John Green on solving big medical problems | ReThinking with Adam Grant

John Green 0:00 What I find helpful is giving myself permission to be bad, you know? To write poorly, to not know where I'm going. So I just try to give myself permission to suck. [upbeat music]

Adam Grant 0:15 John Green, welcome to Penn.

John Green 0:17 Oh, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be with all y'all.

Adam Grant 0:19 You think that now, but we'll see how you feel in an hour.

John Green 0:22 I, I feel [laughs] very confident that these people seem nice, and I bet they submitted great questions. I'm worried about you.

Adam Grant 0:28 What are you worried about?

John Green 0:29 Oh, I always worry a little bit when I get interviewed by you because you're a very good interviewer. You know?

Adam Grant 0:33 Do you want me to be a bad interviewer?

John Green 0:35 No, no, no, I do prefer a good interview. But you, you are unusually good, for sure.

Adam Grant 0:40 Uh, that's a lot of pressure now. Thanks, John Green-

John Green 0:42 You're welcome [laughs]

Adam Grant 0:43 ... for lowering the stakes here.

John Green 0:44 [laughs]

John Green 0:45 Okay.

Adam Grant 0:45 So I, I have to tell you, I was deeply ambivalent about this book f- when I saw it because I would not normally read a book about tuberculosis.

John Green 0:53 Right.

Adam Grant 0:54 But I would normally read a book by John Green.

John Green 0:56 That was, uh, my hope [laughs]

Speaker 0:58 [laughs]

John Green 0:59 ... is that I could, uh, force you into reading a book about tuberculosis. [laughs]

Adam Grant 1:03 Well, it worked, and, uh, dare I say, it was a page-turner.

John Green 1:07 Thank you. That was my hope.

Adam Grant 1:09 I was, I was kind of shocked. Um, but I thought it was, I thought it was beautifully written. Obviously, the topic could not be more important, although I didn't realize the importance of it until, until I read your words. Um, but it was also arresting and motivating in a way that I think is, is really unusual for a book. So why? Why did you force us to read about tuberculosis?

John Green 1:28 [laughs] There are lots of diseases I could've written about, but to me, tuberculosis is the exemplary disease of injustice because we know so little about it, and we talk so little about it. I mean, this is the deadliest infectious disease in the world, and yet I didn't know that. I think most people don't know that. And, uh, that speaks to tuberculosis' long history of kind of being neglected.

Adam Grant 1:49 I, I had no idea, frankly, any of the history that you covered in the book, and it was just, it was sort of horrifying to learn, how many times do we have to go through figuring out that we can cure this before we actually make the cure available everywhere?

John Green 2:02 Apparently, we have to go through it at least one more time.

Adam Grant 2:06 Devastating. Um, tell me about what,

Adam Grant 2:09 what got you interested in tuberculosis 'cause I think the, the personal connection to this story was really moving.

John Green 2:14 Yeah. So it's one thing to say 1.25 million people die of a disease, but if you don't n- every year, which is the case with tuberculosis, but if you don't know anyone with tuberculosis, then you're kind of multiplying 1.25 million by zero, and it's hard to understand what that means. But, uh, I'm able to multiply 1.25 million by, by several. Um, and one of the reasons... Let me start that over, Adam. I don't like my answer.

Speaker 2:39 [laughs]

Adam Grant 2:40 You can't self-edit during a live interview.

John Green 2:42 I'm self-editing the podcast.

Speaker 2:43 [laughs]

John Green 2:44 I'm self-editing the live interview. It's happening right now.

Adam Grant 2:47 [laughs]

John Green 2:47 You're watching it occur.

Adam Grant 2:49 [laughs]

John Green 2:50 Um, the short answer, which is how I'm gonna answer the question, I met a kid at a tuberculosis hospital in Sierra Leone. And when I got to that tuberculosis hospital, I didn't even know there were tuberculosis hospitals. Uh, that, that... I thought tuberculosis hospitals were a phenomenon of the 1910s, you know? And so we visit this tuberculosis hospital, and there's this little kid, and his name is Henry, which is my son's name, and he looked to be about the same age as my son, who was nine at the time. And Henry walked me all around this tuberculosis hospital, and he showed me the wards, and he showed me the laboratory, and he showed me the kitchen where they made food. And I figured he must be somebody's kid, like a doctor or a nurse or something. Finally, we made our way back to the doctors, uh, who were kinda gathering together, talking about cases, and they sorta shooed Henry away in a very loving manner. He was sort of like the mayor of that hospital. Like, everywhere he went, like, people would greet him and saying, like, "Oh, Henry, it's great to see you." And, um, I said, "Who- whose kid is that?" And they said, "He's a patient, and he's one of the patients we're really concerned about because we know his tuberculosis is not responding well enough to the antibiotics." So even though he was w- relatively healthy and able to walk around, they could tell that his tuberculosis was inevitably gonna come roaring back and that when it did, they wouldn't have any tools in a country like Sierra Leone to help him. They also told me that Henry wasn't nine, he was 17. He'd just been so emaciated by, uh, first by malnutrition and then by TB that he looked much younger. And it was really in following Henry's story and learning more about Henry, especially after I reunited with him in 2023, that I wanted to write this book.

