How John Green Turned Celebrity into Obsessive Optimism

"The Fault in Our Stars" is one of the bestselling novels of the century. Why did its author just devote five years of his life to a staggering work of non-fiction about... tuberculosis? Because John Green became a super-fan of fourth-tier English football. He employed FIFA and Belichick-level tactics to build a compassionate community on YouTube. He understood the difference between enough and more than enough. And he never forgot to be awesome. • Order "Everything Is Tuberculosis" https://everythingistb.com/ • Subscribe to John Green's YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/vlogbrothers • Subscribe to Henry Reider's YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@Tuberculosis-l1jSurvivorHenry Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Onnit's Black Friday sale doesn't start until later this month, but listeners get in early. If you're new to Onnit, go to Onnit.com and use code PABLO for 30% off your first order starting today. If you've never tried Onnit, start with AlphaBrain. It's their daily nootropic built to support focus, memory, and mental clarity on days when you need to be locked in, whether that's powering through a tough workout or staying focused during back-to-back meetings. Get early access and save 30% off your first order at Onnit.com. That's O-N-N-I-T dot com. And use code PABLO. Some exclusions apply.

• 0:45Pablo Torre?

  This episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out is brought to you by McDonald's. The Quarter Pounder with Cheese with Medium Fries and a Drink is now $8. And look, I've chased down a lot of strange stories, but nothing quite like what's inside a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. It is 100% fresh beef cooked right when you order it, with no artificial flavors, colors, fillers, or preservatives in the beef. The onions are hand-topped by someone who knows the perfect amount by memory. Two slices of cheese and a star, and two pickles side by side. So every bite gets both. And every time one's ordered, a cowbell sound rings in the kitchen. That's the grill master's cue to put a fresh patty on the grill. My move?

• 1:28Pablo Torre?

  QPC, fries and a drink after a long day of recording. That is my happy place. The Quarter Pounder with Cheese with Fries and a Drink, now $8 for a limited time only, only at McDonald's. For a limited time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska, and California. And for delivery, fresh beef not available in Alaska and Hawaii. Offer not valid for delivery. This episode is brought to you by Apollo.io. A lot of the stories on this show start the same way. Something that looks pretty simple turns out to be a mess, once you look under the hood. Well, it's no different in the sales world. Your team has a tool for finding prospects, a different tool for reaching out to them, and a third for keeping track of it all.

• 2:13Pablo Torre?

  On paper, that's a system. In practice, it's a salesperson spending the better part of the day copying names from one tab into another, and not much of it actually selling. Apollo.io is a platform that helps sales teams find the right buyers and reach out to them. It brings prospecting, outreach and follow-up into one place instead of several separate tools. It's used by sales teams of all sizes, from small businesses to larger organizations, and it's built for teams who want less manual busywork and more time with buyers. If your marketing and sales teams are trying to work from the same view of the customer, it's worth a look. Sign up for free at Apollo.io. That's Apollo.io. Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

• 2:58Pablo Torre?

  I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  I'm on the back of the shorts, the liminal space between left thigh and buttock. That's my, uh, that's my chosen area. Why be on the front of the shirt when you can be on the back of the shorts?

• 3:11Pablo Torre?

  Right after this ad.

• 3:14Speaker 03

  You're listening to DraftKings Network.

• 3:30Pablo Torre?

  I love this book, by the way.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  Thank you, man.

• 3:32Pablo Torre?

  I read it. I always have to just like dangle all of the dog ears and the ink. It's burrowed into my head in a way that I want to get to. And by the way, thank you for being here.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  Oh, my God, this is so cool.

• 3:42Pablo Torre?

  I do feel obligated, though, because we are a technically sports show.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, we got to talk about sports.

• 3:47Pablo Torre?

  I want to talk about how you are one of the most absurd characters in professional soccer.

• 3:51Speaker 02

  Thank you. That's how I prefer to think of myself.

• 3:54Pablo Torre?

  The whole idea of you and English soccer and how do you tell that story for people who don't know the lore of John Green?

• 4:01Speaker 02

  I fell in love with a fourth-tier English soccer team called AFC Wimbledon.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  They had their team taken away from them like the Baltimore Colts were moved to Indianapolis. That had never happened before in English soccer.

• 4:17Speaker 04

  On May the 28th, 2002, the FA approved a plan to move Wimbledon FC 60 miles north to Milton Keynes. Thousands of fans felt betrayed.

• 4:28Speaker 05

  This is the death of Wimbledon as far as I'm concerned.

• 4:30Speaker 06

  We did say originally that it wasn't going to be over until a ball was kicked in Milton Keynes or at Plough Lane, but it still doesn't feel quite over until today. It's a very sad day for English football, I think.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  And so the fans had to restart the club. And they started out with literal tryouts in a public park. They started out in the ninth tier of English football. And because in England and European football, you can get promoted or relegated. You can move up and down the ladder. They moved up the ladder rung by rung. Until finally, by 2011, they were one step away from being a full-time professional team again.

• 5:05Speaker 07

  A bunch of the Wimbledon fans to give Luton the lead. Fast blood to Wimbledon. Courtesy of goalkeeper Seb Brown.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  And they made it all the way to the playoff final in a penalty shootout with a 19-year-old kid who worked part-time at a rental car place.

• 5:22Speaker 07

  He scored now. No! It's been denied by Seb. It looked as though that was going to cross the line. Brilliant save by the Wimbledon goalkeeper.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  Saving the two penalties. Man. An incredible story. I think the greatest underdog story in the history of sports.

• 5:37Speaker 07

  And Wimbledon are down to one penalty kick to take them into the Football League. The fairy tale is complete.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  And now they've been a professional team for, you know, about 15 years. And they're doing great. They're owned by their fans, so there's no rich guy to fund the team or anything. It's just a regular bunch of people. And everybody pitches in the way that they can pitch in. And one of the ways I can pitch in is financially.

