60 Minutes - 2/2/2020: Frontotemporal Dementia, Pleistocene Park, John Green

Episode Date: February 3, 2020

Frontotemporal dementia -- or FTD -- is the most common and most devastating forms for dementia. As Bill Whitaker tells us, the cause of the illness, which effects many Americans under the age of 60, remains unclear. With Arctic permafrost thawing too quickly, scientists in Siberia are considering drastic measures. Scott Pelley reports. John Green, the best-selling author of books like "The Fault in Our Stars," opens up to Jon Wertheim about exploring his fears through his writing.  To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And, of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile. Different is calling. Meet Tim's new Oreo Mocha Ice Caps with

Oreo in every sip. Perfect for listening to the A-side or B-side or bull-side. Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. This is a story about the cruelest disease you've never heard of. It's called frontotemporal dementia, or FTD. FTD is the number one form of dementia in Americans under the age of 60. I was washing my hands and I looked in the mirror and I did not recognize my own face. Didn't recognize yourself? No, I looked in the mirror and I kept looking. I remember I kept looking at this woman wondering who was she? Our adventure led us high above the Arctic Circle

to find out why the Earth is warming so fast so far below. How far below the surface are we right now? Right now we're about 10 meters. So about 30 feet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We met a scientist who enjoys Russian vodka, smokes like a Soviet steel mill, and believes these massive bones exposed by warming could bring the extinct woolly mammoth back from the dead.

That's amazing. I love the vodka. It's amazing. Oh, thank you so much. If you don't know John Green, the teenager is in your life, dear. Hi. As an author, he dominates the young adult bestseller list. Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday. Online, he has millions of YouTube subscribers.

But here's what some John Green fans don't know and will learn tonight. He has a serious mental health condition. I had a lot of self-destructive impulses, and I felt scared all the time. What were you scared of? The short answer is everything. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on this special edition of 60 Minutes. The new BMO VI Porter MasterCard is your ticket to more. More perks. More points.

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and their families, it ought to be much better known than it is. FTD is the number one form of dementia in Americans under the age of 60. What causes it is unclear, but it attacks the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain, which control personality and speech, and it's always fatal. It's not Alzheimer's disease, which degrades the part of the brain responsible for memory. With FTD, people either display such bizarre behavior that their loved ones can hardly recognize them, or they lose the ability to recognize themselves. As we first reported in May, that's what happened to Tracy Lind one day a few years ago

as she was standing in a public restroom. I was washing my hands, and I looked in the the mirror and I did not recognize my own face. Didn't recognize yourself? No, I looked in the mirror and I kept looking. I remember I kept looking at this woman wondering who was she. This is who she was, the very Reverend Tracy Lind, Dean of the Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland, Ohio, one of the city's most prominent preachers and civic leaders.

She was 61 years old when both she and her spouse, Emily Ingalls, began to notice trouble with things Tracy had always done very well, like finding the right word, recognizing congregants' and friends' faces, and, of course, her own. That's when I said, oh, man, I've got to go see a doctor. When that happened, were you scared? Oh, I was scared to death. Emily, what did you think was happening? I thought there's something not right with her brain. On Election Day 2016, Tracy Lind got the diagnosis, frontotemporal dementia.

She has what's called the speech variant of the disease, which, among other things, attacks the part of the brain where language lives. Sometimes you're just, you're fine, and you're on. And then there are other times that the words just don't come out. I mean, even if I know what the word is, sometimes I feel like I'm playing bingo. And when I find the word, I shout it. I feel like an imbecile. You know, apple. Oh, yeah, apple. That's it. And I get all excited. This is acutely painful for Tracy because being a powerful, effective speaker has always been at the core of her identity. One of the first things you did once you got this diagnosis was to resign from your job as dean at Trinity Cathedral.

Why did you take that action so quickly? Mainly it was, I knew I was starting to fail, even though I was faking it pretty well. Since stepping down, Tracy and Emily have traveled around the country and the world speaking and preaching about her FTD, or as Tracy puts it, telling the story of dementia from the inside out. I was determined to live what I had been preaching for over 30 years, that out of pain comes joy. I'm going to face this disease called FTD that I'd never heard of before, and I'm going to see what I can do with it. I don't know if you are aware of how unique this situation is, that you are in the middle

of this decline from dementia, and yet you're so able to articulate what that's like. I am aware of that. I think my curiosity is what's getting me through it. Because otherwise, Phil, I'm just going to lay down and roll up in a ball. Tracy says she has good days and bad days. Just in our interview, there were moments when she was completely in control and moments when she wasn't. And I'm doing some, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I know there's no.

