Pod Insights The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos How to be Awesome - With Almost no Effort (with John Green) About this episode Best-selling author John Green wants to see less suck in the world and more awesome - and you can help achieve that right now! John's turned his attention to tuberculosis (TB) - a disease that is fixable and yet still kills millions of people. But you can stop that.
TB is a disease of poverty - so if you can spare a buck, then you can save lives by donating to GiveDirectly.org/tb https://www.givedirectly.org/TB
Giving to help others is proven to make us feel happier and more hopeful in tough times, so Dr Laurie will match every dollar up to the first $10,000, and John will match donations up to $10,000 after that.
It's a bad time for people everywhere - but even a dollar donated at GiveDirectly.org/tb https://www.givedirectly.org/TB will reduce the suck and increase the awesome.
John's new book Everything is Tuberculosis https://everythingistb.com is out now.
See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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1:08 Laurie Santos? Pushkin.
1:15 Laurie Santos? Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. Today, you're in for a treat because by the end of this episode, my guest and I will have shared how you can do something totally awesome, totally life-saving, and something totally happiness-inducing with almost zero effort. And spoiler, it's going to involve the website givedirectly.org/tb. That's givedirectly.org/tb. One of my favorite parts of being host of the Happiness Lab is that I get to share stuff that I love with you, like the time I interviewed my 80s heartthrob, Rob Lowe, about nostalgia.
1:45 Speaker 00 Just talking with you on this Zoom call, and I'm taken back to, you know, movies I watched in grade school and fun times in college and...
1:52 Laurie Santos? That is amazing. That makes me feel so good. Or when I geeked out about Star Trek with Lieutenant Wesley Crusher himself, Will Wheaton.
1:59 Speaker 05 Star Trek looks through the screen and it says, "There is a place specifically for you in the future." Like you, Lori, there is a space for you in the future. I loved that.
2:10 Laurie Santos? But today, I not only get to chat with someone who I have nerded out about for a very, very long time, but I also have the chance to invite you to help that guest do something to make the world a better place. If you happen to be a nerd fighter like me, then get ready because today I'll be chatting with the amazing John Green.
2:28 Speaker 06 Hold on, I don't even have my headphones in. This is a catastrophe of the scale of which nobody's ever seen before.
2:33 Speaker 00 No, you're good, you're good, you're good.
2:35 Speaker 06 Let me make sure I'm on the right fancy mic. I am. Okay, great.
2:39 Laurie Santos? I'm guessing a lot of my Happiness Lab listeners know who John Green is. John is first and foremost a bestselling author, both of beloved fictional books like Turtles All the Way Down and The Faults in Our Stars, but also nonfiction greats like The Anthropocene Reviewed, a book in which he expertly reviews everything from Diet Dr. Pepper to the smallpox vaccine. But John is also an educator, who with his brother Hank created the awe-inspiring Vlog Brothers and Crash Course YouTube channels. John has been a hero of mine for a while because I see a lot of happiness science in his work.
3:12 Speaker 00 Did you ever think that you would be an expert on a happiness podcast?
3:15 Speaker 06 No, I don't, I don't give off the vibes of somebody who's an expert in happiness, to be honest with you, doc.
3:20 Speaker 00 But you so are, dude. I mean, you're so focused on things like awe and understanding that negative emotions are the things that you want to stick around with. Like, you kind of follow all the science.
3:30 Speaker 06 I mean, when I listen to the podcast, I often think like, oh, I'm closer than I thought I was. Because I'm pretty far away from this sort of like wellness industry version of happiness, but I'm pretty close to the Dr. Laurie Santos version of happiness, which makes me really, for lack of a better term, happy.
3:44 Laurie Santos? John's work embodies so many of the lessons that I've learned studying the science of happiness. That meaning comes not from avoiding suffering, but embracing it. That there's wonder to be found in the mundane. And that even in the face of a lot of terrible, sucky stuff, we can choose to band together to actually fix things. And that's the goal of this episode. John's latest book deals with a problem facing people around the world.
