A note from Wild Card host Rachel Martin: Different people have different reference points for John Green. He is most famous as the young adult author who wrote the massively popular book The Fault in Our Stars, which was turned into a movie by the same name. But then there are the millions of people who know and love him from his many YouTube channels, especially Vlogbrothers, and Crash Course, which he does with his brother Hank.
John Green's latest project is another book, but it's way different from the coming-of-age stories that catapulted him into the culture. It's titled Everything Is Tuberculosis, and it is, as advertised, a nonfiction account of the most deadly disease on the planet, and how simple it would be to wipe it out — if societies just made it a priority.
But the truth is, this book makes sense coming from John Green. Because everything he creates — books, essays, YouTube shows — they are all designed to make you engage with the broader world and to care about other people.
This Wild Card interview has been edited for length and clarity. Host Rachel Martin asks guests randomly selected questions from a deck of cards. Tap play above to listen to the full podcast, or read an excerpt below.
Question 1: Do you spend more time in your head or in the world?
John Green: It's not a particularly close competition there, Rachel.
Rachel Martin: Somehow I thought you were going to say that.
Green: I spend more time in my head by a very wide margin.
Martin: What's it like there?
Green: Pretty intense, to be honest with you. It's a little overwhelming sometimes. I almost can't say what it's like there. It's like trying to describe the ocean to somebody who's never seen it. What did Kafka say? That "a book can be the axe that breaks the frozen sea within?" I'm always trying to break that frozen sea within.
There's always rooms inside of my mind that I've never visited or I don't know how to get to. That's a lot of why I make creative work, because it's a chance to visit those rooms somehow. My understanding of my own self expands in some ways. But I spend a lot of time in my head and not all of it is healthy if I'm honest with you.
Martin: You've been open about your OCD.
Green: Yeah, I have pretty severe OCD. It's well treated, and I work really hard to treat my chronic illness like a chronic illness, but it is a chronic illness, and it is something I live with every day. And so, sometimes what's in my head is just like a flurry of worries. There's this great Edna St. Vincent Millay poem I think about all the time; it's the perfect summary of obsessive thoughts. She's writing about a snowstorm and she says, "Three flakes, then four [arrive], then many more." And it's like that with my worry sometimes, where it's like, you just have a worry that crosses across your bow, and then another one, and then another one, and then many more.
And it becomes like a snowstorm, just absolutely blinding, impossible to see anything other than the fear. And that's a really difficult, really scary experience because then it feels like you're not in control of your own thoughts. Like you're not the captain of the ship of yourself. You're just along for the ride, and somebody else is steering the ship and that's quite a scary thing to think about your own self.
Martin: Is there anything positive about it? Is there anything beneficial about it? Besides the fact that it is who you are.
Green: Yeah, it is who I am. I mean, I find it to be mostly downsides, to be honest with you. Mostly bummers. Of course, I don't know what I would be like without OCD and so I can't imagine what it would be, but I'm sure I would be different in ways I can't imagine now.
Martin: It is who you are.
Green: Yeah. I like that way of saying it, that like, there is an upside, but the upside is that it is who I am. I've never thought of that before. This is like a therapy session.
Martin: I have a person dear in my life who suffers from OCD and it has been helpful to learn more about it and to learn how, yes, it is debilitating. It can be debilitating. But it is who this person is. And this person is wonderful.
Green: And you're worthy of love. It's maybe the only thing we're worthy of, but you're worthy of love, exactly as you are. And so the fact that this is who you are, and this is part of who you are, means that this is also worthy of love.
Martin: Right.
Green: Oh, that's so beautiful. I've never had that before. That's such a gift to me. Thank you.
Question 2: What's a lesson you keep learning again and again?
Green: I keep learning again and again that hope is the right response to the human condition. And I have to learn this over and over again because despair is an incredibly powerful force in my life and something that I have to battle on an almost daily basis.
So much of my brain tells me that there's no reason to get out of bed or do anything because nothing matters, because the oceans are going to boil in a billion years, because the world is going to end long before that for me and for everyone I love and probably for humanity itself. People are so monstrous and capable of such horrific behavior toward each other and toward the world.
That despair is so powerful because it tells this complete holistic story. It explains everything. "Everything is the way it is because everything and everyone sucks." What an incredibly powerful way to look at the world. It just happens to not be true, right?
The truth is much more complex than that. And so I have to remind myself of that almost every day. I have to relearn that lesson that there is cause for hope. I keep in my wallet a little note that says, "The year you graduated from high school, 12 million children died under the age of 5. Last year, fewer than 5 million did."
That progress, which is real, and which is felt in the lives of millions of human beings and the tens of millions who love them. That progress was not natural. It was not inevitable. It did not happen because it was always going to happen. It happened because millions and millions of people, hundreds of millions of people, maybe billions of people, came together to make it happen, to make the world safer for children.
We decided that we were going to prioritize that, and when we prioritized it, we had tremendous success. And I keep that because I want to remind myself that this is the truth. That is an inalienable truth that we can make the world better for the most vulnerable among us. We just have to decide it's a priority.
Question 3: What feels like magic to you?
Green: Oh, telling stories. Telling stories is magic. The idea that I can write a story, and that story is going to live in someone else's mind. And that if they're generous, they're going to bring their deepest selves to that story. That is genuine magic to me.
When someone tells me that they read The Fault in Our Stars and they thought about their own person in their life who died too young. When someone tells me that they read Turtles All the Way Down and thought about their own experiences of obsessive thoughts or their own life with OCD or whatever it is. It just means so much to me when people will bring their deepest selves to one of my stories. That they can take a book that's maybe OK, and they make it amazing through their generosity. That's really magic to me.
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