Hank Green

William Henry Green II (born May 5, 1980) is an American YouTuber, science communicator, novelist, stand-up comedian, and entrepreneur. He produces the YouTube channel Vlogbrothers with his older brother, author John Green, and hosts the educational YouTube channels Crash Course and SciShow. He has advocated for and organized social activism, created and hosted a number of other YouTube channels and podcasts, released music albums, and has over 8 million followers on TikTok.

Hank and his brother John co-created VidCon, the world's largest conference about online videos, and the Project for Awesome, an annual online charity event, as well as the now-defunct conference NerdCon: Stories, focused on storytelling. He is the co-creator of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (2012–2013), an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in the style of video blogs that was the first web series to win an Emmy. He is also the co-founder of merchandise company DFTBA Records, crowdfunding platform Subbable (acquired by Patreon), game company DFTBA Games, and online video production company Pemberley Digital, which produces video blog adaptations of classic novels in the public domain. Green is the founder of the environmental technology blog EcoGeek, which evolved into Complexly, an online video and audio production company of which he was the CEO until late 2023. Green also hosts the podcasts Dear Hank & John and Delete This with his brother and wife respectively, along with the podcast SciShow Tangents.

Green's debut novel, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, was published on September 25, 2018; its sequel A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor was published on July 7, 2020. Both novels debuted as New York Times Best Sellers. In response to being diagnosed and treated for Hodgkin lymphoma in 2023, Green stepped down as CEO of his companies. While recovering, Green began performing stand-up about his experience. His comedy special titled Pissing Out Cancer was released on the streaming service Dropout on June 21, 2024. In July 2025, Green partnered with Honey B Games to launch Focus Friend, a productivity app which allows users to set a timer that temporarily blocks other apps. The app reached number one on Apple's App Store charts for free apps.

William Henry Green II was born on May 5, 1980, to Mike and Sydney Green in Birmingham, Alabama, but his family soon moved to Orlando, Florida, where he was raised. Green is of Irish ancestry. He graduated from Winter Park High School in 1998. He then earned a B.S. in biochemistry from Eckerd College in 2002 and a M.S. in environmental studies from the University of Montana. His master's thesis was titled "Of Both Worlds: How the Personal Computer and the Environmental Movement Change Everything".

Throughout high school and college, Green created and designed websites for himself and local clients. His first project, the "Mars Exploration Page", in 1994, experienced minor success on the heels of the Mars Pathfinder Mission. A later website, IHateI4.com, which was about Green's dislike for Interstate 4, a widely unpopular highway among Floridians, brought press from local news channels and the Orlando Sentinel. Green continued as a web developer after moving to Montana for graduate school, focusing on developing websites for educational institutions (including the University of Montana) and environmental nonprofit organizations.

While in graduate school, Green created "EcoGeek", a blog focusing on technological advancements that benefit the environment. Starting as a class project, EcoGeek evolved into a major environmental publication. It caught the attention of Time, where it was described as "porn for hardcore science, tech and enviro freaks". Writing about environmental issues, Green has been published on numerous environmental blogs, including Treehugger.com, Yahoo! Green, The National Geographic Green Guide, Scientific American, The Weather Channel, Planet Green, NPR, and in The New York Times. During the mid-2000s, Green wrote regularly for Mental Floss and co-authored one of their books, Mental Floss: Scatterbrained.

From January 1 to December 31, 2007, Hank Green and his brother John ran a video blog project titled Brotherhood 2.0. The original project ran every weekday for the entire year, with the premise that the brothers would cease all text-based ("textual") communication for the year and instead converse by daily video blogs, made available to the public via their YouTube channel Vlogbrothers and on their website.

In 2008, John and Hank first met up with their fans, known as "Nerdfighters". The first gathering was a last-minute decision, but despite the three-day notice, nearly 100 people attended. In August, John and Hank were invited to the Google office in Chicago to talk about the project. That same day, they filled the Harold Washington Library with about 400 young adults. After John's book tour for his third novel, Paper Towns, the brothers went on a national tour in November. With events in 17 different cities, they met Nerdfighters at local libraries and community centers. During this tour, Hank released his first album of Nerdfighter-themed songs, titled So Jokes.

The Green brothers have been interviewed on PotterCast, and have been recurring keynote speakers at the Harry Potter fan convention LeakyCon. The Brotherhood 2.0 project succeeded in its original mission: the brothers have come to communicate more thoroughly with each other, and have a larger influence in each other's lives than they did before the project. The brothers talked on the phone once or twice a year before Brotherhood 2.0, but, according to Hank's wife Katherine, they now "talk almost every day". John and Hank continued to post vlogs every Tuesday and Friday on their channel. Their video topics vary from explanations of current events, reunion videos, joke videos, rant videos, thoughts from various places, Question Tuesdays, and random topics. As of January 6, 2025, they have posted over 2,300 videos. The channel has more than 4 million subscribers, and its videos have been watched over 1 billion times. In light of Hank's May 2023 Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis, the brothers announced that videos might not be released with their usual regularity, and for the first time abandoned their four-minute limit for non-educational videos to save time in making them as Hank underwent chemotherapy treatment and John took on some of Hank's responsibilities at Complexly and DFTBA Records.