4:07 Speaker 06 The new book is called Everything is Tuberculosis. It's a history of tuberculosis told through the perspective of both a long-term historical lens, but also the life of one kid living with tuberculosis in Sierra Leone.
4:19 Speaker 00 And so just for listeners who might not be as familiar, what is tuberculosis?
4:23 Speaker 06 So tuberculosis is an airborne disease. It usually affects the lungs, but it can infect any part of the body, really. And it makes people really sick, but it tends to make them sick quite slowly because the bacteria divides very slowly. And so you can be sick for months or years. But if left untreated, tuberculosis usually does result in death. Fortunately, since the 1950s, we've had a cure for tuberculosis. It's a bacterial infection. So the cure is antibiotics given every day over four to six months.
4:51 Speaker 00 And so why write a book about tuberculosis now? Why tell this particular story at this time?
4:56 Speaker 06 Well, because tuberculosis is still the world's deadliest infectious disease, astonishingly. I mean, I say astonishingly because it's been curable for so long. Like, since the disease became curable, we've allowed over 150 million people to die of it, which is just a figure that's hard for me to get my head around. But it just speaks to how, you know, disease is a biomedical phenomenon, but it's also a social one. And how we imagine disease, how we allocate resources around disease, that shapes not just like how people live and die of diseases like tuberculosis, but also who lives and dies of diseases like TB.
5:30 Speaker 00 John, it seems like part of your TB journey was trying to fix the problem. But part of the TB journey, at least in the book, seemed like, in some ways, TB was sort of like, cool. I don't know if you can use the word cool for some disease that kills lots of people, but it was, it's kind of a fascinating cultural journey.
5:43 Speaker 06 Yeah. I mean, one of the fascinating parts of that cultural journey is that for a while it was considered cool. Like, Victor Hugo's friends would joke with him that he could be a great novelist if only he contracted consumption, because it was so widely believed that consumption made you a great artist and also made you really beautiful. This was part of the romanticization of the disease in the 18th and 19th centuries. But really, tuberculosis is everywhere in history. It's, I argue in the book that it was an ancillary cause of World War I. It was the cause of the cowboy hat. It's the reason New Mexico is a state. The strangeness of tuberculosis is that because it was such a powerful and important part of our culture, I mean, this was a disease that killed one out of every seven people.
6:24 Speaker 06 That it inevitably also became a disease that had a huge impact on our culture and our history.
6:29 Speaker 00 Wait, TB is the reason we have the cowboy hat? That doesn't make any sense.
6:32 Speaker 06 And yet it makes total sense because there was a hat maker in New Jersey named John B. Stetson who got tuberculosis and was told that his only chance of survival was to go west. This was a very common belief at the time. You move west and then you recover your health and the sweet, clean air. And John B. Stetson made it out to St. Joseph, Missouri. And while he was there, he recovered from tuberculosis. About 25% of people, for reasons we still don't understand, will recover without treatment. And John B. Stetson was in that lucky few. And as he recovered, he noticed that the hats in the American West were not very good because there were like Coonskin caps that were literally bug infested. There were like straw hats that folks from New Mexico and Mexico had brought up, but like they didn't work particularly well in St. Joe's rainy environment.
7:17 Speaker 06 And so he invented the Stetson hat. And so, yes, there would be no cowboy hat without tuberculosis.
7:24 Speaker 00 And so your own introduction to TB, as I understand it, started when you met somebody incredible, somebody who reminded you of your own son. Tell me about Henry.
7:32 Speaker 06 Yeah, so Henry shares a name with my son, who is also named Henry. And when I first met Henry Ryder in Sierra Leone in 2019, I thought he was about the same age as my son. I thought he was about nine years old. And he just walked me all around the hospital. And you're right, he's just somebody who's incredible. He was kind of the mayor of that place. Everywhere he went, people were shaking his hand, rubbing his head. And he took me to the lab, he took me to the wards where the patients were living. And he eventually took me back to the doctors who were meeting to discuss cases they were concerned about or whatever. And they sort of lovingly and laughingly shooed Henry away. And then I said, whose kid is that? Is that one of your kids? And they said, no, he's a patient. And he's in fact, one of the patients that we're consulting about because we're very concerned about him.
