize everyone's making it up. And like half the time I change it for the sake of change which is really interesting over time.
I just flip the table just so everyone would get a refresh. Israel Queen becomes one of the show. Yeah, we've never done that. Or maybe we haven't.
We just rationalized it. I think there's a lot of that that happens. No one wants to admit to any decoder. So how many director reports do you have as a CEO?
At complexity I think five. So head of content, head of production, the COO, HR. I guess HR reports the COO and then my assistant and the chief of staff. And then how do you manage your, this is like the hardest thing for me, right?
So I have a big management business function that I have to do as editor-in-chief and I have to be an individual creative on the show and other shows all the time. And I find context switching between those two things to be almost impossible. And a full day of just like walking around in a circle to reset my brain and go to the other thing. You make a lot of stuff, right?
Like I would say your James Webb Space Telescope TikTok is one of my favorite pieces of internet content from the past year. Yeah, that was fun. And you were just like really excited and you were just like in the moment and it's great, but you had to make it. I'm assuming like your COO is like, yo, we got a business deal I got to talk to you about.
And they just had to wait. Like how do you manage that split? How do you manage that time? I don't suffer much in switching.
I find that like once I'm in a meeting, I'm in a meeting and then if I can keep my fingers off of Twitter, then I stay in the meeting. And then once I'm out of the meeting and I'm in an unscheduled time, then I just slip into creative mode. And you know, that might be unproductive creative mode where I'm like trying not to yell at somebody on Twitter. I switched over to that, by the way.
I used to, that time used to be yelling at people on Twitter and now it's trying not to, which is great. I think that's a huge step forward for me. What I recommend, by the way, is I have a Slack channel with like three friends where we tweet the things at each other instead of tweeting them on Twitter. It's very good.
Yeah, I think which of my YouTuber friends would most like this shitty tweet? You know, that video actually I did while my wife was out of town and I was like with my son and he was on a, you know, he was eating his lunch watching YouTube videos and I was like, I'm going to go with this. I've got a great idea for TikTok. Do you have to schedule your unscheduled time?
Oh yeah. Do you have like blocks in your calendar that are like, I'm going to go mess with TikTok? Yeah, actually like Thursday, which is wild. I don't schedule anything on Thursday unless something's bad.
And then I have Friday afternoons, which you're a little bit cut into, I'll be honest. This is creative work here. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, and I have, there's several other periods of my week where usually there's like four hour blocks and then right now, actually next week, I don't have that because there's a bunch of stuff going on.
All right, so here's a classic together question. So when you came on to answer, you've been at it for 15 years, you've got two companies, you've mothered the shifting sands of platforms. How do you make decisions? I mean, there's a bunch of different kinds of decisions.
I mean, you've got to balance your stakeholders. And for me, I'm really lucky in that like the first stakeholder I had, there were two, there's my brother. So we're making this a lot together in like 2007 and then the people who were watching it and that was it. You know, I wasn't even really one because there wasn't like money involved at that point.
And so to have the audience be a primary stakeholder and just have like my brother to be kind of the most important member of the audience was, you know, that feels right. Oftentimes I will be in a meeting and people will be confused about what we should do and it will be extraordinarily obvious to me because like I'm thinking, well, you know, it doesn't matter what that person wants or what that advertiser wants or whatever. Like if it's not, if like the audience is going to lose credibility with those people, if we're going to like not have their support and respect, if we're going to have less of their support and respect after this than before it, that costs way more than anything, any mistake we could possibly make or any relationship to an advertiser. So that is always the primary touch point for decisions unless it's family, you know.
Explain that to me. Well, unless my wife is like, you have not seen your son in four days. Yeah, right. That makes sense to me.
I understand. The family, because there's the mafia boss of all educational YouTubers and if we don't report correctly to the family, you get whacked. Like, I don't know if you've seen the captions out here. The family is serious.
Yeah, I would say there's an underlying YouTube mafia. We'll get into that in a minute. There is, yeah. You have 50 people complexly, they're all working on channels.
Is it all YouTube money that's paying bills? Where's the revenue come from? Oh gosh, no. So it's a huge piece.
I think probably maybe up to a third of our money comes straight from YouTube. But we have channels that are mostly supported by merchandise. We have channels that are mostly supported by crowdfunding. We have channels that are mostly supported.
Like Crash Wars, for example, is crowdfunding, YouTube money, direct ad sales that we sell, and grants. And there is no piece of that that could go away and we can still make the show. And Crash Wars, I think probably the biggest piece is crowdfunding. So a third of the companies running comes from YouTube.
Is that going up? Is it going down? Could you walk away from YouTube? No.
Both culturally and economically, I could not walk away from YouTube. It's a little bit like saying when you walk away from America for me. There's things I very much don't like about it, but I feel a little like a citizen and that would be such a big decision to make for me culturally. But in terms of money, no.
Also, no. Monetization, like just AdSense, is really quite powerful. And we get a lot of views and a lot of money comes from those views and there aren't platforms that share revenue like that. And there's also like, a lot of our traffic comes from the YouTube recommendation system.
A lot of our traffic comes from Search. And there aren't a lot of platforms that are driving a lot of traffic to video with Search outside of YouTube. So the 55% is a big deal. That's 55% of the revenue split.
So you get 55% of the ad money and YouTube down to 45%. There's a lot of companies out there that would not work without that. Let me push on Citizen YouTube for a minute. Oh yeah, please.
