April 14, 2025 • 31 mins
Best-selling author John Green wants to see less suck in the world and more awesome - and you can help achieve that right now! John's turned his attention to tuberculosis (TB) - a disease that is fixable and yet still kills millions of people. But you can stop that.
TB is a disease of poverty - so if you can spare a buck, then you can save lives by donating to GiveDirectly.org/tb
Giving to help others is proven to make us feel happier and more hopeful in tough times, so Dr Laurie will match every dollar up to the first $10,000, and John will match donations up to $10,000 after that.
It's a bad time for people everywhere - but even a dollar donated at GiveDirectly.org/tb will reduce the suck and increase the awesome.
John's new book Everything is Tuberculosis is out now.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hey, Happiness Lab listeners, today, you are in for
a treat, because by the end of this episode, my
guest and I will have shared how you can do
something totally awesome, totally life saving, and something totally happiness
inducing with almost zero effort. And spoiler, it's going to
(00:36):
involve the website GiveDirectly dot org slash TV. That's GiveDirectly
dot org slash TB. One of my favorite parts of
being hosted The Happiness Lab is that I get to
share stuff that I love with you, Like the time
I interviewed my eighties heart Throb rob Low about nostalgia.
Just talking with you on the zoom call and I'm
taking back to you know, movies I watched in grade
(00:56):
school and fun times in college and that is amazing.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
It makes me feel so good.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Or when I geeked out about Star Trek with Lieutenant
Wesley Crusher himself, will we eaten?
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Star Trek looks through the screen and it says there
is a place specifically for you in the future, Like you, Laurie,
there is a space for you in the future.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
I loved that. But today I not only get to
chat with someone who I have nerded out about for
a very very long time. But I also have the
chance to invite you to help that guest do something
to make the world a better place. If you happen
to be a nerd fighter like me, then get ready,
because today I'll be chatting with the amazing John Green.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Hold on, I don't even let my headphones in. This
is a catastrophe of the scale of which nobody's ever
seen before.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
No, You're good, good, You're going to make.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Sure I'm on the right fancy Mike, I am okay, great.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
I'm guessing a lot of my Happiness Lab listeners know
who John Green is. John is first and foremost a
best selling author, both of beloved fictional books like Turtles
All the Way Down and The Fault in Our Stars,
but also nonfiction greades like The Anthroposcene Reviewed, a book
in which he expertly reviews everything from diet Doctor Pepper
to the smallpox vaccine. But John is also an educator who,
(02:07):
with his brother Hank, created the all inspiring vlog Brothers
and Crash Course YouTube channels. John has been a hero
of mine for a while because I see a lot
of happiness science in his work. Did you ever think
that you would be an expert on a happiness podcast.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
No, I don't give off the vibes of somebody who's
an expert in happiness, to be honest with you, Doc,
but you.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
So are, dude. I mean, you're so focused on things
like awe and understanding that negative emotions are the things
that you want to stick around with, Like you kind
of follow all the science.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
I mean when I listened to the podcast, I often
think like, oh, I'm closer than I thought I was,
because I'm pretty far away from this sort of like
wellness industry version of happiness. But I'm pretty close to
the doctor Lori Santos version of happiness, which makes you really,
for lack of a better term, happy.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
John's work embodies so many of the lessons that I've
learned studying the science of happiness. That meaning comes not
from avoiding suffering but embracing it. That there's wonder to
be found in the mundane, and that even in the
face of a lot of terrible, sucky stuff, we can
choose to band together to actually fix things. And that's
the goal of this episode. John's latest book deals with
(03:12):
a problem facing people around the world.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
The new book is called everything is tuberculosis. It's a
history of tuberculosis told through the perspective of both a
long term historical lens, but also the life of one
kid living with tuberculosis and sire leone.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
And so just for listeners, you might not be as familiar.
What is tuberculosis?
Speaker 2 (03:30):
So tuberculosis is an airborne disease. It usually affects the lungs,
but it can infect any part of the body really
and it makes people really sick. But it tends to
make them sick quite slowly because the bacteria divides very slowly,
and so you can be sick for months or years.
But if left untreated, tuberculosis usually does result in death. Fortunately,
(03:50):
since the nineteen fifties, we've had a cure for tuberculosis.
It's a bacterial infection, so the curious antibiotics given every
day over four to six months.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
So why write a book about tuberculosis, now, why tell
this particular story at this time?
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Well, because tuberculosis is still the world's deadliest infectious disease astonishingly,
I mean I say astonishingly because it's incurable for so long.
Like since the disease became curable, we've allowed over one
hundred and fifty million people to die of it, which
is just a figure that's hard for me to get
my head around, but it just speaks to how, you know,
disease is a biomedical phenomenon, but it's also a social one,
(04:25):
and how we imagine disease, how we allocate resources around
disease that shapes not just like how people live and
die of diseases like tuberculosis, but also who lives and
dies of diseases like tb DO.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
I seems like part of your TV journey was trying
to fix the problem, But part of the TV journey,
at least in the book, seemed like in some ways,
TV was sort of like cool. I don't know if
you can use the word cool for some disease that
kills lots of people, But it's kind of a fascinating
cultural journey. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
I mean one of the fascinating parts of that cultural
journey is that for a while it was considered cool,
Like Victor Hugo's friends would joke with him that he
could be a great novelist if only he contracted consumption,
because it was so widely believed that consumption made you
a great artist and also made you really beautiful. This
was part of the romanticization of the disease eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. But really, tuberculosis is everywhere in History's I
(05:14):
argue in the book that it was an ancillary cause
of World War One. It was the cause of the
cowboy hat. It's the reason New Mexico is a state.
The strangeness of tuberculosis is that because it was such
a powerful and important part of our culture. I mean,
this was a disease that killed one out of every
seven people, that it inevitably also became a disease that
had a huge impact on our culture in our history.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Wait, TV is the reason we have the cowboy hat.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
That doesn't make any sense, and yet it makes total
sense because there was a hat maker in New Jersey
named John B. Stetson who got tuberculosis and was told
that his only chance as survival was to go west.
This was a very common belief at the time. You
move west and then you recover your health in the
sweet clean air. And John B. Stetson made it out
(05:58):
to Saint Joseph, Missouri, and while he was there he
recovered from tuberculosis. About twenty five percent of people for
reasons we still don't understand, we'll recover without treatment. And
John B. Stetson was in that lucky few, and as
he recovered, he noticed that the hats in the American
West were not very good because there were like coonskin
caps that were literally bug infested. There were like straw
hats that folks from New Mexico and Mexico had brought up,
(06:20):
but like they didn't work particularly well in Saint Joe's
rainy environment. And so he invented the Stetson hat. And
so yes, there would be no cowboy hat without tuberculosis.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
And so your own introduction to TV, as I understand
it started when you met somebody incredible, somebody who reminded
you of your own son. Tell me about Henry.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Yeah, so Henry shares a name with my son, who
is also named Henry. And when I first met Henry
Rider in Sierra Leone in twenty nineteen, I thought he
was about the same age as my son. I thought
he was about nine years old, and he just walked
me all around the hospital, and you're right, he's just
somebody who's incredible. He was kind of the mayor of
that place. Everywhere he went, people were shaking his hand,
rubbing his head, and he took me to the lab.
