How to Confront the Things that Suck (Live with John Green)

Author and vlogger John Green looks around the world and sees a lot of things that suck. But rather than giving in to despair, he's trying to develop a sense of hope. He says the most "punk rock" thing to do is tackle our problems head-on. 

John embraces the motto: "Human beings can be good news!" In a live discussion with Dr Laurie, he explains that if we work together we can decrease the suck in the world and increase the awesome. 

This live event marked the publication of John's new book Everything is Tuberculosis - which argues that TB is a global disease that we can conquer right now if we put in a little bit of combined effort.

Happiness Lab listeners have already raised tens of thousands of dollar to fight TB by donating to our appeal at GiveDirectly.org/tb.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin Hey Happiness Lab listeners. On the last episode, I
spoke to best selling author John Green about his mission
to get us talking about tuberculosis. TB is a disease
we've been able to successfully treat for decades, and yet
millions of people still die because of it, and that's

(00:36):
partly because we won't hand over the relatively small amounts
of money needed to pay for treatment. John thinks that's
a scandal, and if you agree, we've launched an appeal
to help send any cash you can spare to give
directly dot org slash TB. That's GiveDirectly dot org slash TB.
John's latest book, Everything Is Tuberculosis, is all about this
awful disease that's shaped our world. But that disease won't

(00:59):
go away until we put in some effort to fight
it properly. John asked me to help him out at
a launch event for the book in New York, and
that's what you're about to hear. The evening started with
John giving a short reading from Everything Is Tuberculosis that
explains how a visit to a clinic in West Africa
and a meeting with a special young person sparked his
interest in Tackling TV special thanks to Symphony Space for

(01:21):
allowing us to share this episode with you.

Speaker 2 (01:24):
Hildy, Hello, whoa Hi. Thank you so much, Thank you
so much. It's so great to be here with you today.
It's such a gift to me that to be here
in New York City at Symphony Space for the official

(01:46):
pub date the launch of the book Everything is Tuberculosis.
So this is a little bit of my book from
when I first visited Lacat Tuberculosis Hospital in twenty nineteen,
when I didn't even know to put it, frankly, that
tuberculosis was still a thing. When we arrived at Laka,

(02:06):
we were immediately greeted by a child reduced himself as Henry.
That's my son's name, I told him, and he smiled.
Most Sierra Leonians are multilingual, but Henry spoke particularly good English,
especially for a kid his age, which made it possible
for us to have a conversation that went beyond my
few halting phrases of CREO. I asked how he was doing,

(02:28):
and he said, I am encouraged, sir, I am happy.
He loved that word encouraged, and who wouldn't. It's like
courage is something we rouse ourselves and others into. My son,
Henry was nine then, and this Henry looked about the
same age, a small boy with spindly legs and a
big goofy smile. He wore shorts and an oversized rugby

(02:51):
shirt that reached nearly to his knees. Henry took hold
of my t shirt and began walking me around the hospital.
He showed me the lab where a technician was looking
through a microscope. Henry looked through the microscope and then
asked me to as the lab tech, a young woman
from Freetown, explained that this sample can take tuberculosis, even
though the patient had been treated for several months with

(03:12):
standard therapy. The lab tech began to tell me about
this standard therapy, but Henry was pulling on my shirt again.
He walked me through the wards, a complex of poorly
ventilated buildings that contained hospital rooms with barred windows, thin mattresses,
and no toilets. There was no electricity in the wards
and no consistent running water. To me, the rooms resembled

(03:35):
prison cells. Before it was a TV hospital. LACA was
a leprosy isolation facility, and it felt like one inside
each room, one or two patients lay on cots, generally
on their side or back. A few sat on the
edges of their beds, leaning forward. And all these men
the women were in a separate ward, were thin. Some

(03:58):
were so emaciated that their skins seemed wrapped tightly around bone.
As we walked down a hallway between buildings, Henry and
I watched a young man drink water from a plastic
bottle and then immediately vomit a mix of blood and bile.
I instinctively turned away, but Henry continued to stare at
the man. I figured Henry with someone's kid, a doctor maybe,

(04:20):
or a nurse or one of the cooking or cleaning staff.
Everyone seemed to know him, and everyone stopped their work
to say hello and rub his head or squeeze his hand.
I was immediately charmed by Henry. He had some of
the same mannerisms of my son, the same paradoxical mixture
of shyness and enthusiastic desire for connection. Henry eventually brought

(04:41):
me back to the group of doctors and nurses who
were meeting in a small room near the entrance to
the hospital, and then one of the nurses lovingly and
laughingly shewed him away. Who is that kid, I asked, Henry,
answered a nurse, The sweetest boy. He's one of the
patients we're worried about, said a physician who went by
Doctor Michael. He's a patient, I asked. Yes, he's such

(05:05):
a cute little kid, I said, I hope he's going
to be okay. Doctor Michael explained to me that Henry
wasn't a little boy. He was sixteen. He was only
so small because he'd grown up malnourished and then the
TV had further emaciated his body. He seems to be
doing okay, I said, lots of energy. He walked me
all around the hospital. This is because the antibiotics are working,

(05:27):
doctor Michael explained. But we know they are not working
well enough. We are almost certain they will fail, and
that is a big problem. He shrugged, tight lipped. There
was a lot I didn't understand. Thank you, Thank you
so much. So it is now my honor to introduce

(05:54):
my conversation partner for this evening. I'm so excited I
can barely contain my excitement that doctor Lorri Santos is here.
I mean, doctor Lori Santos is a Yale professor and
the host of one of my favorite podcasts, The Happiness Lab,
where you can learn how to be Happy, which like,
so everybody, please welcome Laurie.

Speaker 3 (06:21):
I think the one thing John didn't mention is that
I'm also a huge John Green fan.

Speaker 2 (06:24):
Oh I want to hear that.

Speaker 3 (06:25):
Fighter sitting up here, like try to try to hold
it together.

Speaker 4 (06:31):
So John, because I'm a fan.

Speaker 3 (06:33):
When I got this invite to come have this conversation
with you, like my head did a little spinny thing,
like the sort of head explosion EMODEI was like all
over my kitchen and I was like, oh my gosh,
I get to talk John Green about his new book.
What's the new book about an organizer like tuberculosis? And
I was like, okay, cool, cool. I trust John Green
with my attention span for anything. I'm gonna, you know,

(06:54):
go with this, And I'm so happy I did, because,
as usual, you put your trust in John Green and
he tells you an amazing story that you didn't know
that you needed to know already. And for those of
you who haven't read the book yet, you're in for
a treat because you, like me now are going to
be a complete TV information Stan.

Speaker 2 (07:13):
You'd love to hear that.

Speaker 4 (07:15):
Yes, yeah, I'm.

Speaker 3 (07:16):
Not going to like do any spoilers, but like tuberculosi
is big, like pre Victorian TikTok beauty trend before TikTok,
like tuberculosis the cause of so many things historically and
so on, like as usual, tuberculosis for John Green has
become not a disease but a story, a story that
shaped literature and beauty, beauty and public health policy. And

(07:37):
I think for me here even happiness and some of
the science of happiness that we're going to get to
talk about. But to start, I'm just curious what made
you want to tell this particular story. Now you know,
we just met Henry, but beyond Henry, like why tuberculosis now?

Speaker 2 (07:51):
Well, to me, tuberculosis is the exemplary disease of injustice.
It is a disease that only exists because we allow
it to exist. It follows the paths of injustice and
inequity that we blaze for it. Overwhelmingly, the people who
will get tuberculosis are the people who are most oppressed,
most marginalized, most left out by the systems that we've built,

(08:15):
whether that's transportation systems or healthcare delivery systems, and so
it's not just a disease, although it is a biomedical
phenomenon obviously, like it's a bacterial infection. There are biomedical
realities about tuberculosis, but it is also a social phenomenon.
How we imagine and have imagined that disease throughout history

(08:38):
matters so much because it doesn't just shape how people
live and die of tuberculosis, it also shapes who lives
and dies of it.