• 6:12Pablo Torre?

  And the source of the money John Green was pitching in is just another layer of the absurdity of this larger story we're about to tell you. Because John Green, in case you did not know, happens to be the same John Green who published his fifth novel in 2012, a YA love story called The Fault in Our Stars. You know, that book that spent 78 straight weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list and also then became a blockbuster hit movie in 2014. And so we're going to get to John's new book, which is staggering and timely and non-fiction in just a second.

• 6:50Pablo Torre?

  But it is important for me to note that John Green wasn't using his book money, his Fault in Our Stars money, when he was supporting AFC Wimbledon. John was actually using the money he made from his other career, which started way back in 2007, on YouTube.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday. I recently found myself at an airport, as I often do, sitting at the gate, waiting for my flight to board, and I couldn't stop thinking about how everyone in the airport would, within a century or so, be dead. Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday. So something you might not know from having watched my last couple of videos is that this has been the most stressful two-week period I have experienced in a while. Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday. I have to tell you about a profound mortification I recently experienced, but first, it's time to manifest second shot in arm. Let's go get vaccinated.

• 7:41Pablo Torre?

  John and his brother Hank have been posting these weekly vlogs every single week for the last 18 years now, building up a channel that's almost up to 4 million subscribers. But to John, who got into YouTube long before there was any advertising revenue in it, his subscribers aren't subscribers. They're members of this community known as NerdFiteria.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  What is a nerd fighter? A nerd fighter is a person who, instead of being made out of like bones and skin and tissue, is made entirely of awesome. So you're saying that nerd fighters don't fight nerds? No, we're clearly pro-nerd.

• 8:18Pablo Torre?

  And NerdFiteria, whose stated mission is to decrease world suck, has become bonded by inside jokes and livestreamed FIFA sessions and these acronyms like DTFBA: Don't Forget to Be Awesome, which is a slogan that has since become a logo, a logo for a very real and very cash-strapped English soccer team in real life.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  So I started out playing FIFA, the video game, and I would livestream it or upload the videos or whatever. Hello and welcome to King's Meadow. Where we're taking on Excelsior from the Netherlands. And then I'd use all the advertising revenue to pay for an actual sponsorship. So then I could see my own logo when I played the video game. I could see my own logo on the player's shorts. I will say this, there are lots of professional FIFA players and semi-professional FIFA players out there. But among them, do you know any other than me who has successfully gotten DFTBA Nerd Fight area written on the shorts of a professional football team? So I've got that going for me. Okay, I'm on the back of the shorts, the liminal space between left thigh and buttock. That's my, uh, that's my chosen area.

• 9:33Pablo Torre?

  That is the finest real estate.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, people say that. Why be on the front of the shirt when you can be on the back of the shorts, you know?

• 9:41Pablo Torre?

  By the way, I have seen, I have seen you play FIFA.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:44Pablo Torre?

  FIFA's, to me, the greatest sports video game of all time.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, and as I'm sure you noted, I'm not very good at it.

• 9:49Pablo Torre?

  You are trash.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  I am.

• 9:52Pablo Torre?

  Many, many are saying, uh, John Green, trash at this thing that generated income that affected soccer in real life.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  They're third in the league this season. They've got a real chance to get promoted up to the third tier. And I couldn't be prouder. Every year, I use some of the money I make from live streaming to try to help them buy a player. And this year, we bought an abs, a player who's absolute mustard. His name's Marcus Brown and that kid, that kid's got amazing, amazing feet.

• 10:16Pablo Torre?

  ESPN called this transfer, quote, "The most unusual transfer in this year's soccer transfer window."

• 10:23Speaker 02

  I think that's true.

• 10:24Pablo Torre?

  The acquisition of Marcus Brown, 25-year-old attacking midfielder, funded by your general enterprise.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, that is correct.

• 10:32Pablo Torre?

  I say all of that to say that what one does with such an audience and with such influence is a question that lots of people across the internet, they dream of that question.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:47Pablo Torre?

  And how you've answered that question is, once again, fucking absurd.

• 10:55Pablo Torre?

  And also, in this case, profound when it comes to the other thing you've devoted now, what is it, a half decade?

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, about five years. I do have a weird job, but you know, that's the, the, the privilege that The Fault in Our Stars, the success of that book and movie gave me was the privilege to really follow my dreams. And you can have really uninteresting dreams. Like, I, I, I feel like a lot of people who are in this position, like, just dream of having more. And like, more than enough is not interesting to me. There's no difference between enough and more than enough. Like, they're both the same to me. And so I've been really incredibly lucky to be able to follow my passions. And my passion is fourth tier English soccer and tuberculosis. Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday. So later this week, I will be on Capitol Hill in Washington DC to discuss tuberculosis with congresspeople, senators and their aides.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  In related news, there will be a major announcement on Thursday about our family's efforts to fight tuberculosis, which remains the world's deadliest infectious disease, even though we know how to end it. And so I've gotten to, you know, follow down those two rabbit holes and find so much community in that.

• 12:04Pablo Torre?

  One through line, though, in those two topics seems to be your obsession.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:09Pablo Torre?

  Like, obsession, I mean that, I suppose, in some ways clinically, but also actually when it comes to your passion for being consumed by a subject.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I fall pretty far down rabbit holes in general. And a lot of people will fall down a rabbit hole and emerge like a couple of weeks later. But with TB especially, I fell down the rabbit hole and haven't emerged and don't expect to ever emerge. And the same thing with AFC Wimbledon, you know, like, I fell in love and, you know, they, actually at Wimbledon games, they sing that song, "Wise men say only fools rush in, but I can't help falling in love with you."

• 12:45Speaker 02

  And that's how I feel. Like, I couldn't help falling in love, couldn't help falling in love with my wife, couldn't help falling in love with AFC Wimbledon, and I can't help falling in hate with tuberculosis.

