Even if you hadn't obsessed over the love interest in Looking for Alaska when you were 13, learned APUSH and high school chemistry from “Crash Course,” or were a follower of Tumblr user fishingboatproceeds, you’ve probably heard of John Green.
Green is a prolific author of nine novels, a content creator, and a human rights activist. With his younger brother and business partner Hank, Green started two YouTube channels: “vlogbrothers” and “Crash Course." The former is an ongoing, week–to–week digital conversation between two brothers, while the latter is a library of easy–to–digest educational videos. Beyond those, the brothers have created charity fundraiser called Project for Awesome, a podcast called “Dear Hank and John,” and an annual conference for video creators called VidCon. Green is a public figure who has been a part of the Gen Z zeitgeist for the entire duration of our lives, cropping up where you might least expect him and maintaining an endlessly eager and humble zest for knowledge and progress.
So of course when Green came to Penn to bestow his writing wisdom and promote his new book Everything is Tuberculosis in a live interview with Adam Grant, Street was in attendance.
Green has always had a proclivity for tackling human rights injustices around the world. In the past, he’s advocated for global health initiatives and campaigns against maternal mortality in hospitals in Sierra Leone. Over the last several years he has shifted his focus to aiding in the ongoing fight against tuberculosis, consolidating his research, musings, and stories into Everything Is Tuberculosis.
When he visited a tuberculosis hospital in Sierra Leone, he didn’t expect to meet someone who shared his son’s name—or to carry that boy’s story with him across continents and college campuses. Henry was emaciated, soft–spoken, and had taken over 20,000 pills in his lifetime. At first glance, Green thought he was nine, maybe the over–eager son of a doctor or nurse. He was 17.
Henry was a patient, but also something more: a guide, a caretaker, basically the mayor of the hospital. He had spent so much time there that his presence seemed to linger in the hallways. His quiet, optimistic authority stood in contrast to the brutal chaos of his disease.
Green’s question—why tuberculosis, and not malaria or cancer?—lingers, conscious or not, in everyone’s minds whenever he references his project. It has a devastating answer. “We know frighteningly little about it,” he said. “The drugs are where the disease is not, and the disease is where the drugs are not.”
Essentially, the real cause of tuberculosis is us. We know how to kill it. We just choose not to.
“We have systems that don’t value all human lives equally,” he tells the crowd. TB is seen as expensive to treat—not because it is, but because the market doesn’t reward curing poor people. “It’s not nearly as expensive as curing cancer. But no one tells cancer patients”—such as his brother Hank, now thankfully in remission—“that their treatments aren’t cost effective.”
Against a backdrop of internet clout chasers and grifters who intentionally change their brands and glom onto different sides of topical social issues to remain relevant, John Green stands out because he's never cared about being famous. He constantly mentions how grateful he is for the loyal audience he’s accumulated, the people who discovered him through one avenue or another and, drawn to his eager kindness and self–critical humility, decided to come along for the ride. The disparate crowd of Penn students at his talk confirms that: some discovered him through “Crash Course” in high school, some grew up as readers of young adult romance and bildungsroman literature, but they all stuck around for Green himself.
Green exudes the same warm, magnetic presence you see on the screen. He cracks jokes, engages personably with interviewer Grant, and at times “self–edits” his answers to questions with the same unabashed ease that he would edit one of his podcasts or YouTube videos. He acknowledges that while he spends a lot of time intentionally championing the causes he cares about, he also often finds himself swept up in online social discourse. As bans over books that include racially sensitive or LGBTQ+ content sweep the nation, Green’s books have not been left alone. He’s always quick to push back on how his debut novel Looking For Alaska has been unjustly removed from schools because of the misrepresentation of its brief and deeply unerotic fellatio scene. Green even makes a light–hearted comment that even though his books are often included in ban campaigns against LGBTQ+ authors and authors of color, it partially feels like a perverse justification for the blatant attempts to erase marginalized communities, as though someone is saying, “See, we’re not racist, we banned John’s books too!”
During the rapid–fire section towards the end of the interview, Green is asked what he would show first to the aliens if they came down to observe Earth. He hardly has to skip a beat before saying that he would proudly display a graph that measures the sharp decline in child mortality in the past 30 years. For all that we have to show for our thousands of years of human history, Green thinks the fact that people came together to save the children rises to the very top of it all.
Green claims that he constantly worries about death, that “it’s coming for us, it’s all around us.” And yet, for all his talk of death and disease, Green is still incredibly alive. He lights up when talking about his favorite soda—Dr Pepper. “There’s nothing else that tastes like it in nature,” he says, fully serious. If he could have one sponsorship in the world, it wouldn’t be for a new book or podcast. It’d be Dr Pepper.
And when asked about his career—his many pivots from YA fiction to YouTube to activism—he doesn’t talk about ambition or fame. He talks about Hank. “Being the tail to Hank’s comet,” he says, as earnestly as his sober recollections of his TB research, “is the greatest privilege.”
It’s this unshakable humility, this sense of always orbiting something greater, that makes Green’s work so quietly powerful. Whether it’s saving children from preventable disease or making teenagers cry about fictional cancer, he’s always writing about the same thing: how we love each other, how we fail each other, and how—if we try hard enough—we just might get better at being human.
Because somewhere beneath the statistics and the stories and the 20,000 pills, there’s a man who just wants more people to stay alive long enough to drink something fizzy, to fall in love, and to chase comets in personal pursuit of what living a good life means to them.