(07:01):
He took me to the wards where the patients were living,
and he eventually took me back to the doctors who
were meeting to discuss cases they were concerned about or whatever,
and they sort of lovingly and laughingly shoot Henry away.
And then I said, whose kid is that? Is that
one of your kids? And they said, no, he's a patient,
and he's in fact one of the patients that we're
consulting about because we're very concerned about him. And it
(07:22):
turned out that Henry wasn't nine like I imagined him. He
was seventeen. He'd just been so emaciated, first by malnutrition
and then by the disease that he looked much younger.
And it was really in following Henry's story and getting
to know Henry that I ended up writing the book.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
So something that I was shocked by in your book
and kind of embarrassed when I was reading it, is
that I sort of assumed that TV was like this
disease of the past, like some like old Victorian problem
that you know, you look into old pictures and stuff
like that totally give me a sense of why we
don't realize the scope of TV today and what the
actual scope is today.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
I think one of the reasons we don't realize the
scope is that it tends to be a problem in
places where people are least likely to have access to megaphones,
you know, least likely to be able to make their
voices heard. But the scope of the problem is really
really significant. About ten million people get sick with tuberculosis
every year, and about one point twenty five million die,
and unfortunately that number is likely to go up in
(08:17):
the next few years.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
This seems really crazy, right, that the disease is still
around even though we have good treatments for it. Yeah,
why aren't we fixing this? Like this seems like a
problem that medically we've sorted out the hard part, Right,
we have antibiotics that can fix this, Like, why are
people still dying from this?
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Well? TV isn't an easy disease to cure by any
stretch of the imagination. But you know, my brother had
cancer a couple of years ago, and that also wasn't
an easy disease to cure. It costs about one hundred
and fifty times more to cure my brother's cancer than
it costs to cure Henry's tuberculosis, and yet nobody at
any time said, I'm not sure that it makes sense
to treat you. It might be better to focus more
on prevention. No, it's true that in a narrow sense,
(08:55):
it's a better investment to focus on the prevention of
cancer than it is to focus on treating cancer. But
of course that's a ludicrous thing to say. We would
never say that to someone living with cancer. And yet
Henry heard that all the time. He heard that there
just aren't resources out there to offer you the kind
of personalized, taylored care that you would need in order
to survive. And as a result, he was really, really
(09:15):
sick for a really long time. I mean, Henry was
essentially on his deathbed when finally, thanks to an extraordinary doctor,
doctor jerom To Farah, and the Sierra Leonian Ministry of
Health and the nonprofit organization Partners in Health, they all
kind of came together and decided that this kid was
worthy of that kind of treatment. And even though, as
doctor Jeroum told me, I know, it's just one kid,
(09:36):
but what if he can be the first of many?
And he has been the first of many Blessedly, so
many more people are receiving the kind of treatment that
Henry finally was able to receive, and that's why he's
here with us today.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
But it seems like what you're saying is that TV
isn't just like a medical problem, it's really like a
social justice problem. It's really sort of a disease of poverty.
Is that kind of what you found writing the book?
Speaker 2 (09:56):
Absolutely, it is a social justice problem. Tuberculosis follows the
paths of injustice that we blaze for it, and that's
been the case for decades now. Anybody can get TV.
It's an airborne disease, but you're vastly more likely to
be come sick and die if you're malnourished, if you
have other health problems like an HIV infection or diabetes,
and so it's a disease of injustice in every way.
(10:17):
And the reason I wrote this book is because for me,
it's the exemplary disease of injustice. It's certainly not the
only one, but it is a disease that is a
social phenomenon as much as a biomedical one.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
It also seems to be one that we kind of
ignore for the same reason we ignore poverty, right, Like
we like to think we have control over the disease.
We like to think that, you know, we earned our status.
If we happen to kind of be privileged enough not
to be in a place where this disease is wiping
people out. It seems to also be kind of a
problem of human nature.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
Yeah, totally. I mean, I think that's a great observation.
We are uncomfortable with dealing with randomness and injustice in
our social orders, because of course we are. It discomforts
those of us who are extremely privileged. It also discomforts
other people because we don't really want to live in
a world where like the most powerful emperor of all time,
(11:04):
Alexander the Great, can die from just like typhoid or
malaria or whatever, which is why for centuries we've had
rumors that he died of poisoning, because that would be
a much more human centric thing to have happen, a
much more agency based thing to have happened. The places
where we where we don't have agency, or where our
agency is very confusing, like it is with tuberculosis, are
(11:25):
uncomfortable for us, I think, because we don't want to
reckon with not just the randomness in the social order,
but also the injustice that's built into the social order.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
I mean, especially when it comes to life and death.
Like if you're someone like Henry and you're literally hearing
you know your life is not worth saving because it's
too expensive given where you live. I mean, that's just incredible.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
Yeah, I mean, it really is horrifying, and yet people
are told that every day, and not just people with TB,
but also people living with other other diseases. You know,
when my brother got cancer, one of the first things
he said to me was this as a ninety three
percent curate in the United States and a twenty to
seventy percent curate in poor countries. And the reason we
don't know whether it's twenty percent or seventy percent is
(12:04):
because we don't even do a good job of counting.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Man, And you just said something that was even carrier, right,
You said that you know, TV is really bad now
and it's likely going to get worse. Yeah, And that's
in part because you know, you and I are having
this conversation at a strange time when things are getting worse.
Why are things getting worse? And what's happened recently to
change things?
Speaker 2 (12:23):
So we've had dramatic cuts, mostly from the US government
but also from other governments to tuberculosis response. The United
States has long been the most generous funder of tuberculosis response,
and unfortunately we've walked that back in a very sudden,
chaotic way, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of
people seeing their treatment interrupted mid course. Like I said earlier,
(12:44):
it takes between four and six months of treatment to
be cured. If that gets interrupted in the middle, even
if your treatment gets restarted, you're very likely to develop
drug resistant tuberculosis, which is a much much more serious thing.
That's what Henry was living with. And we know that
most of those people will die. Unfortunately, and just as catastrophically,
(13:04):
many of those people will circulate drug resistant tuberculosis in
their own communities. We've already seen the rates of tuberculosis
death go up. I think twelve thousand people excess quote
unquote excess deaths have happened in the last three months.
But it'll go up much more dramatically as time goes on.
Because tuberculosis is a slow killer.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
I mean, this is like a like slow burning moral emergency.
This isn't just like, oh, some made gut cut in
this country that I don't care about so much, Like
this is like really tragic and utterly preventable.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Yeah, yeah, utterly preventable. And also, I mean frankly scary,
because the more complicated drug resistant tuberculosis you have circulating
in communities, the more likely it is that we'll see
more cases of TB that we simply don't have any
tools to treat. I mean, I try not to be
a person who engages in hyperbole when it comes to
(13:55):
global health, and I think it's important to understand that
the main reason we need to respond to this tragedy
is because it's affecting millions of human beings. But there
is another reason to respond to this tragedy, which is
that if we aren't careful, it will affect billions of
human beings.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
And so this salt is pretty sucky.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
But one of the reasons, Yeah, Ury, can you see
why maybe I'm not an expert in happiness. I mean,
are the people listening to this like, oh, this guy's
got happiness cracked?
Speaker 1 (14:21):
They're like, I'm on the wrong podcast. What has happened?