8:15 Speaker 06 And it turned out that Henry wasn't nine like I imagined him. He was 17. He'd just been so emaciated, first by malnutrition and then by the disease that he looked much younger. And It was really in following Henry's story and getting to know Henry that I ended up writing the book.
8:30 Speaker 00 So something that I was shocked by in your book and kind of embarrassed when I was reading it is that I sort of assumed that TB was like this disease of the past, like some like old Victorian problem that, you know, you look in old pictures and stuff like that.
8:42 Speaker 06 Totally.
8:43 Speaker 00 Give me a sense of why we don't realize the scope of TB today and what the actual scope is today.
8:48 Speaker 06 I think one of the reasons we don't realize the scope is that it tends to be a problem in places where people are least likely to have access to megaphones, you know, least likely to be able to make their voices heard. But the scope of the problem is really, really significant. About 10 million people get sick with tuberculosis every year and about 1.25 million die. And unfortunately, that number is likely to go up in the next few years.
9:11 Speaker 00 This seems really crazy, right? That the disease is still around even though we have good treatments for it.
9:17 Speaker 06 Yeah.
9:17 Speaker 00 Why aren't we fixing this? Like, this seems like a problem that medically we've sorted out the hard part, right? We have antibiotics that can fix this. Like, why are people still dying from this?
9:26 Speaker 06 Well, TB isn't an easy disease to cure by any stretch of the imagination. But, you know, my brother had cancer a couple of years ago, and that also wasn't an easy disease to cure. It cost about 150 times more to cure my brother's cancer than it costs to cure Henry's tuberculosis. And yet, nobody at any time said, "I'm not sure that it makes sense to treat you. It might be better to focus more on prevention." No, it's true that in a narrow sense, it's a better investment to focus on the prevention of cancer than it is to focus on treating cancer. But of course, that's a ludicrous thing to say. We would never say that to someone living with cancer. And yet, Henry heard that all the time. He heard that there just aren't resources out there to offer you the kind of personalized, tailored care that you would need in order to survive. And as a result, he was really, really sick for a really long time.
10:10 Speaker 06 I mean, Henry was essentially on his deathbed when, finally, thanks to an extraordinary doctor, Dr. Jerome Tofara, and the Sierra Leone Ministry of Health and the nonprofit organization Partners in Health, they all kind of came together and decided that this kid was worthy of that kind of treatment. And even though, as Dr. Jerome told me, "I know it's just one kid, but what if he can be the first of many?" And he has been the first of many, blessedly. So many more people are receiving the kind of treatment that Henry... Finally was able to receive, and that's why he's here with us today.
10:40 Speaker 00 But it seems like what you're saying is that TB isn't just like a medical problem. It's really like a social justice problem. It's really sort of a disease of poverty.
10:47 Speaker 06 Right.
10:47 Speaker 00 Is that kind of what you found writing the book?
10:49 Speaker 06 Absolutely, it is a social justice problem. Tuberculosis follows the paths of injustice that we blaze for it. And that's been the case for decades now. Anybody can get TB. It's an airborne disease, but you're vastly more likely to become sick and die if you're malnourished, if you have other health problems like an HIV infection or diabetes. And so it's a disease of injustice in every way. And the reason I wrote this book is because for me, it's the exemplary disease of injustice. It's certainly not the only one, but it is a disease that is a social phenomenon as much as a biomedical one.
11:21 Speaker 00 It also seems to be one that we kind of ignore for the same reason we ignore poverty, right? Like, we like to think we have control over the disease. We like to think that, you know, we earned our status if we happen to be privileged enough not to be in a place where this disease is wiping people out. It seems to also be kind of a problem of human nature.
11:37 Speaker 06 Yeah, totally. I mean, I think that's a great observation. We are uncomfortable with dealing with randomness and injustice in our social orders because, of course, we are. It discomforts those of us who are extremely privileged. It also discomforts other people because we don't really want to live in a world where like the most powerful emperor of all time, Alexander the Great, can die from just like typhoid or malaria or whatever, which is why like for centuries, we've had rumors that he died of poisoning because that would be a much more human centric thing to have happen, a much more agency-based thing to have happen. The places where we don't have agency or where our agency is very confusing, like it is with tuberculosis, are uncomfortable for us, I think,
12:20 Speaker 06 because we don't want to reckon with not just the randomness in the social order, but also the injustice that's built into the social order.