Do you want help? Can you help, please? Okay. This is the way this very sad illness presents. Dr. Bruce Miller may be the world's leading expert on frontotemporal dementia. He runs a lab at the University of California, San Francisco that's doing cutting-edge research on the two main forms of FTD, the speech variant that Tracy Lind has

and a behavioral variant that attacks personality, judgment, and empathy. Pleasure to see you both again. On the day we visited Dr. Miller's clinic, he and his team met with FTD patient Thomas Cox and his wife, Laurie. At first glance, Thomas seems fine, but he's not. I've got an FTD. Okay. And has it affected you so far? No. In fact, Laurie Cox says that starting a few years ago, Thomas lost interest in her, in their son, and in his work,

so much that he was fired from his job. By now, he's pretty much reduced to looking at photos on his phone. That's Bugatti. That's our dog. Your dog. I can blame the disease. I can say that the disease stole my husband. When a family sees someone with this illness, they don't recognize them.

This is not the person I married that I love. This is not my father or my mother. You have said that FTD attacks people at the very soul of their humanity. This is profound as anything that can happen to a human being. It robs us of our very essence, of our humanity, of who we are. Bruce Miller says because so many cases are first misdiagnosed as mental illness, it takes an average of three years and several expensive brain scans to get a correct diagnosis of FTD. So whether it's 20,000 new cases every year, 100,000, 200,000. We still don't know. But in young people with neurodegeneration, frontotemporal dementia is a big one. So if you see someone who is suffering dementia

at a younger age, very strong likelihood that it's FTD. Dr. Miller showed us this composite image of two of the major degenerative brain diseases. Frontotemporal dementia, shown in blue. Alzheimer's disease, shown in red. So very different geography, very different clinical manifestations. What does the blue indicate? The blue indicates that there's loss of tissue. When we see loss of tissue in that brain region,

we know people have lost their interest in life, their drive. They do less. They care less about other people. That loss of empathy, Miller says, can produce dangerous, impulsive, even criminal behavior. And those with behavioral FTD are rarely aware that anything has changed. He went from being a caring, doting father and husband, and it just seemed like he'd flipped a switch off, and he had no idea that he'd changed. He had no idea. Amy Johnson and her husband Mark married in 2006, settled in the small Minnesota town of Wyndham, and now have four young children, three boys and a girl. Four years ago, Amy says, Mark suddenly seemed to stop caring about her and the kids. That's the first time that I really remember thinking to myself, what

happened? Where did you go? Amy recalls a day when she left Mark in charge of their sons, then three and two, only to come home and find the boys playing outside, alone, by a busy street, while Mark sat inside watching TV, oblivious. On other days, he began to display compulsive behavior she had never seen before. He couldn't stop eating. I started locking the food up. He would walk down to the grocery store and buy more. I took his credit card. He'd walk down to the grocery store and steal food. I mean, these changes that you saw, did you ask him what's going on? Yeah. And he just said, oh, I don't think anything's different, is it? It was. Mark

began making inappropriate remarks to a female co-worker at the company where he worked as a manufacturing engineer. He was fired. And his reaction was, oh, well, I guess, OK, so what's for supper tonight? What was your reaction? I was just devastated. I was seven months pregnant at the time with our daughter. With your fourth child? With my fourth child. So as this progresses, what's the eventual outcome?

Outcome of this is always death. Always death. Always death. We have no way of intervening yet to slow the progression. As FTD corrodes the brain, it also eventually causes bodily functions to shut down. That's what leads to death. But Bruce Miller is optimistic, pointing to promising research, both in his lab and funded by NIH grants to scientists around the country. Suddenly we have interventions and research that are going on that give me great hope.

