ReThinking: John Green on fighting diseases of injustice

0:00When I got out of college, I thought there were like three jobs, doctor, lawyer, and other. and I knew I was going to be an other. Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast with Ted on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

0:29John Green sees what's possible more than what seems impossible. John is one of my favorite writers, thinkers, and humans. You might know him as the co-creator of the wildly popular education series Crash Course, or the co-host of Vlogbrothers with his brother Hank, or the best-selling author of beloved books like The Fault in Our Stars. I always loved writing, but it didn't seem like a realistic career option to me. It seemed like being an astronaut or something, or being a professional athlete, like not something that regular people could do. John has a new book out, Everything is Tuberculosis.

1:00I brought him to the Authors at Wharton series to talk live about solving big problems, building great collaborations, responding to book bans, our clashing stances on motivational quotes, and finding motivation. If there's one thing that you take from listening to me, I hope that it's if that doofus can do it, why can't I?

1:29Hey, everybody. John Green, welcome to Penn. Oh, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be with all y 'all. You think that now, but we'll see how you feel in an hour. I feel very confident that these people seem nice, and I bet they submitted great questions. I'm worried about you. What are you worried about? Oh, I always worry a little bit when I get interviewed by you because you're a very good interviewer. Do you want me to be a bad interviewer? No, no, no. I do prefer a good interview, but you are unusually good, for sure. That's a lot of pressure now. Thanks, John Green. You're welcome.

2:01For lowering the stakes here. Okay. So I have to tell you, I was deeply ambivalent about this book when I saw it, because I would not normally read a book about tuberculosis. Right. But I would normally read a book by John Green. That was my hope, is that I could force you into reading a book about tuberculosis. Well, it worked. And dare I say, it was a page turner. Thank you. That was my hope. I was kind of shocked, but I thought it was beautifully written. Obviously, the topic could not be more important, although I didn't realize the importance of it until I read your words. But it was also arresting and motivating in a way that I think is really unusual for a book.

2:43So why? Why did you force us to read about tuberculosis? Well, to me, tuberculosis is the exemplary disease of injustice. I mean, I also could have written about malaria or HIV or diabetes or cancer. You know, if you look at a map of my hometown of Indianapolis and you look at the map of poverty and you look at the map of cancer rates, it's the same map. And so there are lots of diseases I could have 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.

3:16And yet I didn't know that. I think most people don't know that. And that speaks to tuberculosis's long history of kind of being neglected. did. 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. Apparently, we have to go through it at least one more time. Devastating. Tell me about what got you interested in tuberculosis, because I think the personal connection to this story was really moving.

3:50Yeah. So it's one thing to say 1.25 million people die of a disease 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 I'm able to multiply 1.25 million by several. And one of the reasons, let me start that over, Adam. I don't like my answer. You can't self-edit during a live interview. I'm self-editing the podcast. I'm self-editing the live interview. It's happening right now. You're watching it occur. The short answer, which is how I'm going to answer the question.

4:29I 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. 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.

5:05Finally, we made our way back to the doctors who were kind of gathering together talking about cases, and they sort of shooed Henry away in a very loving manner. He was sort of like the mayor of that hospital. Like everywhere he went, people would greet him and say, like, oh, Henry, it's great to see you. And I said, 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 relatively healthy and able to walk around, they could tell that his tuberculosis was inevitably going to come roaring back, and that when it did, they wouldn't have any tools in a country like Sierra Leone to help him.

5:48They also told me that Henry wasn't nine. He was 17. He'd just been so emaciated by 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. Well, I think you've given him a way to help a ton of people. One of the things that I felt was a tremendous amount of moral outrage reading this book, because it just seems wrong that over a million people are going to die of this disease, and we know exactly what we need to do to save them, and it's not happening.

6:25Why not? Well, this great Ugandan doctor, Dr. Peter Mujeni, 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.

6:57My friend Henry took over 20 ,000 pills over the course of his treatment 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 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.

7:47But 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. So what do we do about that? I think you came down in two places on cost-benefit analysis in this book. You gave us a very compelling benefits outweigh the costs calculation. Benefits so outweigh the cost, y 'all. It's incredible. I mean, look, it would cost$25 billion a year for about 10 years to eradicate tuberculosis, which is a lot of money, more than I have, more just looking at the faces in this room. I think very few of you probably have$25 billion.

8:26Although if you do, please contact me. Have I got a disease for you to eradicate? But as a species, we have those resources. We have those resources in abundance, frankly. And so what drives me absolutely bonkers is knowing that we have the ability to confront this disease and that we choose not to. You have taken matters into your own hands. I've watched you taking on pharma using your megaphone. What have you learned? 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 want to get new and better treatments to more people.