12:27 Speaker 00 I mean, especially when it comes to life and death. Like, if you're someone like Henry and you're literally hearing, you know, your life is not worth saving because it's too expensive, given where you live. I mean, that's just incredible.
12:37 Speaker 06 Yeah, I mean, it really is horrifying. And yet, people are told that every day, and not just people with TB, but also people living with other diseases, you know. When my brother got cancer, one of the first things he said to me was, this has a 93% cure rate in the United States and a 20% to 70% cure rate in poor countries. And the reason we don't know whether it's 20% or 70% is because we don't even do a good job of counting.
12:59 Speaker 00 Man, and you just said something that was even scarier, right? You said that, you know, TB is really bad now, and it's likely going to get worse.
13:08 Speaker 06 Yeah.
13:08 Speaker 00 And that's in part because, you know, you and I are having this conversation at a strange time when, when things are getting worse. Why are things getting worse? And what's happened recently to change things?
13:16 Speaker 06 So we've had dramatic cuts, mostly from the US government, but also from other governments, to tuberculosis response. The United States has long been the most generous funder of tuberculosis response. And unfortunately, we've walked that back in a very sudden, chaotic way, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of people seeing their treatment interrupted mid-course. Like I said earlier, it takes between four and six months of treatment to be cured. If that gets interrupted in the middle, even, even if your treatment gets restarted, you're very likely to develop drug-resistant tuberculosis, which is a much, much more serious thing. That's what Henry was living with. And we know that most of those people will, will die, unfortunately. And, and just as catastrophically, many of those people will, will circulate drug-resistant
14:01 Speaker 06 tuberculosis in their own communities. We've already seen the rates of tuberculosis death go up. I think 12,000 people, excess, quote unquote, excess deaths have happened in the last three months. But it'll go up much more dramatically as time goes on, because tuberculosis is a slow killer.
14:16 Speaker 00 I mean, this is like a, like a slow-burning moral emergency. This isn't just like, oh, some aid got cut in this country that I don't care about so much. Like, this, this is like, really tragic and utterly preventable.
14:27 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, utterly preventable. And also, I mean, frankly, scary, because the more complicated drug-resistant tuberculosis you have circulating in communities, the more likely it is that we'll see more cases of TB that we simply don't have any tools to treat. I mean, I try not to be a person who engages in hyperbole when it comes to global health. And I think it's important to understand that the main reason we need to respond to this tragedy is because it's affecting millions of human beings, but... There is another reason to respond to this tragedy, which is that if we aren't careful, it will affect billions of human beings.
15:02 Speaker 00 And so this all is pretty sucky. But one of the reasons-
15:06 Speaker 06 Yeah, Lori, can you see why maybe I'm not an expert in happiness? I mean, are the people listening to this like, oh, this guy's got happiness cracked?
15:14 Speaker 00 They're like, I'm on the wrong podcast for what has happened. But this is the reason I love you and your work, John, so much is that in the face of sucky stuff, you have us do something, right? Which is that you have us find hope and find agency. And so when we get back from the break, we're going to talk about what we can do to fix this totally fixable problem of beating TB around the world. And we're going to see that the act of taking action to fix it is going to come with a bunch of happiness benefits that we might not even expect. Happiness Lab with John Green will be right back.
15:42 Speaker 06 You crush that, man. I mean, that's such a pro. Like, I take like eight takes on my briefs.
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17:22 Laurie Santos? I wanted to pull the whole look together. I found these gorgeous round ruched velvet pillows on Wayfair and bought them in a bunch of different colors to complement the rug. They're soft, they add a fun pop of color, and they make my apartment feel so much more pulled together and ready for the holidays. For all things hosting, Wayfair delivers high-quality, customer-trusted products for your home so you can host and celebrate without the stress. And with Wayfair Verified, you can create a home that stands up to real life with quality products, great value, and trusted reviews. Their products are hand-vetted by product specialists using a 10-point quality inspection. These days, I've been using Wayfair a lot, and I think you should too. When refreshing your home this holiday season, Wayfair delivers exactly what you need.
