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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

Yeah, it was really heavily romanticized in the 19th century. At the time, it was understood to be an inherited disease. So there was nothing you could do to catch it. And so people weren't as worried about it in terms of catching it. And they thought that alongside inheriting TB, you also inherited other traits, like a really sensitive personality. And also you were super hot.

You were really beautiful. You had very pale skin and rosy cheeks and wide sunken eyes. You looked a little bit like an Edgar Allan Poe character. It's no... You know, hot. Yeah. Well, I mean, that was considered hot at the time.

You can see it. You get the vibe. And this was a time when, you know, tuberculosis couldn't be stigmatized away because too many people had it. I mean, at the height of the frightful tuberculization of humanity, as one writer called it, I think in London, one in three people were dying of tuberculosis. And so everyone had TB. Yeah. which at the time was called consumption.

So what were you going to do about consumption other than romanticize it? So it became this disease of beauty and refinement and intellectualism. Like, of course, the great English poet John Keats died of tuberculosis.

And when he was dying, his buddy Percy Shelley wrote him and said, you know, this TV, it does tend to strike people who write great verses as you have done, which I've always thought is hilarious because Percy Shelley also had tuberculosis and he knew that he had it. And so he was also kind of saying like, and I have done, you know? I think we both know that we're both great poets, hence the TB.

Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think Lord Byron said that he would like to die of consumption because the women would say how beautiful and interesting Byron looks in dying. And... And it was seen to be a disease that made you a very good poet or a very good writer. It made you sensitive. It made you open to the suffering of the world.

And what's so heartbreaking to me is that my friend Henry in Sierra Leone who had tuberculosis is also a poet.

and is a beautiful writer and yet was not viewed that way because of the way that we imagine tuberculosis changing so drastically from being a romantic disease to being a stigmatized disease, from being a disease that, as Charles Dickens put it, wealth never warded off to being a disease that wealth pretty much entirely wards off.

That was the before. That was the before. So TB was very much racialized, and it was seen as a disease of civilization by white doctors, to be clear. Not entirely, but it was seen as a disease of civilization, a disease of whiteness. And catastrophically, people who were colonialists believed that people in colonized regions couldn't get TB.

So whether it was the Philippines or India or Sierra Leone, it was believed that those people couldn't get TB. And that has been catastrophic ever since because TB was allowed, consumption was allowed to spread completely unchecked in those communities, which often had impoverished healthcare systems. And often there was very little to no investment in those healthcare systems.

And so even today, you see where are the highest rates of TB? They're always in formerly colonized regions.

You're talking about falling money.

Industrialization is the story of how TB spread and the story of why TB ended up where it ended up. And we've seen that in outbreak after outbreak. We don't just see it in London in the 18th and 19th centuries or in New York and Baltimore in the… 18th and 19th centuries. We see it in Delhi. We see it in Lagos. We see it in Freetown. We see it in Manila.

We see it everywhere where there is industrialization and poverty. We see tuberculosis.

Yeah, I'd love to. There's just this part Yeah, this is a poem that Henry wrote about his mom. Mom, you are special and beautiful. You stand closer when everyone ran away, especially my cousin ran away, but you stood firm. And I love that poem because there's a tense change between you stand closer when everyone ran away as if the present tense of his mom, like, she stays, she stands. Yes.

And everyone else ran past tense away. And that one's always struck me. I mean, Henry's a beautiful poet, but that one in particular has always stuck with me.

It made him an outcast. And that's unfortunately the case for many tuberculosis survivors. Healthcare workers have described to me that one of the greatest heartbreaks of working in a TB hospital is that a lot of times nobody feels like they can go to a funeral. And so family members don't go to the funerals.

And so healthcare workers who cared for their patients are often the only people at those funerals. And it's just a hugely stigmatized disease. But it's important to understand that the reason it's stigmatized is because we don't do a good job of getting the cure to the people who need it. And so it's stigmatized in part because it's seen as dangerous, right? We don't stigmatize strep throat.

And the reason we don't stigmatize strep throat is that it's not a big deal anymore. Tuberculosis shouldn't be a big deal anymore. It should be a rare disease if it exists at all. And so it's our failure to get the cure to the people who need it that really results in stigma.

Showing 1721–1740 of 1,964 · page 87 of 99