9:14But 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. I'm sorry, is that a drug? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It actually is a drug that - Why do you know this? These people on this treatment would have these beautiful long lashes. And so they were like, we should totally repurpose this drug and make it incredibly profitable. And they did. So what I've learned is that because these systems require these companies 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.

9:59And those are the places where we have to come in 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 isn't a huge inconvenience to those companies. I'll be frank with you. Johnson & Johnson doesn't need bedacolin in order to be profitable. And so eventually, under pressure, they did abandon all of their secondary patents on bodacolin. 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.

10:43OK, so obviously, private sector is one place to go. You also make a case, though, that public investment is necessary. It's hugely important. I mean, the one half of one penny 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. America has traditionally been the most generous donor in the fight against tuberculosis. The United States expresses its power partly through its generosity. That's been the case for centuries, really. And there is no replacing public investment. I mean, the majority of people who've seen their treatment interrupted by the USAID defunding stockouts will die.

11:29Like 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.

12:02And it also risks 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. So, John, given that scenario, it seems like private investment is an important band-aid, at least. When I see you 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? Can you just reach out to the CEO and say, I would really hate to create a PR crisis? Can you just fix this now? Oh, I do that. And how does it work compared to the public approach?

12:44I 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. It's very difficult for me to be confrontational. So I find it wildly unpleasant to confront the most powerful corporations in the world. I would much rather have a private conversation with them. 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. And it can be very effective.

13:16You know, I think a lot can happen in private. And we've seen some meaningful change in the world of tuberculosis tools when it comes to private conversations. But sometimes it has to become public. I may not be the only person in the room wondering what was the fight with Hank 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 and I said I don't know where else to put my eyes and that was it we didn't talk for like six hours and then I was like I didn't know where to put my eyes and he was like I get it man I forgive you so yeah it resolved fairly easily thank you for uh for clarifying that um I uh 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.

14:21Talk to us about that, because I think it says something really meaningful about both the human condition and a writer's life. Yeah. So there's this children's pool game that you might've played called Marco Polo, where one person closes their eyes in the pool and says, Marco, Marco. And the other people have to say, Polo, Polo. And then the Marco person kind of uses their echolocation to tag somebody. Never heard it described that way before.

14:49But at any rate, that's how I think of writing, is that I'm sitting in my basement for years writing some version of Marco, Marco, Marco, and 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 still works. Not on my internet. When I say Marco, more often they're like, but why did you choose Marco?

15:29Why wasn't it just Mark? Isn't Marco spelled with a K, not a C? How can you be talking about Marco at a time like this? You're so right, man. They don't say Polo. 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 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.

16:05She died suing her government, trying to get access to that drug I mentioned earlier, bedaquilin. And when she died, she was actually 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, you know, I might've been able to say polo in a meaningful way, but I didn't hear that voice. And I think about what that says about my information feed. I think about what that says about the privilege that I enjoy in my life and how I can do a better job of listening to people who are crying out Marco as well as being the person who's saying Marco.

16:51That's such a poignant sentiment. I think it also gives us a little bit of a window into your self-described sometimes obsessive thoughts. Yeah. So you've written extensively about your experience with OCD by now. It comes up in the book, and I hadn't seen the connection until you called it out that you're writing a book about tuberculosis and many of your own obsessive fears revolve around disease. I spend a lot of time thinking about disease, probably more than the average person. Although I would argue, I mean, my OCD is deeply irrational and everything and it has nothing to do with reason or with reality or with the world as it actually is.

17:32It's a distorted thinking process. But I think it probably, it must be related on some level to my fascination with infectious disease and with writing about disease in general. On the other hand, 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 war and divorce and everything, and so little time writing about disease, which is overwhelmingly, I think, like both the greatest expression of injustice in the world because disease tends to follow the paths of injustice that we blaze for it.

18:10But also like, for lack of a better term, it's just super important. I'm confused why other people don't worry about it. I share that confusion. I think one of the extraordinary things you've done in the past few years is you made it really clear to people, hey, you can be extremely successful and also struggle with mental illness. Yes. You know, I've lived 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. 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.

18:53John, it seems like 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. When it comes to trying to help people when they're pretty far down a conspiratorial rabbit hole, I don't know how to do that. And I have folks like that in my own life, and it's really hard and heartbreaking. And, you know, 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 understand how reliable information works.