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19:12 Speaker 00 One of my favorite John Green quotes, which might be apocryphal, you can tell me, is allegedly the following: "The most punk rock thing to do in the world right now is to embrace the current problems with earnestness and optimism."
19:25 Speaker 06 I did say that.
19:26 Speaker 00 You did say that, okay. It's cool. Like, it's punk rock to look in the face of something really sucky, especially something as bad as global health problems and TB, and say, "We can fix this." And so what's the best way that folks who are listening to this right now can fix the problem of TB with earnestness and optimism?
19:42 Speaker 06 Well, I think there's a bunch of ways we can respond. I mean, just our attention matters. Like, we are much more likely to solve the problems we pay attention to. And when we think about our attention, we need to be thinking about it as a resource that's incredibly valuable, right? Like, all these social media companies know the value of our attention, and we need to understand it, too. But I also think that there are functional things that we can do. We can give to organizations that are making a difference. And there are a lot of ways to make a difference with TB. So obviously, there's organizations that are fighting TB itself, like Partners in Health. There's also organizations that are fighting malnutrition and poverty overall, which we know is a good way to fight tuberculosis. We know from the history of the United States and the United Kingdom that when poverty goes down and when food insecurity goes down,
20:27 Speaker 06 tuberculosis rates also go down.
20:29 Speaker 00 And that means that the cure for tuberculosis isn't in some lab somewhere that, you know, and I don't have to, like, learn about how to create new antibiotic cures. The cure's actually in our wallets and maybe like even small change that we have in our wallets.
20:41 Speaker 06 Yeah, it is incredible the extent to which tuberculosis is a resource problem. Now, we do need better tools. We have great researchers. They need to be better supported so that we have better vaccines for TB. I mean, the only vaccine we have is 105 years old. It's not very effective. We need better, shorter treatment regimens. We need better diagnostics. We need all of that stuff. But we have the tools to cure tuberculosis today. We have the tools to offer people, you know, 93% cure rates today. And we just need to be using those tools. It's the rare problem that actually is mostly a resource problem.
21:15 Speaker 00 And so today, Happiness Lab listeners are going to get a chance to help fix that resource. Problem. If you're a fan of the Happiness Lab, you know, we've worked with GiveDirectly before. GiveDirectly is one of the most effective, cost-effective ways to reduce poverty because they just give people money directly. And one of the cool things is this is actually studies on like giving people cash directly and the effect it can have specifically on TB. John, I don't know if you know this study is one that was done in.
21:40 Speaker 06 In Brazil?
21:41 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah.
21:41 Speaker 06 Oh, it's incredible.
21:42 Speaker 00 Do you want to explain?
21:43 Speaker 06 Yeah, they found, yeah, I mean, you'll all probably misquote it and then you can fix, you can fix everything I said. But that's, that's the nature of the amateur speaking and then the professor speaking, right? Like, that's like, that's the student-teacher relationship at its core. So my understanding is that there was unconditional cash payment transfers to fight poverty in an impoverished community in Brazil. And an unexpected side effect of this was that rates of tuberculosis went down by, I believe, 50%. Like, went down really dramatically.
22:15 Speaker 00 50%? I mean, 50% is, is like bonkers because like you'd think that you need to come in and like vaccinate everybody or like at hospitals. Just giving people some money actually reduced the rates of TB deaths by 50%.
22:29 Speaker 06 And this is a reminder that like people know how to spend money. Like, people, people are much better judges, people living their lives are much better judges of how to spend their money than I ever could be. And so this is why I'm such a big fan of GiveDirectly is because they empower people to make financial decisions that work for them. And as a result, we see less food insecurity, we see, we see more kids going to school, we see safer housing. And all of that contributes to lower rates of tuberculosis, among many other benefits.
23:00 Speaker 00 So just talk about why, like, if you're in a community that's facing tuberculosis, there's more money might help, right? I'm thinking in terms of like prevention and then like finding out and treating the disease once you have it.
