Hello and happy New Year. It's Michelle Martin from Morning Edition. Thank you to everyone who donated during our end-of-year fundraising campaign.

2025 dealt a big blow to NPR and local stations with the loss of federal funding for public media, but we are so heartened by the outpouring of support, and we will get through this together.

Thank you for keeping NPR strong, moving into 2026 and beyond.

Hey, it's Rachel, wishing you a very, very happy new year. And as we are all looking forward to another fresh start, I know I definitely am, I wanted to reshare one of my very favorite conversations. It's with the writer

John Green. And John has this idea of hope being the right response to the human condition.

And that, to me, just feels like the exact right thing to think about as we look forward to a new

year. So with that, enjoy. Do you spend more time in your head or in the world?

It's not a particularly close competition there, Rachel. I spend more time in my head by a very

wide margin. What's that like in there? Pretty intense, to be honest with you.

A little overwhelming sometimes.

I'm Rachel Martin, and this is Wildcard.

The game where cards control the conversation.

Each week, my guest answers questions about their life.

Questions pulled from a deck of cards.

They're allowed to skip one

question and to flip one question back on me. My guest this week is author and YouTube star John

Green. The idea that I can write a story and that story is going to live in someone else's mind

and they're going to bring, if they're generous,

they're going to bring their deepest selves to that story. That is genuine magic to me.

Different people have different reference points for John Green. He is most famous as the

YA author who wrote the massively popular book, The Fault in Our Stars. But then there are the

millions of people who know and love him from his YouTube channels,

...