19:30And I think the architecture of the internet makes it harder, to be honest with you. Yeah, I think so too. Just from reading some of the research on debunking unfounded conspiracy theories, it seems like a helpful starting point is just to ask people, what sources do you consider credible? 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. Right, that's interesting. Well, I'll try to use that with my family. Try it at your own risk. So while your crash course videos are being gobbled up in schools, at the same time, some of your books are being banned.

20:06Yeah, that's a weird experience. Which is hilarious. 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 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. um that's my main feeling is that it seems weird uh it really bugs me it and and not 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 collective insanity that's caused um lots of school districts to ban lots of books but it's devastating I mean it it hurts It really has hurt the ability of my books to reach people.

20:53And that's true for lots of other authors, the vast majority of whom are LGBTQ authors or authors of color. I sometimes feel like I'm thrown in there. So they'll say, look, we're not racist. We also ban John's books. I guess I have to wonder, it seems to be the case that sometimes book banning is counterproductive, right? It just draws attention to the very book that people are trying to sweep under the rug. Have you experienced that at all? 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.

21:34It'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 curate their libraries in line with their expertise. I mean, 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. Bravo. 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? Well, my dad always used to tell me that coal miners don't get to get coal miners block.

22:15But I never found that very helpful.

22:20so what I find helpful is giving myself permission to be bad you know to write poorly to not know where I'm going like I delete 80 or 90 percent 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 going to 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 want to 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.

23:00Like, you go back and watch the first videos that Hank and I made in 2007. They're bad. Like, and I'm not being modest. We've made good videos since then, but not then. Those videos were bad. And about 300 people loved them, but they loved them because they loved us. And so I think just starting sometimes is the hardest thing. Like it's a cliche to say that the scariest thing for a writer is an empty word document, but it's true. It's really hard to write the first word. The first word is so much harder than the second word. I think you might be onto something. The best preparation is action. Absolutely.

23:37That's so much more succinct. God, this guy. For the aspiring writers in the room, do you have a favorite writing tip? 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.

24:15That's that's how you get a character to walk through a doorway. Because all I want to do, Adam, honestly, when I'm writing fiction is have two two people in a room talking to each other about their problems. You should have been a psychologist. What is the worst career advice you've ever gotten? Oh, I've gotten so much bad career advice. First off, there are so many different careers, but the truth is regular people engage in all kinds of creative work, and they do it in all sorts of different ways. It may be a side hustle. 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.

24:53The 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, you know, a marketing campaign. Because you have to find a little bit of the intrinsic value in doing the work. Because otherwise you become entirely reliant upon exterior feedback, exterior positive, it doesn't matter. Validation? Validation. That is, God, Adam Grant! That is the exact word that I was looking for. 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.

25:37You have to find meaning in the making of the thing, not just meaning in the way the thing is received. Well put. I got a text earlier from a super fan of yours who insisted I ask you this question. Oh, God. The question is, John, what is your favorite Hank Green creation? Oh. That came from Hank Green.

26:01He knows what I'm going to say. He invented a form of glasses that render three-dimensional movies in a crisp two dimensions. Isn't that backwards? Yeah, he called me and he was like, hey, I figured out a way to make 3D movies just be in 2D. I said, why would you want to do that, Hank? That's the worst idea I've ever heard. 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 want to go to the movies with their friends but don't get headaches when they watch 3D movies and I was like Hank your market for this product is six people and the product 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.

26:59Turns out there are a lot of people who want to watch 3D movies in two dimensions. And Hank is a genius. And I was wrong. And when he asked me for$5 ,000 in startup capital, I should have provided it. Team Hank all the way on that one. Yeah. No, he saw it coming. So, I mean, it's hard to pick a favorite thing that Hank has done. But I always say 2D glasses because it's the most ludicrous thing he's done. Okay, he did submit a follow-up question that was more serious. Hank says, my real question is, John, if you had to quickly prove to aliens that humanity was worth saving, what would you show them?

27:35I 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 5 million did. And that progress was not inevitable. It was not natural. It did not happen because people were always going to get healthier, or we were always going to make the world safer for children.

28:19It happened because millions of people, billions of people, if you count all the taxpayers who participated in that progress, came together 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. Wow. That's really powerful. I have to continue on the Hank thread a little bit here. Hank is my brother, by the way, in case there's anyone who doesn't know that. I feel that's been established.

28:54Yeah, he's my little brother, and he's very successful on TikTok. I think it's important for you to know that he's mostly a big deal on TikTok. Well, strangely enough, this goes to one of the questions I want to ask you, which is, 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. It's really, really special. 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.