But this is the reason I love you and your
work John so much, is that in the face of
sucky stuff, you have us do something right, which is
that you have us find hope and find agency. And
so when we get back from the break, we're going
to talk about what we can do to fix this
totally fixable problem of beating TV around the world. And
we're going to see that the act of taking action
(14:43):
to fix it is going to come with a bunch
of happiness benefits that we might not even expect. Happiness
lab with John Green, We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
You crush that, man, I mean, that's such a pro
like I take like eight takes on my breaks.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
One of my favorite John Green quotes, which might be apocryphal,
you can tell me, is allegedly the following The most
punk rock thing to do in the world right now
is to embrace the current problems with earnestness and optimism.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
I did say that.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
You did say that, Okay, it's cool, Like it's punk
rock to like look in the face of something really sucky,
especially something as bad as global health problems in TV,
and say we can fix this. And so, what's the
best way that folks who are listening to this right
now can fix the problem of TV with earnestness and optimism.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Well, I think there's a bunch of ways we can respond.
I mean, just our attention matters, Like we are much
more likely to solve the problems we pay attention to,
And when we think about our attention, we need to
be thinking about it as a resource that's incredibly valuable, right,
Like all these social media companies know the value of
our attention and we need to understand it too. But
I also think that there are functional things that we
(15:58):
can do. We can give to organizations that are making
a difference, And there are a lot of ways to
make a difference with TV. So obviously there's organizations that
are fighting TV itself, like Partners and Health. There's also
organizations that are fighting malnutrition and poverty overall, which we
know is a good way to fight tuberculosis. We know
from the history of the United States and the United
Kingdom that when poverty goes down and when food and
(16:20):
security goes down, tuberculosis rates also go down.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
And that means that the cure for tuberculosis isn't in
some lab somewhere that you know, and I don't have
to like learn about how to create new antibiotic cures.
The cure is actually in our wallets and maybe like
even small change that we have in our wallets.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Yeah, it is incredible the extent to which tuberculosis is
a resource problem. Now, we do need better tools. We
have great researchers, they need to be better supported so
that we have better vaccines for TV. I mean, the
only vaccine we have is one hundred and five years old.
It's not very effective. We need better, shorter treatment regimens,
we need better diagnostics, we need all of that stuff.
But we have the tools to cure tuberculosis today. We
(16:57):
have the tools to offer people, you know, ninety three
percent cure rates today, and we just need to be
using those tools. It's the rare problem that actually is
mostly a resource problem.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
And so today Happiness Lablinsters are going to get a
chance to help fix that resource problem. If you're a
fan of the Happiness Lab, you know we've worked with
give Directly before. Give directly is one of the most effective,
cost effective ways to reduce poverty because they just give
people money directly. And one of the cool things is
this is actually studies on like giving people cash directly
(17:29):
and the effect it can have specifically on TV. John,
I don't know if you know this study is one
that was done in in Brazil.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Yeah, yeah, Oh it's incredible.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Do you want to explain?
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Yeah, they found Yeah, I mean you'll I'll probably misquoted
and then you can fix you can fix everything I said.
But that's the nature of the amateur speaking and then
the professor speaking right Like, that's like, that's the student
teacher relationship at its core. So my understanding is that
there was unconditional cash payment transfers to fight poverty in
(17:58):
an impoverished community in Brazil, and an unexpected side effect
of this was that rates of tuberculosis went down by
I believe fifty percent, like went down really fifty percent.
Speaker 1 (18:11):
I mean fifty percent is like bonkers, because like you'd
think that you need to come in and like vaccinate
everybody or like had hospitals. Just giving people some money
actually reduce the rates of TV deaths by fifty percent.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
And this is a reminder that like people know how
to spend money, like people, people are much better judges
people living their lives are much better judges of how
to spend their money than I ever could be. And
so this is why I'm such a big fan of
gift directly is because they empower people to make financial
decisions that work for them, and as a result, we
(18:44):
see less food and security, we see more kids going
to school, we see safer housing, and all of that
contributes to lower rates of tuberculosis, among many other benefits.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
So just talk about why, Like, if you're in a
community that's facing tuberculosis, this more money might help, right,
I think in terms of like prevention and then like
finding out and treating the disease once you have it.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
Yeah, So that's one obvious way, right, is that you're
more likely to be able to use the healthcare system
and benefit from the healthcare system. But there are less
obvious ways too, Like you're more likely to have safe
housing with where maybe you aren't living cheek by jow
with lots of other people, where maybe you have a
little bit better ventilation in your home, which we know
reduces the risk of transmitting TV. You might be able
(19:27):
to afford better public transportation, so you're on public transport
that isn't quite as crowded. There's a lot of different
ways in which this could prevent TV infection, but it
can also prevent TV death by allowing people to access
the healthcare system.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
I mean that was one of the things that was
striking in your book, where you just talk about the
reality of this disease in Sierra Leone. You talk about
how people might even have access to treatments, maybe the
money for treatments, but treatment's super far away, and so
they don't have the money for public transportation or they
can't miss work, and then they wind up not getting
treated and the disease gets worse. Yeah, and maybe it
turns into drug resistant disease, which is even worse. I mean,
(20:02):
it's just incredible how much resources can help here.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Yeah, resources can really help. And then you know, we
often those of us who live in countries with relatively
strong systems, and maybe I shouldn't be including myself in
that category, but I think I think I still can't
those of us who live in countries with relatively strong
systems forget sometimes how many systems have to work together
for this stuff to happen, right, Like, you need functioning
(20:25):
transportation systems, you need electricity so that there can be
cold chain, and you need trucks that have cold chain,
and like, in order to keep a vaccine cold is
a tremendous amount of work, and so all of this
stuff has to work together for us to fight diseases
of injustice. And yet there is also the truth that
like systems get stronger when people are less poor. We
know this, We know this from history, We know it
(20:47):
from our history. And so that's why I'm a big
fan of an organization like Gift Directly that you know,
fights poverty in the most radical and yet stunningly obvious
way possible.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
Obviously, it is funny how we like try to complicate
you know, charity. Yeah, just like we're going to have
middlemen and all this stuff. Like and if you've heard
the show before and heard our work would give Directly before,
you know that. Basically, what Gift Directly does is they
give these so called unconditional cash transfers to people in poverty.
Basic that just means no strings attached, no bureaucracy, no middleman,
(21:20):
forest families just get a bunch of cash. And what
we're going to do with Give Directly now is that
we're going to actually give these unconditional cash transfers to
people living in the countries with the highest TB rates.
So you's gonna be places like Bangladesh, Kenya, Liberia, Uganda.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Last time we did this, John, we raised over one
hundred thousand dollars per gift directly.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
I like to think that if you are involved, we're
going to get more money. But I'm gonna pledge. I
didn't do this last time, but this time I'm going
to pledge. I'm going to match the first ten thousand
dollars of donations that we get from Happiness Lab listeners,
which automatically puts us up to twenty thousand dollars. If
the Happiness Lab listeners give ten thousand bucks.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
I will I will match the next ten thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Oh my gosh. And if my math is correct and
we're doing the matching, that means we already get up
to four eight thousand dollars. You see the professor, the
psych professor, doing math in her head of ten plus
ten plus ten.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
It's a beautiful thing to watch. I really like your
eyes rolled back in your head for those of you
just listening, And it was really it was really a
wonder to see doctor Sanders trying to multiply ten times four.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
But talk about the benefits that we could see if
we actually are able to raise this much money, especially
during this time of so many aid cuts.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to overstate the difference that
it makes. I mean, I've seen the difference that it
made in my friend Henry's life to go from living
an absolute poverty to not and you know, everything becomes easier.
