John Green

speaker

1,964 appearances 40 recordings 7 series first heard Dec 2021 last heard 25 Jun

John Green’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 27 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 10.

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Pablo Torre Finds Out · How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism · 25 Mar 2025 podcast

There's no difference between enough and more than enough. Like, they're both the same to me. And so I've been really incredibly lucky to be able to follow my passions. And my passion is fourth-tier English soccer and tuberculosis. Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday. So later this week, I will be on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

to discuss tuberculosis with congresspeople, senators, and their aides. In related news, there will be a major announcement on Thursday about our family's efforts to fight tuberculosis, which remains the world's deadliest infectious disease, even though we know how to end it. And so I've gotten to, you know, follow down those two rabbit holes and find so much community in that.

Yeah, I fall pretty far down rabbit holes in general. And a lot of people will fall down a rabbit hole and emerge like a couple weeks later. But with TB especially, I fell down the rabbit hole and haven't emerged and don't expect to ever emerge. And the same thing with AFC Wimbledon, you know, like I fell in love. And, you know, they actually at Wimbledon games, they sing that song.

Wise men say only fools rush in, but I can't help falling in love with you. And that's how I feel like I couldn't help falling in love. I couldn't help falling in love with my wife. Couldn't help falling in love with AFC Wimbledon. And I can't help falling in hate with tuberculosis.

Well, in 2019, I visited a TB hospital in Sierra Leone. We were actually there to learn about maternal health. My wife and I have supported a maternal hospital in Sierra Leone for a long time. But while we were there, on the last day, the doctors we were with asked to visit a tuberculosis hospital. And I had no idea that tuberculosis was still a thing.

I thought it was like what killed John Keats, you know, like a disease of the distant past. And I was like, there's tuberculosis hospitals. That's wild. And when we got there, the doctor started talking about, you know, doctor stuff. And I was grabbed by this little kid who had the same name as my son, Henry, and looked to be about the same age as my son, who was nine at the time.

And Henry just started walking around the hospital. He took me to the laboratory, took me to the wards and introduced me to a couple of patients. And everywhere he went, he was like the mayor of that place. Like everybody would rub his head and joke with him and pick him up and hug him. And I figured he was someone's kid, like one of the doctor's kids or one of the kitchen worker's kids.

And finally, we made our way back to the doctors and they sort of shooed him away. And I said, whose kid is that? And they said, he's not anybody's kid here. He's a patient. And he's one of the patients we're really, really concerned about because it turns out Henry had a complicated case of drug-resistant tuberculosis. And he wasn't nine like I had imagined. He was 17.

He'd just been so stunted by malnutrition and then by TB that he looked much younger. And what happened to Henry over the next few years as he tried to survive his form of drug-resistant tuberculosis, which you or I would be cured of no problem, is really what inspired my obsession with TB.

Yeah.

Yeah, so I mean, I want to be careful to not state that there are upsides to OCD because in my experience, it's mostly downsides. A lot of downsides. It doesn't make you better at FIFA. No. That's an incredible joke. That's so true. It doesn't make you better at FIFA, that's for sure. But also it doesn't make you a good detective.

Like that show Monk where he's got OCD but he's a really good detective. That's not my experience at all, man. I'm a really bad detective when I'm sick. I can't pay attention to anything but my worries.

Yeah, yeah, Tony Shalhoub, you sold me a bill of goods. Great show, but yeah, I don't buy it all the way. So I don't think there's any upsides to OCD. I have spent a lot of my life, though, thinking about microbes and worrying about contamination and having a fear of that. And so I'm sure that fits into my life in ways that I don't fully understand, but...

I wanted to write about that a little bit in the book because I wanted, you know, I don't really like nonfiction where the author doesn't acknowledge their place in it, you know? Or like, what are the possible reasons why you might be focusing on this? And so I wanted to kind of explore that a little bit. But just that basic question of, wasn't tuberculosis cured? Yeah. No, it was.

It was cured in the 1950s. And, you know, in sanatoriums around the United States, people essentially got up off of their deathbeds and went on to live long and healthy and productive lives. But as the Ugandan doctor Peter Mugeni said of HIV, where are the drugs? The drugs are where the disease is not. And where is the disease? The disease is where the drugs are not.

And that's still the case with tuberculosis. I mean, this is a disease that we've known how to cure since the 1950s. And since it became curable, we've let 150 million people die of it.

Yeah, it does.

Right, yeah, no, I mean, almost all of human history, TB has been our deadliest infection.

About the marketing of a disease. It's done a terrible job of marketing tuberculosis. It's got terrible branding.

Yeah.

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