In January 2012, Hank and John created the educational YouTube channel Crash Course, as part of the site's Original Channel Initiative. The channel features several educational courses based on the high school curriculum, and first launched with series focusing on Biology and World History. According to John, the brothers see Crash Course "as an introduction, as a way to get kids excited about learning, not as an attempt to replace traditional classroom materials." Their goal is to create "resources that allow for more valuable interaction in the classroom," with hopes that the channel will one day span the entire high school curriculum.

The two brothers initially hosted the channel, with Hank focusing on the science courses and John teaching the humanities courses. The channel has since expanded to welcome new hosts such as Craig Benzine, Phil Plait, and Emily Graslie into its roster, and has launched new courses such as Astronomy, Physics, and Philosophy. As part of YouTube Kids, a separate Crash Course: Kids channel was launched in March 2015, with Sabrina Cruz hosting a Science course geared toward a younger audience.

During the Brotherhood 2.0 project, Green accepted a challenge to perform an original song biweekly (on "Song Wednesdays") and he has continued, though less frequently, to write, record, and perform songs. His songs include "I'm Gonna Kill You", "Baby, I Sold Your Dog on eBay", and "What Would Captain Picard Do?". Green's first successful song was "Accio Deathly Hallows", which was featured on YouTube's front page preceding the release of the final Harry Potter book, and has been viewed over two million times.

Green's first studio album, So Jokes, was released in 2008 and reached number 22 on the Billboard Top 25 revenue generating albums online. He has since released four other albums: I'm So Bad at This: Live! (2009); This Machine Pwns n00bs (2009); Ellen Hardcastle (2011), which was named for the winner of a 2010 charity raffle; and Incongruent (2014), with his new band, Hank Green and the Perfect Strangers.

Green's debut novel, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, was published on September 25, 2018. It is a science fiction novel about a young woman who gains overnight fame when she stumbles across an alien structure. The book debuted as a New York Times Bestseller. The sequel, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor, was released on July 7, 2020, and was on the July 26, 2020, New York Times Bestsellers list at number 6. When signing novels, Green often includes a symbol known as the "Hanklerfish", meant to resemble an anglerfish.

In June 2015, the Green brothers started the weekly podcast Dear Hank & John. Holy Fucking Science was a science podcast with an "adult tone" that ran from 2017 to 2018. Delete This was launched in 2018; in it, Green and his wife Katherine look at Green's Twitter account. SciShow Tangents, also launched in 2018, is described as "a lightly competitive knowledge showcase".

In September 2019, Green started creating content on TikTok. He has seen growing success and been called a "top creator" on TikTok by The New York Times. As of June 2023, he has over 7 million followers and over 563 million likes on his page. His content mainly consists of educational, humorous, and social-commentary videos. After a TikTok video that spoke positively about his book An Absolutely Remarkable Thing went viral, Green saw a 3,200% increase in sales on Amazon.

In 2007, the brothers introduced an annual charity project, the Project for Awesome (P4A), in which YouTube users take two days, originally in mid-December, to create videos promoting charities or nonprofit organizations of their choice. The amount of money raised has increased every year (with the exception of 2011). In 2021, the event was moved to late February, and a record $2,368,016 was raised.

DFTBA Records (an initialism for "Don't Forget to Be Awesome") is an e-commerce merchandise company co-founded by Green and Alan Lastufka in 2008. Originally a record label, its main focus was music generated by prominent YouTubers, including Green, Dave Days, Charlotte McDonnell, and Molly Lewis. The company now focuses on selling merchandise for prominent YouTubers. DFTBA Records has an independent distribution network. Lastufka said the record label's goal was to provide a distribution network for talented artists of YouTube and to ensure their music reaches the "largest audience possible". On June 19, 2014, Lastufka announced that he had sold his entire stake in the company and resigned as president, to pursue other projects.

VidCon is an annual conference based around online video first held in 2010. The Green brothers founded VidCon in response to the growing online video community. Hank has said, "We wanted to get as much of the online video community together, in one place, in the real world for a weekend. It's a celebration of the community, with performances, concerts, and parties; but it's also a discussion of the explosion in community-based online video." VidCon was acquired by Viacom in 2018.

In 2011, Green created "2-D" glasses, which allow one to watch 3-D movies in 2-D. The glasses were originally created for those who experience discomfort watching 3-D movies (such as Green's wife) and consist of either two right or two left lenses from a pair of regular 3-D glasses.

After two years of producing Crash Course and SciShow through grants provided by YouTube, the Green brothers decided to find a more sustainable way to fund the projects. In 2013, they launched Subbable, a monthly subscription-based crowdfunding platform similar to Kickstarter that would let subscribers pledge a monthly donation to creators and receive perks in exchange by building up a pledge bank. Among the platform's initial creators and channels were the Green brothers' Crash Course and SciShow, and YouTubers CGP Grey, MinutePhysics and Wheezy Waiter. In the Subbable introduction video, Green said:

Hank Green resides in Missoula, Montana, with his wife Katherine Green and their son.

Green was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis in 2003. As a child, he was diagnosed with sensory integration dysfunction and ADD. When asked if he considers himself an atheist, he said, "I don't believe there's a God, but I'm not comfortable saying that there is no God." He is bisexual.

Foreword to Pride and Prejudice (2014 Lizzie Bennet Diaries edition)

A Supplementally Useful Publication (2020)

"A Naturalist on Hoth", From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back (2020)

"Bonker Doesn't Die" (2021 Project for Awesome short story)