29:30I left for boarding school when my brother was 11. So I never knew him as a teenager. 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. And I really am kind of the tail to Hank Green's Comet. Is there something you can teach us about how to build that kind of relationship? Make stuff together. 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. Okay, so one of my most brilliant collaborators, Marissa Shandel, is here. And she sent me a video that you and Hank did a while back.

30:09It was a Vlogbrothers video about motivation. and it shocked me because you talked about how you love motivational quotes. I do. I watched that and I was like, John Green likes motivational quotes? This is just incongruous. You're a deep thinker and you write about important, complicated things. Thank you. And you like these cheesy... What is going on here? The cheesier, the better. It's not about how many times you fall. It's about how many times you get up. I'm like, yeah, it is. I love that cheesy stuff because it's true. It works on me. And so I am deeply inspired by the cheesiest, like always attributed to anonymous because nobody is willing to take any credit for having said something so silly.

30:57But I love it. I love an encouragement. Maybe you can help me with this because 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 controlled experiment to support that? But secondly, some of them are just wrong. Like, you know, like, 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. Vastly closer. Secondly, like, you'll probably get hit by an asteroid. Yeah. Well, also, if you shoot for the moon and you land in the stars, it's a catastrophe. You're so far from the moon.

31:32You're white years away from the moon. Also, stars are very uncomfortably hot. Very hot. You don't want to land amid a star. That's the last thing you'll ever do. No, I agree with you. 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. Like, sometimes people ascribe them to me, you know? Because I did say in one of my books, in An Abundance of Catherine's, 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.

32:08The point of life is to like be here with each other in true solidarity and try to ease each other's journeys. 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. Out of context. Very disappointing.

32:29Okay. Lightning round time. Are you ready for this? I love a lightning round. Excellent. All right. First question. you delete most of your tweets. Why? I mean, have you been on Twitter? That's the answer. I'm sorry. I thought this was a lightning round, Adam. It is, but I wanted to hear why. What leads you to abandon the thought you thought was worth sharing? Oh, the moment that it escapes containment and like it starts to get retweeted 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. What's something you've rethought lately? Oh my God, almost everything.

33:06I have rethought my relationship to organizations like USAID, who I've often been critical of, but I also feel very strongly about. But I feel very strongly about their work, and their work has made a huge difference and saved millions of lives. What do you think is the biggest impact that AI will have on creative careers? I don't know. And I think anyone who says they know is not telling the truth. I don't know. I don't know. Some people say long form is dead. I say long live long form. What do you say? I say long live long form. Long form is the future, I think. Good. That's good news for a lot of us.

33:48But I'm also biased. I mean, I write books for a living. Touche. To close the lightning round, if you could only have either banana scratch and sniff or Dr. Pepper, what would you choose? Oh, torture. But Dr. Pepper, it's my daily companion. 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.

34:27Are you sure you're not on their payroll? No, I tried to be Adam. I had this incredible conversation with the Dr. Pepper Snapple company. They were like, hey, we know you're a big fan. We'd love to talk to you about a sponsorship. And I was like, Dr. Pepper should sponsor humanity's relationship with the moon. And they were like, we were hoping that you would make a TikTok saying that you like Dr. Pepper. And I was like, that's boring and I do it anyway. And they never had a follow-up call. All right, John, so two closing questions before we end. One is just coming back to tuberculosis. for those in the room who want to do something about it, where can we begin?

35:02Nothing can fill the gap that 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 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. Okay, love it. Last question is, this is actually a mashup of two audience questions.

35:33Given that you explore so many existential topics, what would you say is the meaning of life and what is your goal in life? Thanks for the easy one. Thanks for the softball. 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. 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 little role to play in the job of together forging meaning in life.

36:14Well, 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. Thank you. It's a gift to be with y 'all. Thank you.

36:37Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by TED with Cosmic Standard. Our producer is Jessica Glazer. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our engineer is Asia Pilar Simpson. Our technical director is Jacob Winnick. And our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Roxanne Hilash, Van Ben Chang, Julia Dickerson, Tansika Sung Manivong, and Whitney Pennington Rogers. Original music by Hans Dale Su and Alison Leighton Brown.

37:07The first generation of kids who read that book are now in their 30s, and they're fine. They're okay. They're scarred and traumatized, but not by looking for Alaska, right? But instead by the like overall circumstances in which they find themselves. I thought you were going to say it was Twilight. No, I love Twilight. I will not stand for Twilight slander.