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 · last 12 months

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, so there's this children's pool game, Marco Polo, where one person closes their eyes and says, Marco, Marco, Marco, and then everybody else has to say Polo, and then that's how the person who's got their eyes closed finds somebody to tag, and then they become the Marco person. And this game, it's kind of just a call and response of one person saying Marco and everybody else responding Polo.

And that's how I feel about writing and content creation in general is that I'm saying Marco, Marco. I'm in my basement for five years writing this book saying Marco, Marco, Marco. And then the book comes out and for the first time I hear someone say Polo. And that's a magical, magical thing for me, whether it's a YouTube video, a Crash Course video, or a book.

To hear that person say polo is magical. But I also think it goes both ways. I hear Shreya and other people who've died of TB telling me, Marco, Marco, Marco, and asking me to respond. And this book is my attempt to respond.

There's TB outbreaks on some level in the U.S. every year. We have about 10,000 cases of active TB a year. So it's certainly not something that's eliminated from the United States by any stretch of the imagination.

But also, I mean, I think that the biggest news story and the most devastating one from the perspective of people who care about TB is the defunding of USAID has had really profound consequences for people living with tuberculosis.

Well, the first thing I'd say about that is that a large measure of America's power over the last 50 years has come from its generosity. The second thing I'd say is that this is not only a problem in impoverished countries. To imagine that disease understands political borders is a fundamental misimagining of disease, right? We know this from COVID. We know it from HIV.

We know it from every pandemic we've ever experienced. And by chaotically and without any warning, discontinuing the treatment of hundreds of thousands of people living with tuberculosis, we know that when your treatment gets interrupted in the middle of your course of antibiotics, you are vastly more likely to develop drug resistance.

That's a catastrophe personally for the person who's affected that way. But it's also societally an issue because it means that there's more drug-resistant, more complicated drug-resistant TB floating around in communities. People are acquiring more complicated drug-resistant TB.

All of that is, I mean, that should scare all of us regardless of where we live because a totally resistant form of tuberculosis that we have no tools to treat is truly a nightmare.

Yeah, yeah.

Right. I mean, I think people are beginning to question the idea of inoculation itself, the idea of scientifically proven treatments itself. And a lot of those people have a lot of power right now. And that worries me.

I do, yes. I'm not afraid to quote a Journal of Cost-Benefit Analysis. There's a journal for literally everything, man.

Right. I mean, just from a financial perspective, think about how much money we used to spend on tuberculosis in the United States. I mean, at the height of the TB crisis in America in the late 19th, early 20th centuries, There were almost as many beds to treat people with tuberculosis as there were beds in hospitals for all other conditions combined.

We spent a tremendous amount of resources trying to address the TB crisis in that period of American history. And now we spend... far, far less because this is a curable disease that's infectious. And so we can just stop chains of infection and lower the burden of the disease, which in turn means that we have to spend less money on the disease in the future.

So Henry eventually, after failing a second line of antibiotics and being hospitalized for almost two years straight, losing the opportunity to go to high school, losing countless opportunities, he was eventually, thanks to the incredible efforts of his doctor, Dr. Jeroen Tefera and the Sierra Leonean government and this organization, Partners in Health,

All those folks came together to provide Henry with the kind of personalized, tailored response to his particular infection that you or I would have gotten on day one. And as a result, Henry was cured. He essentially got up off of his deathbed and lived. And now he takes care of his mother. He's a junior at the University of Sierra Leone. He's studying human resources and management.

I'm so proud of him. I'm so proud to be his friend. And, you know, in writing this story, Henry was so generous in sharing his story with me and asking me to share his story more broadly, asking me to use that megaphone that you referred to to share his story. That's a big part of the reason why I wrote the book was because Henry wanted me to.

He makes first-person content about daily life in Sierra Leone, about the challenges of gathering water, about what different neighborhoods in his community look like. You should Google Henry Ryder YouTube and make sure to subscribe to his YouTube channel. Every time we talk or every time he talks to a group of people, he's such a good YouTuber in this way.

This is a critical—this is something—we were talking about YouTube strategy before we went on the air. Yeah. This is something that I would tell you. Please. Every single time Henry talks to an audience, he says, Make sure you support Henry.

Don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel. Don't be afraid to make the ask. All right? So he's not afraid to make the ask. Don't be afraid to make the ask. And I'll make the ask on his behalf. Google Henry Ryder YouTube and check out his YouTube channel.

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