23:10 Speaker 06 Yeah, so that's one obvious way, right? Is that you're more likely to be able to use the healthcare system and benefit from the healthcare system. But there are less obvious ways, too, like you're more likely to have safe housing with, where maybe you aren't living cheek by jowl with lots of other people. Where maybe you have a little bit better ventilation in your home, which we know reduces the, the risk of transmitting TB. You might, you might be able to afford better public transportation, so you're on public transport that isn't quite as crowded. There's a lot of different ways in which this could prevent TB infection, but it can also prevent TB death by allowing people to access the healthcare system.
23:46 Speaker 00 I mean, that was one of the things that was striking in your book where, you know, you just talk about the reality of this disease in Sierra Leone. You talk about how people might even have access to treatments, maybe the money for treatments, but treatment's super far away. And so they don't have the money for public transportation, or they can't miss work. And then they wind up not getting treated and the disease gets worse.
24:05 Speaker 06 Yeah.
24:05 Speaker 00 And maybe it turns into drug resistant disease, which is even worse. I mean, it's just incredible how much resources can help here.
24:11 Speaker 06 Yeah, resources can really help. And then, you know, we often, those of us who live in countries with relatively strong systems, and maybe I shouldn't be including myself in that category, but I think I think I still can. Those of us who live in countries with relatively strong systems, forget sometimes how many systems have to work together for this stuff to happen, right? Like, you need functioning transportation systems, you need electricity so that there can be cold chain, and you need trucks that have cold chain. And like, in order to keep a vaccine cold is a tremendous amount of work. And so all of this stuff has to work together for us to fight diseases of injustice. And yet, there is also the truth that like, systems get stronger when people are less poor. We know this, we
24:52 Speaker 06 know this from history, we know it from our history. And so that's why I'm a big fan of an organization like GiveDirectly that, you know, fights poverty in the most radical and yet stunningly obvious way possible.
25:06 Speaker 00 Obvious way. It is funny how we like, try to complicate, you know, charity.
25:10 Speaker 06 Yeah.
25:11 Speaker 00 Just like, we're gonna have middlemen and all this stuff, like, and if you've heard the show before and heard our work with GiveDirectly before, you know that basically what GiveDirectly does is they give these so-called unconditional cash transfers to people in poverty. Basically, that just means no strings attached, no bureaucracy, no middleman. Poorest families just get a bunch of cash.
25:29 Speaker 06 Yeah.
25:29 Speaker 00 And what we're gonna do with GiveDirectly now is that we're going to actually give these unconditional cash transfers to people living in the countries with the highest TB rates. So these are gonna be places like Bangladesh, Kenya, Liberia, Uganda.
25:43 Speaker 06 Wow.
25:43 Speaker 00 Last time we did this, John, we raised over $100,000 for GiveDirectly.
25:48 Speaker 06 Wow.
25:49 Speaker 00 I like to think that if you are involved, we're gonna get more money. But I'm gonna pledge, I didn't do this last time, but this time I'm gonna pledge, I'm gonna match the first $10,000 of donations that we get from Happiness Lab listeners. Which automatically puts us up to $20,000 if the Happiness Lab listeners give $10,000.
26:07 Speaker 06 I will, I will match the next $10,000.
26:09 Speaker 00 Oh, my gosh. And if my math is correct and we're doing the matching, that means we already get up to $40,000. You see the professor, the psych professor doing math in her head of 10 plus 10 plus 10.
26:21 Speaker 06 It's a, it's a beautiful thing to watch. I was, I really, I, you like, your eyes rolled back in your head, for those of you just listening. And it was really, it was really a wonder to see Dr. Sanders try to multiply 10 times 4.
26:34 Speaker 00 But talk, talk about the benefits that we could see if we actually are able to raise this much money, especially during this time of so many aid cuts.