It's a big idea. But there's YouTube, a company, which is not benign. It's a company. It has motives.
It has a CEO. It's also true. I will say that this is also true of the country. It's true.
But like, you know, you don't get to vote out, Susan, like she's the CEO of YouTube. She's got to deliver a revenue line to Google shareholders and turn to Alphabet. It's very complicated, that's for sure. But then there's the YouTube community.
In the most reductive sense, are you a citizen of the YouTube community or the YouTube company or is it both at once? How does that feel for you? I think that it's impossible to disentangle them. I think that a lot of YouTubers think of themselves as part of the YouTube community and not of YouTube, the company.
You can do that in your head. You can have that be a separation you make in your head. I don't think that it's a separation that exists in the real world, though. You know, the YouTube community is based on the YouTube algorithms, which is based on YouTube's business model.
I wouldn't be the first person to live in a place where I don't get to vote for the leader. You know, probably the vast majority of... societies for pre-democracy in some way and also like there are levers which is why like when i'm thinking about like this is you know you say okay i don't get to vote on susan but what are the levers that people have and like people who work for youtube have a lot of power over susan people who make content on youtube have some power advertisers have power over susan like there are levers that people pull and have pulled that you know you just watch it with instagram i don't know when it's gonna come out but uh instagram getting a tremendous pushback of over sort of like having the app be just straight up tiktok yeah kim kardashian's not even instagram's like uh we're very sorry yeah so there are it's like kim kardashian is an oligarch of instagram basically who has enough power to influence and so like it's all power structures and of course i'm you know there are many ways in which youtube's not a country for example i can leave whereas you know citizens of countries can't leave them easily anyway you know but i do try and like recognize that in myself and also almost a little bit indulgent where it's just like i have to accept that i live a lot of my life and this is you know i'm more this way than most people but like this is the case for a lot of people we live a lot of our lives in these places that are corporate autocracies and like that is our choice and the fact that it is our choice is the thing that gives us freedom from the feeling of being an actual autocracy because we can't choose to leave but like my businesses can't choose to leave but that's kind of also okay you know in the same way that like my business couldn't choose to leave my town or like many people's business couldn't choose to leave my town which i think is bigger than most people think it is both in terms of business and in terms of our actual like our attention which is the only thing that we have we need to take a quick break but when we come back we have to talk about the youtube algorithm we're back just before the break you said something i want to focus on a little bit you said that algorithm shifts affect the community and i think every youtube creator i've ever talked to is aware of that at their core right that the distribution platform and the whims of the distribution platform will directly affect what they make and you can see it i'm a recent bad example like bad like philosophically bad example is views on johnny depp amber heard coverage skyrocketed so like hundreds of channels like video game channels suddenly pivoted to like live courtroom reaction channels to get themselves in a partner program and monetize and then explicitly said and we're gonna go back to making video games yeah that dynamic is not obviously audience i think but like how do you see it like you've been a part of how do you see it play out there's an algo change and the group text blows up and it's like we're all gonna make train videos today like it's better to imagine instead of like a change happening within youtube and so you see like a shift but like it's easier to imagine um when you look at two different platforms that have different algorithms they have different form factors they have different start dates like they came around at different moments in time and all that stuff tremendously impacts what kind of stuff gets made what the culture of the platform is how the creators behave what the incentives are so like it goes back to McLuhan right it's just like the medium is the message and like in this case the algorithm is a really important part of the medium so the thing that gets created is going to be the thing that succeeds like that's just that we can't say that for sure because there are some things that people will make even if it's successful some of it's not very much anymore but like what we can say is that things won't get made if they don't succeed and if they do it doesn't matter because no one's seen so what gets created and like the vast difference between what a television show is what a facebook video is what a youtube video is what a tweet is what a tiktok is what an instagram uh reel is like these things are very different from each other like what succeeds on those platforms is different even in the case of like vertical swipable video which is it seems like the same medium on these different platforms like very small changes you know have huge impacts and so like that i think the difference between a youtube video and a facebook video is like as different as if you like a tv show on youtube let's get into like the weeds of it like you are the broadest rush right like a science youtuber yeah sometimes youtube loves science other times it's like we're all everyone's dressed up like elsa and stab elmo and hart like just weird things happen on youtube that suddenly gather views and nobody can like predict it or understand even people inside of youtube are often surprised that the algorithm has decided is trending today yeah yeah i think that they worry about it they spend a lot of time being like what is our machine doing you know like i i cover tech and business that's the thing i want to do because we have our own site although the traffic from our site comes from many platforms including google so we have some pressure there but we're like this is the thing we make and the audience will come to us directly and that's right it feels like for creators on platforms there's that you want to be a science youtuber other people want to be tech youtubers or beauty youtubers and sometimes youtube is like yep the audience will come to you for that and sometimes like no the audience is somewhere else and your business will collapse yeah mechanically for you how is that expressed how does that feel how does that work it feels like you need to figure out how to disentangle yourself from the algorithm so you have to have like it's great to have deeper relationships with the individual people it feels also feels like there's two things that work one is the decisions of human beings which is the only input that algorithms get and so you get a higher click-through rate your video will do better and that click-through rate is not being determined by the algorithm it's being determined by a like a bunch of human beings making decisions so you know as with all content creators forever like it's not like magazine covers aren't like this you know you have to market your content somehow and you do it on youtube with title and thumbnail on tiktok you do it with you know like figuring out how to hook people so they will watch for a little while