• 13:11Pablo Torre?

  This message is brought to you by Apple Card. With Apple Card, you earn unlimited daily cash back on everyday purchases like groceries, or merch, or tickets to the game. Plus, it can be used anywhere MasterCard is accepted. No matter your team, no matter where you shop, Apple Card is here to help you tackle game day. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank, USA, Salt Lake City Branch. Terms and more at applecard.com. Gifts mean more when they have the power to give more. They can inspire more discovery, give more confidence, and unwrap more of who you are. This Black Friday, give a gift that goes beyond the box. The Dell XPS 13 Laptop.

• 13:55Pablo Torre?

  With a beautiful design and cutting-edge performance, it helps you unlock more possibilities. It's the thinnest, lightest XPS laptop yet, with touchscreen, a backlit keyboard, and long-lasting battery life to power you through your day. Built with a durable aluminum chassis, weighing just 2.2 pounds, and Intel Core processors, it's fast, reliable, and portable enough to keep up wherever you go. Visit dell.com to explore the possibilities with XPS. While shopping, you'll also find great perks like Dell Rewards, fast free shipping, premium support, and financing with flexible payment options. Plus, you can find great deals on monitors and accessories. That means you can score a whole new setup now for less. This Black Friday sale is one you don't want to miss.

• 14:40Pablo Torre?

  Head to dell.com/deals. That's dell.com/deals.

• 14:49Pablo Torre?

  I'm pretty sure this won't shock anyone out there, but buying a car is just a hard process. You have to figure out what you want from thousands of options, then you have to find somewhere that's offering a good deal, then you get hit with unexpected fees. But let's just break it down, and think about how you'd describe your ideal car to a friend. You know, something like, good gas mileage, four-wheel drive, reliable, under 30 grand. Luckily, CarGurus makes it that easy. Just describe it to CarGurus the same way. With Guru, you search in your own words and you get listings, real listings, that match. No endless filters, just the car that fits your life. CarGurus also helps you shop with more transparent pricing,

• 15:31Pablo Torre?

  allowing you to see when dealer fees are included so you can compare listings with greater confidence. And with more than 4 million listings, CarGurus has the biggest selection of cars. So it's easier than ever to find the right car and the right deal. It is no wonder CarGurus is the number one most visited car shopping site, according to SimilarWeb's estimated traffic data. So buy or sell your next car today with CarGurus at cargurus.com. Go to cargurus.com to make sure your big deal is the best deal. That's C-A-R-G-U-R-U-S dot com. Cargurus dot com.

• 16:11Speaker 07

  With the Discover Cash Back Card, it's payback time when you earn cash back on everyday purchases. Activate and earn 5% cash back at different categories each quarter on up to $1,500 in purchases. That's 5% cash back at different places each quarter, like grocery stores, on gas, and at restaurants. It pays to discover. Terms apply. See discover.com/five for details.

• 16:42Pablo Torre?

  I do want to get to how it is that a bestselling novelist ends up devoting five years to a book entitled, "Everything is Tuberculosis." So how did you fall for this subject?

• 16:55Speaker 02

  Well, in 2019, I visited a TB hospital in Sierra Leone. We were actually there to learn about maternal health. My wife and I have supported a maternal hospital in Sierra Leone for a long time. But while we were there, on the last day, the doctors we were with asked to visit a tuberculosis hospital. And I had no idea that tuberculosis was still a thing. I thought it was like what killed John Keats, you know, like a disease of the distant past. And I was like, there's tuberculosis hospitals? That's wild. And when we got there, the doctors started talking about, you know, doctor stuff. And I was grabbed by this little kid, who had the same name as my son, Henry, and looked to be about the same age as my son, who was nine at the time. And Henry just started walking me around the hospital. He took me to the laboratory, took me to the wards, and introduced me to a couple of patients.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  And everywhere he went, he was like the mayor of that place. Like, everybody would rub his head and joke with him and pick him up and hug him. And I figured he was someone's kid, like one of the doctor's kids or one of the kitchen workers' kids. And finally, we made our way back to the doctors and they sort of shooed him away. And I said, whose kid is that? And they said, he's not anybody's kid here. He's a patient. And he's one of the patients we're really, really concerned about because it turns out Henry had a complicated case of drug resistant tuberculosis. And he wasn't nine, like I had imagined. He was 17. He'd just been so stunted by malnutrition and then by TB that he looked much younger. And, you know, what happened to Henry over the next few years, as he tried to survive his form of drug resistant tuberculosis, which you

• 18:21Speaker 02

  or I would be cured of, no problem, is really what inspired my obsession with TB.

• 18:28Pablo Torre?

  When you describe how your brain personally processes the idea of bacteria, it gives me a window into how it is maybe that you feel that call particularly acutely?

• 18:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:41Pablo Torre?

  Could you explain how OCD and how your own reckoning with yourself fits into how it is that you spent all of this time immersed in this?

• 18:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, I mean, I want to be careful to not state that there are upsides to OCD because in my experience, it's mostly downsides. A lot of downsides.

• 18:59Pablo Torre?

  Doesn't make you better at FIFA.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  That's an incredible joke. That's so true. It doesn't make you better at FIFA, that's for sure. But also, it doesn't like make you a good detective. Like that show Monk where he's got OCD, but he's a really good detective. That's not my experience at all, man. I'm a really bad detective when I'm sick. I can't pay attention to anything but my worries.

• 19:22Pablo Torre?

  Tony Shalhoub, you goddamn liar.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Tony Shalhoub, you sold me a bill of goods. Great show, but yeah, I don't buy it all the way. So I don't think there's any upsides to OCD. I have spent a lot of my life, though, thinking about microbes and worrying about contamination and having a fear of that. And so I'm sure that fits into my life in ways that I don't fully understand. But I wanted to write about that a little bit in the book because I wanted, you know, I don't really like nonfiction where the author doesn't acknowledge their place in it, you know? Or like, what are the possible reasons why you might be focusing on this? And so I wanted to kind of explore that a little bit.