When might you expect a breakthrough? I'm hoping in the next five years that we will have very powerful therapies in certain variants of frontotemporal dementia that may stop it cold. Tracy Lind and Emily Ingalls have no idea whether any breakthrough will come in time to help them. If not, Tracy will eventually lose the ability to speak at all and then the ability to swallow. The not being able to swallow part, that's what's really frightening. So I try to live in the present moment.

I'm not very good at living in the moment, so I worry a lot about the future. Do you worry about taking care of me? Yeah, I worry about taking care of you. Sure. What's going to be the hardest part? I think the hardest part is going to be the loss of the relationship. Has Emily told you this before? No, I don't think so. As you can see, caregivers suffer as much as patients. For months, Amy Johnson kept Mark at

home, even as she mothered four small children and held a full-time job. But his symptoms got worse and worse. When did it become clear to you that you had to put him in a facility? I went to an appointment with a psychiatric nurse practitioner. And she said, I think it's time for you to look for a different place. Because now when he thinks of something, the part of his brain that tells him that's a bad idea doesn't work anymore. When we met him, Mark Johnson was in an assisted living facility

about an hour away from home. He had gained nearly 100 pounds due to compulsive eating. Amy has since moved him to another facility where he needs one-on-one care. Amy says it's costing her $13,000 a month. Out of pocket? Out of pocket. He would be devastated to know that that's where his retirement savings are going and that they're not going to his family. Crippling costs are common for FTD families, and it's often tough to find a facility to care for patients like Mark Johnson. The assisted living industry is not set up for 6'3", 40-year-olds.

How's it going? This is Bill. How are you? Very nice to meet you. Amy visits Mark as often as she can and invited us to come along one afternoon. He told us he'd just like to go home. Do you think you need help? No. So do you understand why you're here? No.

Think you'd be okay at home? Yeah. Yeah. I think Amy thinks, I don't want to put words in her mouth, but I think she thinks this is the best place for you right now. Okay. After another minute, Mark said, all right, see ya, and we left him. Big hug. Okay.

It's clearly painful for Amy to see what FTD has done to her husband and to know what it will do. They gave him two to five years to live. Two to five years? Two to five years. So how are to five years? Two to five years. So how are you doing now? It depends on the day. I miss him a lot.

Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping, history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more.

The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck. Available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Temperatures in the Arctic continue to warm more than twice as fast as the rest of the world. That's according to the U.S. government's latest climate report. The past six years in the Arctic have been the warmest there since records began in 1900. Decades ago, an eccentric Russian geophysicist warned that frozen soil, called permafrost, contained enough greenhouse gas itself to pose a threat to the climate if it ever melted. As we first reported last March, science scoffed at Sergei Zimov's warning.

But now that the permafrost is collapsing, the world is listening. We traveled to the Siberian Arctic to meet Zimov, who has devised a scheme to save the world in a place that he named for the last ice age, Pleistocene Park. Our trip took three days, and our final leg in an adventure of geoscience was on an aeronautical fossil, a Soviet-era Antonov. We approached a Siberia we had never seen in our imaginations, a forest touching the horizon in a land sequined with lakes. This was far north even by a Siberian compass, above the Arctic Circle, where the Colima

River fills the East Siberian Sea. Fifteen time zones from New York, we found the aspiring ghost town of Chersky, a trading port. In Soviet times, Chersky was gutted by the fall of communism, losing 80% of its residents. There's not much reason to visit unless, like many scientists today, you're beating a path to the Northeast Scientific Station to meet its founder, 63-year-old Sergei Zimov. Hello. Hello. I'm Scott. I'm Sergei. Nice-year-old Sergei Zimov. Hello. Hello. I'm Scott.

I'm Sergei. Nice to see you, Sergei. He welcomed us in summer, when fireweed enjoys a few weeks of liberation. But 40 Siberian winters remained indelible on Zimov's face, the price of solitude for a geophysicist who longed to be remote from his communist bosses. When people hear the word Siberia, they think about exile, but it sounds to me like exile's exactly what you had in mind. Yes, only one problem, so long winter. The winter's long. Winters are long as ever, but not as cold. This ground was once so icy, humankind named it permafrost.

But in the 1990s, Zimov noticed it wasn't so permanent. Frozen ground. Do you hear? Yep. It's roof of permafrost. He can remember when his shovel wouldn't bite the frozen surface. But now he's down more than six feet. In the past, all our soil, which was melted in summer, freeze everywhere totally, and it's happened usually in November, December.

