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

Yeah, are we gonna listen to the fans or are we gonna listen to the powers that be? Are we gonna listen to the people who are suffering from tuberculosis or are we gonna listen to the pharmaceutical companies that say it's impossible to provide cost-effective care to those people?

Yeah.

I always say that tuberculosis is everything from geography to history. So it's geography in the sense that towns like Pasadena, California and Colorado Springs, Colorado only exist because they were essentially founded as tuberculosis colonies.

It's history in the sense that World War I was started by two boys who were dying of tuberculosis and knew they were dying and so assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand together. Very tragic, obviously, but also quite farcical.

As I write about in the book, it was, I mean, you know, a bunch of teenagers who were not particularly well-organized or well-equipped and then combined with the Archduke Franz Ferdinand's utterly, unbelievably incompetent support staff.

That's exactly right. Somebody said, like, what do you think? Sarajevo's full of assassins? And of course, Sarajevo was, in fact, full of assassins. Narrator. Yeah, the narrator comes in and says, like, there were more assassins.

The cowboy hat, yeah. There was a hat maker in New Jersey who got tuberculosis and like so many TB survivors was told the only way he could survive was to go west and get some of that clean air, get out of the city, get out of New York and New Jersey and go get some clean air and see if he could dry his lungs out. This fella goes out to Missouri and he recovers.

And for reasons we don't really understand, about 25% of people who develop active tuberculosis end up surviving and recovering. And I wish we understood that better, but we still don't really understand it that well. But he got better. And as he got better, he noticed that the hats out West kind of sucked. There were the coonskin caps that were literally bug infested.

And then folks from Mexico and Texas had brought up straw hats that didn't work well in that Missouri rain. And so John B. Stetson, which was his name, developed the Stetson.

The cowboy hat? It does, it does, yeah. He was fated for it.

Yeah, George Orwell died of TB. Ringo Starr. Ringo Starr only became a Beatle because he learned how to drum in a sanatorium. Thomas Wolfe. Yep. Thiago Silva? Thiago Silva. Let's talk about Thiago Silva for a minute. That one's not in your book. It's not in my book, but I think about Thiago Silva a lot because people are like, can you connect football to TB?

And I'm like, yeah, I don't even have to go back to the 19th century or whatever. Soccer and TB connect in the life of Thiago Silva. He started out in Brazil and then eventually made his way to Europe and ended up at Moscow. And that's when he developed a life-threatening case of TB.

Now, he'd probably had a TB infection for a long time, but for whatever reason, his disease became active when he was in Moscow, and he almost died. He was really, really sick and had to leave the game for a while, but then made his way back into the game and became one of the greatest players of his generation. He won a Champions League. Like, he became an amazing, amazing player.

And he's also a tuberculosis survivor.

Yeah, biomedically, tuberculosis is caused by a bacteria, but I don't think that's the only way we should imagine tuberculosis. In the 21st century, you can't really say it's caused by a bacteria because we know how to kill the bacteria. We decrease tuberculosis rates by 99% in the United States. So we can't say it's caused by this bacterium we know how to kill.

We have to acknowledge that it's caused by us. Our systems that... distribute resources the way that they distribute them, our choices about whether or not we're going to distribute cures to the places where they're most needed. Those are the real causes of tuberculosis today.

Shreya Tripathi. She sued her government of India to try to get access to bedaquiline, this really critical drug for treating drug-resistant tuberculosis. It's incredibly powerful. Yes.

She eventually won that court case, but it took a long time. And in the intervening time, her lungs just became too damaged for her to survive. And so even though the bedaquiline was able to clear the infection, there was no way to save her life. And she died. I believe she was 19 years old. And I... I think about Shreya a lot because she cared about my work.

Shreya loved The Fault in Our Stars and also was rereading it in the days before her death. And she was doing this heroic, heroic work to get not only for herself, but for all people living with drug-resistant TB to increase access to bedaquiline. And I didn't hear her call in time. You know, I didn't hear about the work that she was doing in time to be able to lend my little voice to that.

And that's something I think about a lot. Like, how am I using the megaphone that I've been given and what voices am I not hearing? Why am I not hearing voices like Shreya's?

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