• 20:01Pablo Torre?

  But just that basic question of wasn't tuberculosis cured?

• 20:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it was. It was cured in the 1950s and, you know, in sanatoriums around the United States, people essentially got up off of their deathbeds and went on to live long and healthy and productive lives. But as the Ugandan doctor Peter Mugeni said of HIV, where are the drugs? The drugs are where the disease is not. And where is the disease? The disease is where the drugs are not. And that's still the case with tuberculosis. I mean, this is a disease that we've known how to cure since the 1950s. And since it became curable, we've let 150 million people die of it.

• 20:39Pablo Torre?

  So this is where, as I'm reading your book and I'm like underlining stuff, I'm like, okay, I'm gonna underline a lot here. I should probably just come up with a new strategy for note taking, because some of this stuff reads like crazy sports statistics.

• 20:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:51Pablo Torre?

  Like TB regained its status as the world's deadliest infectious disease in 2023.

• 20:57Speaker 05

  Taking COVID-19's place as the leading cause of death from those diseases is tuberculosis, better known as TB. According to the World Health Organization, more than 8 million people worldwide were diagnosed with TB last year, which is-

• 21:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:12Pablo Torre?

  After COVID had briefly took over the number one spot, you know, the top seed from 2020 to 2023.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah, no, I mean, almost all of human history, TB has been our deadliest infection.

• 21:21Pablo Torre?

  Okay. Before people get worried, man, you guys are gonna go really into like the darkest statistics in this book. I also want to point out that this is a story also about branding?

• 21:31Speaker 02

  Totally about branding.

• 21:32Pablo Torre?

  About the marketing of a disease?

• 21:34Speaker 02

  It's done a terrible job of marketing tuberculosis. It's got terrible branding.

• 21:38Pablo Torre?

  Well, I mean, the idea that, I'm gonna, I'm gonna quote you here, what you write in the book, "When TB rates declined in the US toward the end of the 19th century, some physicians worried it would harm the quality of American literature."

• 21:50Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, no.

• 21:51Pablo Torre?

  With one writing, quote, "By way of compensation for good health, we may lack certain cultural joys."

• 21:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. In that sense, TB used to have great branding. I mean, the best branding-

• 22:01Pablo Torre?

  I didn't know anything about how tuberculosis was enshrined and in some ways fetishized.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was really heavily romanticized in the 19th century. At the time, it was understood to be an inherited disease. So there was nothing you could do to catch it. And so people weren't as worried about it in terms of catching it. And they thought that alongside inheriting TB, you also inherited other traits, like a really sensitive personality. And also, you were super hot. You were really beautiful. You had very pale skin and rosy cheeks and wide sunken eyes. You looked a little bit like an Edgar Allan Poe character. It's no-

• 22:34Pablo Torre?

  You know, hot.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, that was considered hot at the time.

• 22:39Pablo Torre?

  Oh, no, look, some of the paintings you provide in this.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:42Pablo Torre?

  I can see it.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  You can see it. You get the vibe. And this was a time when, you know, tuberculosis couldn't be stigmatized away because too many people had it. I mean, at the height of the frightful tuberculosis of humanity, as one writer called it, I think in London, one in three people were dying of tuberculosis. And so everyone had TB, which at the time was called consumption. So what were you going to do about consumption other than romanticize it? So it became this disease of beauty and refinement and intellectualism. Like, of course, the great English poet John Keats died of tuberculosis. And when he was dying, his buddy Percy Shelley wrote him and said, you know, this TB, it does tend to strike people who write great verses, as you have done, which I've always thought is hilarious because Percy Shelley also had tuberculosis and he knew that he had it.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  And so he was also kind of saying like, and I have done, you know? I think we both know that we're both great poets, hence the TB.

• 23:37Pablo Torre?

  This sort of like euphemism, and that was a consumptive chic.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:41Pablo Torre?

  Describing the women also applied to what it meant to be a great artist.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think Lord Byron said that he would like to die of consumption because the women would say how beautiful and interesting Byron looks in dying. And it was seen to be a disease that made you a very good poet or a very good writer. It made you sensitive. It made you open to the suffering of the world. And what's so heartbreaking to me is that, you know, my friend Henry in Sierra Leone, who had tuberculosis, is also a poet and is a beautiful writer. And yet was not viewed that way because of the way that we imagine tuberculosis. So changing so drastically from being a romantic disease to being a stigmatized disease, from being a disease that, as Charles Dickens put it, wealth never warded

• 24:29Speaker 02

  off, to being a disease that wealth pretty much entirely wards off.

• 24:34Pablo Torre?

  Right. There is an American doctor you quote in the book who had called it a disease of the master race.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:40Pablo Torre?

  That was the before.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  That was the before. So TB was very much racialized and it was seen as a disease of civilization by white doctors, to be clear, not entirely. But it was seen as a disease of civilization, a disease of whiteness. And catastrophically, people who were colonialists believed that people in colonized regions couldn't get TB. So whether it was the Philippines, or India, or Sierra Leone, it was believed that those people couldn't get TB. And that has been catastrophic ever since because TB was allowed, consumption was allowed to spread completely unchecked in those communities, which often had impoverished healthcare systems. And often, there was very little to no investment

• 25:22Speaker 02

  in those healthcare systems. And so even today, you see where are the highest rates of TB, they're always in formerly colonized regions.

• 25:31Pablo Torre?

  Yeah. I mean, it seems like if you're going to track the end of the romance, the romantic era of TB, and it then becoming something that is afflicting infamously the underclass.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:45Pablo Torre?

  You're talking about following money.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  You're talking about following money.

• 25:48Pablo Torre?

  Industrialization.