Now, in all winter, it did not freeze. What does that tell you? It means permafrost is melt. What does that tell you? This is a warning to the world because organic matter in the permafrost, plants and animals, has been frozen for hundreds of thousands of years. As it thaws, microbes consume that organic matter and release carbon dioxide and methane, greenhouse gases, which contribute to a warmer climate. We just pulled this up out of the hole, and it's burning my fingers it's so cold. Yes, soil with water, and water is ice. In five minutes, it will be melt.

Years ago, Zimov calculated there is enough carbon in permafrost to threaten the world. But big science gave that idea a cold shoulder, maybe in part because of Zimov himself. He endures Siberian winters when most Russians head south. He enjoys a refreshing vodka from time to time, smokes like a Soviet steel mill, and often just lies down to think. I sometimes describe him as somewhere between a madman and a genius. Max Holmes is a leading climate scientist and deputy director of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts. He told us Zimoff's key discovery was that Siberian permafrost held far more carbon than anyone knew.

When Zimoff made this observation, he couldn't get his papers published in scientific journals. It can take a while to get papers published that fly in the face of conventional wisdom. But science warmed to Zimoff's theory, and now he's published dozens of papers in science journals. Max Holmes has made several visits to Zemoff's station. The estimates of how much carbon locked up in permafrost keep going up, and most of us were probably thinking about the upper meter. The upper three feet or so of the soil. Yeah, the upper three feet, that's right. If you go down much deeper than that, the carbon content's very low. But what's special about this area where Zemoff is,

the carbon content of the permafrost extends to much greater depths. So consequently, there's an awful lot of carbon that's locked up there. Scientists estimate there is more greenhouse gas in permafrost than in all of the world's remaining oil, natural gas, and coal. There's no consensus about how much of it could be released. How far below the surface are we right now? Right now we are about 10 meters. So about 30 feet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ten times deeper than originally thought, we found the remains of Ice Age plants and microbes. Let's see if we can take some samples.

With Zimov's chief collaborator, his son, Nikita. It's a ticking carbon bomb, as it's called. A carbon bomb. Yeah. Nikita Zimov grew up here with his father and sensibly moved south for college, leaving behind the old man in the river. But Nikita's plan to be a mathematician melted away when Sergei asked his son to return to see what he had seen.

A few hours from the research station, there's a vast subsidence of permafrost, sort of a rolling landslide called Duvani Yar. Geology is a slow science, but here it's almost a spectator sport. The bones of extinct woolly mammoths are thawing after more than 12,000 years. The collapse of frozen Earth is happening in much of the Arctic, including Alaska. 25 percent of the northern hemisphere is permafrost. The Zemoffs have a theory, many would say a crazy idea, for diffusing the carbon bomb. They want to cool the permafrost by returning part of Siberia to the Ice Age,

or at least what it looked like in those days, known as the Pleistocene era. If we were standing on this hill in the Pleistocene era, what would we see? No any trees. It looks this place, and also lions. Lions? Yes, the main predator was lions here. Sergei Zimov told us when man became the main predator, the woolly mammoth and other large grazers were hunted to extinction. Forest replaced grasslands, and that made Siberia vulnerable to a warming climate, because trees trap more heat than grass, and winter temperatures of 40 below

can't freeze the permafrost if there are no herds of animals to trample the insulating snow. So this is what you use instead of a mammoth? Yeah. As a demonstration project they call Pleistocene Park, Nikita Zimov is knocking down trees over 54 square miles and restocking the big grazers. Zimoff's believe returning the land to its Ice Age appearance will cool the permafrost even in a warming world. You're trying to bring the animals back now. How can you do that? Physically, I mean, or morally?

Or financially? All three, but let's start with physically. You need what? Hundreds of thousands, millions of these animals? You need's start with physically. You need what? Hundreds of thousands? Millions of these animals? You need to start with something. Second, you need to prove people that the concept works. And to prove that concept works, for many things, you don't need millions of animals. You brought up the moral issue of bringing the animals in here.

