Wild Card with Rachel Martin - John Green still has hope

Episode Date: March 27, 2025

John Green keeps busy – from authoring blockbuster young adult novels like "The Fault in Our Stars," to running a YouTube empire with his brother Hank, to publishing his latest nonfiction book, "Everything Is Tuberculosis." His projects share one key goal: to make the world "suck less." John talks to Rachel about how he battles despair and why he's unconcerned with the question of God's existence. To listen sponsor-free, access bonus episodes and support the show, sign up for Wild Card+ at plus.npr.org/wildcardSee pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Do you spend more time in your head or in the world? It's not a particularly close competition there, Rachel. I spend more time in my head by a very wide margin. What's the mic in there? Pretty intense, to be honest with you. A little overwhelming sometimes. I'm Rachel Martin, and this is Wildcard. The game where cards control the conversation.

Each week, my guest answers questions about their life. Questions pulled from a deck of cards. They're allowed to skip one question. And to flip one question back on me. My guest this week is author and YouTube star John Green. The idea that I can write a story and that story is going to live in someone else's mind, and they're going to bring, if they're generous, they're going to bring their deepest selves to that story. That is genuine magic to me.

Different people have different reference points for John Green. He is most famous as the Y.A. author who wrote the massively popular book, The Fault in Our Stars. But then there are the millions of people who know and love him from his YouTube channels, especially vlog brothers and crash course, which he does with his brother Hank. His latest project is another book, but it's way different from his coming-of-age stories. It's titled, Everything is Tuberculosis, and it is, as advertised, a non-fiction account of the most deadly disease on the planet, and how simple it would be to wipe out if societies just made it a priority.

But this book makes sense coming from John Green, because everything he creates, books, essays, YouTube shows, they are all designed to make us engage with the broader world and to care about other people. John Green, welcome to Wildcard. Oh my gosh, thank you so much for having me. So we're just going to get going. Let's do it.

You feel good? I feel great. Okay, let's go. Let's do it. Round one, the memory's round. First three cards, one, two, or three. I'm going to go with two. Two.

What's something you're going to do? Your parents taught you to love? You know, the only way I can make my parents proud of me is not worldly success, but engaging in the world in a loving, contributive way. So my parents were both, they both worked at nonprofit organizations. My dad worked for the Nature Conservancy for many years. And my mom was a community activist, an organizer in Orlando, Florida. And, you know, we grew up being taught that the way that you live in the world is, has to be,

you have to contribute something. My parents, like, never, I never feel like they're proud of me when I win an award or, and my book hits the bestseller list or any of that stuff. Like, what makes them proud of me is when, like, this hospital that my wife and I and our community helped fund called the Maternal. Center of Excellence is going to open next year. And when I told my parents that, they were like, I'm very proud of you. That's what makes them proud. So I think the thing that they taught me to love more than anything was, for lack of a better term, and I realize this sounds a little cheesy,

but humanity. They taught me to be in favor of humanity, to think that humanity maybe isn't good news now, but might be good news, like we can be good news. The potential, yeah. Yeah, that there's some potential for us. So that's the first thing that comes to mind in terms of like what they taught me to love is people. That's big. Where's your hospital? It's in the Kono district in Sierra Leone in a city called Coitou Town. And it's not my hospital, to be clear.

It's the Sierra Leone's People's Hospital. It's owned by the government and owned by the people through their government. So I'm very proud to have played a little bit of a role in it, though. And we're going to get to that hospital and your time in Sierra Leone. what inspired in the form of this book and so much more. But thank you for that answer. Okay. Next three.

One, two, or three. I'm going to go three this time. Three. Okay. What was your form of rebelling as a teenager? You started laughing before I even got the sentence out, John. Well, it's funny that this refers to form singular. I don't want to limit you.

By all means. If there were multiple forms of the rebellion, please. I was an unbearable teenager. I'm going to turn this one on to you. I'm making you answer this one so I can think about what I'm willing to say on this show and what I'm not willing to say. That's part of it. That's totally part of it, right? Like there's the truth and then there's what's the truth that I can share for public consumption? Okay, my form of rebelling.

So I was a good kid. Yeah. And I very much wanted my parents' approval. I was not the rule breaker of the family. But, you know, I did something almost more cruel. The only anecdote that's coming to mind is it was around Christmas. And I was in our front hall closet. And I was kind of notorious for snooping around looking for Christmas presents.