and then give them enough of a reward they'll click the like button or at least finish the video without swiping so like you have to be aware of the things that the algorithm is probably taking into account which is like click-through rates and launch their time it's almost all of it on youtube and then you have to uh you have to create content that will actually inspire those actions but there's the second thing where if youtube doesn't know what your stuff is it can't figure out who to show it to to get the higher click-through rate because there are you know there are a lot of different kinds of people my science videos are being shown to everyone in order to get a three percent click-through rate my science videos are being shown to people who are more likely to click on science videos and that is what's getting that click-through rate higher than like 0.5 but if youtube doesn't know how to find the people who will like your content that's a failure of youtube that's a youtube failure it's not a content failure it's a hard problem to solve but like what it does is it reinforces existing audiences and making content for existing audiences and then when things like amber heard johnny depp mess happen the algorithm will identify a new group of people but you really need a pretty big critical mass to create that or you need a lot of time or you need a spin-off from some other group and it's harder for youtube because they get way fewer data points than tiktok which you know you probably watch you know 20 tiktoks in the amount of time you spend watching one youtube video that's just more data it seems like all this right you have to have this pretty analytical logistical somewhat ruthless brain right you know what the algorithms want you know the platforms want you know the economics of the platform are like the end of the day you're still trying to get paid i assume and then you have to be a creative yeah but then you particularly have to manage 50 people through that process like how do you communicate out here's all the stuff i know about the platform how to inform the content to 50 people it's hard and like also it's important to not think that that's everybody's job we actually have an easier time writing a great episode of sci-show then we do marketing a great episode of sci-show and it's like the title is you know you got a 700 word script and the title is five to seven words and it's like the by far the most important words the interplay between the thumbnail and the title where you have them sort of talking to each other or like oftentimes my editorial team they'll want to tell people what's in the video in the title they'll be like here's what's in the video here's what you're gonna get and i'm like well now they don't need the video like they don't feel like they need the video because they feel like oh yeah okay i got that information now i like through the headline and this is the problem in all headlines through the headline i got enough information where i don't need to consume the content inside of the headline so trying to figure out the way to get people's people a little confused almost without making them believe something that's not true that's another big problem like a headline can be true but it can make me believe something that's not true so that's like a line that we have internally at the company that if people are being misled by a headline then because the former people are going to read the headline they're going to watch the video or the title i guess is what it's called i back in the day i didn't make youtube videos i wrote words yeah no you're speaking my language that's great that's how my text leads yeah so we don't want every person in the company to be worrying about that now we do want writers to be thinking about how to market the videos when they're writing the script or in the pitch at least like is this pitch marketable and you know i like to get pitch meeting sometimes so that i can be like how that's cool that's cool thing about the universe but like who cares yeah and sometimes it's fine to make videos that are only gonna get 100,000 views but the the way that i can talk about marketing content is i will do it and then i'll do a case study or i'll look at somebody else and i'll be like hey like to do an editorial or something like look how this person solved this problem this is a really complicated idea to get across in a title and a thumbnail like what's actually interesting about this topic and they did it by x strategy and you know i love that that's like my one of my favorite parts of being a youtuber is trying to figure out how to click on your videos without being a bad person so i i'm always into into doing that one of the worst aspects of journalism for me on that note is that sometimes it feels like a zero-sum game like everyone's gonna publish an iphone review and i gotta make sure you pick mine yeah really it's like real people are really cheap but like sometimes it feels very zero-sum yeah do you think about other science youtubers other youtubers as your competition they're still in the community with you what's that relationship like we don't uh we're all like we're all friends um yes the only people that we don't like are the ones who are lying a little bit or cheating a little bit in some way so they might make headlines that are kind of cheating or they might like make their videos by doing copyright infringement that we couldn't get away with or their videos just like shoddily researched and so they're like it's not good information so that's the only people that we don't like there's like um in the sort of educational youtuber community there is some drama there's also a tendency that like it's very hard to get them to work together so it's very impressive to me when people do get them to work together because they're just so smart that everybody thinks they know the right way to do everything so like and everybody's way is slightly different but like you know we get together and play board games and um are dumb and you know have for the last 10 years and when there's new people who come up like they like invariably if like the test is like it does your content inspire and amaze and delight and is accurate and if that's the case like there seems to be very little barrier once the algorithm decides that like people are gonna see it like that's that's the hard part but once people start seeing it and other youtubers start thinking oh my gosh that's interesting it seems to be like quite an open place as long as you're not being manipulative or misinforming people that's maybe the third time you've mentioned the algorithm is sort of like an external force that will make a decision i'm picking up on that because i know you mentor a lot of creators you make a lot of videos about the platforms the nature of the platforms when younger creators come to you for guidance and mentorship when i talk to folks like that they really do see the algorithm it's an external force that might bless them or not and i'm always kind of like yes but no right like it's there's a part of it that's in your control how do you give that advice it is very yes but no and i think that it's you know it can be very hard when the problem isn't the algorithm which is often the case like it's you know it's just that the the hook isn't hooky enough or the hosting isn't snappy enough or something and uh you know it's extremely crowded out there so that's tough but usually when i'm like having long conversations with creators it's because the confidence is very good so the main thing there is like you know it's it's got to be obsession and it sort of sucks that it has to be obsession but like you're obsessed with the difference between