What do you mean by that? I mean, some people say you're playing God. You know, I think it's not me playing God. It was our ancestors who was playing God 15,000 years ago. Humans came and they dropped the number of animals worldwide. And we are just trying to get this back. This is where the Zemoff's experiment gets crazier. What they need is the greatest tree crusher of the last 20,000 years, and they are surrounded with evidence of the once abundant woolly mammoth. That's amazing. It's young female.

Young female mammoth. This one is at least 20, 25 pounds. Do you need the woolly mammoth to bring all of this back in the park? It's like, do you need your right arm to leave and do your job? No, you don't need it, but with your arm, you will do it better. So same with mammoths. Today, one place you might get a woolly mammoth is in Boston, Massachusetts, specifically in the lab of Harvard geneticist George Church. Sergei is hoping that you're going to deliver a mammoth to him. Can you do that?

I think he's hoping that we will deliver an animal that is very similar to the ones that used to roam there. We need cold-resistant elephants. That's what he would like. Church is another scientist who's made the trek to Zimov's world. He returned to his renowned genetics lab with DNA from mammoth bones. If you look at the 23 genomes of the elephants, there's lots of evidence of lots of interbreeding all over the place among the different so-called species. So in a way, we're just recreating a hybrid that could easily have existed. When do you imagine you might be able to pull up a truck

and deliver this creature to Pleistocene Park? I would say that probably in five years we'll know whether we can get this to work for mice and maybe pigs and elephants. And then if we can get embryos to grow in the laboratory all the way to term, then it's probably a decade. The Zemoffs have not convinced everyone in climate science. Critics say they lack long-term temperature records of the permafrost, and their work is restricted to a relatively small area. You know, to the untrained eye, someone could come away from a meeting with Sergei

thinking that he's a crackpot. Yeah, that's right. I mean, he kind of plays the part. But as a climate scientist, how do you evaluate him? I think he's usually right. Certainly, has controversial ideas and a lot of them I think end up being supported over time. What do you think of his concept of Pleistocene Park? Fascinating theory. I'm fascinated by the science that can be done to figure out if it's correct. I'm glad he's pursuing this. We need to think about solutions. The Zimoffs have little funding for their big idea. The government donated the land,

and their income flows from the rent that they charge visiting scientists for the research station. Theirs is science on a shoestring with a very long timeline. Sergei, you've devoted your life to this, but I wonder why you thought it was important that Nikita devote his life to this. Why it's important? Our experiment, it's a long time experiment. Decades, decades. It'll take decades? Yes. And it's also, you think about my grand-grandchildren. They have some intriguing results in the early days of Pleistocene Park.

Data show the permafrost is becoming colder where heat-trapping trees have been cut down. It's a little more weight on the genius side of the madman scale, and perhaps early evidence that resurrecting the future of the world may depend on burying Siberia's past. New animals have arrived at the park since our story first aired last March. Not mammoths, but a dozen bison from Denmark. It took Nikita Zimov and his crew more than a month to bring them by land and river to their new home. While you may not have heard of the author John Green, be assured that the teenagers in your life have. He's America's answer to J.K. Rowling with his mega bestsellers spawning blockbuster movies. Green has become wildly popular thanks largely to his loyal teenage

audience. As we first reported back in 2018, Green is also the rare literary talent who doubles as a podcaster and a YouTube star. His success stems from his intuitive understanding of adolescents, his ability to meet them on their level and on their devices. To those who consider today's teens a disaffected tribe, rarely glancing up on their phones and video games, John Green offers a counter-narrative. Let's talk about teenagers. 60 Minutes core audience, I understand. Well, you know. You write a lot about teenagers. Yeah. Why this cohort?

They're doing so many things for the first time, and there's an intensity to that. You know, there's an intensity to falling in love for the first time. And also there's an intensity to asking the big questions about life and meaning that just isn't matched anywhere else. You've said before that adults underestimate teenagers. Well, I think sometimes teenagers maybe don't have the language to talk to us in ways that seem compelling to us, and maybe that makes it easy for us to dismiss them or think of them as less intellectually curious or intellectually sophisticated than we are,

but I don't think that's true at all. I love the book. It's amazing. Oh, thank you so much. John Green's books in the YA, or young adult genre, dominate bestseller lists. And while the stories take place in the U.S., This is the Swedish cover of the Falkner story. they echo worldwide, having been translated into 55 languages. Lithuanian, Slovenian, Croatian.