And I saw at the top shelf, tucked back, were, three Velcro wallets. And one of them was Garfield, I don't know, Spider-Man maybe. And then there was a Michael Jackson wallet and like his face was just on it. And I like knew. I'm like, mom picked out this Michael Jackson wallet for me. And I hate Michael Jackson. And how could she do this? Like she didn't know me or something. And so I just walked around the house talking about how much I hated Michael Jackson. Like, what? a spoiled little brat. That's what came to mind. So I also had very loving parents, grew up in a very communicative household. It was very difficult to rebel against my parents, but I found many ways

to do it anyway. You persevered John Green. I persevered. I believed in myself. Since you told a story about how unbearable you could be as a teenager, I'll tell one about me. I was smoking on my parents' back porch. I went to boarding school when I was in high school, but I was home for the and I was smoking on my parents' back porch. And my mother came outside and said, you can't smoke out here. Like, you can't smoke cigarettes. You're a child. And I said, what are you going to do?

The contempt. The contempt. The utter contempt for authority in all its forms. I was a tough kid, and yet I had parents and teachers who refused to let me go. Like, they refused to stop believing in me. And that made all the difference. Like, no matter how unbearable I was in class, Many of my teachers were still like, yeah, but I believe in you.

Huh. And that made a huge difference in my life. Were you just not interested in school? You were curious about the things that were being put to? I was extremely, I was extremely curious. I was a very poor student, but I was intellectually engaged. So I read all of the books for English class. I just didn't read them when I was supposed to.

I would read them after I was supposed to or I would read them. I was just, I think I desperately, I, I, I didn't. desperately wanted attention. I desperately wanted to be special. I wanted to be acknowledged as special. And the thing that terrified me most deeply was the thought that I maybe didn't have that much potential. Like, I wanted to not live up to my potential because that meant that I had potential. And I was deeply terrified as a kid that I wasn't special, that I didn't have any kind of extraordinary. abilities. That was my biggest fear. And so... Right, because if you don't try, then you don't fail. Exactly. And so I didn't try and I didn't fail, except it turns out that you do fail if you don't try, both literally and figuratively. And it was only when I was a senior in high school that I finally figured out that, like, learning is a privilege. It's an incredible privilege to be able to better contextualize yourself and your place in the universe is, it's not something that we do to get a

piece of paper that says we can be an adult now. It's something we do because that's the privilege of a lifetime to be able to understand the world around us. That's what we're here to do, I believe. I'm so grateful to those teachers for not giving up on me. Yeah. Okay. This is the last one in this round. Okay. One, two, or three. I'm going to go two again. Two. Were you obsessed with a particular cosmic question as a kid? Oh, yeah. A bunch of them. But yeah, I really was. Give me one. Not everybody says yes. I was a very cosmically minded child.

I was very upset about the nature of the universe. What was upsetting? Well, dude, I don't know if you've heard. But in about a billion years, the oceans are going to boil because the earth is going to become so hot. So that is upsetting. And then the sun is going to consume the Earth and all that we were and thought and did will be part of the sun. This was vexing you from a young age? Yeah, I was in a planetarium when I found out about it.

I remember it very vividly at the Orlando Science Center. I was in a planetarium. And they were like, so listen, yeah, we're good for like a few hundred million years. And back then, I thought that humanity was just inevitably going to go on. You know, I didn't have any apocalyptic anxieties, unlike now. when I got them by the boatload. I didn't have any apocalyptic anxieties back then. I just thought of humanity as being this sort of semi-permanent phenomenon.

And I remember being in this planetarium, and no one else was freaking out about the fact that the oceans were going to boil and that life was going to be completely impossible and that the Earth would become like Mars. I just, I was very upset about it. And so from a very young age, I've been concerned with what I now know as humanity's temporal range. Like every species has a temporal range. Like elephants have been here for about three million years. We've been here for about 300,000. There's a reptile species I'm obsessed

with called Tuatara that have been here for 250 million years. And I've been obsessed with the question of like when this is going to end and what it's ending means for me and for everyone I love and for the question of eternity. I was always very concerned about the question of eternity. like where what happens with us not not in terms of like heaven and hell but like what happens with the memory of us with all the work that we did with all the stuff that we figured out yeah um what does it mean that like we we worked so hard to figure out what's keeping the stars apart and someday that knowledge will be consumed alongside everything else we ever did or thought how old were you like 10 yeah yeah it was a real it was a real it was a real it was a real

A real bummer. Two boys. And my eldest, who's 12, is going through some of the same stuff. Yeah. And I was a really religious kid. And so I had a framework that made sense. And so that's where I leaned on to answer those questions. Right.

