"The Fault in Our Stars" is one of the bestselling novels of the century. Why did its author just devote five years of his life to a staggering work of non-fiction about... tuberculosis? Because John Green became a super-fan of fourth-tier English football. He employed FIFA and Belichick-level tactics to build a compassionate community on YouTube. He understood the difference between enough and more than enough. And he never forgot to be awesome. • Order "Everything Is Tuberculosis" https://everythingistb.com/ • Subscribe to John Green's YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/vlogbrothers • Subscribe to Henry Reider's YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@Tuberculosis-l1jSurvivorHenry Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the main theme of John Green's new book?
Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.
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.
You're listening to Giraffe King's Network. I love this book, by the way. Thank you. I read it. I always have to just like dangle all of the dog ears and the ink. It's burrowed into my head in a way that I want to get to. And by the way, thank you for being here. Oh, my God. This is so cool. I do feel obligated, though, because we are a technically sports show. Yeah, we got to talk about sports.
I want to talk about how you are one of the most absurd characters in professional soccer.
Thank you. That's how I prefer to think of myself.
the whole idea of you and English soccer, and how do you tell that story for people who don't know the lore of John Green?
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.
On May the 28th, 2002, the FA approved a plan to move Wimbledon FC 60 miles north to Milton Keynes. Thousands of fans felt betrayed. This is the death of Wimbledon as far as I'm concerned.
We did say originally that it wasn't going to be over until a ball was kicked in Milton Keynes or at Plough Lane, but it still doesn't feel quite over until today. It's a very sad day for English football, I think.
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Chapter 2: Why did John Green become a fan of AFC Wimbledon?
Like TB regained its status as the world's deadliest infectious disease in 2023.
Taking COVID-19's place as a leading cause of death. from those diseases is tuberculosis, better known as TB. According to the World Health Organization, more than 8 million people worldwide were diagnosed with TB last year, which is- Yeah, yeah.
After COVID had briefly took over the number one spot, the top seed from 2020 to 2023.
Right, yeah, no, I mean, almost all of human history, TB has been our deadliest infection.
Okay, before people get worried, man, you guys are going to go really into like the darkest statistics in this book. I also want to point out that this is a story also about branding. Totally about branding.
About the marketing of a disease. It's done a terrible job of marketing tuberculosis. It's got terrible branding.
Well, I mean, the idea that I'm going to quote you here, what you write in the book, when TB rates declined in the U.S. toward the end of the 19th century, some physicians worried it would harm the quality of American literature. Oh, yeah. No. With one writing, quote, by way of compensation for good health, we may lack certain cultural joys.
Yeah.
In that sense, TB used to have great branding. I mean, the best branding. I didn't know anything about how tuberculosis was enshrined and in some ways fetishized.
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Chapter 3: What happened to Wimbledon FC in 2002?
Yeah.
Describing the women also applied to what it meant to be a great artist.
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.
Right. There is an American doctor you quote in the book who had called it a disease of the master race.
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.
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