Speaker 3 (08:46):
And so something I really found stragging it in your book,
And I'm kind of embarrassed to admit before I read
the book, I kind of feel like TV was.

Speaker 2 (08:53):
This disease of the past totally.

Speaker 3 (08:55):
And the book reminds you, of course that this is
ongoing struggle for millions of people. Or remind me of
the Flockner quote like the past is not dead, the
past not even in the past, Like TV not dead,
also not in the past. Give me a sense of
the scope of TV today and why it's a plate
that we need to be paying attention to now.

Speaker 2 (09:11):
Well, the scope of TB today is very different from
the scope of TB six weeks ago, unfortunately, and so
last year about ten million people got sick with tuberculosis.
About one point twenty five million died. The most recent
estimates are that with the defunding of USAID, we can
probably expect that to go up by about thirty percent,

(09:33):
which is hundreds of thousands of human lives. Stephanie Nolan
reported in The New York Times last week that hundreds
of thousands of people have seen their treatment interrupted. This
is a catastrophe on an individual level because it means
those people are very likely to die. Most of those
people will die if they aren't promptly put back on treatment.
And even if they are promptly put back on treatment,

(09:54):
they're very likely to develop drug resistant tuberculosis because even
a brief period without access to treatment can lead to
drug resistance. And so that's a catastrophe on an individual level.
It's also a societal catastrophe because it means that there
will be more complicated forms of drug resistant tuberculosis circulating
in communities, potentially, you know, most terrifyingly, leading to forms

(10:19):
of tuberculosis that we simply have no tools to treat
or cure, which is a threat to the entire world.
I mean, of course, tuberculosis doesn't have a moral compass.
It also doesn't have a geographical compass. It doesn't know
about political borders. It will always strike the most vulnerable
among us. But it isn't limited to impoverished communities. We

(10:44):
have tuberculosis here in New York City. We have tuberculosis
in the United States and this so that's the size
of the problem. We're going to lose at least one
point twenty five million people, probably more to tuberculosis this year.
And all of those deaths, I want to be clear,
are needless. When I asked doctor kJ Sung how many

(11:05):
people should be dying of TB if everybody had access
to healthcare, he seemed very confused, and then after a
moment he said, well, none, And that really struck me
that all of those deaths are optional.

Speaker 3 (11:18):
There's so many sucky cygings about TB. But one thing
that the book describes in such a poignant way is
that people don't just suffer from the disease. They suffer
from the culture and the stigma around the disease. And
sometimes they're not suffering from the microbes. They're suffering from
our crappy human minds and the way we think about disease,
and so explain why this part of the disease is
so painful, and maybe share some parallels with how TB

(11:41):
and other kinds of diseases that we think about today
are very similar in this regard.

Speaker 2 (11:45):
Yeah, I mean, tuberculosis is a highly stigmatized disease. Several
TV survivors have told me that surviving the stigma is
harder than surviving the disease. People will be abandoned by
their families. They're told that they're responsible for their own illness.
They're told that they got TB because they were too poor,
or they got TB because they drank too much, or

(12:05):
they got TB for any number of reasons. The truth
is that, of course, illness doesn't know about morality, right, Like,
my dad had cancer a couple times when I was
a little kid in the nineteen eighties. He had bladder cancer,
and I saw some of this up close. That like
in the nineteen eighties, it was still pretty commonly believed

(12:26):
that like cancer was caused by like bottling up your emotions,
and that became like a literal cancer. That is, it
makes a kind of somatic sense in the way that
all these stigmatizing ways of thinking do, but of course, like,
we know that's not what my dad got bladder cancer.
Just to be clear, he's actually very expressive man, very

(12:49):
in touch with his emotions. And even if you weren't,
he still didn't deserve to get cancer. There I was
engaging in stigma. So it's devastating for people because it's
already difficult to live with disease. It already others you
it already. You know, you're already told by the social

(13:11):
order that you're not a full person. You're already, you know,
dehumanized in all kinds of ways when you're ill. And
yet this way of imagining the sick as less than
fully human, as outside of the regular, you know, group
of the social order, it just it doubles the burden
of being ill. And so I think we really have

(13:33):
to fight it. The problem with stigma is that the
best way to fight it is to make it curable, right, Like,
think about strep throat. We don't stigmatize strep throat. Nobody
says like, oh, you got strep throat, like you must
be a terrible person. We don't stigmatize strep throat because
it's eminently curable, and that should be the case with
tuberculosis and most other diseases of injustice.

Speaker 3 (13:55):
I think it's so fascinating though, because I feel like,
even with strep throat, it's kind of like, well you
went out to that restaurant.

Speaker 2 (14:01):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Like we always want to have a
reason why people got sick. Yes, there's this wonderful young
woman named Casey Aldman who died of cancer a few
years ago, and she told me once that stigma is
a way of saying, you deserved for this to happen,
and I don't deserve for it to happen. And so

(14:21):
for me not to have to worry about this happening
to me, I have to have a reason why this
happened to you. And that's what stigma is ultimately.

Speaker 3 (14:30):
But it's so messed up that we make up this reason.
I mean, in some ways it's kind of good, right.
You had this quote in your book that I loved.
We like to know why things happen, especially bad things.

Speaker 4 (14:40):
Right.

Speaker 3 (14:40):
Our mind is just searching for explanations, and the way
we search for explanations for all kinds of scientific stuff.
But in this case, well, like, well, if the explanation
is this disease just hits you, indiscriminately, like I'm at
risk too.

Speaker 4 (14:51):
Our brains can't handle that.

Speaker 2 (14:53):
Yeah, it's really overwhelming. And so the other strategy we
have for dealing with this, in addition to stigma is romanticization,
which sort of seems like the opposite of stigma when
you first think about it, because instead of like dehumanizing someone,
you're sort of putting them on a pedestal. But it
serves the same function of casting someone out of the
social order. Like I've experienced this a little bit because

(15:14):
I have what the television commercials call moderate to severe
obsessive compulsive disorder, and that is my actual diagnosis.

Speaker 4 (15:26):
It is not actually it's not actually a drug commercial
that year.

Speaker 2 (15:28):
No, No, this is real, man, this is real life.
And people both stigmatize OCD. You know, some of the
compulsive behaviors especially are highly stigmatized because they're seen as
odd or off putting. But they also romanticize OCD that
they act like having OCD comes with all these superpowers.
It makes you a brilliant detective, like that guy on

(15:49):
the television program Monk. And like that's just not my experience,
Like I haven't found that it makes me good at
anything other than worrying about the very specific and totally
irrational thing that I'm consumed with worry about, and it
I just I think it's overrated, you know. And so romanticization,

(16:10):
which happened a lot in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
as a way of making sense of this disease, as
a way of making understanding why a bad thing was happening,
was just another strategy for saying, you deserve for this
to happen, and I don't like. One of my favorite
examples of this is John Keats, the great British Romantic
poet who died of tuberculosis in eighteen twenty five. When

(16:32):
he was dying, Percy Shelley wrote him a letter that
was like, hey, you know, this is a bummer. I'm
paraphrasing this is a bummer and everything, but this consumption
does tend to strike people who write great verses as
you have done, which is a very interesting thing for
Percy Shelley to say, because he also had consumption. So

(16:55):
he was a little bit like, and I am also
a great poet. Consumption flex, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, consumption flex.
Classic consumption flex.