And my kid doesn't have that. And so I'm seeing him have these kinds of existential questions at this very young age, especially what you said about where does the knowledge go? Where does the memory go? or does our collective understanding go and to just try to help him be okay with the not knowing of it all?

Yeah, I think what I would say to your son and what I would say to my childhood self is it is a bummer. I don't want to take anything away from the size of the bummer that this is all temporary. But also the fact that it's temporary means that it really matters.

It really, we really have an obligation to each other and that obligation isn't forever. It's for now. The obligation is to this moment. We live in this moment of not yet. And as long as we're in that moment of not yet, we have to fight for each other. Was there, how did you get out of that young paralysis, that young mental cosmic paralysis? Or you just learn to better manage it. Yeah, I still feel it sometimes, to be honest with you, different versions of it. I mean, I think now it takes mostly, takes the form of like how do we allow such injustice in the world how do we allow such profound unfairness and inequity and just go on in the face of it as if it's not um overwhelming and and consuming that's how it that's the form it takes now because i don't feel as much existential dread i mean to be honest i don't feel that much existential dread because I think it's okay that we're going to end.

I don't think it's bad news. We live in a universe where everything that we've ever observed ends. That has to be okay. That's the way it is. Okay, so before we start round two, I want to push back from the game for a minute and talk about your new book. It is called Everything is Tuberculosis. And you read this is a beautiful book.

And the image I had upon completing it is you, like, shouting, you know, in like a shopping mall. Like, you know, there's an auntie Ann's pretzel shop here and then an Orange Julius and John Green's in the middle going like, doesn't everyone get that tuberculosis is awful and it can be fixed and we're not doing it? Is that the, the emotion behind why you focused on this topic? Yes. In another world, I would be one of those like preachers outside the mall with a little amplifier next to me, and I'd be like, tuberculosis is the world's deadliest infectious disease, and we know how to cure it. How are we letting this happen? Before you go into the mall, please consider what it means that we're letting this happen.

Like, how do we keep letting, how have we let this happen for 70 years? I mean, the disease has been curable since the 1950s, and since it became curable, we've allowed over 150 million people to die of it. That is unfathomable to me. It's beyond outrageous. So this is the question you're getting all the time, but still, it needs to be asked. How did the author of The Fault in Our Stars become myopically obsessed with tuberculosis? Well, I mean, to be totally honest with you, I think the Fault and our Stars and the success of that book bought me a certain amount of creative freedom and the freedom to follow my interest and my passion. and I am as surprised as anyone that the place where that took me was tuberculosis. But in 2019, when my wife and I were in Sierra Leone to learn about the maternal health care system there,

on the last day of our trip, we were asked by some doctors to visit a tuberculosis hospital. And I was like, a tuberculosis hospital. Like, is that still a thing? Yeah. I considered myself pretty well versed in the world of health, but I would never have guessed that tuberculosis was still the deadliest infectious disease in the world. And so we visited this TV. hospital and when we got there I met this kid whose name was Henry which is also my son's name

and this kid looked to be about the same age as my son who was nine then and Henry started walking me all around the hospital he took me to the laboratory he took me to the wards where I saw patients who were sicker than you know anything any anything I've ever seen I used to work in a children's hospital and I still had no frame of reference for how sick these folks were and then eventually took me back to the doctors and nurses who were meeting to discuss cases they were concerned about, and they sort of shooed him away very lovingly. And I said, whose kid is that? Is that one of your kids? And they said, no, he's a patient, and he's one of the patients we're really concerned about. And it turned out Henry wasn't nine. He was 17. He was just so emaciated by malnutrition in TB that he looked much younger.

And it was really, Henry's story is the reason I'm obsessed with tuberculosis. Henry is the reason the book exists. So, I mean, you could have witnessed that and devoted more of your time, more of your money, your energy, and your wife on that issue. But why did you decide that it's where you wanted to put your creative focus and write a book about it? Well, when I reunited with Henry four years later and we became friends, so he eventually survived tuberculosis. He almost died. He was essentially on his deathbed when he finally got access to the kind of personalized care

that you or I would expect and deserve. He finally got access to that care. As a result, he was cured of his TB. He lived. He's still here with us today. He's a junior at the University of Sierra Leone. And when we met again and became friends,

he asked me to share his story. He wanted me to share his story. And I had also spent the last four years becoming obsessed with TB, trying to learn about TB when I got home from that first trip. And so it was a mix of that. It was a mix of Henry wanting me to tell the story and me wanting to tell the story. And frankly, some support from my publisher.

