John Green
Appearances
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
And so the fans had to restart the club. And they started out with literal tryouts in a public park. They started out in the ninth tier of English football. And because in England and European football, you can get promoted or relegated, you can move up and down the ladder.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
And what's so heartbreaking to me is that my friend Henry in Sierra Leone who had tuberculosis is also a poet.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
And so even today, you see where are the highest rates of TB? They're always in formerly colonized regions.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
You're talking about falling money.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
We see it everywhere where there is industrialization and poverty. We see tuberculosis.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
They moved up the ladder rung by rung until finally by 2011, they were one step away from being a full-time professional team again.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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?
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
And they made it all the way to the playoff final in a penalty shootout with a 19-year-old kid who worked part-time at a rental car place.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
The cowboy hat? It does, it does, yeah. He was fated for it.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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?
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
Saving the two penalties. Man. An incredible story. I think the greatest underdog story in the history of sports.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
And he's also a tuberculosis survivor.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
And now they've been a professional team for, you know, about 15 years, and they're doing great. They're owned by their fans, so there's no rich guy to fund the team or anything. It's just a regular bunch of people, and everybody pitches in the way that they can pitch in, and one of the ways I can pitch in is financially.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
I do, yes. I'm not afraid to quote a Journal of Cost-Benefit Analysis. There's a journal for literally everything, man.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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,
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
I'm a regular Bill Belichick.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
tree over there yeah yeah that worries me too i mean can i tell you my favorite joke it's a norm mcdonald joke i mean he heard it from someone else but norm mcdonald used to tell this joke about a moth that walks into a podiatrist's office and podiatrist says what seems to be the problem moth the moth says oh my god doc if only there were just one problem my wife doesn't love me anymore
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
And I don't blame her. I look in the mirror every day, and I look at myself, and I think, like, look at this lump of flesh. Look what I've become. My children, they're failures. My son married a woman I hate, and my daughter, she has nothing to give me. I just hate life, Doc. I don't know if I can go on. And the podiatrist says, yeah, those are really serious problems, Moth.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
I'm super sorry to hear that, but, you know, this is a podiatrist's office. What brought you here today? And the moth says, oh, the light was on. That's my favorite joke. That's my favorite joke because like a huge percentage of the time as humans, we're just flying to the light. We don't even know why. We're just flying to the light of power. We're flying to the light of money.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
We're flying to the light of more. And we don't even think about why. And I'm certainly guilty of that myself. But my favorite things in life are where I think like, you know what would be a more interesting light to fly to or a more fun light to fly to would be something else.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
I think it's really hard when you're... I really feel for these young YouTubers who get successful when they're really young. I mean, I got successful when I was married and like an adult and I had kids and like my life was pretty set. 22, 23, 17 in some cases, years old. It's a very different situation. And that's really hard.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
But I would just encourage those folks to try to think about what are the interesting lights to fly toward instead of just the standard lights.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
That's right. There you go. Make the ask. Thank you, John. Thank you.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
Good morning Hank, it's Tuesday. I recently found myself at an airport, as I often do, sitting at the gate waiting for my flight to board, and I couldn't stop thinking about how everyone in the airport would, within a century or so, be dead. Good morning Hank, it's Tuesday.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
So something you might not know from having watched my last couple videos is that this has been the most stressful two-week period I have experienced in a while. Good morning Hank, it's Tuesday. I have to tell you about a profound mortification I recently experienced, but first, it's time to manifest second shot in arm. Let's go get vaccinated.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
What is a nerdfighter? A nerdfighter is a person who, instead of being made out of, like, bones and skin and tissue, is made entirely of awesome. So you're saying that nerdfighters don't fight nerds. No, we're clearly pro-nerd.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
So I started out playing FIFA, the video game, and I would livestream it or upload the videos or whatever.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
And then I'd use all the advertising revenue to pay for an actual sponsorship. So then I could see my own logo when I played the video game. I could see my own logo on the player's shorts. I will say this. There are lots of professional FIFA players and semi-professional FIFA players out there.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
But among them, do you know any other than me who has successfully gotten DFTBA Nerdfighteria written on the shorts of a professional football team? So I've got that going for me. I'm on the back of the shorts, the liminal space between left thigh and buttock. That's my chosen area. That is the finest real estate. Yeah, no, people say that.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
Why be on the front of the shirt when you can be on the back of the shorts, you know?
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
Yeah, and as I'm sure you noted, I'm not very good at it. You are trash.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
They're third in the league this season. They've got a real chance to get promoted up to the third tier. And I couldn't be prouder. Every year, I use some of the money I make from live streaming to try to help them buy a player. And this year, we bought a player who's absolute mustard. His name's Marcus Brown, and that kid's got amazing, amazing feet.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
Yeah, that is correct.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
Yeah, about five years. I do have a weird job, but, you know, that's the privilege that The Fault in Our Stars, the success of that book and movie gave me was the privilege to really follow my dreams. And you can have really uninteresting dreams. Like, I feel like a lot of people who are in this position, like, just dream of having more. And, like, more than enough is not interesting to me.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
Thank you. That's how I prefer to think of myself.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
I'm on the back of the shorts, the liminal space between left thigh and buttock. That's my chosen area. Why be on the front of the shirt when you can be on the back of the shorts? Right after this ad.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
I fell in love with a fourth-tier English soccer team called AFC Wimbledon. They had their team taken away from them, like the Baltimore Colts were moved to Indianapolis. That had never happened before in English soccer.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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...
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How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
Right, yeah, no, I mean, almost all of human history, TB has been our deadliest infection.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
About the marketing of a disease. It's done a terrible job of marketing tuberculosis. It's got terrible branding.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism
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.