Speaker 3 (17:05):
One's like you think about TV, is that we moralize it.
We look for explanations stigmatize people. Another psuchy thing about
TB is that it ruins this thing that we so
need to be healthy humans, which is our sense of connection.
So a super sad part about this book is that
John tells all these stories of TV patients who have
to get shipped off to some sanatorium. Henry is a

(17:25):
wonderful case in point here they just have little control
over their lives. And the interesting thing I thought was
so cool in your stories about TV is that this
has kind of been a big theme of your work
with fictional characters too, Right, these folks who just want
to be connected and just want to be part of
the world, but they kind of can't for some reason.
And so I'm curious what you learned about isolation from
TB and kind of connection broadly.

Speaker 2 (17:46):
Yeah, Henry has told me that his dream is to
be a person in society, which I think is so
beautiful because he just wants to be accepted as a
full person in his society, and for so long that
was denied to him because of tuberculosis, not because of
the disease itself, but because of the way the disease
is imagined. By us, by the people around him, by

(18:07):
his community, and it is really really difficult, especially you know, historically,
like my great uncle died of tuberculosis in nineteen thirty
and he was in a sanatorium. He died in a sanatorium,
like so many millions of Americans, and he was in
a sanatorium. And in those sanatoria, people's lives were so
highly controlled. They were told that they shouldn't cry, including children,

(18:30):
were told they shouldn't cry because it would be an
exciting cause of tuberculosis. They were often told they couldn't
be visited by their families because that might excite them
and lead to tuberculosis. They were told they couldn't stand up,
They were told they whether or not they were allowed
to read, whether or not they were allowed to journal,
and so on. They lived these very highly controlled lives,

(18:51):
and unfortunately that's still the case for many people living
with tuberculosis. We still emphasize control over care.

Speaker 3 (18:58):
And I think this is something more broadly about disease.
I mean, you've talked, you know, as you just did
so nicely about your own mental health struggles. I think
anybody facing any disease right now, it's kind of the
loneliness connection.

Speaker 2 (19:09):
Yeah, it's really hard to be isolated, right, And disease
itself can be isolating because it makes us hard for
it can make it hard for us to leave the house.
It can, especially infectious disease can make it dangerous to
be around other people, and that's really hard. Those interruptions
to connections are so profound. And I think it's safe

(19:32):
to say that if Henry had been like most people
and had been completely abandoned by his family the way
so many people are, he probably wouldn't have survived. But
he was very fortunate and is very fortunate to have
an extraordinary mother who visited him almost every day of
the three years that he was hospitalized and brought him
extra food every chance that she got, and loved him

(19:54):
through that. He wrote a beautiful poem about her that
I quote in the book about how he said, you
stand here when others ran away, and that switch of
tents where he's talking about his mother standing in the
present tents and everyone running away in the past tense
has always been so meaningful to me.

Speaker 3 (20:14):
I mean, I think he's also really lucky that he's
an amazing author that's bringing his story to light here today.

Speaker 4 (20:19):
This is a part Us just a clap food.

Speaker 1 (20:24):
You're listening to a special bonus episode with me talking
live to author John Green about his book Everything Is Tuberculosis.
It's time for a break, but we'll be back in
a moment. So I want to switch gears and talk

(20:46):
a little bit about happiness.

Speaker 2 (20:47):
Because I love talking about happiness. I talk about what
an easy time to talk about happiness, Laurie, No, But
this is why I'm.

Speaker 3 (20:55):
So happy to be on stage with you talking about happiness,
because I think you know, usually when we talk about happiness,
we get it wrong. We're kind of in toxic positivity space,
where's like, happiness is about ignoring all the terrible stuck
in the world, and we're just going to be like joy, joy,
joy all the time. And I think you get happy
Pinus right from a scientific perspective because you realize that
meaning comes not from avoiding suffering, but from embracing it

(21:16):
with a sense of duty curiosity. You get that wonder
can come from really mundane, weird stuff, and we can
kind of get positive emotion from that, and you get
that in the face of like really terrible, sucky stuff.
The move is curiosity and kindness and so he's actually
kind of happiness expert.

Speaker 4 (21:35):
I think is really what we're getting at.

Speaker 2 (21:37):
Thank you. That is my reputation.

Speaker 5 (21:40):
So let's start with hope.

Speaker 3 (21:46):
You've said before that you don't like this idea of optimism,
but prefer this concept of hope. How do you define hope?
And what is thinking so closely about TV taught you
about hope.

Speaker 2 (21:56):
Hope for me is a belief that we can make
the world better together. We can only do it together,
but we can do it together. And it's also a
belief that human beings can be good news. I'm not
saying that we are good news. We're certainly not good
news all the time. I'm not saying we're good news.
I'm saying we can be good news. We might be

(22:18):
good news. We can become good news, and we can
be good news for each other. Right like that, That
is what I really believe. And I believe that because
if I don't like, my life is in danger. Like
despair for me is not some it's not some abstract

(22:39):
idea that feels very distant. It's something that I struggle
against every days. It's the thing that makes it hardest
to get out of bed. You know, much more than fatigue.
It's fear and despair and worrying and being consumed by
those emotions. And if I don't have a measure of
hope to combat that with, I'm in big, big trouble.

(23:01):
And so I have spent a lot of time trying
to develop my sense of hope and hold on to
it and believe that it is the correct response to
the human condition. And I really do believe it.

Speaker 3 (23:18):
You had this is where I reveal I'm a nerd
and I read everything about John, but you had this
quote that I love and whish I could just totally steal.
Which is the most punk rock thing to do in
the world right now, is to embrace the current problems
with earnestness and hope.

Speaker 2 (23:32):
Yeah, earnestness is so underrated man, People like to uh
And I get it. I totally get it, especially if
you're young you've had an uncommonly crappy situation that you've
grown up in, like if you're under the age of
like thirty five, My I'm sorry. And also like I

(23:53):
feel a little responsible because like we did. We did
that a lot of it, not all of it. Some
of it was done by infectious disease, but we did
a bunch of it, and I'm sorry, are bad. We
didn't do a good job of being good news for
you a lot of times, and I'm really, I'm genuinely

(24:15):
sorry about that. And this is a really difficult time
to grow up. But I think so many people use
irony as a kind of armor, as a way of
trying to protect themselves, and I absolutely understand wanting to
protect yourself. It can you know, being earnest to the
world is hard work. I think about it in terms
of my dog who would who would my old dog

(24:39):
who who's since passed away. He would he would run
around and then he would get real tired and he
would roll over and he would show his belly to us,
the vulnerable part, the most vulnerable part of him. He
would show it to us and trust us. And that's earnestness.
And it's hard, hard work, and it's hard work to
be vulnerable, but I think it's worth it.

Speaker 3 (25:03):
That's a nice transition because one of the things I
absolutely love about your work is a kind of counter
and tuitive thing, which is it. I know lots of
your fans know that one of the goals of being
a nerd fighters, We're going to decrease the suck.

Speaker 4 (25:15):
Yours to decreasing the sock in the audience.

Speaker 3 (25:17):
Right, But the counter intuitive part is that to decrease
the suck, you often have to actively point out the suck, right,
to find the hidden suck and drag it out into
plain sight when no one's paying attention to Triberculiss, you're like, no.

Speaker 4 (25:30):
Look at the suck. Look at it.

Speaker 3 (25:32):
You wave the suck in people's faces, and that must
be hard, Like you're kind of the bearer of the
suck in lots of ways, and I'm curious how you
handle that.

