I’ve been a fan of Hank Green, and his brother John, since their “Vlogbrothers” series in YouTube’s early days. As well-meaning and well-spoken nerds, they rapidly assembled a community of like-minded terminally online followers. One channel quickly turned into a network, laying the groundwork for educational franchises like SciShow and Crash Course. But with a big audience and community, they’ve also made good. In 2012, the brothers launched a foundation aligned with their goal to “decrease world suck”, and since then it has granted $17 million to more than 100 charities. Earlier this year, Complexly, the company the Green brothers started to produce educational content for their channels and partners like PBS, became a non-profit after both brothers donated their equity in the company.
Which is why the recent fallout over Hank admitting to using ChatGPT for research feels like such a seismic internet event. Hank Green isn’t a faceless media conglomerate chasing a payout, he’s a beloved creator at the center of the internet’s fiercest debate about automation, scale, and burnout. Hank first addressed the issues in a reply to a tweet, but the original tweet to which Hank replied to was deleted, and later posted a longer Reddit apology, admitting he had fallen into an unhealthy habit of relying heavily on generated notes to keep up with his brutal publishing schedule. He announced a pause on several of his personal projects, conceding that “the level of dopamine I’ve been getting from interacting with LLMs… is not healthy for me or good for the world.”
The backlash was swift, loud and deeply personal. It also wasn’t just about dragging Hank into the ongoing flame war over whether AI is worth the environmental and ethical costs. The real blow was how directly those shortcuts collided with his core brand. For nearly two decades, Hank’s primary currency has been his unvarnished earnestness, radical transparency and rigorous, evidence-based trust. When one of the internet’s most famously authentic educators admits that the friction of research was quietly being outsourced to a hallucination engine, the disappointment from long-time fans cuts straight to the core of the contract he built with his audience.
Don’t Forget to Be Awesome
To understand how someone so dedicated to earnestness ends up in his position, you have to look at the sheer, terrifying scale of what he tries to maintain. Hank and John didn’t become educational media moguls and then rest on their laurels. John, for his part, continues to make Vlogbrothers videos, do podcasts and write YA books. But Hank has been operating at an entirely different velocity.
In just the last 24 months, Hank has: released a comedy special, launched a Kickstarter for a book, launched a Kickstarter for another show, guest-hosted episodes of The Verge’s Decoder podcast, launched a #1 app, given MIT’s commencement speech, appeared on Dropout.tv, appeared on an episode of Taskmaster, started another podcast, launched a daily puzzle game and… launched another daily puzzle game.
A lot can happen in two years, but he did all of the above while also continuing to release regular content on his existing channels and shows, which, again, over that exact same window included:
- 178 regular YouTube videos on his channel
- 128 videos on the Vlogbrothers channel
- 67 episodes of the Dear Hank and John podcast
- 21 episodes of the Ask Hank Anything video series
- 16 episodes of the SciShow Tangents video series / podcast
- 11 episodes of his Humans podcast
- 5 episodes of the Delete This podcast
- and a whole bunch of other guest appearances that I couldn’t possibly count
I honestly don’t know how he can manage that. I mean, if I had to guess, it’s that he has help from some of Complexly’s roughly 85 employees so he may not be personally attending to every detail of everything he’s a part of, but even if you’re not the driving force behind that much content, it’s still a lot to be a part of.
Appreciating Pushback
There was a good discussion in Garbage Day by Ryan Broderick earlier this week about how LLMs make it extremely easy to stretch yourself past what you can reasonably support. If you’re building and achieving things you want to do with AI, it’s incredibly addicting. Seeing things you couldn’t do before just appear before your eyes is a dopamine machine.
I have a lot of compassion for Hank Green, because the kinds of things he’s doing and building are the kinds of things I too would want to do and build. I tried standup comedy once in college. I’ve also enjoyed making podcasts, videos, silly web projects and funny PowerPoints. Hank Green is living my dream, for sure. I’ll certainly never be able to handle that he was on TASKMASTER.
But this is where AI is the most harmful, because while he did all of that, there’s still… more. It may not have been in pursuit of money or power, but I would want Hank to know that everything he’s done so far is enough. I would assume Hank has people in his life who have probably been telling him he’s probably doing too much as well, but he wouldn’t get that from an AI chatbot. And while I type all of these things to seemingly compliment a person I’ve never met—which is a very parasocial thing to do—I’m actually doing it as cover to say this to myself. I may not be doing nearly as many things as Hank Green, but if I had an audience and a team behind me that could enable me to do them, I definitely would have tried to do just as much as he did.
Two things can be true at the same time: modern tools like LLMs and algorithms can give us terrifying, almost magical powers to build our dream projects at a scale we never thought possible. And at the exact same time, these tools are addictive, unsustainable traps that can push people to chase an endless “more.” Infinite capacity isn’t infinite purpose. You can build a mountain of things you love and still end up crushed by the weight of making them.
Galaxy Brain
Last November, Hank appeared on the inaugural episode of Charlie Warzel’s podcast “Galaxy Brain”, and laid out this exact dynamic:
“I think that sometimes people can be legitimately shocked by a majoritarian viewpoint. Like, they’ll hear somebody say something that’s pretty much right down the middle of the road average American stuff, and they’ll be like, ‘Whoa, people believe that still?’ And it’s like you’re in a little corner and you think it’s everybody.”
Hank was pointing out that any algorithmically amplified platform is going to optimize for what keeps people watching and clicking. Over time, that incentive structure inevitably drifts away from content that makes you feel good and toward content that makes you feel bad. The algorithm naturally selects stories of us that feel “morally stained,” outrageous or reprehensible. Not because we want to feel miserable, but because those reaction-driven signals are what the platform rewards:
“I think that like a great deal of the internet is sort of made of outrage bait. But as a creator, what I always think is we make, as creators, what the algorithms want. And the algorithms want what the people will watch. … I work with these algorithms. I know that. I have to get views. I have to compete in this environment.”
To prove his point, he talked about how one of John’s videos about tuberculosis screenings in the Philippines was underperforming when it had very earnest titles. So Hank retitled it to hook into existing outrage about Elon Musk and USAID cuts. The whole thing left Hank uncomfortable because the story was about something genuinely good, but he had to reframe it around something bad so it would be seen by more people.
That is the ultimate tragedy of the modern internet. Outrage content always demands a target, and in an environment built on relentless optimization, Hank Green was a perfect candidate for a downfall. It’s been less than a week, and yet the rage is still spreading online. At this point, it’s not even about Hank anymore.
But when the machine demands infinite output and rewards conflict, even a brand built on pure authenticity can stretch to the point where it looks and feels synthetic. And if someone as thoughtful and well-meaning as Hank Green can get swallowed up trying to feed that machine, none of us stand a chance unless we can all learn when to stop.