• 25:50Speaker 02

  Industrialization is the story of how TB spread and the story of why TB ended up where it ended up. And we've seen that in outbreak after outbreak. We don't just see it in London in the 18th and 19th centuries, or in New York, in Baltimore in the 18th and 19th centuries. We see it in Delhi. We see it in Lagos. We see it in Freetown. We see it in Manila. We see it everywhere where there is industrialization and poverty. We see tuberculosis.

• 26:16Pablo Torre?

  You quote in the book, I wonder if you could just read some of Henry's poetry?

• 26:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'd love to.

• 26:21Pablo Torre?

  There's just this part.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is a poem that Henry wrote about his mom. "Mom, you are special and beautiful. You stand closer when everyone ran away. Especially, my cousin ran away. But you stood firm." And I love that poem because there's a tense change between "you stand closer when everyone ran away," as if the present tense of his mom, like, she stays, she stands.

• 26:48Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 26:49Speaker 02

  And everyone else ran, past tense, away. And that one's always struck me. I mean, Henry's a beautiful poet, but that one, that one in particular, has always stuck with me.

• 26:57Pablo Torre?

  Just the idea that this went from something that was worthy of bragging about by some of the great authors of our time, to then being a thing to truly lament and mourn because it made Henry deeply lonely, let alone, you know, at risk.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  It made him an outcast, and that's unfortunately the case for many tuberculosis survivors. The healthcare workers have described to me that one of the greatest heartbreaks of working in a TB hospital is that a lot of times, nobody feels like they can go to a funeral. And so, family members don't go to the funerals, and so, healthcare workers who cared for their patients are often the only people at those funerals. And it's just a hugely stigmatized disease, but it's important to understand that the reason it's stigmatized is because we don't do a good job of getting the cure to the people who need it. And so, it's stigmatized in part because it's seen as dangerous, right? We don't stigmatize strep throat. And the reason we don't stigmatize strep throat is that it's not a big deal anymore. Tuberculosis shouldn't be a big deal anymore. It should be a rare disease, if it exists at all.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  And so, it's our failure to get the cure to the people who need it that really results in stigma.

• 28:07Pablo Torre?

  The part of what I'm sensing as the through line between, again, AFC Wimbledon to Henry and Sierra Leone is that this is also a story about class, obviously, and money and power.

• 28:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:19Pablo Torre?

  And, okay, who are we listening to when it comes to people who are saying, "This is happening to us, and it's [bleeped] up"?

• 28:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. Are we gonna listen to the fans, or are we gonna listen to the powers that be? Are we gonna listen to the people who are suffering from tuberculosis? Or are we gonna listen to the pharmaceutical companies that say it's impossible to provide cost-effective care to those people?

• 28:50Pablo Torre?

  Cozy makes furniture for the part of life that nobody warns you about. Getting the couch into the room, making the room feel like you, then actually living on it, spills it all. With Cozy, your home can grow with you by adapting to new spaces, new styles, and every era of your life. It's modular furniture, so you can actively adjust your furniture to fit any space. It's all built around making the entire home comfortable and easy, so that your stuff works with your life, not around it. The covers are washable and interchangeable, so a refresh is only one wash away, and the spill goes from panic to shrug. And it all ships to your door in easy-to-move boxes. Plus, Cozy's free one-on-one design consultations make the whole home vision a lot less intimidating. Cozy has everything you need to make your home feel like it has a plan,

• 29:35Pablo Torre?

  because Cozy makes every part of the process easy. So, visit Cozy today, that's C-O-Z-E-Y dot com, and make yourself at home.

• 29:47Pablo Torre?

  Did you know over 75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated? And 90% don't get enough potassium, which is a key electrolyte responsible for energy, muscle function, and clear thinking? Well, that's why you can be drinking water all day and still feel tired, or foggy, or just off. And while most hydration packs really load up on the sugar, Instant Hydration contains zero sugar. There's no glucose spike and no sugar crash. And that is really important to me, because it not only gives me electrolytes without loading me up with sugar, but it also helps me avoid that late afternoon crash. You know, that time of day when your eyes start drooping as you reply to yet another email, and you need something to get you back on track. Just mix a packet of Instant Hydration with water,

• 30:31Pablo Torre?

  and I am feeling ready to push through to the end of the day. For a better way to stay hydrated, go to instanthydration.com/ptfo and use my promo code PTFO for over 40% off your first subscription order. It's Instant Hydration's best offer available. That's instanthydration.com/ptfo, promo code PTFO.

• 30:53Pablo Torre?

  Life in 2026 is tough. We all have our struggles and we could all use some help. But trying to figure out how to get the right mental health treatment for you can feel overwhelming. Talkiatory helps you move from "I know I need help" to actually having a psychiatrist who listens and a clear personalized treatment plan. Talkiatory is 100% online psychiatry practice that provides comprehensive evaluations, diagnoses, and ongoing medication management for conditions like ADHD, anxiety, depression, and more. With Talkiatory, you can meet with a licensed psychiatrist, who takes the time to understand what's going on, builds a personalized treatment plan, and supports you over time with consistent, evidence-based care.

• 31:37Pablo Torre?

  And all 800-plus clinicians are in-network with major insurers, so you can use your existing insurance instead of paying monthly subscriptions or out-of-network costs. Head to talkiatory.com/ptfo to complete the short assessment and get matched with an in-network psychiatrist in just a few minutes. That's T-A-L-K-I-A-T-R-Y.com/ptfo to get matched in minutes. Talkiatory.com/ptfo.

• 32:11Pablo Torre?

  Part of the branding problem, as we now turn to the guy who put his logo again between the thigh and left buttock.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, right where it belongs.

• 32:19Pablo Torre?

  On a soccer, on a soccer short. Part of the branding problem of TB is that it's actually deeply fascinating once you realize how ubiquitous it has been in all of the sort of like movie scenes throughout human history.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:33Pablo Torre?