And I'll give you one example. Henry spent two hours
going to school and two hours going from school every
single day for the first two and a half years
(22:56):
of his education at the University of Sierra Leone. So
you can imagine what a burden that is. And it's
not like you can study on these incredibly crowded transports
that he would be taking, trucks or buses that he
would be taking. But then he was able to afford
a motorbike and as a result, now he can go
directly to school and come directly home. That's a blessing
for him in every imaginable way. But I think you know,
(23:20):
it also comes down to things like safe housing. I mean,
for years, Henry lived in a home where the roof leaked.
It was a steel or tin roof and the roof leaked,
and so he was wet every single night. He would
tell me that there was no place that he could
put his bedroll where he wouldn't be wet and where
his mom wouldn't be wet, and that's miserable. It's also
bad for your health, and you know, bad for your
(23:42):
quality of sleep, bad for your mental health. And so
I just think, like small differences are big, big differences
in impoverished communities.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
And what's really incredible, and you know, the psychology didn't
need to work this way, but it does, is that
if you can do something to help somebody in that
awful situation, even with like five bucks ten bucks, what
the research really shows is that you'll be boosting your
own happiness too. Turns out we get more of a
happiness kind of bang for our buck by giving five
bucks in a way that will help somebody else than
we do if we spend in ourselves blow it on
(24:13):
a latte or something. But some of your work shows
the second way we get a happiness benefit from this, right,
which is that when we take action about something that's sucky,
we wind up feeling like the world is less sucky.
We wind up doing something to like build our own
hope up. And I know you've talked about this a lot,
like in the face of just like things being really bad,
(24:35):
Actually trying to fix it can make you a little
bit more hopeful.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
Yeah, it's always been hard for me to get out
of bed in the morning. It is hard for me,
not just to stare at the ceiling. It is hard
for me not just to scroll on my phone and doom,
scroll until it's bedtime again. Like that's just that's just
who I have always been. It's always been hard for me,
and I have found, I have found that absolutely that
the more that I give of my resources, of my time,
(25:00):
of my attention to problems of the world, instead of
feeling worse, I feel better, especially if I don't just
let myself get overwhelmed by the fire hose of problem.
Right Like I do not labor under the delusion that
tuberculosis is the only problem that we're facing in the
United States right now, by any stretch of the imagination, right,
But it is the place where I feel like I
have chosen to try to make a difference, And in
(25:23):
some ways that makes it easier to live with the
rest of the fire hose, because I can say, like, well,
I hope other people and I believe other people are
making the choice to respond to climate change, or other
people are making the choice to respond to this injustice
or that injustice, because I'm making the choice to respond
to tuberculosis, which you know, I feel like I'm uniquely
(25:43):
able to respond too well. And I do find I
do find that that boosts my happiness. I mean, I
just got off this grueling three week long book tour,
and going into the book tour, I told my wife
I was like, I'm going to come home a shell
of a person. I'm going to come home destroyed and
devastated and like it's going to take me months to recover.
And what actually happened is I got home and I
(26:04):
was really happy to see my family and really happy
to see my dog. But like I didn't feel that
way at all. I felt incurg because I'd been on
the road meeting people who are also fighting to make
the world better and that's just an encouraging thing to
be around.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
Yeah, And also what the researchers is like, it doesn't
actually matter how much you do. I mean, you went
on a grueling book tour and wrote a whole book
about this, But like, if somebody is listening and all
you can give is three bucks, five bucks, just do that.
You know, our last give directly. Campaigns were more more
made up of people giving incredibly small amounts of money,
amounts of money that they thought were small. But it
turns out when we all do it together, we can
(26:36):
have this huge impact.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
And that's true not just for money, right, like, that's
also true for advocacy, for activism. You know, thousands of
people came together to ask Johnson and Johnson, for instance,
to abandon their patents on bdacaul in, their secondary patent
attempts on baedaculan.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
And maybe just say what baedaculan is, just so.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
I just assumed that the world knows what pedacculan is.
Bdacculin is a really important drug for treating multi drug
resistant tuberculosis and one of the drugs that Henry really
needed and was told that he couldn't afford. And so
thousands of people coming together to make that accomplish something
that no one could have accomplished in isolation. And I
think that's very much and very often the case is
(27:18):
that we feel powerless. But one of the reasons we
feel powerless is because we feel like we're alone and
our three dollars or our email to our congress person
doesn't matter. Much. But when you're part of a huge community,
and you are part of a huge community, if you're
part of the Happiness Lab community, then your three dollars
matters more because it's not three dollars, it's three dollars
in partnership with thousands of other people's three dollars.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
And so end us off on what makes you hopeful
about fighting TV and fighting other secky stuff when you
can do that in the context of a community.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
Well, I think you know. I've one of the things
I've learned from you and from my therapist is that
pushing negative emotions to the side, or ignoring them or
trying to deny them is not the right way. It's
the maybe the easy way, and the way that sort
of makes a kind of common sense, but it just
doesn't work very well. And so I'm engaging with a
(28:08):
lot of negative emotions right now, but I'm using them
to fuel fuel hope instead of using them to fuel despair.
That's what I'm trying to do anyway, to fuel hope
that better diagnostics are coming for TB, that maybe a
better vaccine is coming, and to fuel hope that yes,
we have fallen down the staircase of human health in
the last few months. But that's not permanent. This isn't
(28:31):
the end of the story. This is the middle of
the story, and it really falls to us to write
a better ending.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Can part of that ending be you saying to my listeners,
don't forget to be awesome, because that would be really cool.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Yes, they say in my hometown, friends, don't forget to
be awesome.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
So tuberculous is terrible disease, but only a disease of poverty.
We can fix it. And if we want to treat
poverty like the emergency it is, and TV like the
emergency it is, we can help by giving to give directly.
So Happiness Lab listeners go visit GiveDirectly dot org, slash TV.
Make me and John apparently pony up our ten thousand
bucks to fix something that is totally fixable with our
(29:13):
collective effort. John, thank you so much for coming on
the Happiness Lave. You totally are a happiness expert. I
know you don't think that, but.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
I really I love that. I'm going to tell my
therapist that this week I'm going to say, did you know, Joellen,
I am according to a happiness expert. A bit of
a happiness expert myself.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
I'm going to see the eyes rolling And thanks so
much to John Green for taking the time to chat
with me. And I'm just thrilled that he's also going
to be matching up to ten thousand dollars in donations
from all of you. I had no idea he'd be
willing to do that. So if hearing about this totally
fixable problem of TB has made you excited to help
(29:48):
decrease world suck and make yourself feel awesome, please consider
giving whatever you're comfortable sharing to give directly dot org
slash TB. That's give directly dot org slash TB. Seriously,
anything is helpful. Even tossing five bucks towards this important
cause can help us all come together as a community
to fix something important. These times feel very tough and
(30:11):
very uncertain, but research shows that you'll likely feel a
lot better about this big mess if you take some
positive action, and you can do that with just a
dollar donated at GiveDirectly dot org slash TB. That's GiveDirectly
dot org slash TB. John and I also recently recorded
a live event to celebrate the release of his new
book everything is tuberculosis. We had a lot of fun
(30:33):
despite the subject matter, and even ended the evening with
my favorite thing ever, a sing along We're.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
Here because we're here, Because we're here, because we're here,
We're here, because we're here, because we're here, because we're here.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
I'm going to drop that show as a special bonus,
so look out for it coming soon on Happiness Lab
with Me, Doctor Laurie Santos
Pushkin. Hey, Happiness Lab listeners, today, you are in for
a treat, because by the end of this episode, my
guest and I will have shared how you can do
something totally awesome, totally life saving, and something totally happiness
inducing with almost zero effort. And spoiler, it's going to
(00:36):
involve the website GiveDirectly dot org slash TV. That's GiveDirectly
dot org slash TB. One of my favorite parts of
being hosted The Happiness Lab is that I get to
share stuff that I love with you, Like the time
I interviewed my eighties heart Throb rob Low about nostalgia.