Speaker 2 (25:43):
Well. The key for me is being able to handle
that in community. You know, I am not the only
TV fighter in the world. There are thousands, maybe millions
of TV fighters. There are TV hunters in Lisutu right
now actively finding cases of tuberculosis, not just waiting for
people to come into the hospital when they're so sick

(26:04):
that it's very hard to cure them. There are TV
fighters in the back of the room right now who
are partly responsible, who are partly responsible for the fact
that two million more gene expert tests are available than
were last year because Dan and hur finally lowered the

(26:26):
price of that test. And it's hard, hard work. It's
hard work for community health workers. It's hard work for
doctors and nurses, it's hard work for us. It's hard work.
But it's also really good work. And to do it
in community is fun. The last thing the great physician

(26:50):
Paul Farmer ever said to me was, isn't this fun?
Isn't it fun that we get to be friends in
this work? And that's true. It was really fun to
be friends with Paul.

Speaker 4 (27:01):
I mean, this is something that we get wrong a lot, right.

Speaker 3 (27:04):
We think, you know, kind of avoiding discomfort rather than
sort of embracing it in community. The path through a
happy life is the path to a more beatingful life
because you just kind of keep all the good emotions and.

Speaker 4 (27:14):
Get rid of the bad.

Speaker 3 (27:14):
But one thing I love that your work has done
for me, your novels and this book is like it
kind of puts it in your face and makes you
think about it more. It also feels like this is
something that you've done for a while. I know, way
back in the day you had time working as a
student chaplain and children's hospitals. I feel like that maybe
must have been some of the first spots you look
closely at illness and death, so maybe you really experience

(27:37):
with it, but a lot of us don't like looking
at the suck like so close on. I'm curious how
you learn to sit with just comfort rather than running
from it. And also, just like how you did it
for the book, right, you were trying to bring this
out to community with your work, but there was a
lot of times you were sitting with some pretty negative
stuff writing this, and I'm just kind of curious how
you tackle that.

Speaker 2 (27:57):
I wanted to write a hopeful book. I think that
all good books, all true books, are have to be hopeful,
because I think hope is, for lack of a better term, true.
But I also wanted to write a the honest book.
And the honest truth is that tuberculosis is an unbelievably
horrifying scourge that we've allowed to be with us now

(28:18):
for the seventy years since it's been curable, and that
says a lot about us. It says that we don't
value all human lives equally, even if we say we do.
It says that we've built systems that exclude people, that
exclude especially marginalized and racialized people. It says that we've
failed to deliver cures to the people who need those

(28:40):
cures the most. It says that we've built systems that
prioritize the creation of capital over the creation of saving
human the creation of human health. It says a lot
of bad things about us, but it is also true,
as I say in the book, that the year I
graduated from college, two point five million people died of tuberculosis,

(29:04):
and last year one point twenty five million did. That's
one point twenty five million too many. Nobody should die
of tuberculosis. But that progress is real, and it's important
to understand that it wasn't natural, it wasn't inevitable, it
wasn't always going to happen. That progress happened because lots
of people work together to make it happen, and we

(29:24):
devoted resources and attention to making it happen. And so
for me, the answer to that question is solidarity, solidarity, solidarity.
The answer to that question is trying to find ways
to be in community to feel less alone. That is
really the key for me. When I don't feel alone
in my feelings or in the world, I feel happy.

(29:45):
And when I do feel alone, in my feelings or
in the world. I feel scared, and so.

Speaker 3 (29:51):
Let's talk about how you've not felt alone in this process.
I think one of the things that's amazing about your
work is that you use the power of narrative to
shape how a lot of people have viewed the situation
thinking about it, maybe not with despair, but with like
this is sucky, but like we can put some agency
in to fix this. I'm just curious what the response
has been from your fans so far, Like, what have

(30:11):
you heard about people learning about the TV crisis through
this book and through your work.

Speaker 2 (30:16):
Well, it's pretty great, it's pretty amazing. This. So I
just realized just now in the last three seconds that
there are probably some like infectious disease doctors who thought
they were coming to a talk about tuberculosis.

Speaker 4 (30:30):
I mean, we can go there if you want. I
was gonna do with happiness.

Speaker 2 (30:32):
Yeah, no, I just totally forgot about them. And they
must be like, who the hell is this guy? Why
are all these people laughing at these jokes? I don't
understand why. If I say it's not normal to sneeze,
well they have a reaction. So please don't feel excluded.

(30:55):
Please feel welcomed. I forgot your question because I got
concerned about the infectious disease doctors reaction. Ben Like, the
reaction has been incredible. I mean, it's been not that
I'm reading every good Reads review but which you should
not do. I know there are some authors in the room,

(31:17):
some author friends, some authors in the room don't read
your Goodreads reviews, but I should. I should suffer. You
should not do as I say, not as I do.
But no, the response has been incredible and really overwhelming.
I mean, just the fact that, like I mean to

(31:39):
your point that you made at the beginning of our conversation,
the fact that people would be like, oh, this young
adult novelist wrote a book about tuberculosis I'm in is incredible,
Like that is an incredible fact, What a what a
gift to me. Thank you so so much for believing

(32:02):
in my work that much and just being here today.

Speaker 3 (32:07):
So but this is just a theme with so much
your work, at least my kind of interaction with your work,
which is like your stuff always brings us into things
that we do not face, and a big one for
me because I'm a huge the natophobe. Is it a
lot of your work deals with the fragility of life.
The natophobia is fear of death. By the way, probably a.

Speaker 4 (32:24):
Lot of you.

Speaker 2 (32:24):
Oh thank god, I was in trouble.

Speaker 3 (32:27):
So I was dropping some Yale professor's stuff right there.
I apologize. I apologize, No.

Speaker 4 (32:32):
Like yours stuff.

Speaker 3 (32:33):
I mean fall on ourself, Like you just make us
look at death like we're part of the natural world.
It's gonna happen to YouTube, yes, but like we don't
like to think of ourselves as animals, Like we don't.

Speaker 4 (32:45):
We don't like to look at the natural world.

Speaker 3 (32:46):
And I think that has led to a lot of
the stigma and the stuff we're talking about. And yeah,
the good news is that the science shows that you're right.
The more we focus on the fragility of life, the
more you embrace it, the more you do generous stuff,
the more you live well. But I'm just curious how
you deal with that, Like, what's gravitated you towards this,
and what have you discovered personally by focusing on this

(33:09):
so closely.

Speaker 2 (33:10):
Well, I just think it's a big deal. I'm a
little like you. I'm a little confused. It's a thing.
I'm a little confused. Why everyone else isn't thinking about
it all the time. Yeah, yeah, right. I texted my
brother once I was in an airport and I texted
my brother, do you ever think about the fact that
when you're in an airport, everybody who's in the airport
will be gone in like seven or eight decades? And

(33:34):
Hank God bless him wrote back, No, but I do,
LORI I do. I don't know why. I don't know
why I was put here to witness a lot of
death and talk a lot about death, but I was.
And that's just that's that's the situation I ended up in.

(33:58):
I am like you, I don't know if I'm afraid
of death so much as I'm deeply concerned about it,
you know, like I just think it's a very very
big deal and that we need to we should spend
more time thinking and talking about it, because when we
don't than when people are dying, or when people who
are going are with people who are dying, we kind

(34:20):
of exclude them. We sort of push them to the side,
and we're like, oh no, that's very inconvenient, Like that's
something I don't like thinking about, that's something I don't
like being exposed to, and that makes it so much
harder to die. It makes it so much harder to
love someone who's dying. And so I think it's I
just think it's important, And I think dying people and
people who are loving people who are dying need to

(34:41):
be fully embraced by the social order.

Speaker 3 (34:44):
And then we need to remember that we can take
agency to fix the parts of the social order that
are hurting people, that are causing people to suffer.

Speaker 4 (34:51):
Yeah, you have this love. There's so many good quotes
in this book.