  How do you sort of give the elevator pitch for its omnipresence?

• 32:39Speaker 02

  I always say that tuberculosis is everything from geography to history. So it's geography in the sense that towns like Pasadena, California, and Colorado Springs, Colorado only exist because they were essentially founded as tuberculosis colonies. It's history in the sense that World War I was started by two boys who were dying of tuberculosis and knew they were dying and so assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand together. Very tragic, obviously, but also quite farcical. As I write about in the book, it was... I mean, you know, a bunch of teenagers who were not particularly well organized or well equipped, and then combined with the Archduke Franz Ferdinand's utterly, unbelievably incompetent support staff.

• 33:21Pablo Torre?

  Right. I mean, just briefly, the story I recall from the book is that there was some quote like, "Look, we're not gonna have another attempted assassination."

• 33:29Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. They had somebody said like, "What do you think? Sarajevo's full of assassins?" And of course Sarajevo was in fact full of assassins.

• 33:36Pablo Torre?

  Narrator.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, narrator comes in and says like, "There were more assassins."

• 33:43Pablo Torre?

  The cowboy hat.

• 33:44Speaker 02

  The cowboy hat, yeah. There was a hat maker in New Jersey who got tuberculosis and like so many TB survivors, was told the only way he could survive was to go west and get some of that clean air, get out of the city, get out of New York and New Jersey and go get some clean air and see if he could dry his lungs out. This fellow goes out to Missouri and he recovers. And for reasons we don't really understand, about 25% of people who develop active tuberculosis end up surviving and recovering. And I wish we understood that better, but we still don't really understand it that well. And, but he got better. And as he got better, he noticed that the hats out west kinda sucked. There were the coonskin caps that were literally bug infested.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  And then folks from Mexico and Texas had brought up straw hats that didn't work well in that Missouri rain. And so John B. Stetson, which was his name, developed the Stetson.

• 34:36Pablo Torre?

  John Stetson, sounds like a very fake name you would make up for the guy who invented that hat.

• 34:41Speaker 02

  The cowboy hat? It does, it does, yeah. He was faded for it.

• 34:45Pablo Torre?

  Other names though, George Orwell.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, George Orwell died of TB.

• 34:49Pablo Torre?

  Ringo Starr.

• 34:50Speaker 02

  Ringo Starr only became a Beatle because he learned how to drum in a sanatorium.

• 34:54Pablo Torre?

  Thomas Wolfe.

• 34:55Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 34:56Pablo Torre?

  Thiago Silva?

• 34:57Speaker 02

  Thiago Silva. Let's talk about Thiago Silva for a minute.

• 35:00Pablo Torre?

  That one's not in your book.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  It's not in my book, but I think about Thiago Silva a lot because people are like, "Can you connect football to TB?" And I'm like, "Yeah, I don't even have to go back to like the 19th century" or whatever, like soccer and TB connect in the life of Thiago Silva.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  Thiago Silva. Morata for all the world. He started out in Brazil and then eventually made his way to Europe and ended up at Moscow. And that's when he developed a life threatening case of TB. Now, he'd probably had a TB infection for a long time, but for whatever reason, his disease became active when he was in Moscow and he almost died. He was really, really sick and had to leave the game for a while, but then made his way back into the game and became one of the greatest players of his generation. He won a Champions League, like he became an amazing, amazing player. Chelsea champions.

• 35:50Speaker 02

  The Blues from the. And he's also a tuberculosis survivor.

• 35:54Pablo Torre?

  But just some more context for the sportsy statistical parts of TB here, right? So when you talk about TB being the number one deadliest infectious disease, the top seed in the March Madness bracket of illness, it's more than malaria, typhoid and war?

• 36:09Speaker 02

  Combined.

• 36:09Pablo Torre?

  Combined, but you also argue that it's not really caused by the bacteria as much as that is scientifically the answer to that question.

• 36:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, biomedically tuberculosis is caused by a bacteria, but I don't think that's the only way we should imagine tuberculosis. In the 21st century, you can't really say it's caused by a bacteria because we know how to kill the bacteria. We decreased tuberculosis rates by 99% in the United States. So we can't say it's caused by this bacterium we know how to kill. We have to acknowledge that it's caused by us, our systems that distribute resources, the way that they distribute them, our choices about whether or not we're going to distribute cures to the places where they're most needed. Those, those are the real causes of tuberculosis today.

• 36:53Pablo Torre?

  There is a woman you write about in your book on that note, who was in India.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:58Pablo Torre?

  How do you pronounce her name?

• 36:59Speaker 02

  Shreya Tripathi. She sued her government of India to try to get access to bedacolin, this really critical drug for treating drug resistant tuberculosis. It's incredibly powerful. Now, an even more extreme strain of TB is causing concern in India, an untreatable form resistant to all the drugs normally used. Deadly and infectious, it's shown up in cities across the country. Doctors warn if it's not curtailed now, the spread will be devastating. She eventually won that court case, but it took a long time. And in the intervening time, her lungs just became too damaged for her to survive. And so even though the bedacolin was able to clear the infection, there was no way to save her life and she died. I believe she was 19 years old.

• 37:44Speaker 02

  And I, um, I think about Shreya a lot because she cared about my, my work. Shreya loved The Fault in Our Stars and also was reading it, rereading it in, in the days before her death. And she was doing this heroic, heroic work to get, not only for herself, but for all people living with, with drug resistant TB to increase access to bedacolin. And I didn't hear her call in time, you know? I didn't hear about the work that she was doing in, in time to be able to lend my little voice to that. And that's something I think about a lot, like, how am I using the megaphone that I've been given? And what voices am I not hearing? I'm not, why am I not hearing voices like Shreya's?

• 38:27Pablo Torre?