a 3.9 percent click through rate and a 4.0 click through rate like you're just thinking about that you're thinking about you know your view to like ratios on tiktok you're thinking about like what was different about this video why did this one pick up and often like on tiktok it can straight be magic like i think that i think almost intentionally introduces randomness into uh how it promotes content because it like gets people more that randomness is yeah you know your brain has to figure it out and so it's like creates false narratives and so you know like the main thing though is like how you select great topics and then it's also how you deal with success which is something that is easier to talk about because it's it's more transferable from person to person whereas success is so different you know 10 years ago than it is now i don't have experience i don't know what it would be like to try and start right now one of the things i've noticed in the pandemic just on that note is like these jobs have become very public very lonely yeah and you know you're like in montana so you've always been sometimes but like three years ago someone in the version would like publish a hit like a big scoop and it's like walk into the newsroom and like people would know it and there's like a little bit of a feedback loop even though all these things are happening online now it's like you're alone like you're just alone at home like many people in these industries creative industries are just kind of like alone at home you get famous online and you're like close your laptop lid and you're still alone it's a weird thing that is happening right now yeah so when you're talking about dealing with success is it there's a lot of weird agents and lawyers who come to you is it suddenly strangers are going to dissect the background of every video and be weird about you or is it it's still going to feel lonely because that to me is the weirdest part of this entire moment yeah i mean it's all of those things one of the hard parts of being a creative entrepreneur is that you have to both be ambitious but also balance it with like something healthy so i don't know like ambition can be healthy but ambition is usually early in a career it comes from but there's like a little bit of chip on your shoulder there's like trying to prove yourself there's trying to be more successful than this person you think sucks like there's a lot of kind of dirty fuels that burn pretty hot and that's drives a lot of people and i'd certainly use them so i try to talk about it in those terms but also there has to like if you go all in you have to be able to come some out and whether that's like six months later or whether it's every day i think it's better for it to be every day where you have pieces of why you think you matter and your identity that are not connected to a hundred thousand people loving you who you've never met so what are the things that you're diversifying into that still bring you joy and still make you feel valued and i think that in part like i'm lucky to have lived in my panel this whole time where um my friends don't care that much and what we talk about is like i went about work and they went about work you know and also like it puts into perspective you know that like i got like a lot of cool things going on so i can feel good about it without comparing myself to other creators who are maybe getting more views per video um you know but like like my friend who is a baker you know is worrying about bakery things and i'm worrying about click-through rates and like that's just like some people worry about bakery things and some people worry about youtuber things this is perfect time to come back we're going to turn our attention to we're back let's talk about tiktok just before the break we're talking about views on your videos you're on the show because you tweeted us about creator funds and tiktok's economics are set up as a zero-sum game right there's a fixed pot of money a billion or so dollars that they distribute to the creators on the platform per views and that's all the money and the platform's obviously growing like a weed and that means the pants are getting smaller and smaller you made a very long video about this anchorage let me go watch it you did a good job of summarizing it so go ahead it's just division it's like i feel like this audience there's a fixed pot of money and more people are eating money and some money's a spot right yeah but you're on tiktok right i would say like i've seen more and more of you on tiktok over time because it's kind of just like easier to make the cost of tiktok production is so much lower how are you thinking about that balance between platforms how do you think about tiktok so to talk about tiktok let's talk first about instagram because i think that instagram is fascinating because instagram never shared revenue with creators or it hasn't done in like weird little temporary ways or something now there's never been like youtube where it's like we're going to create a stable economic ecosystem where you know how much you are making and you are making that money based on how effectively we can sell ads against your content and what that did is it created an instagram where in order to have a viable business as an instagram creator you had to do it as a person who's going to be good at doing brand deals and so like instagram kind of created the brand deal a little bit uh and that was the way that you could be a professional instagrammer and this was fantastic can you explain what a brand deals for people sure a brand like l'oreal comes to you and says we want you to talk about our shampoo in your tiktok or in your instagram post and uh and it's just like a way of getting an advertising impression that's connected to the credibility uh and the authenticity of the creator so what that created was an ecosystem where you could only be a professional in the ecosystem if you were good at selling certain products and that meant that instagram be came focused on lifestyle and beauty content and aspirational content not because there was anything intrinsic to instagram about that kind of content but because that was the economic incentive like you had to create aspirational content so people would want to have a life like yours so that you could sell them shampoo that seems like a huge miss to me that they were like if you had created a platform where you could make money doing lots of different kinds of things like youtube did then you would have a much more impactful bigger deeper cool interesting platform now that i don't think like instagram is cool and interesting it's like especially like most of the things that are going on on instagram that are interesting though don't make any money so tiktok is interesting in that if you saw that it was like okay why would we share a portion of our money with creators if instagram figured out how to do it without sharing anything i think the reason to say that is because you're screwing yourself over you're saying like only certain kinds of content that are good at selling stuff are going to be economically viable on your platform but at the same time brand deals are working very well on tiktok and so you know i don't know if that's permanent and it also seems to be that it doesn't need to be as aspirational it doesn't like it's not needing to sort of like rest on you want my life it can be more like we have the same life and so trust me but you know the reality is people are making plenty of money like they're making money like that not at this like per view level anything like you know how to make it work on tiktok tiktok gives the creator instead of money it gives them attention and creators figure