Just talking with you on the zoom call and I'm
taking back to you know, movies I watched in grade
(00:56):
school and fun times in college and that is amazing.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
It makes me feel so good.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Or when I geeked out about Star Trek with Lieutenant
Wesley Crusher himself, will we eaten?
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Star Trek looks through the screen and it says there
is a place specifically for you in the future, Like you, Laurie,
there is a space for you in the future.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
I loved that. But today I not only get to
chat with someone who I have nerded out about for
a very very long time. But I also have the
chance to invite you to help that guest do something
to make the world a better place. If you happen
to be a nerd fighter like me, then get ready,
because today I'll be chatting with the amazing John Green.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Hold on, I don't even let my headphones in. This
is a catastrophe of the scale of which nobody's ever
seen before.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
No, You're good, good, You're going to make.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Sure I'm on the right fancy Mike, I am okay, great.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
I'm guessing a lot of my Happiness Lab listeners know
who John Green is. John is first and foremost a
best selling author, both of beloved fictional books like Turtles
All the Way Down and The Fault in Our Stars,
but also nonfiction greades like The Anthroposcene Reviewed, a book
in which he expertly reviews everything from diet Doctor Pepper
to the smallpox vaccine. But John is also an educator who,
(02:07):
with his brother Hank, created the all inspiring vlog Brothers
and Crash Course YouTube channels. John has been a hero
of mine for a while because I see a lot
of happiness science in his work. Did you ever think
that you would be an expert on a happiness podcast.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
No, I don't give off the vibes of somebody who's
an expert in happiness, to be honest with you, Doc,
but you.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
So are, dude. I mean, you're so focused on things
like awe and understanding that negative emotions are the things
that you want to stick around with, Like you kind
of follow all the science.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
I mean when I listened to the podcast, I often
think like, oh, I'm closer than I thought I was,
because I'm pretty far away from this sort of like
wellness industry version of happiness. But I'm pretty close to
the doctor Lori Santos version of happiness, which makes you really,
for lack of a better term, happy.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
John's work embodies so many of the lessons that I've
learned studying the science of happiness. That meaning comes not
from avoiding suffering but embracing it. That there's wonder to
be found in the mundane, and that even in the
face of a lot of terrible, sucky stuff, we can
choose to band together to actually fix things. And that's
the goal of this episode. John's latest book deals with
(03:12):
a problem facing people around the world.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
The new book is called everything is tuberculosis. It's a
history of tuberculosis told through the perspective of both a
long term historical lens, but also the life of one
kid living with tuberculosis and sire leone.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
And so just for listeners, you might not be as familiar.
What is tuberculosis?
Speaker 2 (03:30):
So tuberculosis is an airborne disease. It usually affects the lungs,
but it can infect any part of the body really
and it makes people really sick. But it tends to
make them sick quite slowly because the bacteria divides very slowly,
and so you can be sick for months or years.
But if left untreated, tuberculosis usually does result in death. Fortunately,
(03:50):
since the nineteen fifties, we've had a cure for tuberculosis.
It's a bacterial infection, so the curious antibiotics given every
day over four to six months.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
So why write a book about tuberculosis, now, why tell
this particular story at this time?
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Well, because tuberculosis is still the world's deadliest infectious disease astonishingly,
I mean I say astonishingly because it's incurable for so long.
Like since the disease became curable, we've allowed over one
hundred and fifty million people to die of it, which
is just a figure that's hard for me to get
my head around, but it just speaks to how, you know,
disease is a biomedical phenomenon, but it's also a social one,
(04:25):
and how we imagine disease, how we allocate resources around
disease that shapes not just like how people live and
die of diseases like tuberculosis, but also who lives and
dies of diseases like tb DO.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
I seems like part of your TV journey was trying
to fix the problem, But part of the TV journey,
at least in the book, seemed like in some ways,
TV was sort of like cool. I don't know if
you can use the word cool for some disease that
kills lots of people, But it's kind of a fascinating
cultural journey. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
I mean one of the fascinating parts of that cultural
journey is that for a while it was considered cool,
Like Victor Hugo's friends would joke with him that he
could be a great novelist if only he contracted consumption,
because it was so widely believed that consumption made you
a great artist and also made you really beautiful. This
was part of the romanticization of the disease eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. But really, tuberculosis is everywhere in History's I
(05:14):
argue in the book that it was an ancillary cause
of World War One. It was the cause of the
cowboy hat. It's the reason New Mexico is a state.
The strangeness of tuberculosis is that because it was such
a powerful and important part of our culture. I mean,
this was a disease that killed one out of every
seven people, that it inevitably also became a disease that
had a huge impact on our culture in our history.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Wait, TV is the reason we have the cowboy hat.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
That doesn't make any sense, and yet it makes total
sense because there was a hat maker in New Jersey
named John B. Stetson who got tuberculosis and was told
that his only chance as survival was to go west.
This was a very common belief at the time. You
move west and then you recover your health in the
sweet clean air. And John B. Stetson made it out
(05:58):
to Saint Joseph, Missouri, and while he was there he
recovered from tuberculosis. About twenty five percent of people for
reasons we still don't understand, we'll recover without treatment. And
John B. Stetson was in that lucky few, and as
he recovered, he noticed that the hats in the American
West were not very good because there were like coonskin
caps that were literally bug infested. There were like straw
hats that folks from New Mexico and Mexico had brought up,
(06:20):
but like they didn't work particularly well in Saint Joe's
rainy environment. And so he invented the Stetson hat. And
so yes, there would be no cowboy hat without tuberculosis.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
And so your own introduction to TV, as I understand
it started when you met somebody incredible, somebody who reminded
you of your own son. Tell me about Henry.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Yeah, so Henry shares a name with my son, who
is also named Henry. And when I first met Henry
Rider in Sierra Leone in twenty nineteen, I thought he
was about the same age as my son. I thought
he was about nine years old, and he just walked
me all around the hospital, and you're right, he's just
somebody who's incredible. He was kind of the mayor of
that place. Everywhere he went, people were shaking his hand,
rubbing his head, and he took me to the lab.
(07:01):
He took me to the wards where the patients were living,
and he eventually took me back to the doctors who
were meeting to discuss cases they were concerned about or whatever,
and they sort of lovingly and laughingly shoot Henry away.
And then I said, whose kid is that? Is that
one of your kids? And they said, no, he's a patient,
and he's in fact one of the patients that we're
consulting about because we're very concerned about him. And it
(07:22):
turned out that Henry wasn't nine like I imagined him. He
was seventeen. He'd just been so emaciated, first by malnutrition
and then by the disease that he looked much younger.