Speaker 3 (34:54):
You guys, bring a highlighter when you start reading this
because you're just gonna want to agree easy. But here's
another one that I think fits with this idea a lot.
You note that when we know about suffering, when we
are proximal to it, we are capable of great generosity.
That is a striking thing about your is that you
make us care about life that's really fragile, but you
somehow allow us to do it in a way that
doesn't cause us to like, you know, shield their eyes.

(35:16):
You cause us to react with generosity and helpfulness. And
so I want you to tell some stories of generosity
that have come out from this book.

Speaker 4 (35:24):
You know, what have the.

Speaker 3 (35:24):
Fans been able to do these sort of TV fighters
that maybe wouldn't have happened if you hadn't written this.

Speaker 2 (35:30):
So many TV fighters are taking actions. One of those
actions is something like giving money to support TV charities
who are trying to fill gaps that, I want to
be clear, cannot be filled by anything but governments, but
are desperately trying to fill whatever gaps they can. And
that is itself a tremendously generous and helpful action. Also,

(35:55):
and I know this, I know you hear this all
the time, and it sounds like pitter patter, I totally understand.
But people like TV fighters regularly organize call athons and
email athons to reach out to their representative, and that
matters when I talk to people in Washington. I talked
to someone a couple of days ago who was like,

(36:16):
I have been getting a lot of calls about tuberculosis,
and I'm like, good, I hope you're getting a lot
of calls about other things as well. I hope you're
getting a lot of calls about diseases of injustice, like
malaria and HIV and diabetes and heart disease. And so

(36:36):
I'd really think that matters. And and I am so
inspired by them, they really they really lead me. They'll
have a Callithon and I'll be like, oh God, all right,
I'll call Todd Young. And Todd Young is a senator
of mine who's a big believer in global health, has
been a big supporter of global health, was one of
the sponsors of the NTV Now Act. But I right

(36:58):
now need him to be more more public in his
support of global health. And so I just call him,
you know, and I let him know that.

Speaker 3 (37:09):
One of the reasons I'm so glad you bring this
up is, like me writing about happiness science now, is
that there's lots of evidence that one of the best
things you can do to increase hope is to actually
take agency about something small. When you make this speed
del call to your senator and or you do something
to fight TV, it doesn't just like do good in
the world. It actually changes your psychology. You kind of
feel like, oh, there are ways to take action on

(37:31):
these things. Like it's a funny kind of like spiral
loop that when we act in ways that are hopeful,
we actually become more hopeful. And so I think that
you're increasing hope in a couple ways. One just through
the narrative but second, just through getting people to get
off their butt and do stuff.

Speaker 2 (37:46):
Yeah, I feel better. And it's really hard to get
off your butt and do stuff, especially right now, like
the temptation to despair is so overwhelming and the sort
of the horrors abound in so many directions for a
lot of people that it's really difficult to even know
where or what to respond to, where or what to
take action. But those, on some level you asked me earlier,

(38:09):
I picked TB, and on some level because I had
to pick something. You know, there's a lot of problems.
I could have picked one of the other ones, you know.
I could have picked climate change, I could have picked malaria.
I mean, there's an endless number of problems, right, But
I'm counting on y'all to solve some of those problems,
and then you count on me to try to deal
with TB, and then together, hopefully we make a better world.

Speaker 3 (38:41):
So I'm going to just nerd out about more quotes
in this book because my highlighter died when I was
reading it, and so I'm just going to give you more.
This one is related to just where we were just
talking about this idea that like when you act, you
can overcome your despair. And you know that mere despair
never tells the whole human story as much as despair.
I would like to insist otherwise. And this was very
comforting for me because they suggested that John two experiences

(39:04):
despair about all this horrible stuff. He I mean, that's
like community, right, were just talking about why this is
zo immortant. But you're able to approach these moments of
despair in ways that truly show the human story. And
so I'm wondering with this book, in particular, with Henry's
story in particular, like how'd you tried to weave that in?
Because you're like throwing the despair out there. What kind

(39:25):
of like literary magic do you use to get us
to like flip the switch and go towards joy and
hope and so on.

Speaker 2 (39:31):
Well, I tried to draw that arc, right, the arc
from despair to hope. On some level, that's the arc
of lots of my books. It's the arc I tried
to draw on the anthropascene reviewed too, from you know,
going from a place of profound hopelessness and fear and
a feeling that there was no reason to get out

(39:51):
of bed in the morning to a place of hope.
There's individual essays that try to draw that arc, but
the book itself also tries to draw that arc. And
I wanted to draw that arc in this book too,
because even though the size of the crisis is overwhelming,
and this is just one crisis among many, right like
tuberculosis is just one disease among many. Health is just

(40:14):
one issue among many. Even so, I still think that
there is cause for hope. I still think that there
is reason for hope, not because things are going to
get better in the next year, but because, like we
have to fight for them to get less worse. Every
person who doesn't die of tuberculosis is who would otherwise die,

(40:35):
is a success for us. And unfortunately, the number of
people who are going to die of tuberculosis is going
to go up because of decisions mostly made by my government,
to some extent decisions made by other governments, but mostly
decisions made by my government. My job is to try
to fight that every way I can, all along, all
along that journey, whether that's you know, legislatively, whether that's

(40:59):
through the through the judicial branch. However, that is to
fight that every way I can.

Speaker 3 (41:04):
Another way I think you fight it really well. And
this is something that I'm so grateful for your work
for is you often fight the sucky stuff with awe,
the sense of wonder.

Speaker 2 (41:13):
Yeah, wonder is underrated.

Speaker 3 (41:14):
Man, oh my gosh, there's like a oh my gosh,
don't even get me started. In a happiness science, it's
like one of the positive emotions that is so easily
available to us, like literally in the people around us
and the good things they're doing, or in like nerdy science,
like just go on blog brothers and you'll see some
awe for sure, but we don't realize it's such a
powerful emotion. And so I wanted to ask you an
awe question. In the whole TV story that you've told,

(41:37):
what was the moment where you found the most wonder,
the most awe?

Speaker 2 (41:40):
And thinking about this story, there's a moment where we
as a species figured out that this wasn't an inherited disease,
that this was a disease caused by a bacterium. And
I was reading about this moment where Robert Coke is
literally giving like reading a paper at a scientific conference

(42:03):
and the audience just falls completely quiet, and one member
of the audience and I hold that evening to be
the most significant moment of my scientific life, and that
moment when we realized, Okay, this isn't an inherited condition.
This is an infectious condition, which means that we need
to be imagining it and understanding it and fighting it

(42:26):
very differently, not just accepting it but trying to try
to find ways to fight it. Is a huge moment
in human history, and it really is a moment of
awe because it was the culmination of so many generations
of people trying to understand the world around them, the
culmination of people trying to develop microscopes to see smaller
and smaller creatures, and eventually we see these wiggling rods

(42:51):
that we discover cause tuberculosis.

Speaker 3 (42:54):
I mean, it's such a beautiful story because it's like sciencey,
nerdy science awe, Like, oh my god, we figured I
was on microbe. But it was also a story of
people like tackling these interesting problems, Like you tell such
great human stories about the scientist.

Speaker 2 (43:07):
Yeah, just like trying to figure out like how do
you actually prove a chain of transmission? Bad news for
guinea pigs for sure, but how do you prove a
chain of transmission? How do you that this little wiggly
rod is actually what's causing the illness, not like just
some coincidence or some byproduct of the illness. That's a

(43:30):
really difficult problem, and Robert Coke had a brilliant solution
for it. Now later he would go on to cause
tremendous harm. And that's also part of the scientific story,
is that in the pursuit of scientific understanding, we can
cause a lot of harm, especially if we're not careful.
And he wasn't adequately careful when it came to promoting

(43:51):
what he believed was a solution to tuberculosis. But that
moment of discovery has always stuck with me because it's
just so because it wasn't just about him. It was
about thousands of people who'd contributed to that field. And
so he gets all the credit. But think about all
the people who had to follow down the wrong paths
in order for Robert Coke to understand what the right

(44:13):
path was. Think about the people who were editing the
medical journals that Robert Coke read, Think about the people
who were living with tuberculosis, who were pursuing their own
treatments and understandings of the disease. All the doctors who
are working on tuberculosis. This it's really a collaboration of
millions of people that led to this moment.