Adam Grant 4:31 Uh, I think you've given him a way to help a ton of people.

Adam Grant 4:35 One of the, one of the things that I felt was a tremendous amount of moral outrage reading this book because it just, it just seems wrong that, that over a million people are gonna dis- die of this disease, and we know exactly what we need to do to save them, and it's not happening. Why not?

John Green 4:50 Well, this great Ugandan doctor, Dr. Peter Mugyenyi, said once of HIV/AIDS drugs, "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." And that's very much the case with tuberculosis. We have really good tools for curing tuberculosis. Now, it's not easy to cure. It's a bacterial infection, but it's not like getting strep throat or something. You have to take antibiotics, a combination of antibiotics every day for four or maybe six months. If you have drug-resistant tuberculosis, that can be much longer, 12 or 18 months. My friend Henry took over 20,000 pills over the course of his treatment, uh, over many years while he was being treated for tuberculosis. So it's not an easy disease to cure, but it is very curable. And, and the reason is that it's seen as, uh, expensive is, is one reason. It's viewed as expensive, but it's not expensive. Like, my brother had cancer a couple years ago, as you know, Adam, and, um, it cost about 150 times more to cure my brother's cancer than it c- cost to cure Henry's tuberculosis. And at no point did anyone say to my brother, "I'm just not sure this is cost-effective." Nobody said that to my brother. And so I think about that a lot in the context of tuberculosis survivors because it's a similarly hard disease to cure in the sense that it takes months of treatment, just like my brother's cancer did, but it's very curable. And the short answer to why we don't cure it is that we simply have systems that don't value all human lives equally.

Adam Grant 6:21 So what do we do about that? I think, uh, you came down in two places on cost-benefit analysis in this book. You gave us a very compelling benefits outweigh the costs calculation.

John Green 6:33 Benefits so outweigh the cost, y'all. It's incredible. I mean, look, now it would cost $25 billion a year for, for about 10 years to eradicate tuberculosis, which is a lot of money, more than I have, more... Just, just looking at the faces in this room, I think very few of you probably have $25 billion. Although if you do, please contact me. [laughs]

Adam Grant 6:54 [laughs]

John Green 6:54 Have I got a disease for you to eradicate.

Adam Grant 6:58 [laughs]

John Green 6:59 But as a, as a species, we have those resources. We have those resources in abundance, frankly. And so what, what drives me, me absolutely bonkers is knowing that we have the ability to confront this disease and that we choose not to.

Adam Grant 7:16 You have taken matters into your own hands. Um, I've, I've watched you taking on pharma using your megaphone. What have you learned?

John Green 7:25 Well, pharmaceutical companies aren't evil, and the people who work at them aren't evil. That's the first thing I've learned. Like, the people who work at them are nice people and good people who wanna get, uh, new and better treatments to more people. Um, but some of the systems that they work under really prioritize maximizing profit, right? And so we end up in this very strange situation where coming up with a drug that lengthens your eyelashes is much more valuable than coming up with a drug that treats tuberculosis.

Adam Grant 7:55 I'm sorry, is that a drug?

John Green 7:56 Yeah, yeah, yeah. It actually is a drug that treat-

Adam Grant 7:58 Why do you know this?

John Green 7:59 These people on the treatment would have these beautiful long lashes.

Adam Grant 8:02 [laughs]

John Green 8:03 And so they were like, "We should totally repurpose this drug and make it incredibly profitable," and they did. So what I've, what I've learned is that, um, the, because these systems require these companies to, to try to maximize profit, a lot of times there's a misalignment between the needs of human health and the needs of the market. And those are the places where we have to come in as, as, as groups of individuals and pressure those companies to at least make those drugs and those diagnostic tests and those tools available in impoverished communities at cost or near cost. And that, that isn't a huge inconvenience to those companies. I'll, I'll be frank with you. Johnson & Johnson doesn't need bedaquiline in order to be profitable. Um, and so eventually, under pressure, they did abandon all of their secondary patents on bedaquiline. And so now this incredibly powerful TB drug has gone from being way too expensive to seeing its price drop by 55% in just two years because now there's generic competition.