out how to turn that attention into money and a lot of kinds of content though still aren't that good at that and so the platform is limiting itself only to content that's good at helping people sell things for other people or for themselves if they're you know they're big enough to sort of create their own products and i think that's very limiting for the platform and i think it's very bad for creators because it means that the kind of content it's not just what's successful it's also what uh can be turned into something that's monetizable do you make money from tiktok i mean no but i do the main way i have made money from tiktok is that i have a sock subscription and the socks you get a pair of socks delivered every month to you designed by different independent artists that we decide to collaborate with and all of the profit from the sock club goes to charity so i don't make money but the sock club has donated over a million dollars to charity and tiktok has been the biggest piece of the marketing of the sock club so i can see that conversions come like tiktok is pretty good at converting so i get that but the success of youtube just leads me to believe that the savvy move is to share revenue rather than create these static pools but that's a very hard message to sell when you have gone from losing money every year to just printing cash and to say like okay we're printing cash we're going to give away half of it it's a hard sell and i very much hope that youtube does put that pressure on by having that relationship with shorts which is just exploded as well like my shorts are getting better than my tiktoks really yeah but shorts are monetized by a creator fund shorts are currently basically unmonetized so yeah they're monetized by a creator fund but for youtube shorts is unmonetized there's no advertisements running on shorts shorts is a hole that they're throwing money into right now so to me i'm like okay you can give us creator fund is better than sharing uh 50 percent of nothing but the moment youtube launches its monetization product for shorts which has to be soon right well you have a different kind of relationship with youtube than me i ask youtube questions 35 cons people lawyer out an answer yeah and then it's grounded to dust and answers nothing i thought neil's answer on this podcast was really good though he was like straight out like we will share revenue on shorts ads the same way we share revenue on everything else but they don't know how they're gonna do it yeah that's a great like neil's great i think that was a great episode but like he has to say that because he already has the thing and he can just promise the next thing forever tiktok can't say that because they don't have the thing what thing don't they have they don't have a like an ad sense like model that shares revenue like that they just have a creator fund youtube already has the model everyone wants do you think it's the model or the technology that's the problem like what's the difficulty of launching the thing so i think for youtube it's very easy to say we will extend our current advertising model from regular youtube to shorts the problem to solve there is it's not pre-roll right it's in between swipes the video right so you have to figure out who's responsible for that for the impression so there's a little bit of a technology and business and politics problem there but like not unstoppable because you can just expand the thing that you already have yeah and say it's gonna work this way and you've got the pre-existing understanding of everyone that some huge percentage of the money coming in will go out yeah and that everyone includes again like alphabet shareholders who know that youtube is built this way and so extend model for them tiktok right they just have a giant chinese corporation that no one can really pierce the veil of in the chinese government but they can't necessarily be like we're changing our revenue model so that 55 percent of every incoming dollar that goes out like that's a big change right so you're saying it's harder to sell for the shareholders more than it's harder to sort of build the product or yeah like spotify is the best comparison actually which is like tangential but has the same problem like every dollar you pay in spotify mostly goes out to artists or record labels um and songwriters and whoever but like you know they're ever they're chasing increasing margins by doing podcasts and they don't have that economic relationship but then on the flip side spotify also has huge shareholders in the record labels which own huge terms to spotify and they've got a legal regime in this country yeah where they're like regulated into having to pay certain amounts of license fees for music in certain ways and like creators get none of that there's like legal like that's law whereas the tiktok's problem is can you get shareholders on board with the idea that this will be a more dynamic long-lasting ecosystem if we uh pay creators not just sort of like put the burden of monetization on them but also do some work to actually pay them more than like you know 0.0000 cents for a few yeah but like i know in over the course of the past many years you have made many videos where like youtube is dumb for x and then youtube will like change it right like my joke is that the life cycle of every youtuber hits an inflection point where they make a youtube video about how they are youtube and that's where like everything changes they become self-aware like in this world like that video is when it happens but like youtube is responsive to its creative community you think tiktok is responsive to its creative community that way i don't really i think that they've got some pretty big prop like you know they're responsive to big big creators big big big creators like instagram's responsive to a kardashian for example like a huge problem they have is that moderation is really automated and there's very little recourse i've had friends who've had channels with over accounts with over a million followers that just lost it and there's no recourse like i hank green could not get them passed i'm very egotistical but like i got contacts inside tiktok and i was like what can we do for this person and they're like the person who handles that does not take my calls like i'm not allowed to talk to them i think that there's just not enough infrastructure built up there it feels to me more like the relationship between facebook and creators where it's sort of like you know they're gonna do what they're gonna do and i think that maybe the concern is like if you give creators a little bit they're gonna expect more and more and more so just let them deal with us as we exist and you know if we hear something that seems like a good feature change we'll change that feature we won't like say that we respond to the creator community even like it's more like imagine us as a black box and not you know people and that people don't make these decisions it's tiktok that makes these decisions and i think that's how most creators think about it they don't think about it as a group of people does that make a viable hedge against youtube i know a lot of creators who think okay the audience is moving to tiktok the platform certainly are terrified of the audience moving to tiktok but economically it doesn't seem like a viable hedge or a sustainable or stable hedge against something like youtube what do you mean by hedge you know earlier we talked about diversifying revenue streams so i think like patreon is a viable hedge against the instability of youtube right so for a creator is tiktok a viable hedge okay yeah uh you know what i think the creators are often super aware of the fact that like that