It's really wonderful to have your books travel to places you've never been. I mean, it's a weird but really beautiful experience. His most famous book, The Fault in Our Stars, was a bestseller for more than three years. It's down to you, Hazel Grace. And adapted to a hit film in 2014 that grossed more than $300 million. I guess this water was the star-crossed love of my life. Tinged with tragedy, the story follows two teenagers with cancer who fall in love. I love you so much.

Heavy and heady stuff for an adolescent audience. The subjects you deal with are quite weighty. Death and suicide and cancer. A lot of teenagers haven't had these experiences per se, but these books resonate with them. How is that? Maybe lots of teenagers haven't had these particular experiences, but I do think they know of loss and they know of grief

and they know of pain. Maybe the particulars of an experience aren't universal, but the feelings are. Okay, I'm going to need you to hit this button. One reason he connects so well with teenagers, at age 41, Green is still a kid at heart. I love that you're just staying in that corner. His youthful spirit drives more than book sales.

It made him a YouTube star. Hi there, this is John Green. And I'm Hank Green, and we are the Vlogbrothers on YouTube. In 2007, the early days of YouTube, John Green and his kid brother Hank began sharing videos as a way to stay in touch with each other. Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday. In short order, and in lockstep with the growth of YouTube, the Greens' videos amassed a huge

audience, now nearly a billion total views strong. This online video platform, in turn, has fueled John Green's readership. They play off each other. Yeah, in a way, they're different sides of the same coin, right? Because what interests me really is the idea of connecting with a viewer or with a reader without having to, like, actually talk to them and look at them and all of that. This preference, Green said, is the legacy of his own socially awkward adolescence.

Who do you envision are your readers? I don't envision a reader. You don't? I think in some ways I'm writing back to my high school self to try to communicate things to him, to try to offer him some kind of comfort or consolation. Who was that guy? I had a difficult time in high school. I wasn't a very good student and I had a lot of self-destructive impulses and I felt scared all the time. What were you scared of? The short answer is everything. He explores those fears in his most recent book, Turtles All the Way Down, a bestseller for 50 straight weeks since it debuted at number one.

Its theme, obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD, based on Green's own. For this book, he obeyed that time-honored rule of the craft, write what you know. I wanted to try to give people a glimpse of what it is. I wanted to try to put them, you know, at least a little bit inside of that experience. You use the word thought spiral. What does that mean? The thing about a spiral is that it goes on forever, right? Like, if you zoom in on the spiral, it can keep tightening forever. And that,

for me, is the nature of obsessive thought, that it's this inwardly turning spiral that never actually has an endpoint. So it might be, I'm eating a salad, and it suddenly occurs to me that somebody might have bled into this salad. Now, they probably didn't. This is what you're thinking. But this is what I'm thinking. And instead of being able to move on to a second thought, that thought just expands and expands and expands and expands. And then I use compulsive behaviors to try to manage the worry and the overwhelmedness that that thought causes me. So how do you get out of this coil? How do you break this infinity? I have a few strategies. I exercise. That's probably the biggest thing.

You dashed to Bloomington last night. Exercise is pretty magical in my life. I don't enjoy it. I don't relish the thought of going for a run, but it is very helpful because I can't think. I do feel lucky to have some distance from it sometimes. John Green lives in Indianapolis, where his life comes short on stress, long on anonymity. It is very funny. He and his wife, Sarah Urist Green, a curator and online art educator, are parents of a son age 8 and daughter 5.

Sarah began reading his manuscripts when they started dating 14 years ago. And I was really nervous because I really liked John, and I knew that if the book was bad, it wasn't going to work. The relationship wasn't going to work. The relationship wasn't going to work. Not the book wasn't going to work. No, no, no. The book might have worked or not,

but I couldn't be dishonest about that. And if I didn't like it, no. The book might have worked or not, but I couldn't be dishonest about that. And if I didn't like it, sorry. I mean, I'm super glad I didn't know that at the time. I don't think I'm going to handle that pressure. Unfiltered criticism. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. John, do you remember when you told Sarah about your OCD?