You would think that my publisher would be like, this sounds like departure and not in a good way. But actually, they were very supportive. They were like, yeah, let's do it. Is it just about making it a priority? Like, why does tuberculosis still kill so many people in 2025? I mean, the short answer to that question is us, you know, at this point in the 21st century, as I argue in the book, you can't really say that tuberculosis is caused by a bacteria because we know how to kill the bacteria. Tuberculosis is caused by us, by human choice, by human-built

systems that exclude some people and say that some people's lives are less valuable than others, you know? I mean, it would cost about $25 billion a year to eradicate TB globally. And that's a lot of money, but it's also not a lot of money. Like, my brother had cancer a couple years ago, and he's fine now. But when he had cancer, not once did anyone say, like, I'm not sure if this is cost effective. It costs about 150 times more to cure my brother's cancer than it costs to cure Henry's tuberculosis. And yet, Henry was told over and over again, this just isn't cost effective. We don't have access to the medicines. It doesn't make sense to treat people like you. And my brother never heard that.

Yeah. I mean, the morality. of that is awful, like choosing one life over another life. Yeah, and it's very difficult to reconcile with what we know to be true, which is that all human lives have equal value. Yeah. Congratulations on the book. It's really, really wonderful. Everyone should read it.

Thank you. You feel ready for more game? Yeah, let's do it. Let's go. Round two. This is insights, insights. Okay, three cards in my hand. One, two or three.

Let's go one. One. Do you spend more time in your head or in the world? It's not a particularly close competition there, Rachel. Somehow I thought you were going to say that. Say your answer. I spend more time in my head by a very wide margin. What's it like in there?

Pretty intense, to be honest with you. A little overwhelming sometimes. But I almost can't say what it's like in there. It's like trying to describe the ocean to somebody who's never seen it. You know, like it's what did Kafka say that a book can be the axe that breaks the frozen sea within? I'm always trying to break that frozen sea within. There's always rooms inside of my mind that I've never visited or I don't know how to get to. And that's a lot of why I make creative work is because it's a chance to visit those rooms somehow, a chance to feel my understanding of my own self-expand in some ways.

But I spend a lot of time in my head and not all of it is healthy, if I'm honest with you. You've been open about that, about talking about your OCD. Yeah, I have pretty severe OCD. And so it's well treated and I work really hard to treat my chronic illness like a chronic illness. it is a chronic illness and it is something I live with every day. And so sometimes what's in my head is just like a flurry of worries. There's this great Edna St. Vincent Malay poem I think about all the time where she says, I think she's writing about depression more than obsessive thoughts, but I think it's the perfect summary of obsessive thoughts. She says, she's writing about a snowstorm,

and she says three flakes, then four appear, then many more. And it's like that with my worries sometimes where it's like you just have a worry that kind of crosses crosses across your bow and then another one and then another one and then many more and it becomes like a snowstorm just absolutely blinding impossible to see anything other than the fear and that's a really difficult really scary experience because then it feels like you're not in control of your own thoughts like you're not the captain of the ship of yourself you're just along for the rise and somebody else is steering the ship. And that's quite a scary thing to think about your own self.

You wrote about this very intimately, personally, in the novel Turtles all the way down. What was it like to ascribe language to things that you didn't think you could find words for? I mean, was it just actually very difficult to write the book? Because you couldn't find language to describe what was happening in your head. That's exactly what it was like. was like trying to find language for these deeply abstract experiences, you know, trying to find some kind of form or direct expression for something I've only ever felt as feeling. And in some ways, that was extremely difficult, but in other ways it was extremely fulfilling. And hearing from people

who feel like, who also have OCD or other mental health conditions associated with spiraling thoughts, hearing from them that it might have given form or language to their own experience is one of the great things that's ever happened to me in my career. So it was hard. It was the hardest book to write that I've ever written for sure, but it was also really fulfilling and I felt like I was trying to bring to the surface what my experience of being alive has been for so long. Is there anything positive about it? Is there anything beneficial about it besides the fact that it is who you are?