26:41 Speaker 06 Yeah, I mean, it's hard to overstate the difference that it makes. I mean, I've seen the difference that it made in, in my friend Henry's life to go from living in absolute poverty to not. And, and, you know, everything becomes easier. And I'll give you one example. Henry spent two hours going to school and two hours going from school every single day for the first two and a half years of his education at the University of Sierra Leone. So you can imagine what a burden that is. And it's not like you can study on these incredibly crowded transports that he would be taking, trucks or buses that he would be taking. But then he was able to afford a motorbike. And as a result, now he can go directly to school and come directly home. That's a blessing for him
27:23 Speaker 06 in every imaginable way. But I think, you know, it also comes down to things like safe housing. I mean, for years, Henry lived in, in a home where the roof leaked. It was a steel or tin roof and the roof leaked. And so he was wet every single night. He would tell me that there was no place that he could put his bedroll where he wouldn't be wet and where his mom wouldn't be wet. And that's, that's miserable. It's also bad for your health and, you know, bad for your quality of sleep, bad for your mental health. And so I I just think like, small differences are big, big differences in impoverished communities.
27:58 Speaker 00 And what's really incredible, and you know, the psychology didn't need to work this way, but it does, is that if you can do something to help somebody in that awful situation, even with like, five bucks, 10 bucks, what the research really shows is that you'll be boosting your own happiness too. Turns out, we get more of a happiness kind of bang for our buck by giving five bucks in a way that will help somebody else than we do if we spend it ourselves, blow it on a latte or something.
28:21 Speaker 06 Hmm.
28:22 Speaker 00 But, but some of your work shows the second way we get a happiness benefit from this, right? Which is that when we take action about something that's sucky, we wind up feeling like the world is less sucky. We wind up doing something to like, build our own hope up. And I know you've talked about this a lot, like, in the face of just like, things being really bad, actually trying to fix it can make you a little bit more hopeful.
28:44 Speaker 06 Yeah, it's always been hard for me to get out of bed in the morning. It is hard for me not just to stare at the ceiling. It is hard for me not just to scroll on my phone and doom scroll until it's bedtime again. Like, that's just, that's just who I have always been. It's, it's always been hard for me. And I have found, I have found that absolutely, that the more that I give of my resources, of my time, of my attention to problems of the world, instead of feeling worse, I feel better, especially if I don't just let myself get overwhelmed by the fire hose of problems, right? Like, I do not labor under the delusion that tuberculosis is the only problem that we're facing in the United States right now, by any stretch of the imagination, right? But it is the place where I feel like I have
29:26 Speaker 06 chosen to try to make a difference. And in some ways, that makes it easier to live with the rest of the fire hose, because I can say like, well, I, I, I hope other people, and I believe other people are making the choice to, to respond to climate change, or other people are making the choice to respond to this injustice or that injustice, because I'm making the choice to respond to tuberculosis, which, you know, I feel like I'm uniquely able to respond to well. And I do find, I do find that that boosts my happiness. I mean, I just got off this grueling three-week-long book tour. And going into the book tour, I, I told my wife, I was like, I'm gonna come home a shell of a person. I'm gonna come home destroyed and devastated and like, it's gonna take me months to recover. And what actually happened is I got home
30:10 Speaker 06 and I was really happy to see my family and really happy to see my dog, but like, I didn't feel that way at all. I felt encouraged because I'd been on the road, meeting people who are also fighting to make the world better. And that's just an encouraging thing to be around.
30:21 Speaker 00 Yeah. And, and also what the research was is like, it doesn't actually matter how much you do. I mean, you went on a grueling book tour and wrote a whole book about this. But like, if somebody's listening and all you can give is three bucks, five bucks, just do that. You know, our last GiveDirectly campaigns were, were more made up of people giving incredibly small amounts of money, amounts of money that they thought were small. But it turns out when we all do it together, we can have this huge impact.
30:44 Speaker 06 And that's true, not just for money, right? Like, that's also true for advocacy, for activism. You know, thousands of people came together to ask Johnson and Johnson, for instance, to abandon their patents on, on, on bedacalin, their secondary patent attempts on bedacalin.
30:58 Speaker 00 And maybe just say what bedacalin is, just so.