they are in the attention game rather than the money game and that that's more what motivates most of them anyway it certainly motivates you at the beginning before any money is there so i think that in that way it is like it's certainly an attention hedge if it's not an economic one but at the same time like i even after you know two plus years of being a tiktoker like a straight like i'm a tiktoker now i do not feel like it's a stable place and i feel like what's interesting to me is like when does it happen when does that moment of self-awareness arise in enough people because this happens every platform i remember when like the relationship between twitch and streamers was just so beautiful and loving and rosy and everybody was so happy about every decision that twitch made and then like at some point it was like and i remember that with youtube too like we loved youtube early on like there was never any drama between youtube and youtubers in the beginning and i think that you know it's been interesting because it isn't really when creators start to feel that way it's when audiences start listening to them about it because right now you can make a tiktok about how annoying you annoy you are by some decision tiktok made but unless the audience is like gonna watch that instead of the next thing that they could immediately swipe to then it doesn't matter it's not gonna get any views do you think that tiktok the mechanism of tiktok is swipe actually insulates tiktok from that kind of criticism right because you have a relationship with youtubers you might not have a relationship with tiktokers right i think that it does until tiktok starts to experience like in the audience's head isn't all positive vibes and you know right now i think that the vast majority of people use tiktok i don't picture them as like an upstart like what a surprise what a delightful little place um without any idea of how big bite dance is you know i think they think they take this tiny little sudden sudden company that is fighting the big dogs and that's like an underdog story and that feels really good and so it's sort of like well you know give them give them time give them give them some slack they're like tiktok they're a tiny little company and it's just like you know i don't think anybody like it's very it would be very weird for because like you know you don't have any other interactions with bite dance as an american human do you think of yourself as a citizen of tiktok you just call yourself a tiktoker yeah are you a citizen of tiktok or you're a citizen of youtube yeah totally is it a different surface level like tiktok for example will send you a 200 flower arrangement but they will not talk to you about whether your friend's account got canceled you know and i think that they may be cutting back on this a little bit but really for a while there the tiktok slide was out of hand like i was like my wife was like you need to tell them to stop sending stuff is that everybody is like i don't know we'll see if it happens again this christmas but it's like cakes and skateboard decks and hoodies and boxes it's just like this is a company that does not have to make money that's what that indicates me like this is a company that's still totally in the burn phase and maybe will be forever in the burn phase i don't think the tiktok is in the burn phase anymore and i also think that like spending a thousand dollars on a that's making them a hundred thousand dollars is a great deal for them like if they can send me flowers instead of sharing revenue that's a huge win this is my second question tiktok is by dance by dances a chinese company i know i'm just i just realized in this conversation the people i know at tiktok who are going to listen to the conversation i just want to say i'm sorry this is how i feel i would love i would love to not feel this way i would love to feel like you have the capacity to take on the sort of complexity of the challenges you face and i would love to feel like you want to support creators the same way that youtube does but i don't feel that way yeah and that's what the difference in like citizenship feeling is for you yeah but i do feel like i love the tiktok community hugely like this is where it's complicated like there's so much creativity and there's so much air there's so much light in the forest where there isn't any on youtube so much opportunity to get discovered and that that means that the diversity of science creators is head and shoulders above youtube it's younger it's more female it's more of color it's and like these are just people are making like people want content from different kinds of people and like i've loved that and i also love like just how culture just freaking happens like it's a huge driver of culture it feels and like i am happy to be on it i have a lot of concerns about it and i think that it's definitely a citizenship thing to not sort of like accept the place where you are as the way that it will always be here's what i'll say about that diversity creators thing it feels like youtube's algorithms have like settled in they're like middle-aged they're gonna be who they are forever what do you inject into an algorithm to turn it into a 12 year old again like that's we gotta figure that out yeah like they all need to have mid-life crises the tech recommendation algorithm on youtube needs to like buy a convertible and be young again you know like just get really into model trains no like i heard you on wayform with marquez and i've talked to marquez about this too we see this too youtube thinks that our video should be shown to 97 97% men and then we look at the actual stats in the tech industry and like 70% of purchase decisions in tech are made by women so i know based on the actual money that is spent that women are very interested in technology and you can like make content for them and then you run into this like crusty old youtube algorithm that is very set in its ways and it's like only dudes and tiktok like just doesn't have the crust it hasn't developed the rigidity and it just fires stuff at anybody to see what will happen and that like that algorithmic dynamic seems like the opportunity but also feels like a very big story about how culture works right now yeah and it's also very interesting because it's a different question will you watch this versus will you click on this and i think that we have biases about ourselves and about what content is for us in our own minds too and i think that deciding to click on a technology review video or a science video might be a very different decision than whether i will watch it once it starts playing so there is difference there as well but yeah i mean when i think about this i'm going back to a previous moment in conversation i think about like how tiktok is structured for creators it's just so designed for the user it's not designed for creators it's like it's so optimized for the best possible experience of the user which is now like it's starting to walk back from that a little bit because like you start to put more advertisements and you start to control things a little bit more so that you can not be in burn mode forever and youtube did this to tv you know it was a much better user experience to tv and now it's been the last 10 years trying to like create systems that actually make it like not just pure candy land you know we will promote whatever stuff does well even if it's extraordinarily destructive to society and that means space you know it's space open for somebody who comes along with a set of features that is even better for users and even sort of more easy and fun to use we've talked a lot about youtube in there how it works how they work and access youtube