And it was really in following Henry's story and getting
to know Henry that I ended up writing the book.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
So something that I was shocked by in your book
and kind of embarrassed when I was reading it, is
that I sort of assumed that TV was like this
disease of the past, like some like old Victorian problem
that you know, you look into old pictures and stuff
like that totally give me a sense of why we
don't realize the scope of TV today and what the
actual scope is today.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
I think one of the reasons we don't realize the
scope is that it tends to be a problem in
places where people are least likely to have access to megaphones,
you know, least likely to be able to make their
voices heard. But the scope of the problem is really
really significant. About ten million people get sick with tuberculosis
every year, and about one point twenty five million die,
and unfortunately that number is likely to go up in
(08:17):
the next few years.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
This seems really crazy, right, that the disease is still
around even though we have good treatments for it. Yeah,
why aren't we fixing this? Like this seems like a
problem that medically we've sorted out the hard part, Right,
we have antibiotics that can fix this, Like, why are
people still dying from this?
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Well? TV isn't an easy disease to cure by any
stretch of the imagination. But you know, my brother had
cancer a couple of years ago, and that also wasn't
an easy disease to cure. It costs about one hundred
and fifty times more to cure my brother's cancer than
it costs to cure Henry's tuberculosis, and yet nobody at
any time said, I'm not sure that it makes sense
to treat you. It might be better to focus more
on prevention. No, it's true that in a narrow sense,
(08:55):
it's a better investment to focus on the prevention of
cancer than it is to focus on treating cancer. But
of course that's a ludicrous thing to say. We would
never say that to someone living with cancer. And yet
Henry heard that all the time. He heard that there
just aren't resources out there to offer you the kind
of personalized, taylored care that you would need in order
to survive. And as a result, he was really, really
(09:15):
sick for a really long time. I mean, Henry was
essentially on his deathbed when finally, thanks to an extraordinary doctor,
doctor jerom To Farah, and the Sierra Leonian Ministry of
Health and the nonprofit organization Partners in Health, they all
kind of came together and decided that this kid was
worthy of that kind of treatment. And even though, as
doctor Jeroum told me, I know, it's just one kid,
(09:36):
but what if he can be the first of many?
And he has been the first of many Blessedly, so
many more people are receiving the kind of treatment that
Henry finally was able to receive, and that's why he's
here with us today.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
But it seems like what you're saying is that TV
isn't just like a medical problem, it's really like a
social justice problem. It's really sort of a disease of poverty.
Is that kind of what you found writing the book?
Speaker 2 (09:56):
Absolutely, it is a social justice problem. Tuberculosis follows the
paths of injustice that we blaze for it, and that's
been the case for decades now. Anybody can get TV.
It's an airborne disease, but you're vastly more likely to
be come sick and die if you're malnourished, if you
have other health problems like an HIV infection or diabetes,
and so it's a disease of injustice in every way.
(10:17):
And the reason I wrote this book is because for me,
it's the exemplary disease of injustice. It's certainly not the
only one, but it is a disease that is a
social phenomenon as much as a biomedical one.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
It also seems to be one that we kind of
ignore for the same reason we ignore poverty, right, Like
we like to think we have control over the disease.
We like to think that, you know, we earned our status.
If we happen to kind of be privileged enough not
to be in a place where this disease is wiping
people out. It seems to also be kind of a
problem of human nature.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
Yeah, totally. I mean, I think that's a great observation.
We are uncomfortable with dealing with randomness and injustice in
our social orders, because of course we are. It discomforts
those of us who are extremely privileged. It also discomforts
other people because we don't really want to live in
a world where like the most powerful emperor of all time,
(11:04):
Alexander the Great, can die from just like typhoid or
malaria or whatever, which is why for centuries we've had
rumors that he died of poisoning, because that would be
a much more human centric thing to have happen, a
much more agency based thing to have happened. The places
where we where we don't have agency, or where our
agency is very confusing, like it is with tuberculosis, are
(11:25):
uncomfortable for us, I think, because we don't want to
reckon with not just the randomness in the social order,
but also the injustice that's built into the social order.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
I mean, especially when it comes to life and death.
Like if you're someone like Henry and you're literally hearing
you know your life is not worth saving because it's
too expensive given where you live. I mean, that's just incredible.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
Yeah, I mean, it really is horrifying, and yet people
are told that every day, and not just people with TB,
but also people living with other other diseases. You know,
when my brother got cancer, one of the first things
he said to me was this as a ninety three
percent curate in the United States and a twenty to
seventy percent curate in poor countries. And the reason we
don't know whether it's twenty percent or seventy percent is
(12:04):
because we don't even do a good job of counting.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Man, And you just said something that was even carrier, right,
You said that you know, TV is really bad now
and it's likely going to get worse. Yeah, And that's
in part because you know, you and I are having
this conversation at a strange time when things are getting worse.
Why are things getting worse? And what's happened recently to
change things?
Speaker 2 (12:23):
So we've had dramatic cuts, mostly from the US government
but also from other governments to tuberculosis response. The United
States has long been the most generous funder of tuberculosis response,
and unfortunately we've walked that back in a very sudden,
chaotic way, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of
people seeing their treatment interrupted mid course. Like I said earlier,
(12:44):
it takes between four and six months of treatment to
be cured. If that gets interrupted in the middle, even
if your treatment gets restarted, you're very likely to develop
drug resistant tuberculosis, which is a much much more serious thing.
That's what Henry was living with. And we know that
most of those people will die. Unfortunately, and just as catastrophically,
(13:04):
many of those people will circulate drug resistant tuberculosis in
their own communities. We've already seen the rates of tuberculosis
death go up. I think twelve thousand people excess quote
unquote excess deaths have happened in the last three months.
But it'll go up much more dramatically as time goes on.
Because tuberculosis is a slow killer.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
I mean, this is like a like slow burning moral emergency.
This isn't just like, oh, some made gut cut in
this country that I don't care about so much, Like
this is like really tragic and utterly preventable.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Yeah, yeah, utterly preventable. And also, I mean frankly scary,
because the more complicated drug resistant tuberculosis you have circulating
in communities, the more likely it is that we'll see
more cases of TB that we simply don't have any
tools to treat. I mean, I try not to be
a person who engages in hyperbole when it comes to
(13:55):
global health, and I think it's important to understand that
the main reason we need to respond to this tragedy
is because it's affecting millions of human beings. But there
is another reason to respond to this tragedy, which is
that if we aren't careful, it will affect billions of
human beings.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
And so this salt is pretty sucky.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
But one of the reasons, Yeah, Ury, can you see
why maybe I'm not an expert in happiness. I mean,
are the people listening to this like, oh, this guy's
got happiness cracked?
Speaker 1 (14:21):
They're like, I'm on the wrong podcast. What has happened?