Adam Grant 9:09 Okay, so obviously private sector is one place to go. You also make a case, though, that public investment is necessary.

John Green 9:15 It's hugely important. I mean, the one half of one penny, uh, per tax dollar that we were spending on foreign aid until about eight weeks ago was, I think, the best investment that the American people made. Um, America has traditionally been the most generous donor of, in the fight against tuberculosis. The United States, uh, expresses its power partly through its generosity. That's, that's been the case for centuries, really. And, um, and, and there is no replacing public investment. I mean, the vast majority of people who've seen their treatment interrupted by the USAID, um, defunding stock-outs will die. Like I said earlier, it takes four to six months of antibiotics to cure this disease, but if you interrupt your treatment in the middle of those four to six months, it's catastrophic. Even if you only interrupt it for a couple weeks, it means a skyrocketing risk of developing drug resistance. If you have drug-resistant TB, it means a skyrocketing risk of developing further drug resistance, which is a catastrophe not only for that individual, who is very likely to die, but it is also a societal catastrophe because it means much more drug-resistant tuberculosis circulating in communities that's harder to treat. And it also risks the, the great terror of us all, which is a version of tuberculosis that we have no tools to address, which would take us right back to the 1910s and 1930s when my great uncle died.

Adam Grant 10:44 So John, given, given that scenario, it seems like private investment is an important Band-Aid at least. When I see you, you know, sort of going after a company on social media, my first thought is you've done this so often and so effectively now that do you even need the megaphone? Um, can you just reach out to the CEO and say, "I would really hate to create a, create a PR crisis. [laughs] Like, can you just fix this now?"

John Green 11:06 Oh, I, I do that. [laughs]

Adam Grant 11:09 And does, how does it work compared to the public approach?

John Green 11:11 It... I, I mean, I much prefer a private approach. I do not enjoy publicly naming and shaming anyone or anything. I'm not a confrontational person. My brother and I have worked together for 20 years. We've had one argument in those 20 years. This is, it's very difficult for me to be confrontational, so I find it wildly unpleasant to, to confront the most powerful corporations in the world. I would much rather have a private conversation with them. Um, and I try to have those private conversations every time or offer to have those private conversations, and I say, "I think we both don't want this." Um, and it can be very effective. You know, I think a lot can happen in private and, and we've s- we've seen some meaningful change in the world of tuberculosis, uh, tools, uh, when it comes to private conversations, but sometimes it, it has to become public.

Adam Grant 11:57 I may not be the only person in the room wondering what was the fight with Hank.

John Green 12:01 Oh, um, it was during the first VidCon. My brother and I started a YouTube conference, and some, like, some screen wasn't working properly, and I said, "Hank, the screen isn't working properly." And he said, "I know." And I said, "You need to fix it." And he said, "Stop looking at me that way."

Adam Grant 12:18 [laughs]

John Green 12:18 And I said, "I don't know where else to put my eyes." [laughs]

Adam Grant 12:23 [laughs]

John Green 12:23 And that was it.

Adam Grant 12:24 [laughs]

John Green 12:25 We didn't talk for like six hours.

Adam Grant 12:27 [laughs]

John Green 12:28 And then I, and then I was like, I didn't know where to put my eyes.

Adam Grant 12:31 [laughs]

John Green 12:31 And he was like, "I get it, man. I forgive you."

Adam Grant 12:34 [laughs]

John Green 12:34 So yeah, it's, it resolved fairly easily.

Adam Grant 12:37 Thank you for, uh, for clarifying that.

Adam Grant 12:40 So when I was reading the book, there were, there were all these gems buried in it, and one of my favorite moments, maybe my favorite paragraph, was about Marco Polo. Talk to us about that 'cause I think it said something really meaningful about both the human condition and a writer's life.

John Green 12:54 Yeah. So there's this children's pool game that you might have played called Marco Polo, where one person closes their eyes in the pool and says, "Marco, Marco, Marco," and the other people have to say, "Polo, polo." And then the, the Marco person kind of uses their echolocation to tag somebody. And-

Adam Grant 13:11 Never heard it described that way before [laughs]

John Green 13:13 [laughs] But at any rate, that's how I think of writing, is that I'm sitting in my basement for years saying, writing some version of Marco, Marco, Marco, and, uh, eventually the book comes out and for the first time I hear someone say back to me, "Polo." And it's the loveliest thing. It's the most amazing thing. And it's true for all creative work, really. I mean, on the internet, the Marco Polo happens much faster, right? You say Marco on Instagram, and somebody says polo three seconds later or whatever, which I don't find quite as fulfilling, but it, it still works.