  There's this way that you describe the power of the megaphone that you have, which is, by the way, not a small voice, but quite a large one inasmuch as we all live in a deeply fragmented world where no one listens or hears.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  No one, no one has that large of a voice, except for Beyonce.

• 38:42Pablo Torre?

  That's right. And if Beyonce is listening to this program?

• 38:47Speaker 02

  She's a friend of the pod.

• 38:49Pablo Torre?

  We got some shorts that you might be interested in. But you use this analogy to playing Marco Polo.

• 38:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:57Pablo Torre?

  For content creation. And as somebody who is also in this, like crazy making game of making content, it just spoke to me in a way that I had been trying to articulate. So could you explain the Marco Polo thing?

• 39:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's this children's pool game Marco Polo, where one person closes their eyes and says Marco, Marco, Marco. And then everybody else has to say polo. And then that's how the person who's got their eyes closed finds somebody to tag. And then they become the Marco person. In this game, it's kind of just a call and response of one person saying Marco and everybody else responding Polo. And that's how I feel about writing and content creation in general, is that I'm saying Marco, Marco. I'm in my basement for five years, writing this book, saying Marco, Marco, Marco. And then the book comes out, and for the first time, I hear someone say Polo. And that's a magical, magical thing for me, whether it's a YouTube video, a Crash Course video, or a book.

• 39:54Speaker 02

  To hear that person say Polo is magical. But I also think, you know, it goes, it goes both ways. Like, I hear Shreya and other people who've died of TB telling, telling me Marco, Marco, Marco, and asking me to respond. And this is, this book is my attempt to respond.

• 40:12Pablo Torre?

  You know, part of, I guess, the helpful news bump, but also cruelty of this book.

• 40:20Speaker 02

  Would have loved for this book to be a little less timely, man.

• 40:23Pablo Torre?

  I mean, you emerge after five years of obsession over this subject to discover that this is newsy.

• 40:31Speaker 03

  This morning, health officials in Kansas are dealing with the largest documented outbreak of tuberculosis in US history.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  There's TB outbreaks on some level in the, in the US every year. We have about 10,000 cases of active TB a year. So it's certainly not something that's eliminated from the United States by any stretch of the imagination. But also, I mean, I think that the biggest news story, and the most devastating one from, from the perspective of people who care about TB, is the defunding of USAID has had really profound consequences for people living with tuberculosis.

• 41:04Speaker 05

  The uncertainty around the Trump administration's sweeping funding freeze is also alarming many in the world of global health, since it could affect key programs overseen by the US Agency for International Development, or USAID.

• 41:18Pablo Torre?

  I mean, there is this larger argument that's going on right now, in which you can point out, hey, we are killing children.

• 41:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:25Pablo Torre?

  By not supporting programs that have already paid for the things that would keep them alive.

• 41:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:31Pablo Torre?

  And the counterargument is, we need to worry about ourselves.

• 41:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 41:36Pablo Torre?

  How do you process that argument?

• 41:40Speaker 02

  Well, the first thing I'd say about that is that a large measure of America's power over the last 50 years has come from its generosity.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  The second thing I'd say is that this is not only a problem in impoverished countries. To imagine that disease understands political borders is a fundamental misimagining of disease, right? We know this from COVID, we know it from HIV, we know it from every pandemic we've ever experienced. And by chaotically and without any warning, discontinuing the treatment of hundreds of thousands of people living with tuberculosis. We know that when your treatment gets interrupted in the middle of your course of antibiotics, you are vastly more likely to develop drug resistance. That's a catastrophe personally for the person who's affected that way.

• 42:33Speaker 02

  But it's also societally an issue because it means that there's more drug resistant, more complicated drug resistant TB floating around in communities. People are acquiring more complicated drug resistant TB. All of that is, I mean, that should scare all of us regardless of where we live because a totally resistant form of tuberculosis that we have no tools to treat is truly a nightmare.

• 42:58Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I mean, look, there's, there are just like levels to which there is relevance in your book. One of them, of course, has to do with like how our health and human services are currently going.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:10Pablo Torre?

  It's the very premise of inoculation.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  Right, I mean, I think people are beginning to question the idea of inoculation itself, the idea of scientifically proven treatments itself, and a lot of those people have a lot of power right now, and that worries me.

• 43:24Pablo Torre?

  And so I say all of that just to set up this notion that you quote from the Journal of Cost Benefit Analysis.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  I do, yes, I'm not afraid to quote a Journal of Cost Benefit Analysis. There's a journal for literally everything, man.

• 43:40Pablo Torre?

  What, I mean, again, just talk about consumptive chic, the Journal of Cost Benefit Analysis. They found that every dollar, this is a 2023 paper, every dollar invested in TB yields 46 US dollars in benefits.

• 43:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:56Pablo Torre?

  On top of the fact that you would save, you know, almost 1 million deaths per year, but forget about the deaths.

• 43:59Speaker 02

  Right. I mean, just from a financial perspective, think about how much money we we used to spend on tuberculosis in the United States. I mean, at the height of the TB crisis in America in the late 19th, early 20th centuries, there were almost as many beds to treat people with tuberculosis as there were beds in hospitals for all other conditions combined. We spent a tremendous amount of resources trying to address the TB crisis in in that period of of American history. And now we spend far, far less because this is a curable disease that's infectious. And so we can just stop chains of infection and lower the burden of the disease, which in turn means that we have to spend less money on the disease in the future.

• 44:41Pablo Torre?

  Right. And as a byproduct of that, we should also point out that a kid in Sierra Leone, a kid like Henry, is over 100 times as likely to die of tuberculosis than a child born in the United States.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:54Pablo Torre?

  And so when it comes to how Henry is doing and how he became himself a case study.

• 45:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:03Pablo Torre?

  In modern medicine, that we should acknowledge here, what's the state of that union?