But this is the reason I love you and your
work John so much, is that in the face of
sucky stuff, you have us do something right, which is
that you have us find hope and find agency. And
so when we get back from the break, we're going
to talk about what we can do to fix this
totally fixable problem of beating TV around the world. And
we're going to see that the act of taking action
(14:43):
to fix it is going to come with a bunch
of happiness benefits that we might not even expect. Happiness
lab with John Green, We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
You crush that, man, I mean, that's such a pro
like I take like eight takes on my breaks.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
One of my favorite John Green quotes, which might be apocryphal,
you can tell me, is allegedly the following The most
punk rock thing to do in the world right now
is to embrace the current problems with earnestness and optimism.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
I did say that.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
You did say that, Okay, it's cool, Like it's punk
rock to like look in the face of something really sucky,
especially something as bad as global health problems in TV,
and say we can fix this. And so, what's the
best way that folks who are listening to this right
now can fix the problem of TV with earnestness and optimism.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Well, I think there's a bunch of ways we can respond.
I mean, just our attention matters, Like we are much
more likely to solve the problems we pay attention to,
And when we think about our attention, we need to
be thinking about it as a resource that's incredibly valuable, right,
Like all these social media companies know the value of
our attention and we need to understand it too. But
I also think that there are functional things that we
(15:58):
can do. We can give to organizations that are making
a difference, And there are a lot of ways to
make a difference with TV. So obviously there's organizations that
are fighting TV itself, like Partners and Health. There's also
organizations that are fighting malnutrition and poverty overall, which we
know is a good way to fight tuberculosis. We know
from the history of the United States and the United
Kingdom that when poverty goes down and when food and
(16:20):
security goes down, tuberculosis rates also go down.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
And that means that the cure for tuberculosis isn't in
some lab somewhere that you know, and I don't have
to like learn about how to create new antibiotic cures.
The cure is actually in our wallets and maybe like
even small change that we have in our wallets.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Yeah, it is incredible the extent to which tuberculosis is
a resource problem. Now, we do need better tools. We
have great researchers, they need to be better supported so
that we have better vaccines for TV. I mean, the
only vaccine we have is one hundred and five years old.
It's not very effective. We need better, shorter treatment regimens,
we need better diagnostics, we need all of that stuff.
But we have the tools to cure tuberculosis today. We
(16:57):
have the tools to offer people, you know, ninety three
percent cure rates today, and we just need to be
using those tools. It's the rare problem that actually is
mostly a resource problem.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
And so today Happiness Lablinsters are going to get a
chance to help fix that resource problem. If you're a
fan of the Happiness Lab, you know we've worked with
give Directly before. Give directly is one of the most effective,
cost effective ways to reduce poverty because they just give
people money directly. And one of the cool things is
this is actually studies on like giving people cash directly
(17:29):
and the effect it can have specifically on TV. John,
I don't know if you know this study is one
that was done in in Brazil.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Yeah, yeah, Oh it's incredible.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Do you want to explain?
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Yeah, they found Yeah, I mean you'll I'll probably misquoted
and then you can fix you can fix everything I said.
But that's the nature of the amateur speaking and then
the professor speaking right Like, that's like, that's the student
teacher relationship at its core. So my understanding is that
there was unconditional cash payment transfers to fight poverty in
(17:58):
an impoverished community in Brazil, and an unexpected side effect
of this was that rates of tuberculosis went down by
I believe fifty percent, like went down really fifty percent.
Speaker 1 (18:11):
I mean fifty percent is like bonkers, because like you'd
think that you need to come in and like vaccinate
everybody or like had hospitals. Just giving people some money
actually reduce the rates of TV deaths by fifty percent.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
And this is a reminder that like people know how
to spend money, like people, people are much better judges
people living their lives are much better judges of how
to spend their money than I ever could be. And
so this is why I'm such a big fan of
gift directly is because they empower people to make financial
decisions that work for them, and as a result, we
(18:44):
see less food and security, we see more kids going
to school, we see safer housing, and all of that
contributes to lower rates of tuberculosis, among many other benefits.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
So just talk about why, Like, if you're in a
community that's facing tuberculosis, this more money might help, right,
I think in terms of like prevention and then like
finding out and treating the disease once you have it.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
Yeah, So that's one obvious way, right, is that you're
more likely to be able to use the healthcare system
and benefit from the healthcare system. But there are less
obvious ways too, Like you're more likely to have safe
housing with where maybe you aren't living cheek by jow
with lots of other people, where maybe you have a
little bit better ventilation in your home, which we know
reduces the risk of transmitting TV. You might be able
(19:27):
to afford better public transportation, so you're on public transport
that isn't quite as crowded. There's a lot of different
ways in which this could prevent TV infection, but it
can also prevent TV death by allowing people to access
the healthcare system.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
I mean that was one of the things that was
striking in your book, where you just talk about the
reality of this disease in Sierra Leone. You talk about
how people might even have access to treatments, maybe the
money for treatments, but treatment's super far away, and so
they don't have the money for public transportation or they
can't miss work, and then they wind up not getting
treated and the disease gets worse. Yeah, and maybe it
turns into drug resistant disease, which is even worse. I mean,
(20:02):
it's just incredible how much resources can help here.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Yeah, resources can really help. And then you know, we
often those of us who live in countries with relatively
strong systems, and maybe I shouldn't be including myself in
that category, but I think I think I still can't
those of us who live in countries with relatively strong
systems forget sometimes how many systems have to work together
for this stuff to happen, right, Like, you need functioning
(20:25):
transportation systems, you need electricity so that there can be
cold chain, and you need trucks that have cold chain,
and like, in order to keep a vaccine cold is
a tremendous amount of work, and so all of this
stuff has to work together for us to fight diseases
of injustice. And yet there is also the truth that
like systems get stronger when people are less poor. We
know this, We know this from history, We know it
(20:47):
from our history. And so that's why I'm a big
fan of an organization like Gift Directly that you know,
fights poverty in the most radical and yet stunningly obvious
way possible.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
Obviously, it is funny how we like try to complicate
you know, charity. Yeah, just like we're going to have
middlemen and all this stuff. Like and if you've heard
the show before and heard our work would give Directly before,
you know that. Basically, what Gift Directly does is they
give these so called unconditional cash transfers to people in poverty.
Basic that just means no strings attached, no bureaucracy, no middleman,
(21:20):
forest families just get a bunch of cash. And what
we're going to do with Give Directly now is that
we're going to actually give these unconditional cash transfers to
people living in the countries with the highest TB rates.
So you's gonna be places like Bangladesh, Kenya, Liberia, Uganda.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Last time we did this, John, we raised over one
hundred thousand dollars per gift directly.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
I like to think that if you are involved, we're
going to get more money. But I'm gonna pledge. I
didn't do this last time, but this time I'm going
to pledge. I'm going to match the first ten thousand
dollars of donations that we get from Happiness Lab listeners,
which automatically puts us up to twenty thousand dollars. If
the Happiness Lab listeners give ten thousand bucks.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
I will I will match the next ten thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Oh my gosh. And if my math is correct and
we're doing the matching, that means we already get up
to four eight thousand dollars. You see the professor, the
psych professor, doing math in her head of ten plus
ten plus ten.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
It's a beautiful thing to watch. I really like your
eyes rolled back in your head for those of you
just listening, And it was really it was really a
wonder to see doctor Sanders trying to multiply ten times four.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
But talk about the benefits that we could see if
we actually are able to raise this much money, especially
during this time of so many aid cuts.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to overstate the difference that
it makes. I mean, I've seen the difference that it
made in my friend Henry's life to go from living
an absolute poverty to not and you know, everything becomes easier.