Adam Grant 13:48 Not on my internet.

John Green 13:49 [laughs]

Adam Grant 13:50 When I say Marco, more often, they're like, "But why did you choose Marco?"

John Green 13:53 [laughs]

Adam Grant 13:55 "Why wasn't it just Mark?"

Speaker 13:56 [laughs]

Adam Grant 13:57 "Does, isn't Marco spelled with a K, not a C?"

John Green 14:00 Yeah. How can he be talking about Marco at a time like this?

Adam Grant 14:04 [laughs] Yes.

Speaker 14:05 [laughs]

John Green 14:05 They don't say polo. That's why, that's why I don't like it as much. That's why I like writing books more is because you have a long, you have more of a chance to really engage in a deeper conversation, and people hopefully understand why you're saying Marco at the end of it. But I also think it works in the sense ... I mean, I, I write about it in the book in the context of this young woman named Shreya who was a big fan of my book, The Fault In Our Stars, and she died of drug-resistant tuberculosis. She died, uh, suing her government, trying to get access to that drug I mentioned earlier, bedaquiline. And when, when she died, she was actually reading The F- rereading The Fault In Our Stars in the last days of her life. And I often think if I'd become alive to the tuberculosis crisis earlier, if I had heard Shreya's voice crying out, "Marco, Marco, Marco," um, you know, I might have been able to say polo in a meaningful way, but I, I didn't hear that voice. And I think about what that says about my information feed. I think about what that says about, uh, the privilege that I enjoy in my life and, um, how I can do a better job of, of listening to people who are, who are crying out Marco as, as well as being the person who's saying Marco.

Adam Grant 15:16 It's such a poignant sentiment. I think it also gives us a little bit of a window into your self-described sometimes obsessive thoughts.

John Green 15:24 Yeah.

Adam Grant 15:25 You've written extensively about your experience with OCD by now. Um, it comes up in the book, and I hadn't seen the connection until you called it out, um, that you're, you're writing a book about tuberculosis and many of your own obsessive fears revolve around disease.

John Green 15:42 I spend a lot of time thinking about disease, probably more than the average person. Although I would argue ... I mean, my, my OCD is deeply irrational in everything, and it has nothing to do with reason or with reality or with the world as it, as it actually is. You know, it's a, it's a distorted thinking process. Um, but I, I think it probably, it must be related on some level to my, my fascination with, with infectious disease and, and, and with writing about disease in general. On the other hand, it's v- it's always been confusing to me why more people don't write about disease, this thing that kills 90% of us. We spend so much time writing about other things that kill and harm us, like, uh, war and divorce and everything, and so little time writing about disease, which is overwhelmingly, um, I think, like, both the greatest expression of, of injustice in the world because disease tends to follow the paths of injustice that we blaze for it. But also, like, for lack of a better term, it's just super important. I, I'm confused why other people don't worry about it.

Adam Grant 16:41 I, I share that confusion. One of the, the extraordinary things you've done in the past few years is you've made it really clear to people, hey, you can be extremely successful and also struggle with mental illness.

John Green 16:52 You know, I, I've lived with, with fairly serious illness for most of my adult life, and yet I also have a really wonderful life, and those things aren't mutually exclusive at all.

Adam Grant 17:04 What have you learned about how to manage that?

John Green 17:06 Well, I mean, the biggest thing that I've learned, there's two things, right? There, there's taking my medicine every day, which can be very challenging. You know, of course I'm worried. Life is worrisome, and the world right now especially is worrisome, but that doesn't tell the full story.

Adam Grant 17:22 John, it, it seems like there are a growing number, there's a growing number of people who are dealing with irrational fears and thoughts right now, only unlike you, they don't realize their beliefs are irrational. And I wonder if you could talk to us about how you think about confronting that.

John Green 17:37 When it comes to trying to help people, um, when they're pretty far down a conspiratorial rabbit hole and, um, I don't know how to do that. And I, I have folks like that in my own life, and it's really hard and heartbreaking and, you know, it's easy to get, it's easy to get lost out there. And especially in an ocean of information, it's easy to get lost. It's hard to, it's hard to understand how reliable information works, and I think the architecture of the internet makes it harder, to be honest with you.

Adam Grant 18:06 Yeah. I, I think so too. From, just from reading some of the research on, on debunking, you know, unfounded conspiracy theories, it seems like a, a helpful starting point is just to ask people, like, what sources d- do you consider credible, um, and what would convince you that your beliefs are wrong? And once you find out what they find persuasive, it's a little bit easier to reach them on their terms.

