867 - Everything Is Tuberculosis: A Conversation With John Green
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.8 • 620 Ratings
🗓️ 12 March 2025
⏱️ 15 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
About this episode:
John Green is a New York Times bestselling author and YouTuber known for writing books like The Fault In Our Stars. His latest book is about tuberculosis. In this episode: A conversation with John Green about why he chose to write about TB, the current state of public health and its challenges, and how the disease and its prevalance reflects so much back on us in terms of who we are as a society.
Guest:
John Green is the award-winning, #1 bestselling author of books including Looking for Alaska, The Fault in Our Stars, Turtles All the Way Down, and The Anthropocene Reviewed. With his brother, Hank, John has co-created many online video projects, including Vlogbrothers and the educational channel Crash Course. John serves on the board of trustees for the global health nonÂprofit Partners In Health and spoke at the United Nations High-Level Meeting on the Fight to End Tuberculosis. John lives with his family in Indianapolis. You can visit him online at http://johngreenbooks.com or join the TB Fighters working to end tuberculosis at http://tbfighters.org .
Host:
Lindsay Smith Rogers, MA, is the producer of the Public Health On Call podcast, an editor for Expert Insights, and the director of content strategy for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Show links and related content:
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Everything Is Tuberculosis (book)—http://Everythingistb.com
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Henry Reider, TB Survivor—YouTube
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Henry’s story–Vlogbrothers
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Tuberculosis in the U.S.—Public Health On Call (February, 2025)
Transcript information:
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, |
| 0:05.9 | where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges. |
| 0:16.3 | If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jhh.edu. |
| 0:23.8 | That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:31.3 | This is Lindsay Smith Rogers. John Green is a New York Times bestselling author and YouTuber. |
| 0:37.1 | He's known for writing fiction about teenagers, relationships, and poetry, but his latest book is about tuberculosis. |
| 0:44.1 | In this episode, we talk about why the topic of TB and how the disease and its prevalence reflects so much back on us in terms of who we are as a society. |
| 0:56.0 | Let's listen. John Green, thank you so much for joining us in terms of who we are as a society. Let's listen. John Green, |
| 1:01.5 | thank you so much for joining us on public health on call. How are you today? I'm okay. Thanks for having me. It's been a long couple weeks when it comes to foreign aid for the stuff that I care |
| 1:07.0 | about a lot like tuberculosis and especially devastating last week. But personally, |
| 1:11.9 | I'm doing great. Well, that's mixed bag to hear. But we're going to talk about your new book today. |
| 1:17.6 | Everything is tuberculosis, which is fantastic. Thank you. |
| 1:21.0 | Millions of people have read your books. They've been developed into popular movies of all the |
| 1:25.7 | topics in the world that you could write about. And you kind of prefaced here for me. Why tuberculosis? I had no, you know, if you told me |
| 1:34.0 | five years ago, I was going to write a book about tuberculosis. I would have been duly astonished. |
| 1:37.9 | But I didn't know that tuberculosis was still the world's deadliest infectious disease. I didn't |
| 1:42.2 | know anything about TB until I visited |
| 1:44.5 | a TB hospital in Sierra Leone in 2019. I met a young man there named Henry who shares a name |
| 1:51.7 | with my son. And after meeting Henry and following his story of trying to survive drug-resistant |
| 1:57.8 | tuberculosis, I felt like this was the story I had to tell. So I'm |
| 2:01.8 | still writing about smart young people who love poetry. It's just now I'm writing a true story about |
| 2:07.0 | a real one. And you also say in your book that you're not a medical historian, but this book |
... |
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