Speaker 1 (44:34):
It's time for a break, but we'll be back soon
with more of John Green and his thoughts un Suck,
awesome and the end of tuberculosis.

Speaker 3 (44:48):
Another theme that comes up in this book and in
lots of your books is that even when you're facing
these terrible situations, you can find these moments of like
small joy. And it was one of the best things
about the book is that you'll hear many of Henry's
moments of small joy. I'm curious where you're getting your
small moments of joy in this not the worst of circumstances,
but with the time right now.

Speaker 2 (45:11):
People are always funny, Like people are funny. Dying people
are funny. People are funny when they're suffering, Like people
are funny. People are always funny. This is my favorite
thing about us is like I love some gallows humor.
I love some like late night everything is terrible, let's
make a joke about it, humor. And I just think
I find joy in that. I find joy in human connection.

(45:34):
I find joy in getting to do this work together
with y'all like to me it it goes back to
what Paul said, like, isn't this fun? You know, despite everything,
despite the fact that we're trying to tackle the world's
biggest problems and healthcare, inequity and the legacies, the horrific
legacies of colonialism. This, this being able to be in

(45:57):
this work together is really very quite fulfilling. And so
I find a lot of a lot of joy in that.
I find joy, for lack of a better term, in resistance.

Speaker 3 (46:13):
I love the humor point too, because I had to say,
even though it was a John Grubbe book, I really
didn't think there.

Speaker 4 (46:18):
Was gonna be a lot of humor in a book
about sparrculous West.

Speaker 2 (46:20):
A couple of jokes in.

Speaker 4 (46:21):
You know what, that's there. It's there. I found it.
But that's hard.

Speaker 3 (46:25):
Like again, it kind of just nerdy literary question, right,
like how do you find ways to weave the humor
into such a terrible story of suffering?

Speaker 2 (46:34):
Well, I mean I would just say that, like Henry
is a very funny person who suffered a lot. I
have suffered some and yet am hilarious. I don't know,
Thank you, thank you for that thoroughly unearned applause. Yeah,

(47:00):
like every you know, life is funny books. Horace said
twenty one hundred years ago that poetry should inst and delight.
It's easy to instruct, it's hard to delight. It's especially
hard to delight when you're instructing. And I did want
this to be a book that at least had moments

(47:20):
of delight, because, you know, reading a book should should
be pleasurable. It shouldn't feel like work. It shouldn't feel like, oh,
I've got this obligation. It should feel like a connection,
a chance to you know, connect with a story and
connect with an author and kind of co create something together.

Speaker 3 (47:39):
So we're tragically running out of time because this is
like the coolest hour of my wife to be up
here with John. And but we're not going to end
on my questions. Different thing I forgot to tell you
at the top of the show was that we're going
to hear from you. You all have submitted questions in advance,
and I and John's folks have picked some of the
best ones and we're going to go through those. But
this is going to be my last question, and so

(48:02):
I wanted to end in the most nerified way possible.
I want to not forget to be awesome. Uh, come on,
you've got folks, this is a problem. As you know,
it can be easy to forget to be awesome when
we're tackling hard topics, when it feels like the world
is falling apart. I'm curious, how are you embracing awesome

(48:25):
these days?

Speaker 2 (48:27):
Well, we talk about decreasing world suck and we talk
about increasing world awesome, and I think they're both important.
I think it's important to try to increase the overall
worldwide level of awesome. You know what I've been doing recently,
and this is ludicrous. I've been playing this video game
called Fifa. It's a soccer video game, and I play

(48:50):
as the team I sponsor in real life so that
I can so that I can see my logo on
the back of their shorts. It brings me great joy
to see my own logo on the back of their
shorts inside a video game, and then people pay me
to watch this ridiculousness. I'm not good at this game.

(49:13):
I actually I did a sports podcast yesterday and this
guy was talking to me about it, and he said,
you're really trash at FIFA, and I was like, thank you.
I know, and and people pay me for this, and
then I use the money to buy a real life
player for my soccer team. Don't applaud this stupidity. This

(49:38):
is a terrible use of resources. But I did it
because it brings me a lot of joy. So yeah,
just little things like finding finding a video game you
like playing Red Dead, Redemption two, whatever. It is, just
finding some joy.

Speaker 4 (49:54):
Love that. So now we're transitioning to your questions.

Speaker 2 (49:58):
These are all for your question. Sorry, we can't answer
all of them.

Speaker 4 (50:02):
Okay.

Speaker 3 (50:03):
First one is from Olivia Marie from Birmington, New York.

Speaker 4 (50:08):
Livia, you don't want ye.

Speaker 3 (50:12):
Okay, this one Bighamton, thank you.

Speaker 4 (50:17):
Sorry. Olivia Marie's question.

Speaker 3 (50:21):
We know you now connect a lot of things to
tuberculosis because tuberculosis is everything. Can you connect tuberculosis to
Taylor Swift?

Speaker 2 (50:30):
Yeah? Yeah, hold on, I got to get on my phone.
I don't want to miss the I don't want to
mess up the lyric. She's got a lyric about tuberculosis.
Hold on, where is we?

Speaker 3 (50:45):
I almost want you to sing this lyric afterwards.

Speaker 2 (50:48):
I'm not going to sing it, Okay, I can't find it.
But it's something like you know, like went to the
Lake district. You know the line where the poets went
to die, the lake district where the poets went to die.
Y'all y'all heard that?

Speaker 4 (51:12):
End up singing the whole audience.

Speaker 2 (51:14):
That's about the British Romantic poets who all died of tuberculosis.
Legitimately it is. That's not like, it's not like a
distant connection, like she has written indirectly about TV. Thank you.
By the way, I am very grateful to my producing

(51:35):
partner Rosianna, who when we were reading that question backstage
and I was like, I don't know if I could
do it. Rosianna spun around and she was like, what
do you mean you can't do it and immediately produced
that lyric in a way that I clearly cannot.

Speaker 3 (51:52):
Okay, we're like taking it down from Taylor Smith because
this is a tough one.

Speaker 4 (51:55):
This is from anushre. She notes.

Speaker 3 (51:59):
A newre notes I was diagnosed with spinal TB after
years of pain when I visited a doctor in India.
I had gone to dozens of doctors in the States
to no avail.

Speaker 2 (52:08):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (52:09):
Given the popularity of global travel, TB no longer seems
like a disease that is only localized to certain countries. Right,
how do we encourage American doctors to consider TB, especially
in its rare re forms, as a possible diagnosis.

Speaker 2 (52:22):
This is such an important question, and thank you so
much for asking it. So this is a huge problem.
We have ten thousand cases of active TB in the US.
It's going up and it will go up much more now,
and yet we don't think of TV a lot of times.
Doctors they have a phrase that I think is a
very beautiful phrase. They say, we have a low index

(52:44):
of suspicion. Is an index of suspicion a phenomenal phrase.
I have a very high index of suspicion with almost everything.
But they say they have a low index of suspicion
with tuberculosis, you know. And they say, like, oh, when
you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras. And I

(53:04):
understand that. But we have quite a lot of TV here,
and so, you know, the public health officials that I've
talked to are always trying to educate the doctors and
nurses and communities that tuberculosis is a diagnosis we should
be thinking about, including tuberculosis with bone involvement like you had,
which I know can be unbelievably painful. I mean, I've

(53:26):
spoken to people who described that pain to me in
ways that just made me shudder. And so I'm so
sorry that you had to go through that, so grateful
that you were eventually able to be diagnosed. But it
doesn't surprise me that you were ultimately diagnosed in India,
where there's lots of tuberculosis, where folks have a high
index of suspicion, rather than in the United States. But
it is something that we need to work on with

(53:47):
our public health departments, with doctors and nurses, with our
hospital systems, to remind them to think of TB when
they're thinking when they're hearing from their patients.