John Green 18:25 Right. That's interesting. Well, I'll try to use that with my family.

Speaker 18:28 [laughs]

Adam Grant 18:29 Try it at your own risk. Um, so while,

Adam Grant 18:32 while your, your Crash Course videos are being gobbled up in schools, at the same time, some of your books are being banned.

John Green 18:38 Yeah, that's a weird experience.

Adam Grant 18:38 Which is hilarious-

John Green 18:40 I agree

Adam Grant 18:41 ... I have to say.

John Green 18:41 Like, people always ask me, "How do you feel about it?" And they want me to be, like, outraged, and I guess I am outraged, but, like, mostly it just hurts my feelings to, to be called a pornographer. I really... That's not what I set out to do, and I think that if you read those books that way, it's weird.

Adam Grant 18:54 [laughs]

John Green 18:55 Um, that's my main feeling, is that it seems weird. Uh, it really bugs me. It... And, and not... Uh, look, I'm not on the, I'm not the hero of that story or the main character of that story. The main character of that story are the teachers and librarians who are daily affected by this, uh, collective insanity that's caused, um, lots of school districts to ban lots of books. But it's devastating. I mean, it, it hurts. The, it really has hurt the ability of my books to reach people, and that's true for lots of other authors, the vast majority of whom are LGBTQ authors or authors of color. Um, I a- I sometimes feel like I'm thrown in there so they'll say, "Look, we're not racist. We also ban John's books."

Adam Grant 19:43 [laughs] I, I guess I have to wonder, uh, it seems to be the case that sometimes book banning is, is counterproductive, right? It just draws attention to the, the very book that people are trying to, to sweep under the rug. Have you experienced that at all?

John Green 19:57 I think that used to be the case more than it's the case now. I think the chilling effect has actually begun to work fairly well, so that sales of highly banned books, instead of going up like they used to, are now going down. It's so, it's so hard to fight against, and yet we have to fight against it because we have to stand up for the librarians and teachers who want to be able to teach and, and, and curate their libraries w- w- in line with their expertise. I mean, we have, we have trained and hired people to do this work, and those people are teachers and librarians, and we just need to trust them to do their jobs.

Adam Grant 20:33 Bravo.

Adam Grant 20:34 So a bunch of questions that were submitted are about writing. This seems like a good time to ask a few of them. How do you deal with writer's block when you have it?

John Green 20:42 Well, my dad always used to tell me that coal miners don't get to get coal miners block.

Adam Grant 20:49 [laughs]

John Green 20:50 But I never found that very helpful.

Adam Grant 20:53 [laughs]

John Green 20:54 So what I find helpful is giving myself permission to be bad, you know? To write poorly, to not know where I'm going. I, I delete 80 or 90% of my first drafts, and so there's no consideration about trying to, you know, make sure that every word that goes down on paper is gonna survive into the final manuscript. So I just try to give myself permission to suck. I think a lot of times we spend so much time in the preparatory phases thinking about how we wanna do something, thinking about how we're going to do something and what it might look like and who we might do it with. Just start. Just start and be bad.

Adam Grant 21:32 I think you might be onto something. The best preparation is action.

John Green 21:36 Absolutely. That's so much more succinct. God.

Adam Grant 21:39 [laughs]

John Green 21:40 This guy.

Adam Grant 21:41 [laughs] For the aspiring

Adam Grant 21:43 writers in the room, do you have a favorite writing tip?

John Green 21:45 I think the best apprenticeship we have as writers is reading, right? Like, we get to learn directly from Toni Morrison. We get to learn directly from Shakespeare. I used to work as a book reviewer and I reviewed hundreds and hundreds of books over a five-year period while I was writing Looking for Alaska, and I almost preferred the bad ones in terms of learning about writing, because then you can see the strings of the puppets moving a little bit more and you can be like, "Oh," like, "that's how you do that. Uh, that's, that's how you get a character to walk through a doorway." 'Cause a- all I wanna do, Adam, honestly, when I'm writing fiction, is have two, two people in a room talking to each other about their problems.

Adam Grant 22:23 You should've been a psychologist.

John Green 22:24 [laughs]

Adam Grant 22:26 Miscalling.

Adam Grant 22:27 What is the worst career advice you've ever gotten?

John Green 22:29 Oh, I've gotten so much bad career advice. Many people are told, first off, there are so many different careers. There are so many different jobs. But the truth is regular people engage in all kinds of creative work, and they do it in all sorts of different ways, and it may be a passion project, it may be something that you choose not to monetize. But regular people do creative work in all sorts of ways. The value for me is in the making of the thing. You have to be able to find value in making the thing, and that's true whether or not it's creative work or, uh, you know, a marketing campaign. Because you have to find a little bit of the intrinsic value in doing, in doing the work, because otherwise you become entirely reliant upon exterior feedback, exterior, uh, positive... It doesn't matter. Um-

Adam Grant 23:18 Validation?