• 45:08Speaker 02

  So Henry eventually, after failing a second line of antibiotics and and being hospitalized for almost two years straight, losing the opportunity to go to high school, losing countless opportunities, he was eventually, thanks to the incredible efforts of his doctor, Dr. Jerome Tofara, and the Sierra Leonean government, and this organization Partners in Health, all those folks came together to provide Henry with the kind of personalized, tailored response to his particular infection that that you or I would have gotten on day one. And as a result, Henry was cured. He essentially got up off of his deathbed and and lived. And now he takes care of his mother. He's a junior at the University of Sierra Leone. He's studying human resources and management.

• 45:52Speaker 02

  I'm so proud of him. I'm so proud to be his friend. And, you know, in writing this story, Henry was so generous in sharing his story with me and asking me to share his story more broadly, asking me to use that megaphone that you referred to to share his story. That's a big part of the reason why I wrote the book was because Henry wanted me to.

• 46:13Pablo Torre?

  And I fear now that you've buried the lead. Because Henry is not merely someone who survived years of struggle and pain in that hospital alone. He's a goddamn YouTuber.

• 46:25Speaker 02

  He's a YouTuber. He's such a good YouTuber, too.

• 46:28Speaker 06

  Guys, today we are going to talk about an important topic that is affecting millions of people worldwide. Now, guys, the topic is tuberculosis or TB.

• 46:42Speaker 02

  He makes like first-person content about, um, about life, daily life in Sierra Leone, about the challenges of gathering water, about what different neighborhoods in his community look like. You should Google Henry Ryder YouTube and make sure to subscribe to his YouTube channel. Every time we, uh, we talk, or every time he like, uh, talks to a group of people, he always, he's such a good YouTuber in this way. This is a critical, this is something, we were talking about YouTube strategy before we went on the air.

• 47:07Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  This is something that I would tell you.

• 47:09Pablo Torre?

  Please.

• 47:10Speaker 02

  Every single time Henry talks to an audience, he says,

• 47:13Speaker 06

  Make sure you support Henry, make sure you subscribe and share.

• 47:17Speaker 02

  Don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel. Don't be afraid to make the ask. All right? So he's not afraid to make the ask. Don't be afraid to make the ask. And I'll make the ask on his behalf. Google Henry Ryder YouTube and check out his YouTube channel.

• 47:28Pablo Torre?

  Your coaching tree grows.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Job. I'm a regular Bill Belichick.

• 47:48Pablo Torre?

  When I think about what I found out here at the end of the show, I am generally deeply concerned that the incentive structure we've set up on the internet has led to not what you have described here, but the opposite. People who are using their megaphone for genuine, and again, I get it, but just genuine, uh, enrichment via supplement promo codes.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 48:14Pablo Torre?

  And, and everything in that. Tree over there.

• 48:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that worries me too. I mean, can I tell you my favorite joke? It's a Norm MacDonald joke. I mean, he heard it from someone else, but Norm MacDonald used to tell this joke about a moth that walks into a podiatrist's office and the podiatrist says, "What seems to be the problem, moth?" The moth says, "Oh, my God, doc, if only there were just one problem. My wife doesn't love me anymore." And I don't blame her. I look in the mirror every day and I look at myself and I think like, "Look at this lump of flesh. Look what I've become. My children, they're failures. My son married a woman I hate and my daughter, she has nothing to give me. I just hate life, doc. I don't know if I can go on." And the podiatrist says, "Yeah, no, those are really serious problems, moth. I'm super sorry to hear that, but, you know, this is a podiatrist's

• 49:00Speaker 02

  office. What brought you here today?" And the moth says, "Oh, the light was on." That's my favorite joke. That's my favorite joke because like, a huge percentage of the time as humans, we're just flying to the light.

• 49:12Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  We don't even know why. We're just flying to the light of power. We're flying to the light of money. We're flying to the light of more. And we don't even think about why. And I'm certainly guilty of that myself. But my favorite things in life are where I think like, you know, it'd be a more interesting light to fly to or a more fun light to fly to would be something else. I think it's really hard when you're, I really feel for these young YouTubers who get successful when they're really young. I mean, I got successful when I was married and like an adult and I had kids and like my life was pretty set. Twenty-two, twenty-three, seventeen in some cases, years old. It's a very different situation. And that's, that's really hard, but I would just encourage those folks to

• 49:55Speaker 02

  try to think about what are the interesting lights to fly toward instead of just the standard lights.

• 50:00Pablo Torre?

  Yeah. John Green, thank you for shining a light on a subject that unfortunately now is also going to be a thing I tell lots of people about whether they like it or not.

• 50:12Speaker 02

  I love to hear that, man. I love to hear that.

• 50:15Pablo Torre?

  As long as they subscribe to my channel.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  That's right. There you go. Make the ask.

• 50:18Pablo Torre?

  Thank you, John.

• 50:20Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 50:29Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.

• 50:35Pablo Torre?

  And I'll talk to you next time.

• 50:56Speaker 07

  With a Discover Cash Back Card, it's payback time when you earn cash back on everyday purchases. Activate and earn 5% cash back at different categories each quarter on up to $1,500 in purchases. That's 5% cash back at different places each quarter, like grocery stores, on gas, and at restaurants. It pays to discover. Terms apply. See discover.com/five for details.

• 51:20Speaker 06

  State Fair food is getting smaller and pricier. We'll have room for fried cookies. Okay, you never overspend on food. What's your deal?

• 51:28Speaker 03

  What's his deal? He went to Metro and got $450 in value on the new Samsung Galaxy 837 5G for free and no activation fees.

• 51:37Speaker 06

  Free phone? Oh, sign me up.

• 51:39Speaker 03

  Get that more for your money feeling, only on Metro by T-Mobile. Bring your number and activate $40 period plan. $450 base on device discount, waived activation fee. Not available if with Metro T-Mobile in the past 180 days. At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet, like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone, and including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save, too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage HMO and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.