Speaker 3 (53:56):
It also feels like if we're doing that more in
the US, it just turns TV into more of a
conversation here, which hopefully can get people to care about
it worldwide too.

Speaker 2 (54:05):
Absolutely all right.

Speaker 4 (54:07):
Here's one from from New York City.

Speaker 3 (54:11):
Is there a story graph Buddy read for Everything's tomerculosis?

Speaker 4 (54:15):
Should we create one?

Speaker 5 (54:17):
No?

Speaker 2 (54:17):
And yes, I'm in totally What did you think I
was going to say, like, no, don't read this book
in community they would bum me out. No, please read
it in community. Incredible. The best way to read is
to have conversations. I married a person from a book club.

(54:38):
We were in a two person book club, and we
had no idea that we were interested in each other.
We thought it was totally normal to start a two
person book club to read books together and then to
meet and discuss those books over drinks. We thought that
was just a completely platonic thing. And then one day

(55:00):
I was like, am I in love? We both highlighted,
you want to hear something really cute. We both highlighted
the same passage in a Philip Roth book, and the
passage was the thing isn't owning the person. The thing
is having another contender in the room with you. And

(55:22):
Sarah has always been that contender in the room.

Speaker 3 (55:32):
That is acused thing ever, And I don't think you
thought you were going to get dating.

Speaker 4 (55:35):
A vice from John Green on stage.

Speaker 2 (55:37):
Today, start a two person book club. That's my advice.

Speaker 4 (55:42):
I mean, apparently it worked.

Speaker 2 (55:43):
Yeah, it worked.

Speaker 3 (55:44):
And make sure you share each other's highlights in the books.
You can do it with really good book here. But
since you're getting personal, I'll jump to this question. This
is one from Ellen Stearns from Large Bart, New York.
How has being a parent changed.

Speaker 4 (55:57):
You as a writer so much?

Speaker 2 (56:00):
For one thing, it slowed me down, but no, it's
changed it so much. I could never have written The
Fault in Our Stars or Turtles all the Way Down
without Henry and Alice because with The Fault Nar Stars,
you know, having kids helped me to understand this deep
fundamental truth about love, which is that love is stronger

(56:21):
than death, Love survives death. As long as Henry and
Alice or I am alive, I will be their dad
and they will be my kids. And so love is
stronger than death. And understanding that made it possible for
me to write The Fault Nar Stars, I think, and
I never knew that until I was a parent myself.

(56:42):
And then with Turtles all the Way Down, they helped
me because they helped me get better. They helped me,
they helped me get better every day.

Speaker 3 (56:58):
I want to do a fall up on that one
you mentioned, Fauldnar Stars, Turtles all the Way Down. Curious
how being a parent helped you with this book. You
shared the passage that one of the things that brought
you to chat with Henry is that you know you shared.

Speaker 4 (57:11):
A name with your son.

Speaker 2 (57:12):
Yeah, I'd never thought about that, but that's true, Henry.
If it weren't for you, they'd probably, you know, everything
is tuberculosis or if we'd named you Atticus as we
thought about, might not exist. Man, that's so weird. Life
is so weird.

Speaker 3 (57:29):
So here's another cultural one. This one's from Molly from
Jersey City. If Moulain Rouge was more realistic, would Christian
have caught TV from satim?

Speaker 2 (57:40):
I don't know, not necessarily. I mean, we forget. How
long does that the whole thing take place? Like five days?

Speaker 4 (57:49):
Like it's like a two hour show.

Speaker 2 (57:51):
Yeah, it's wild though, like a like a lot happens,
but like it all takes place over the course of
the development of one show. Maybe it's like six weeks.
I don't she gets sick. Very It's not a super
realistic portrayal of tuberculosis. There are realistic portrayals of tuberculosis
and media, but that is not, in my opinion, and
really one of them. What's your favorite Red Dead Redemption

(58:12):
to the video game? It's very realistic, Okay, I just have.

Speaker 4 (58:18):
To channel Connor from Brooklyn.

Speaker 3 (58:20):
I don't know if you were shuting your listening to this,
but you actually wrote a question about red Dead redemption too,
so I'm gonna read I'm going to read that one.
Connor notes most of what I know about tuberculosis comes
from the video game.

Speaker 4 (58:34):
Correct.

Speaker 3 (58:34):
I was wondering if you've ever played that game, SEW,
and if so, what do you think about his portrayal
of the deceased.

Speaker 2 (58:42):
I thought it was great. I thought I did a
great job. He gets six slowly over time. This is
a spoiler for anybody hasn't played this video game, but
not that much of a spoiler. It's fun and it's
a really fun video game. You have to kill a
lot of people, which I was trying to play with

(59:02):
my son, and I was like, is there a way
for us not to kill so many people?

Speaker 4 (59:06):
Like?

Speaker 2 (59:06):
Can we just sort of negotiate? Seems to go straight
to violence every time you can ever have a conversation
where you're like, listen, wouldn't this be better if you
just gave us half the money and kept the other half?
But you're an outlaw, so I guess it's part of it.
But it's a beautiful video game. It's just like very
visually beautiful, very engaging and engrossing, and I thought the

(59:27):
portrayal of TV was quite good.

Speaker 4 (59:30):
Are there other video games that have portrayed TB?

Speaker 2 (59:34):
I only play FIFA in Red Dead Redemption two.

Speaker 4 (59:40):
Oway.

Speaker 3 (59:42):
Now we're going to get to a tough one because
you're bringing the tough ones. Think John can take it.
Your work in so many of your books, especially Fall
in Our Stars, explores illness and the different ways it
impacts our relationships with the world and with each other.
How has your own personal relationship with illness changed since
Hank's cancer diagnosis.

Speaker 2 (01:00:02):
Yeah, it's an interesting question. I mean, I think it
probably has changed in ways that I haven't totally settled
on yet. Like it feels like Hank just had cancer,
and I know it was a year and a half ago, but.

Speaker 4 (01:00:13):
Can you I mean, I'm sure all the fame.

Speaker 2 (01:00:14):
Oh yeah, just for the infectious disease doctors in the room.
I keep forgetting about them through there. My brother had cancer.
Weird thing to laugh at. No, I'm just kidding. It's
fine to laugh at it. My brother had cancer two
years ago. He had Hodgkin lymphoma, but we didn't know
what kind of cancer he had for about three weeks.

(01:00:35):
And that was the scariest three weeks of my life.
We thought it might be a metastasist from another site
or another kind of lymphoma that was much more serious,
and in the end he had this very treatable, very
curable form of cancer. And it's worth noting that nobody
ever said, I'm not sure if treating your cancer is

(01:00:55):
cost effective, even though it cost one hundred and fifty
times more to cure Hank's cancer than it would have
cost to cure Henry's TV. Nobody ever said that. Nobody
thought about that. It never came up, It was never
a discussion. Hank got the kind of personalized, tailored treatment
that any of us would expect and that all of
us deserve, and as a result, he survived, and he's

(01:01:16):
healthy today and doing great, And you know, it has
changed the way I think about illness. It's just a
reminder that illness often comes quickly. What does he comings say,
spring is like a perhaps hand coming carefully out of nowhere,
and that feeling of something coming carefully out of nowhere
can be wondrous and also terrifying. And it was a

(01:01:38):
really hard thing for our family to go through. But
Hank was was very well supported throughout, not just by us,
but also by so many people. And i'matologized if I
get emotional, but by so many people in this community
it made a huge difference for his ability to get
through that.