Yeah, yeah, it is who I am. I mean, I find it to be mostly downsides, to be honest with you. Mostly bummers. And so it's hard to, of course, I don't know what I would be like without OCD. And so I can't imagine what it would be, but I'm sure I would be different in ways. I can't imagine now. Yeah. It is who you are.

Yeah. I like that way of saying about that. But there is an upside. But the upside is that it is who I am. I've never thought of that before. This is like a therapy session. Thank you. I have a person dear in my life who suffers from OCD.

And it has been instrumental, it has been helpful to learn more about it and to learn how, yes, it is, debilitating. It can be debilitating. But it is who this person is. Yeah. And this person is wonderful. And you're worthy of love. Yeah. You know, like, it's maybe the only thing we're worthy of, but like, you're worthy of love is exactly as who you are. And so the fact that this is who you are and this is part of who you are means that this is also worthy of love. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's so beautiful. I've never had that before. That's such a gift to me. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you for talking about it. Okay. Three more. One, two, or three. Has anyone ever made you pick? Someone did.

All right. Then I won't do that. I won't do that. I won't do it. I don't do it. I like that you're just like, I want to do something different. Yeah, I'm just like my high school self. I want to be a special little boy. Oh, you know who did it? Ira Glass did it. So you're in good company. Of course he did. Of course he did. Then pick one. Pick one. All right, fine.

I'll pick one. All right. It's kind of cheating. But see, then the game's not in control. And I like having the game in control, John. Three, three, three. Three. Okay.

My bad. I shouldn't have messed with the game. The game is its own thing. The game is like the third presence. Yes, exactly. The game is important and must be honored. That's right. What's a lesson you keep learning again and again?

Oh, what a great question. Give me a minute. Yeah, yeah. I keep learning again and again that hope is the right response to the human condition. And I have to learn this over and over again because despair is an incredibly powerful force in my life and something that I have to battle on an almost daily basis. so much of my brain tells me that there's no reason to get out of bed or do anything because nothing matters because the oceans are going to boil in a billion years because the world is going to end long before that for me and for everyone I love and probably for humanity itself and

people are so monstrous and capable of such horrific behavior toward each other and toward the world and that despair is so powerful because it tells this complete holistic story. It explains everything. Everything is the way it is because everything and everyone sucks. What an incredibly powerful way to look at the world. It just happens to not be true, right? Like, it happens to be a lot more complicated than that. The truth is much more complex than that. And so I have to remind myself of that almost every day. I have to relearn that lesson that, like, there is cause for hope. I actually, um, I don't have it with me because they made me take my phone away, but I keep in my wallet a little note that says,

the year you graduated from high school, 12 million children died under the age of five. Last year, fewer than five million did. That progress, which is real and which is felt in the lives of millions of human beings and the tens of millions who loved them, that progress was not natural. It was not inevitable. It did not happen because it was always going to happen. happened because millions and millions of people, hundreds of millions of people, maybe billions of people came together to make it happen, to make the world safer for children. We decided that we

were going to prioritize that. And when we prioritized it, we had tremendous success. And I keep that because I want to remind myself that this is the truth. Like that is an inalienable truth that we can make the world better for the most vulnerable among us. We just have to decide it's a priority. And so is cause for hope. There's always reason for hope because we have this incredible capacity to collaborate together, to make the world better together. And yet at the same time, we also have the capacity to make the world worse together. And it is so much easier to destroy progress than it is to build it. As we have lately found out, it is so much easier to destroy institutions than it is to build or maintain them. And I have to hold those competing ideas in my mind at the

same time, which is the hardest thing in the world for me, but also kind of the most important. What's the first rung on the ladder out of the pit? You know what I mean? Like when you wake up and it's there again and the darkness and the despair and the oceans and when you look for the evidence that people don't suck, what's the first step? See how we can love each other. Yeah. See how extraordinary the human capacity for compassion and sacrifices. I saw a video of the other day. This is going to sound dumb as hell and I apologize, but it really moved me. I saw a video of a, there was a sea turtle that was caught in between rocks and this guy scrambled down very dangerously and probably foolishly scrambled down these rocks toward the ocean and freed this sea

turtle. Because when we're close to suffering, when we are proximal to suffering, we are astonishingly generous. We are capable of tremendous sacrifice. We will take risks for each other. We will show our love for each other and for the life in this world in profound ways. And when we do not let ourselves become close to other people's suffering or the suffering of other animals, we are capable of absolute monstrosity. And so that's the first rung out for me is like, remind yourself that humans are capable of astonishing acts of compassion and sacrifice. Oh, baby sea turtle. I love a human saving a sea turtle. It gets me every time. I think I can't cry anymore because of the medications I'm on.