John Green 23:19 Validation. That is... God, Adam Grant.

Adam Grant 23:22 [laughs]

John Green 23:22 That is the exact word that I was looking for. You f- you're looking for external validation, and you have to find some of that within you, because if you're only looking for external validation, my experience is it will never be enough. You have to find meaning in the making of the thing, not just meaning in the way the thing is received.

Adam Grant 23:40 Well put. Uh, I got a text

Adam Grant 23:43 earlier from a super fan of yours who insisted I ask you this question.

John Green 23:47 Oh, God.

Adam Grant 23:48 The question is, John, what is your favorite Hank Green creation?

John Green 23:53 Oh.

Adam Grant 23:54 Uh, that came from Hank Green.

John Green 23:56 [laughs]

Adam Grant 23:58 [laughs]

John Green 23:58 He invented a form of glasses that render three-dimensional movies in a crisp two dimensions.

Adam Grant 24:06 [laughs] Isn't that backward? Okay, never mind.

John Green 24:09 Yeah. He called me and he was like, "Hey, I figured out a way to make 3D movies just be in 2D."

Adam Grant 24:14 [laughs]

John Green 24:16 I said, "Why would you wanna do that, Hank? That's the worst idea I've ever heard."

Adam Grant 24:20 [laughs]

John Green 24:21 People pay extra to go to the 3D movie theater. Why would they see the movie in 2D? And he was like, "It's for people who wanna go to the movies with their friends, but, um, don't get headaches when they watch 3D movies." And I was like, "Hank, your market for this product is six people."

Adam Grant 24:37 [laughs]

John Green 24:39 And the product, it cannot cost more than $8. So we're looking at a maximum return of, like, 20 bucks? Well, 100,000 copies of 2D glasses later, boy was I wrong.

Adam Grant 24:52 [laughs]

John Green 24:53 Turns out there are a lot of people who wanna watch 3D movies in two dimensions-

Adam Grant 24:57 [laughs]

John Green 24:57 ... and Hank is a genius, and I was wrong-

Adam Grant 25:00 [laughs]

John Green 25:00 ... and when he asked me for $5,000 in startup capital, I should have provided it.

Adam Grant 25:04 [laughs] Team Hank all the way on that one.

John Green 25:06 Yeah. No, he was [laughs] he saw it coming. So, I mean, it's hard, it's hard to pick a favorite thing that Hank has done, but I always say 2D glasses 'cause it's the most ludicrous thing he's done.

Adam Grant 25:17 Okay, he did submit a follow-up question that was more serious.

John Green 25:20 [laughs]

Adam Grant 25:20 Uh, Hank says, "My real question

Adam Grant 25:22 is, John, if you had to quickly prove to aliens that humanity was worth saving, what would you show them?"

John Green 25:30 I think there's so much I could show them because we're capable of such compassion and generosity, and we're capable of such sacrifice for each other. But I would actually show them a graph. I would show them a graph that begins the year I graduated from high school, 1995, and ends today, and that graph would show the number of children who die every day. And what that graph would show is that the year I graduated from high school, 12 million children died under the age of five, and last year, fewer than five million did. And that progress was not inevitable. It, it was not natural. It did not happen because people, uh, because people were always going to get healthier or we were always going to make the world safer for children. It happened because millions of people, billions of people if you count all the taxpayers who participated in that progress, came together to d- and decided to prioritize the lives of children, decided that children's lives should have value. And as a result, we've decreased child mortality by 60% in the years since I graduated from high school, and what breaks my heart is that that might not be true for much longer.

Adam Grant 26:36 Wow. That's really powerful. Um, I, I have to, I have to continue on the Hank thread a little bit here. Um-

John Green 26:45 H- Hank is my brother, by the way, in case-

Adam Grant 26:47 [laughs]

John Green 26:47 ... there's anyone who doesn't know that.

Adam Grant 26:49 I feel that's been established, but-

John Green 26:50 Yeah, he's my little brother-

Adam Grant 26:51 ... just in case

John Green 26:51 ... and he's very successful, um, on, on TikTok. Um-

Adam Grant 26:56 [laughs]

John Green 26:58 I think it's important for you to know that he's mostly a big deal on TikTok.

Adam Grant 27:01 [laughs] Well, strangely enough, this goes to one of the questions I wanna ask you, which is,

Adam Grant 27:06 I, I don't, I don't feel envy very often, but when I watch you and Hank collaborate, I think, "Oh, it would be so cool to have a sibling relationship like that."

