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In this inaugural episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel examines the state of the internet as it stands now in November 2025 with Hank Green, a true citizen of the internet—somebody who has made a living riding the algorithmic waves of the social web. Green started his YouTube channel, Vlogbrothers, with his brother, John, back in 2007, and they now have more than 4 million subscribers. Hank is a creator—and not just in the modern sense of the word. He’s an entrepreneur, an educator, a social-media celebrity, and somebody who understands how to build trust and massive audiences online. He’s deeply attuned to the ways that the technological tools we use begin to change us.

In this episode, Warzel and Green look back on a time when the internet felt small, more serendipitous, and inspiring, and try to tease apart what went wrong. Are people starting to leave TikTok? How exactly did the internet turn into a misery machine? What makes a great headline? Why is it easier now for some people to trust creators over institutions? Green helps make sense of the internet we live on and offers his reasons for why it might get worse before it gets better (but it could get better!).

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hank Green: Like, the thing that really gives me hope is watching teenagers think that what I do is so goddamn cringe, and I’m like: Yes, I’m gonna do it more, so that you think it’s more cringe and you never do what I’ve done with my life. Stay away from this box.

Charlie Warzel: Stay away.

Green: Stay away from the misery square.

[Music]

Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and welcome to Galaxy Brain. Thank you for joining me here on the ground floor of this project. I am thrilled that you are here. This show is nominally about the internet and attention and the ways that all the tools and the media that we use and consume change us in weird and unexpected ways.

And for a long time, I used to describe the internet as this black box, right, that we piped culture and politics and the economy and society into. And what came out at the other end was the same thing, only slightly misshapen and unpredictably weird. But technology has always just been a cheat code for me.

It is a way for me to tell stories and figure things out about the world. The internet is so firmly a part of every aspect of our lives that basically every story is a technology story. All the stories that I love to tell are about us as humans, how we come together, how we’re manipulated, how we talk to each other, and how these tools change the way that we see ourselves and the way we see our neighbors.

I want Galaxy Brain to explore all of this. I want to delight and obsess over news stories that I can’t stop thinking about because they’re ridiculous or they’re weird. I wanna talk to experts, and I wanna take you into my reporting process. I have so many great conversations in my work, and I want them to show up here. My hope is to have them in public.

I wanna learn, and I wanna think out loud with all of you. I wanna make sense of big news stories, but also I just wanna bask in the absurdity of the internet and go down weird rabbit holes. Being online too much can make me feel insane, but what I love about it is that the internet seamlessly blends high and low culture in our feeds.

When something online feels good, it’s because it’s pairing a bit of informational chaos with this feeling of connection and also this sense of knowledge-seeking. I want the show to feel that way, and that’s why I asked Hank Green to be my first guest. Hank is, as one of his social-media bios suggests, a long-time internet guy, but that’s underselling it completely.

Along with his brother John, Hank started one of the earlier successful YouTube channels all the way back before the iPhone, in 2007. He went on to found Complexly, which is an educational-media company. Another of Hank’s bios says, I might have taught you biology, and that isn’t underselling it. It is virtually impossible to list all the things that Hank has done. This summer, he and a friend were messing around with ideas and came up with an app to help people focus. It quickly became the No. 1 free app on the App Store.

There’s a website that you can go to that counts how many days it’s been since Hank started a new project. He is one of the original creators, but he also embodies the creative spirit of the internet. And so I wanted to have Hank here for what I’m calling a State of the Union of the internet in 2025.

This is a look at where things stand. It’s a conversation that’s meant to level-set this podcast going forward. We talked about how the internet has become a misery machine, how institutions have lost trust, how maybe they can begin to win it back. It’s a conversation that touches on this universal frustration of being online and knowing that you’re being manipulated by all these algorithms—and what, if anything, we can do to push back.

Hank is honest, he’s hopeful, he’s funny, and he’s real, which is why he’s the perfect person to kick off this project. Here’s my conversation with Hank Green.

Green: Charlie Warzel, thank you for joining me on the Galaxy Brain podcast.

Warzel: Thank you for doing an introduction for me. Frankly, you know, I’m new at this thing, and you’ve done it once or twice before. So I just, I felt like maybe that would be a good thing. In fact, we may just give you this whole thing if you want it.

Would you like a podcast for The Atlantic?

Green: I’ll ask you some questions. I bet I could come up with something.

Warzel: Good. Good. This is a total panic mode. Minute one. We’re just, like, throwing the whole thing out the window. Really, thank you. Thank you so much. I think you may be sort of the perfect person to kick a lot of this off. Because you are like truly a person of the internet in ways that are, I think, unique.

But I wanted to start really quickly out the gate, and ask you to think back to a time—it can be yesterday, it could be 1998, it can be any time—that you consider, like when you close your eyes, picture a golden age of the internet. Not objectively—your kind of golden age. Your golden moment.

Like, what is it? What pops into your head?

Green: 2012.

Warzel: Why?

Green: Uh, it’s everything until Gamergate was great.

[Laughter.]

Green: I don’t know. There was like; it was the moment. So I, as a YouTuber, I’m primarily a YouTuber. I think that I’ve moved all around and had, like, places where I’ve had a lot of fun that aren’t YouTube. But ultimately, YouTube has been a very stable place. And that’s where we started as creators.

I mean, I did actually start as an internet creator before YouTube, but YouTube was the place where I had actual success. And there was just this, like, time when there was, like, everybody was friends. It wasn’t a very big community. It was big. Like, it felt like it mattered—but to the people who were there, but not to everyone else.

And that’s always the best time on a new platform. Like, when everybody there realizes this is something special. And we’re all here together experiencing this special thing, but nobody outside of the thing knows that it’s special yet. And nobody has ever had the dream of becoming—like, at that point, nobody on YouTube had ever dreamt of becoming a “YouTuber.”

And so all of these people, y