And then I see a human saving a sea turtle and I'm just a bundle of tears. Okay. You made it to our last round, John. All right. Beliefs. Sort of touched on some of this. So we're going to see how it comes up through these other cards. One, two, or three.

How about two? What's the most religious thing about you? Oh, wow. What a good question? I'm a pretty religious person. I don't go to church as much as I used to, but I was actually a student chaplain at a children's hospital before I became a writer, and I thought I was going to become a minister. I was enrolled in divinity school, but the process of being a chaplain was so devastating to me and so overwhelming to all my fancy ideas about why evil exists and why bad things happen to innocent people and all that stuff that I just couldn't pursue the ministry. I couldn't work from inside the church. It really... Because these were very sick kids.

Yeah, I mean, I was with a lot of kids as they died and with their families as they died. And that's impossible to make sense of. I mean, other people can make sense of it. And I'm very grateful to the people who can make sense of it and who can do that work in a long-term ongoing way. Whether it's being a chaplain or a social worker or being a nurse or doctor in a children's hospital, those are my absolute heroes. But that breaks a lot of people's faith in God or religious. Yeah. And it didn't for you.

Oh, it did. But it came back slowly and in pieces and different from the way that it started out. You know, like these days this will bother a lot of people who believe in God and also a lot of people who don't believe in God. Like these days I consider myself a religious person, but I don't spend a lot of time. worrying about the question of whether God is really real. Like whether God is real or a construct is just not that interesting to me. To me, the interesting questions are what does God want for me in the world? What does God expect from me and ask of me? And I can answer those questions or at least find paths toward answering them without having to grapple with whether that God is real and some kind of

real according to someone else's definition of real if that makes sense. Sort of. I mean, you're basically saying, I don't, it sounds like you're just saying, I'm not interested in debating the existence of God because his, her, their existence is real to you. So the end. Yeah. Or at least like, even if it, even if it's a kind of. It doesn't really matter to me that it's constructed. Whether we made God or not, God still feels real in my life. And I still look for answers in my faith tradition, which is Christianity, to try to answer those questions.

And you find not to be a useful sustaining framework for you? It's a helpful framework for me. Is that settled law, or is there anything about that? No, man. No. That's all subject to change. Ask me in three weeks. Very little is settled law with me. The only thing, you know, the only thing that's settled law, that's a really interesting question.

Like, what is settled law for you? Like, what are you not willing to move on? The only thing that's settled law for me is that I believe absolutely that every human being is worthy of loving and worthy of being loved and worthy of understanding and worthy of being understood. I believe that absolutely, that human lives have. enough value that every person deserves to be loved. Like so many, in so many ways, deserving is this terrible framework that we try to apply to all kinds of things where it clearly doesn't apply. Like, my brother didn't deserve to get cancer. He also doesn't deserve all of the, like, fame and wealth that has come his way. Deserving is just the wrong framework

through which to think about that stuff, but we all deserve love. I have nothing more to add to that. Three more cards. One, two, or three. Two. Two. Well, I think we already tackled this one, but I'll ask it. How often do you think about death? Yeah, occasionally. It's come up.

One time I was on, can I tell you a little behind-the-scenes story? One time I was on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and she asked me, why do you write so much of death. And I was like, are you kidding me? Like, are you not aware? Like, have you not heard the news? Have you not heard? Ha ha ha ha ha. Again. You're going to die. The York is too late. The sandwich board. Death is coming for all of us, Rachel. Death is coming. Universally. There's one person widely believed to escape it and we made him our God.

That's how big of a deal it is. Like, what do you mean? Why do you write so much about death? Like, what else are you going to write about? Because death is living. Yeah, it is there. It is omnipresent for me. It is, and so, yes, I think about it a lot.

And I dread it because I love being in this world. Like I said earlier, and this is true that I struggle against despair. I struggle all the time. I mean, I've lived with terrible, crippling depression in my life at times. And yet, I love being in this world. I love being here with you right now. I really do. I am so grateful to all the past me's who, like, fought and scrapped to make it possible for me to be alive today. Because I love being in the world. It is such a gift to me to be able to be alive, to be in. community with other people to love and be loved. It means so much to me. And that will be taken away. Like that will be taken away when I die. That is immensely sad to me. But like you said, death is also life. Death is also an inherent part of living. Everything dies, not just like us, but stars. I think like a hundred million stars are going to die today. An astronomer told me that once and I almost threw up.