John Green 27:14 It's very special. It's really, really special. I, I mean, my brother is my closest collaborator. He is my oldest friend. You know, in adulthood, it's very difficult to remain close to your siblings. In fact, Hank and I weren't particularly close. I left for boarding school when my brother was 11, so I never knew him as a teenager. I never knew him as an adult, and it is the joy of my life to be so tight with my brother and also to have somebody I can trust all the way down. Like, I really am kind of the tail to Hank Green's comet.

Adam Grant 27:46 Is there something you can teach us about how to build that kind of relationship?

John Green 27:50 Make stuff together. Um, you don't have to make it for anybody else. Make pottery together, have a project where you exchange video blogs once a week. Just make something together.

Adam Grant 28:00 Okay, so one of my most brilliant collaborators, Marissa Shandell, is here, and she sent me a video, um, that you and Hank did a while back. It was a Vlogbrothers video about motivation, and it shocked me because you talked about how you love motivational quotes.

John Green 28:14 I do. [laughs]

Adam Grant 28:15 [laughs] I watched that-

John Green 28:16 I-

Adam Grant 28:16 ... and I was like, John Green likes motivational quotes? This is, this is d- just incongruous. Like, you're a deep thinker, and you write about important, complicated things.

John Green 28:27 Thank you.

Adam Grant 28:28 And you like these cheesy affir... Like, what is going on here?

John Green 28:31 The cheesier, the better. "It's not about how many times you fall; it's about how many times you get up."

Adam Grant 28:36 [laughs]

John Green 28:36 I'm like, yeah, it is.

Adam Grant 28:37 [laughs]

John Green 28:38 I love that cheesy stuff because it's true. It works on me. It works on me because it's real, and so I am deeply inspired by the cheesiest, like, always attributed to anonymous because nobody's [laughs] willing to take, take any credit-

Adam Grant 28:52 [laughs]

John Green 28:52 ... for having said something so silly.

Adam Grant 28:54 I-

John Green 28:54 But I love it.

Adam Grant 28:55 Okay.

John Green 28:55 I love an encouragement.

Adam Grant 28:56 May- maybe you can help me with this, 'cause I, I see a lot of those quotes and I just roll my eyes and I'm like, first of all, like, where's your randomized contr- controlled experiment to support that?

John Green 29:03 [laughs]

Adam Grant 29:03 But, but secondly, like, some of them, some of them are just wrong. Like, sh- you know, like, um, "Shoot for the moon, and if you miss, you'll still land in the stars." First of all, the moon is closer than any star, so that's wrong.

John Green 29:14 Vastly closer.

Adam Grant 29:15 Secondly, like you'll probably get hit by an asteroid.

John Green 29:18 Yeah.

Adam Grant 29:18 [laughs]

John Green 29:19 Well, also, if you shoot for the moon and you land in the stars, it's a catastrophe.

Adam Grant 29:25 [laughs]

John Green 29:25 You're so far from the moon.

Adam Grant 29:28 [laughs]

John Green 29:29 You're light years away from the moon.

Adam Grant 29:31 [laughs] Also, stars are very uncomfortably hot.

John Green 29:34 Very hot.

Adam Grant 29:34 I'm told. [laughs]

John Green 29:35 You don't wanna land amid a star.

Adam Grant 29:37 [laughs]

John Green 29:38 That's a cata- That's, that's the last thing you'll ever do.

Adam Grant 29:41 [laughs]

John Green 29:43 Yeah, no, I agree with you. A lot of them, a lot of them don't work for me. But the ones that do work, work for me. The ones that are technically inaccurate don't work for me.

Adam Grant 29:51 [laughs]

John Green 29:51 Like, sometimes people ascribe them to me, you know? Like, people will say, like, it's, you know, it's like J- I, 'cause I did say in one of my, in one of my books, "In An Abundance of Katherines," "What's the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?" But that's at the beginning of the book, and then the whole book is about proving that wrong. The point of live, life is to, like, be here with each other in, in true solidarity and try to e- ease each other's journeys. And, and, and so, like, I spent the rest of that novel trying to prove that quote wrong, and everyone always quotes the quote and I'm like, "No." [laughs]

Adam Grant 30:24 Out of context. Very disappointing. Okay.

Adam Grant 30:27 Lightning round time. Are you ready for this? Hand me-

John Green 30:29 I love a lightning round.

Adam Grant 30:31 Excellent. All right. First question, you delete most of your tweets. Why?

John Green 30:35 I mean, have you been on Twitter?