31:00 Speaker 06 I, I just assume that the world knows what bedacalin is. Bedacalin is a really important drug for treating multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. And one of the drugs that Henry really needed and was told that he couldn't afford. And so, thousands of people coming together to make that, accomplish something that no one could have accomplished in isolation. And I think that's very much and very often the case, is that we feel powerless. But one of the reasons we feel powerless is because we feel like we're alone and our three dollars or our email to our congressperson doesn't matter much. But when you're part of a huge community, and you are part of a huge community, if you're part of the Happiness Lab community, then your three dollars matters more because it's not three dollars. It's three dollars
31:43 Speaker 06 in partnership with thousands of other people's three dollars.
31:46 Speaker 00 And so, end us off on what makes you hopeful about fighting TB and fighting other sucky stuff, when you can do that in the context of a community.
31:54 Speaker 06 Well, I think, you know, I've, one of the things I've learned from you and from my therapist is that pushing negative emotions to the side, or ignoring them, or trying to deny them, is not the right way. It's the, maybe the easy way and the way that sort of makes a kind of common sense, but it just doesn't work very well. And so I'm engaging with a lot of negative emotions right now, but I'm using them to fuel, fuel hope instead of using them to fuel despair. That's what I'm trying to do anyway, to fuel hope that better diagnostics are coming for TB, that maybe a better vaccine is coming, and to fuel hope that yes, like we have fallen down the staircase of human health in the last few months, but that's not permanent. This isn't the end of the story.
32:38 Speaker 06 This is the middle of the story and it really falls to us to write a better ending.
32:43 Speaker 00 Can part of that ending be you saying to my listeners, don't forget to be awesome? Because that would be really cool.
32:51 Speaker 06 Yes, they say in my hometown, friends, don't forget to be awesome.
32:56 Speaker 00 So tuberculosis, terrible disease, but only a disease of poverty. We can fix it. And if we want to treat poverty like the emergency it is and TB like the emergency it is, we can help by giving to GiveDirectly. So Happiness Lab listeners, go visit givedirectly.org/tb. Make me and John, apparently, pony up our 10,000 bucks to fix something that is totally fixable with our collective effort. John, thank you so much for coming on the Happiness Lab. You totally are a happiness expert. I know you don't think that, but.
33:24 Speaker 06 I really, I love that. I'm going to tell my therapist that this week. I'm going to say, did you know, Joellen, I am, according to a happiness expert, a bit of a happiness expert myself.
33:33 Speaker 00 I'm going to see the eyes rolling.
33:39 Laurie Santos? Thanks so much to John Green for taking the time to chat with me. And I'm just thrilled that he's also going to be matching up to $10,000 in donations from all of you. I had no idea he'd be willing to do that. So if hearing about this totally fixable problem of TB has made you excited to help decrease world suck and make yourself feel awesome, please consider giving whatever you're comfortable sharing to givedirectly.org/tb.
34:03 Laurie Santos? That's givedirectly.org/tb. Seriously, anything is helpful. Even tossing five bucks towards this important cause can help us all come together as a community to fix something important. I know these times feel very tough and very uncertain, but research shows that you'll likely feel a lot better about this big mess if you take some positive action, and you can do that with just a dollar donated at givedirectly.org/tb. That's givedirectly.org/tb. John and I also recently recorded a live event to celebrate the release of his new book, Everything is Tuberculosis. We had a lot of fun despite the subject matter and even ended the evening with my favorite thing ever, a sing-along.
34:44 Speaker 07 We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here. We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here.
35:04 Laurie Santos? I'm going to drop that show as a special bonus, so look out for it coming soon on the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.
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36:21 Speaker 08 A BetterHelp ad. I would like to formally request more storage space in my brain. Because somehow I can forget why I opened my laptop where I put my keys, or the name of someone I met 30 seconds ago. But I can remember an awkward conversation from six years ago in extraordinary detail. So if your brain came with a delete button, what would you use it on? Maybe it's that tough breakup you've analyzed from every possible angle, and irrational worry you know doesn't deserve this much attention. The conversation with your boss you keep rehearsing in the shower, or that one comment someone made that you're still thinking about weeks later. We don't always get to choose what sticks around in our heads.
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