Sorry. It was terrible. No, no. I mean, it's essential pain. It's bad news, man. I can't, I can't handle stars. I can handle me dying. I cannot handle a star dying.

That feels, that's too much. Yes, uber sad. Too unbearable. But yeah, death is a huge deal for me. I don't understand why it's not a huge deal for other people. I mean, it has centered a lot of the last few years of my life, too. Like, it's the same thing. I was talking to a dear friend who just recently lost his, lost his mom.

And it's like when you suffer a grief, it's the only thing you can think about. And again, you're walking around the world like, don't you know, she died. Yeah. Why are you all still walking around? And it's, you know, it can be all encompassing. Right. And at the same time, it is that same loss that makes you appreciate. the life that that happened.

Yeah. A writer I like said once that when someone you love dies, you live on planet, this person died, and everyone else lives on planet Earth. And it's so weird because like you're so sure that your world is the world. Like I remember my friend, the great writer Amy Cross-Rosenthal,

when she died, she was a really dear friend of mine. And when she died for months, every day I would wake up and I would be like, Amy's not here. What a weird situation. Yeah. Like the world is still here and Amy's not here. That doesn't make any sense.

It's crazy. Yeah. And yet, like, that is the world. That is the nature of the world. Everyone who's here will not be here in the fullness of time. Nope. I texted my brother once. I was in an airport and I texted my brother.

Do you ever think about the fact that, like, everyone, when you're in an airport, that everyone inside that airport will be gone in like a handful of decades? And he was like, no. I think I think about that all the time. Do you? Yeah, when I'm driving. Whenever I'm in a situation where a lot of people are passing me, like a crowd of people, I sort of get overwhelmed by their life and their death. But also, like, what a gift that we get to share this moment.

Yeah. Like, we won't share any other moment. This is the only moment we get to share. This is the only time we get to be alive. And I often feel really bad for young people because they've grown up. in such a difficult time. Like they've grown up amid a pandemic. They've grown up amid all of this political instability. They've grown up amid this technological revolution of the internet and all that stuff that we don't know what any of it means yet. And that's a very difficult time

to share. But it's the only time we get to share. And we have to find a way to share it as well as we can. Yeah. Good one. Okay. Three. These are the last three. Okay. One, two, or three. Three. What feels like magic to you? Telling Stories. I mean, telling stories is magic. The idea that I can write a story and that story is going to live in someone else's mind. And they're going to bring, if they're generous, they're going to bring their deepest selves to that story so that their reading of that story will be different from anyone else's reading. That is genuine magic to me. Like when someone tells me that they read the fault in our stars and they thought about their own person in their life who died too young. when someone tells me that they read turtles all the way down and thought about their own experiences of obsessive thoughts or their own life with OCD or whatever it is, it just means so much to me when people will bring their deepest selves to one of my stories that, you know, they can, they take a book that's maybe okay and they make it amazing and they make it amazing through their generosity. That's really magic to me. We end the show the same way every time.

with a trip in our memory time machine. All right, let's do it. Here we go. We're there. We're in it right now. So, John, pick one moment from your past. It is a moment you would not change anything about. It is just a moment you would like to linger in a little longer. What moment do you choose? I am 17 years old.

I am driving home from having seen angels in America, the great play with my friends from high school. We are packed into a car, and we are having one of those deep conversations that you know while you're having it is a conversation that you'll remember for the rest of your life. And I would just love to go back there and be with those people again, some of whom are gone now, and be with them. And be with them. and feel that feeling of being deeply woven with them. John Green, his newest book is called Everything is Tuberculosis. It was such a pleasure. Thank you.

Thank you. If you'd like that conversation, you should go back and check out my episode with author Anne Patchett. Both John Green and Anne had these really interesting ways of holding on to parts of the faith that they were raised in. and both of them left me just feeling better about the world. This episode was produced by Summer Tomod and edited by Dave Blanchard. It was mastered by Patrick Murray. Wildcard's executive producer is Yolanda Sangweni. Our theme music is by Romteen Arablewee.

You can reach out to us at Wildcard at npr.org. We're going to shuffle the deck and we will be back with more next week. Talk to you then.