Adam Grant 30:37 [laughs] Is that-

John Green 30:38 That's the answer.

Adam Grant 30:39 [laughs]

John Green 30:39 I'm sorry, I thought this was a lightning round, Adam.

Adam Grant 30:42 It is, but I, but I wanted to hear why. What, what, what leads you to abandon the thought you were, you thought was worth sharing?

John Green 30:47 Oh, the moment that it escapes containment and, like, it starts to get retweeted by, by, by people or commented on by people who aren't in my community, I'm like, "Oh, no, I didn't mean that for you."

Adam Grant 30:59 What's something you've rethought lately?

John Green 31:01 Oh my God, almost everything. Um, I've, I have rethought my relationship to organizations like USAID, who I've, you know, like, have often been critical of, but I also, um, feel very strongly about. But I, like, I feel very strongly about their work, and their work has made a huge difference and saved millions of lives.

Adam Grant 31:19 What do you think is the biggest impact that AI will have on creative careers?

John Green 31:25 I don't know. And I think anyone who says they know is, is not telling the truth.

Adam Grant 31:31 Agree.

John Green 31:31 I don't know. I don't know.

Adam Grant 31:33 Some people say longform is dead. I say long live longform. What do you say?

John Green 31:38 I say long live longform. Longform is the future, I think.

Adam Grant 31:43 Good. That's good news for a lot of us. Uh, so-

John Green 31:46 But I'm also biased. I mean, I write books for a living [laughs]

Adam Grant 31:49 [laughs] Touche. To close the lightning round, uh, if you could only have either a banana Scratch & Sniff or Dr Pepper, what would you choose?

John Green 31:56 Oh, torture, but Dr Pepper, it's my daily companion.

Adam Grant 32:00 [laughs]

John Green 32:01 Dr Pepper is the greatest achievement in human history. It's the only soda that has no natural world analog. It doesn't taste like an orange or like a kola nut or like vanilla or like lemon lime. It tastes like the soda fountain in 1889 in Waco, Texas smelled when Charles Alderton tried to invent a soda that tasted like the smell of that particular pharmacy. And so every time we drink a Dr Pepper, we are drinking the smell of an 1889 Waco, Texas pharmacy.

Adam Grant 32:34 [laughs]

John Green 32:34 That is freaking magic.

Adam Grant 32:36 [laughs]

John Green 32:36 But I had this incredible conversation with the Dr Pepper Snapple company. They, they were like, "Hey, we know you're a big fan. We'd love to talk to you about a sponsorship."

Adam Grant 32:44 [laughs]

John Green 32:44 And I was like, "Dr Pepper should sponsor humanity's relationship with the moon."

Adam Grant 32:49 [laughs]

John Green 32:49 And they were like, "We were hoping that you would make a TikTok saying that you like Dr Pepper"

Adam Grant 32:52 [laughs]

John Green 32:52 And I was like, "That's boring, and I'd do it anyway." They, I never had a follow-up call.

Adam Grant 32:57 [laughs] All right, John, so, uh, two, two closing questions before we end. One is just coming back to tuberculosis. Uh, for those in the room who wanna do something about it, where can we begin?

John Green 33:08 Nothing can fill the gap the government leaves, but we have to try to fill some of these gaps with organizations like Partners in Health that are doing incredible work on tuberculosis, so if you can support those organizations any way you can. But then the other thing is fighting and scrapping for every dollar of tuberculosis research and, uh, response that we can save, and that means talking to people in Congress and in the Senate and asking them to reclaim the power of the purse that is enshrined to them in the Constitution.

Adam Grant 33:35 Okay. Love it. Uh, last question is, this is actually a mashup of two audience questions. Given that you explore so many existential topics, what would you say is the meaning of life, and what is your goal in life?

John Green 33:47 I think the mean... Thanks for the easy one. Um, thanks for the softball.

Adam Grant 33:51 [laughs]

John Green 33:52 I, I think the meaning of life is to be with each other, to be in community, and to carry each other through everything in life, and I think that's why we're here. I also think we're here to pay attention. And my goal for my own life is to try to help people pay attention to the stuff that sometimes is easy to forget about, whether that's tuberculosis or the wonder that's all around us. So that's what I see as my, my, my little role to play in, in the job of together forging meaning in life.

Adam Grant 34:25 Well, you do it magically, John. I cannot think of a time when I've interacted with you or your work and it hasn't made my life better, and I know there are a lot of people in this room who feel that way too. Can't thank you enough.

John Green 34:35 Thank you. It is a gift to be with y'all. [audience cheering] [audience applauding] Woo. Thank you. [upbeat music]