and how there's a leverage influence the ceo of youtube and they've grown and we talked a lot about tiktok as a black box one of the most important elements of tiktok as a black box is that it's owned by a chinese company that has some element of control of the chinese government and they will dispute that actual mechanism of control but like it's there there's something there and there's reports of data being shared there was a story this morning about the chinese government asking for a propaganda account that wasn't labeled as a propaganda account and youtube and tiktok being like uh we have to push back against this but like it's like the conversations are happening you know does this give you any pause about participating in this platform yeah i guess the thing that gives me the most it makes me the most and i don't know if i'm doing the right thing i felt this way about youtube to some extent like there was a time when it felt very values neutral or even values positive to create youtube videos and then there was a time when i felt like oh i don't know every day whether this does more harm than good and i feel that way about all the social media platforms i engage with but the the that's but this is different um and i don't know like i don't feel like i have the expertise to know how different it is and i don't i also don't get the idea that anybody does like i don't think that one thing i will say is that i think that we all underestimate how powerful these platforms are like i think that generally they don't leverage that power for much more than increased revenue you know i think that the best actors out there try to use that power to sort of like you know bury misinformation you know like that's some of the work that they do but almost all of it is how do we get people to stick on our platform so it's just a money motive but like if there's a motive beyond that there's no reason why it couldn't be used for the motive beyond that whether that is to create division or create stick certain narratives in people heads or to make people sort of just more chill like it was facebook's done research on the fact that they can make people happier or more sad by what they show them and they're also like facebook has been trying to optimize for more connection which i don't know that they successfully have ever done but like that's a weird thing to optimize for like it's a weird amount of power for like 10 people to have yeah this is the weirdest thing about our current society that we don't think about a lot is that there's a huge amount of power being held in the hands of like a board and a ceo and you know maybe a couple of people around the ceo and add in you know somewhat antagonistic foreign government in that equation and it's an order of magnitude creepier and you know more worrying so i don't i don't know how to interface with that and i you know my hope is that like i'm not actually drawing people onto the platform but i'm reaching the good stuff while i'm there but like i think that's weasely do you think that you have to be there because that's where the audience is going i honestly don't think about it that way i use the platform because i find it very compelling to use i could have a lot of answers to this question that would seem a little bit less troubling but ultimately i think that we are all kind of chasing just emotions and dopamine and like i like to i'm trying to be honest with myself about that and like the audience is there certainly that's a component of it but like i just it's really fun to use it does seem way more fun than making youtube yeah yeah like instant feedback loop right yeah yeah i also like it's weird because i've also had an novelist and so it's like the full gamut of like i'm gonna work on this for three years and no one's gonna see it And then it's going to be six months done before anybody, you know, any consumer sees it versus a TikTok, which is like, or a tweet, you know, like the most instantaneous, like I went from an idea to feedback on it in, you know, less than five seconds. No, this is my whole thing.
We talk about a lot of platforms. Twitter's never paid anybody a dime. Well, also, they have also never paid themselves a dime. Sure.
Like, ultimately, if you believe that, like, people are, like, rationally, economically motivated, no one should tweet. Like, only disaster can befall you and you'll never make any money. And yet, like, the whole media industry is like, let's tweet. And there's, like, 12 people who've made money from their tweets.
It's like, this doesn't, none of this makes sense. Yeah. You're one of the few creators who could go off and start your own little platform. We have David's on.
He's a streaming service. Anybody want to invest? You have a big enough audience. Do you ever think, like, screw it, I'm leaving these algorithms behind and I'm going to make my own thing and you pay me two bucks a month for Hank Plus?
It's not an or. I've thought about it in the end of the sense. But, like, I don't think that there's enough. Like, we have to make content for it.
I'm quite tired. But I do find that model very interesting. I hope that it's a big part of the future. Seeing creators make stuff that's sort of, like, in between the quality of a YouTube video and a television show because it's on a streaming platform so you can, like, make that work.
And seeing the sort of the different things that can exist that couldn't exist otherwise because of that is great. And I think that Nebula is, like, probably one of the, if not the standout version of that. But, like, I and Complexly are always, like, you know, when we have these conversations that we are impact focused. And so, like, we would rather make a little bit of money from a lot of people than a lot of money from a little bit of people.
So that's a reason why not to. But, like, diversification feels very good. And also being able to make stuff you could otherwise make feels very good. And also there's a bunch of people in my company who want to do stuff we can't afford and be great for them.
I want to end by talking about this, Ox, but here's my last question here. You said you're very tired. Yeah. I think about what you've done, which is build a stable business on the shifting sands of these platforms.
And I've read many stories about where you have to go to YouTube and patiently explain to YouTube how YouTube works. And then, like, do TikTok and then think about this. And it just seems like building a business as a creator on these platforms which are not stable is exhausting, right? We hear about creator burnout all the time.
Where are you? Are you burnt? Are you in it? Are you got another 15 years of Hank Green?
So I'm not burned out. I've never experienced what I think people are talking about when they talk about burnout. I've never experienced, like, a collapse moment. I've had very bad moments in my career, for sure.
But usually they're not about, like, overwork. They're about some external problem that I can't solve. The things that have helped me with that are obviously having a lot of, like, enough resources to get help. You know, usually when I say help, I don't mean, like, therapy, though that's also good.
I mean, like, people to take the burdens off of me. Other people to do things, yeah. And there's having, like, people around me who don't, I'm not, like, as driven because I'm not surrounded by people who want the same things as me. And I think that if I, like, that's very self-reinforcing.
And so that's a nice piece of it. I have a really supportive community of people who, like, if I have to take a break, they're, like, great to take a break. My brother is very supportive. Like, it's always been the two of us in this together.