Speaker 3 (01:02:05):
I mean, I think it just speaks to the power
of community and ways you don't even expect, to the
power of like generosity in reaching out. I'm sure those
of you who were in the audience and said good
things about Hank helped Johann to hang out during this time,
you probably didn't maybe realize how much it was affecting
both of them.

Speaker 2 (01:02:21):
Yeah, I think you probably didn't know like how much
your comments mattered and how much your outreach mattered and
little gifts of all forms. But it really did matter,
you know. It was really overwhelming. I remember when Hank
told me that he was going to I was like,
don't talk about it, just you know, you don't have
to talk about it. Don't feel like you have to

(01:02:42):
talk about it, and he was like, I think I
want to, And then he texted me guaranteed one out
of ten video meant that he knew he was going
to get a lot of views, which he did. That's
a reminder though, that like even amid darkness, we can
be very funny. Like that's a great example to me

(01:03:04):
of like being funny amid everything, like finding ways to
still be because we're still fully human. You don't stop
being a person when you get really sick. That's really
important to understand. So, yeah, he's doing great, and it
has definitely changed the way I think, not just about
illness but about everything. It's just a reminder of the

(01:03:26):
precarity of all things. You know, we're only here for
a little while.

Speaker 3 (01:03:30):
It was also really a theme in the book you
know you mentioned no one ever asked if Hank's cancer
treatment was cost effective. These may come out a final
sort of happiness question, which is like, there's a lot
in this book to get angry about, to get pissed
off about.

Speaker 4 (01:03:45):
How do we channel that appropriately?

Speaker 2 (01:03:47):
I think we have to channel it, like you said earlier,
into action and community, into working together to try to
make the world suck less.

Speaker 4 (01:03:56):
It all goes back to less suck, more awesome.

Speaker 3 (01:03:58):
I think here's the last question I have from the audience,
and it's funny. It's going back to us being here
in New York. I think the organizers really wants to
pick a very New Yorky question. John's last question, but
it's actually a question from Alana Harris, who's from Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Speaker 2 (01:04:14):
Wow, and she makes for coming all this way.

Speaker 3 (01:04:17):
She kindly points out Tulsa, Oklahoma parentheses the capital of
Oklahoma Solas Florence.

Speaker 2 (01:04:25):
Today it is everybody knows that.

Speaker 3 (01:04:29):
Here's what Alanna says. She says, Hi, John, you spent
some time living as a young artist. You spent some
time as young artists living in New York City. Do
you have a favorite police, a favorite piece of advice
you received during that season of your life? And or
do you have any hindsight to offer to the new
generation moving to New York City for careers in the arts.

Speaker 2 (01:04:53):
Get a roommate, maybe five.

Speaker 5 (01:04:59):
No.

Speaker 2 (01:04:59):
I think the best piece of advice I received during
that time actually came from my editor, Julie strass Gable,
who's here, who's been my editor for twenty two years,
since two years before Looking for Alaska was published. And

(01:05:20):
when I was living here, I was writing paper Towns,
and I remember Julie said to me, you're twenty nine.
You can't act like a little deer in headlights anymore.
That was really good advice because I was still acting
like I was twenty two, you know, like I don't
know anything. I'm just a little boy, you know. I'm

(01:05:41):
just trying to make my way in the world. And
that's one thing that comes to mind. The other thing
that comes to mind is another friend who's here at tonight,
Marian Johnson, the great writer. I was writing a book
with Marian Johnson. She was writing Sweet Scarlet. I was
writing Paper Towns. Were sitting across the table from each other,
and I was crying. She said, you know, you don't

(01:06:05):
have to feel everything that they feel. It's really good advice.

Speaker 4 (01:06:15):
Right. Well, that was our last question.

Speaker 3 (01:06:18):
I want to end with another thing we know boose happiness,
which is gratitude when I do this without trying to cry.
But John thank you for bringing to light news suck
that I didn't know about but found incredibly curious and
incredibly hopeful. Oddly, Thanks for giving me hope in moments

(01:06:39):
where I really needed it. And thanks for your curiosity,
your courage, your kindness, and all your books keep them coming.

Speaker 2 (01:06:45):
Thank you so much, doctor Roy Santos, everybody, thanks one
more time for doctor Wrri. Okay, I forgot. I have
a mic over there. It's okay. So we're nearing the

(01:07:11):
end of our time together tonight, But I don't blame
you if you feel like we're also nearing the end
of our time. In a more general sense, you may feel,
as I sometimes do of late, that the world is
a little bit ending. Societal collapse is in the air,
noted theologian Timothy Chalomeay. Recently, he really said that he's

(01:07:38):
so beautiful, and he's so pithy. We know that the
world will end. It will end for each of us,
for all of us, for our planet, but not today,
not yet. My friend Henry loves the verbs and courage
and discourage, and right now I confess that I am
very discouraged. I feel that my courage is being dragged

(01:08:01):
down by all sorts of forces, especially by those who
argue or act as if some human lives are more
valuable than others. How can we respond hopefully to a
moment where hope does not feel rewarded or justified. How
can we imagine better worlds when so many power structures
seem intent upon making worse ones? I mean, one recent

(01:08:22):
estimate holds that, as I mentioned earlier, cutting all US
related tuberculosis funding will result in three million more cases
of TB every year. It's easy to feel that this
is the end of history, and I don't blame you
if you feel it. There's a dread about our historical moment,
a general feeling that horror is here and worse is coming.

(01:08:44):
And I feel that too. I mean, why are we
even here just to suffer, just to worry? Sometimes it
feels that way, but I think we are in this
not yet. We are here to be with each other
in the deepest sense, to help others feel less alone,
and to allow ourselves to help us feel less alone.

(01:09:07):
I believe we are here to accompany each other through
the joys and travails of humanness, through the wonder and
the precaarity. We do not live at the end of history.
We live in the middle of history. I argue in
the book that we're products of history, but we are
also ourselves historical forces, and together we can change the

(01:09:28):
arc of our shared story. I've seen that happen. The
year I graduated from high school, twelve million children died
under the age of five, and last year fewer than
five million did. That progress wasn't natural or inevitable. It
happened because millions of people, billions if you count all

(01:09:48):
the taxpayers who contributed to it, work together to make
the world safer for children. And that is my hope.
I know that today feels like the last day, the
end of the story, because it's the last one we've
lived through so far. But today is not the end
of the story. Today is the middle of the story,

(01:10:09):
and it falls to us to fight for a better end.
My friend Amy Cross Rosenthal, who died of cancer a
few years ago, knew this better than anyone I've ever met.
Amy used to ask people to sing an old song
from World War One, sung to the tune of that
New Year's Eve song ald Lang Zone, British soldiers in
the trenches, horrified by the pointlessness of war, would sing

(01:10:32):
we're here because we're here, because we're here, because we're here,
and Amy changed the meaning of that song without ever
changing the words. She turned it into a kind of
battle cry for hope. It's true that we can't say
with certainty why we are here, but we can nonetheless
celebrate being here, especially being here together in community, because

(01:10:58):
that song, when sung together, takes on an entirely different
meaning at least for me, and if you'll indulge me,
I'd like to sing it together once now, hopefully with
doctor Warri Santos.

Speaker 5 (01:11:14):
We're here because we're here, because we're here, because we're here.
We're here because we're here, because we're here, because we're here.

Speaker 2 (01:11:34):
Thank you so much for being here with us tonight.
Thank you,