And I'll give you one example. Henry spent two hours
going to school and two hours going from school every
single day for the first two and a half years
(22:56):
of his education at the University of Sierra Leone. So
you can imagine what a burden that is. And it's
not like you can study on these incredibly crowded transports
that he would be taking, trucks or buses that he
would be taking. But then he was able to afford
a motorbike and as a result, now he can go
directly to school and come directly home. That's a blessing
for him in every imaginable way. But I think you know,
(23:20):
it also comes down to things like safe housing. I mean,
for years, Henry lived in a home where the roof leaked.
It was a steel or tin roof and the roof leaked,
and so he was wet every single night. He would
tell me that there was no place that he could
put his bedroll where he wouldn't be wet and where
his mom wouldn't be wet, and that's miserable. It's also
bad for your health, and you know, bad for your
(23:42):
quality of sleep, bad for your mental health. And so
I just think, like small differences are big, big differences
in impoverished communities.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
And what's really incredible, and you know, the psychology didn't
need to work this way, but it does, is that
if you can do something to help somebody in that
awful situation, even with like five bucks ten bucks, what
the research really shows is that you'll be boosting your
own happiness too. Turns out we get more of a
happiness kind of bang for our buck by giving five
bucks in a way that will help somebody else than
we do if we spend in ourselves blow it on
(24:13):
a latte or something. But some of your work shows
the second way we get a happiness benefit from this, right,
which is that when we take action about something that's sucky,
we wind up feeling like the world is less sucky.
We wind up doing something to like build our own
hope up. And I know you've talked about this a lot,
like in the face of just like things being really bad,
(24:35):
Actually trying to fix it can make you a little
bit more hopeful.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
Yeah, it's always been hard for me to get out
of bed in the morning. It is hard for me,
not just to stare at the ceiling. It is hard
for me not just to scroll on my phone and doom,
scroll until it's bedtime again. Like that's just that's just
who I have always been. It's always been hard for me,
and I have found, I have found that absolutely that
the more that I give of my resources, of my time,
(25:00):
of my attention to problems of the world, instead of
feeling worse, I feel better, especially if I don't just
let myself get overwhelmed by the fire hose of problem.
Right Like I do not labor under the delusion that
tuberculosis is the only problem that we're facing in the
United States right now, by any stretch of the imagination, right,
But it is the place where I feel like I
have chosen to try to make a difference, And in
(25:23):
some ways that makes it easier to live with the
rest of the fire hose, because I can say, like, well,
I hope other people and I believe other people are
making the choice to respond to climate change, or other
people are making the choice to respond to this injustice
or that injustice, because I'm making the choice to respond
to tuberculosis, which you know, I feel like I'm uniquely
(25:43):
able to respond too well. And I do find I
do find that that boosts my happiness. I mean, I
just got off this grueling three week long book tour,
and going into the book tour, I told my wife
I was like, I'm going to come home a shell
of a person. I'm going to come home destroyed and
devastated and like it's going to take me months to recover.
And what actually happened is I got home and I
(26:04):
was really happy to see my family and really happy
to see my dog. But like I didn't feel that
way at all. I felt incurg because I'd been on
the road meeting people who are also fighting to make
the world better and that's just an encouraging thing to
be around.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
Yeah, And also what the researchers is like, it doesn't
actually matter how much you do. I mean, you went
on a grueling book tour and wrote a whole book
about this, But like, if somebody is listening and all
you can give is three bucks, five bucks, just do that.
You know, our last give directly. Campaigns were more more
made up of people giving incredibly small amounts of money,
amounts of money that they thought were small. But it
turns out when we all do it together, we can
(26:36):
have this huge impact.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
And that's true not just for money, right, like, that's
also true for advocacy, for activism. You know, thousands of
people came together to ask Johnson and Johnson, for instance,
to abandon their patents on bdacaul in, their secondary patent
attempts on baedaculan.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
And maybe just say what baedaculan is, just so.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
I just assumed that the world knows what pedacculan is.
Bdacculin is a really important drug for treating multi drug
resistant tuberculosis and one of the drugs that Henry really
needed and was told that he couldn't afford. And so
thousands of people coming together to make that accomplish something
that no one could have accomplished in isolation. And I
think that's very much and very often the case is
(27:18):
that we feel powerless. But one of the reasons we
feel powerless is because we feel like we're alone and
our three dollars or our email to our congress person
doesn't matter. Much. But when you're part of a huge community,
and you are part of a huge community, if you're
part of the Happiness Lab community, then your three dollars
matters more because it's not three dollars, it's three dollars
in partnership with thousands of other people's three dollars.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
And so end us off on what makes you hopeful
about fighting TV and fighting other secky stuff when you
can do that in the context of a community.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
Well, I think you know. I've one of the things
I've learned from you and from my therapist is that
pushing negative emotions to the side, or ignoring them or
trying to deny them is not the right way. It's
the maybe the easy way, and the way that sort
of makes a kind of common sense, but it just
doesn't work very well. And so I'm engaging with a
(28:08):
lot of negative emotions right now, but I'm using them
to fuel fuel hope instead of using them to fuel despair.
That's what I'm trying to do anyway, to fuel hope
that better diagnostics are coming for TB, that maybe a
better vaccine is coming, and to fuel hope that yes,
we have fallen down the staircase of human health in
the last few months. But that's not permanent. This isn't
(28:31):
the end of the story. This is the middle of
the story, and it really falls to us to write
a better ending.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Can part of that ending be you saying to my listeners,
don't forget to be awesome, because that would be really cool.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Yes, they say in my hometown, friends, don't forget to
be awesome.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
So tuberculous is terrible disease, but only a disease of poverty.
We can fix it. And if we want to treat
poverty like the emergency it is, and TV like the
emergency it is, we can help by giving to give directly.
So Happiness Lab listeners go visit GiveDirectly dot org, slash TV.
Make me and John apparently pony up our ten thousand
bucks to fix something that is totally fixable with our
(29:13):
collective effort. John, thank you so much for coming on
the Happiness Lave. You totally are a happiness expert. I
know you don't think that, but.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
I really I love that. I'm going to tell my
therapist that this week I'm going to say, did you know, Joellen,
I am according to a happiness expert. A bit of
a happiness expert myself.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
I'm going to see the eyes rolling And thanks so
much to John Green for taking the time to chat
with me. And I'm just thrilled that he's also going
to be matching up to ten thousand dollars in donations
from all of you. I had no idea he'd be
willing to do that. So if hearing about this totally
fixable problem of TB has made you excited to help
(29:48):
decrease world suck and make yourself feel awesome, please consider
giving whatever you're comfortable sharing to give directly dot org
slash TB. That's give directly dot org slash TB. Seriously,
anything is helpful. Even tossing five bucks towards this important
cause can help us all come together as a community
to fix something important. These times feel very tough and
(30:11):
very uncertain, but research shows that you'll likely feel a
lot better about this big mess if you take some
positive action, and you can do that with just a
dollar donated at GiveDirectly dot org slash TB. That's GiveDirectly
dot org slash TB. John and I also recently recorded
a live event to celebrate the release of his new
book everything is tuberculosis. We had a lot of fun
(30:33):
despite the subject matter, and even ended the evening with
my favorite thing ever, a sing along We're.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
Here because we're here, Because we're here, because we're here,
We're here, because we're here, because we're here, because we're here.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
I'm going to drop that show as a special bonus,
so look out for it coming soon on Happiness Lab
with Me, Doctor Laurie Santos
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