And so if I'm having a hard time and I whine to him, he will either tell me to stop whining and solve the problem or that actually I'm just whining. And then, like, you know, that's, like, life is hard. And I have chosen a very interesting life, like, and have the opportunity to choose a very interesting life that, like, is, like, love. And if it contains hard parts, then, like, that's other people's lives contain hard parts, too.
But sometimes it's, like, how do we solve this problem? So I have managed to not have to feel like, I don't know, I just am definitely tired. But I think that, like, I wasn't this tired before I had a child. So the sort of additive of, like, having a lot of stuff to do and also, like, long to be, but that is a big, it's definitely tricky and had me thinking more about how do I get great help.
And that, I think, is really, I think that's probably a much bigger deal than I ever anticipated it would be. And something that, I don't know, I don't hear, like, business people talking enough about succession or, like, how to create really stable systems of excellent executives, which just seems to me like it's, like, the whole thing. Yeah, this is the whole show here. Like, how do you build a system that can operate itself?
I'm, like, no one told me to answer that. If you're out there listening, Jeff, give Hank $10 million and get on the show. When I had a kid, that poll switched for me, like, overnight, like, oh, I got to spend a lot more time. There's a lot of stats out there that say that the thing that young people want to be most is YouTuber.
It's, like, the number one desired profession. Whenever I hear the stat, I'm, like, you know, like, yeah, I want to be an NFL quarterback, but, like, it's really hard. And, like, it might not be sustainable. Do you think it's a sustainable career now in 2022?
Oh, I mean, for a lot of people, it is. What about, like, if you're new? Yeah, yeah, I think there's ways to do it. The other thing I think is, I think that it's more like when people want to be a rockstar than when people want to be quarterbacks.
Because being a quarterback, it's not a super transferable skill, and also it's very hard on your body, and also it's very, because it's a very select group of people. But when you want to be a rockstar, you always come out of it being great at guitar. And when you want to be a YouTuber, I feel like you can come out of it being a better communicator. You can come out of it, like, understanding marketing better.
Like, I feel like if you actually sort of, like, chase it to its logical conclusion, it's like, oh, so you want a communications degree, which is valuable. Like, there's a lot of people who have great jobs and have communications degrees. I don't think that's how most kids are thinking about it, but I think if they chase it, that, like, the skills that you develop trying to be a YouTuber are more transferable than trying to be a professional sports star. And, like, I am glad I wanted to be a rock star for a little bit so that I can play my son Silent Garfunkel songs.
If the concern is more how you're setting yourself up for failure, I think the dreams are always, you know, like, I think the main thing about dreams is that once they become less interesting to you, whether because you're failing or because you're changing, that you don't hold yourself to a dream that you don't have anymore. That's the only thing I'd say to those kids. Yeah, I agree with you. I would say that for all the management talk on the show, being in a struggling little band was the best management training I ever received in my life.
Like, you got to four people in a room and now we got to start and stop on time. That's really hard. Yeah. Oh, and being on tour, did you ever go on tour where it's, like, five guys in a van with a thousand t-shirts just smelling each other for two months?
We hit our goal of playing the Metro in Chicago, which is, like, the only thing I ever wanted. And they were like, well, wasn't it? Dream done. I'm going to become a tech recorder.
It's like, I'm out. See everybody later. We realized we didn't have the next set of ambition. That's a whole other show.
You got to have a member of the band who is mostly there to keep everybody else at peace and on time. Yeah. Once you don't, it's like, oh, this is over. It's Joe DeGeorge.
Love him so much. My job in that band was to play a guitar in Final Cut Pro. You have two subscription clubs for charity on top of everything else. Awesome socks.
Awesome coffee. Yeah. So the whole idea is we buy things that we need and want. And, like, the current model is in order to do that, you have to have a founder or stock shareholders who are getting rich somehow.
But, like, do we have to? Like, it's not that complicated. It turns out I'm more complicated than that. Coffee also the same.
But do we have to? Like, can you have a situation where instead of when you buy socks, some strange rich person gets richer that you will never know exists, could it just be that it helps build hospitals or something? So that's the business model that we're playing around with. It's certainly not a unique idea.
I've studied and looked a lot at Newman's own. And there's ways that it makes things easier and there's ways that it makes things harder. And some of those ways that it makes things harder surprise me. But the outcome has been very good.
People have signed up. I think we've got over 10,000 coffee subscribers, over 40,000 stock subscribers. This coffee club just launched recently. And I don't know.
Like, part of me is like, okay, we're going to be a stock company and there's going to be a coffee company and that's going to be great. And part of me is like, we're going to take over the world. We're going to be bigger than Amazon. But, like, I never have a person who thinks too much about what the goals are and think more about what happens today.
And what's happening today seems good. And I'm just going to chase it and do it and whatever decision seems to be the right decision. Thanks again to Hank Green for taking the time to talk today, for inviting himself on the show. Thank you for listening to Decoder.
I hope you enjoyed it. As always, I'd love to hear what you think of the show. You can email us at decoder at theverge.com. You can hit me up directly on at Reckless on Twitter.
If you like the show, please share with your friends and subscribe wherever you get podcasts. If you really like the show, give us a five-star review. And, of course, if you tweet about the show, I will obviously retweet you. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Boston Podcast Network.
Today's episode was produced by Creighton D. Simone and Jackie McDermott, who was edited by Kelly Wright. Decoder music is by Ray Kirster Cylinder. Our senior audio director is Andrew Marino.
Our editor director is Brooke Minters. Our executive producer is Alan Ardotton. See you next time.