I don't know that it was an event so much as it was a process. And part of getting to know me was understanding that I had problems with anxiety. There was never a moment where John kind of sat me down and said, I have OCD. It was more of a gradual process where we were able to kind of put this label on it. And so I can't say that I would ever wish it to go away because it's a part of him. I'd like it to go away, for the record. So much so that in 2015,

fresh off the spectacular success of The Fault in Our Stars, Green decided to take a chance and go off the anti-anxiety medication he had been taking for years. Why did you do that? Well, because I bought into this old romantic lie that in order to write well, you need to sort of like be free from all of these mind-altering substances or whatever. And the consequences were really dire, unfortunately. And I'm lucky that they weren't catastrophic, but they were serious.

And coming out of that experience, I found myself wanting to try to give some sort of form or structure to this fear that I'd lived with for most of my life. Hello, and welcome to the annual Nerdfighter gathering. These John Green fans call themselves Nerdfighters, part of a community that now includes hundreds of thousands of members around the world. The Nerdfighters formed in response to Green misreading the name of this video game, Arrow Fighters. This game seems to be called Nerdfighters. That's my favorite kind of fighters. What's a Nerdfighter? A Nerdfighter is a person who fights for nerds.

Not against nerds. No. These are empowered nerds. Yeah, obviously we're pro-nerd. Really what it's about is being enthusiastic. Being nerdy is really about how you approach what you love. Unabashedly. Yeah. All five of you, proud, unapologetic nerds. Oh, yeah. We take the name of pride. We met these nerd fighters last June. They were attending the 9th Annual VidCon, a YouTube conference John and Hank Green created to help online video fans and creators meet in person. These five told us they were especially grateful to John Green for writing about his anxiety in Turtles All the Way Down.

It's reassuring, for sure. For someone who does experience anxiety, he articulates things I could never articulate before, which both makes me feel seen, but also helps me understand and feel better from different things. Yeah, there's this metaphor of a spiral in the book. That was one of the most useful things I've ever come across in describing my own anxiety, and we use it in the house all the time. And being around this community of people that was so loving really made me grow to be a better person than I would have without it.

I am a homeschooled child. This was her, Presley Alexander, when she was just 7 years old and she first came into the John Green orbit. You are my favorite teachers. Not by reading one of his books, but by watching him on Crash Course. Hi there, my name is John Green. This is Crash Course World History. The educational YouTube series that he started with his brother Hank in their manic signature style. Writing and the ability to read it are so-called markers of civilization.

I mean, I don't want to get all liberal artsy on you, but I do want to... The videos offer lessons in the humanities and sciences. Our nervous system is divided into two main networks that work in harmony. The central nervous system... With more than 8 million subscribers, they're now offered as part of the curriculum in classrooms around the country. On account of his popularity across platforms, Green cuts a figure that he never would have imagined when he was a teenager,

something akin to a rock star. I want to know what your high school self would have thought if they saw you now. My high school self would be very, very happy and excited. I'm embarrassed to admit. I wish that weren't the case. That's a great way to put it. I'm embarrassed to admit. I wish that weren't the case. That's a great way to put it. I agree completely. Hi. The Green brothers are exceptionally supportive of each other.

I've got a costume change ready. Especially when it comes to John's OCD, described so vividly in his latest book. Turtles all the way down. What was it like for you to read that? It did help me understand John better. But in general, be more empathetic toward people who deal with anxiety and OCD. What did you learn about him? The extent to which sometimes he is at the mercy of his own mind. But did it cause you to re-examine or reassess moments in your childhood? Yeah, I mean, there have definitely been times when John had a less stable life where I think, like, the family was worried about him.

With good reason. Hello! Hi, everybody! Lately, there's a lot less to worry about. How are you? With his multimedia, multiillion-dollar empire, John Green is using his pen, his keyboard, and his video camera to normalize teenage social awkwardness and also to destigmatize mental illness. You've said that it's important for young people to be able to see

successful, productive adults challenged by mental illness. Yeah. Expand on that. Well, I have a really wonderful life. I have a really rich, fulfilling life. I also have a pretty serious chronic mental health problem. And those aren't mutually exclusive. And the truth is that lots of people have chronic mental health problems

and still have good lives. I'm Scott Pelley. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.