Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, Happiness Lab listeners, today, you are in for
Speaker 1: a treat, because by the end of this episode, my
Speaker 1: guest and I will have shared how you can do
Speaker 1: something totally awesome, totally life saving, and something totally happiness
Speaker 1: inducing with almost zero effort. And spoiler, it's going to
Speaker 1: involve the website GiveDirectly dot org slash TV. That's GiveDirectly
Speaker 1: dot org slash TB. One of my favorite parts of
Speaker 1: being hosted The Happiness Lab is that I get to
Speaker 1: share stuff that I love with you, Like the time
Speaker 1: I interviewed my eighties heart Throb rob Low about nostalgia.
Speaker 1: Just talking with you on the zoom call and I'm
Speaker 1: taking back to you know, movies I watched in grade
Speaker 1: school and fun times in college and that is amazing.
Speaker 2: It makes me feel so good.
Speaker 1: Or when I geeked out about Star Trek with Lieutenant
Speaker 1: Wesley Crusher himself, will we eaten?
Speaker 2: Star Trek looks through the screen and it says there
Speaker 2: is a place specifically for you in the future, Like you, Laurie,
Speaker 2: there is a space for you in the future.
Speaker 1: I loved that. But today I not only get to
Speaker 1: chat with someone who I have nerded out about for
Speaker 1: a very very long time. But I also have the
Speaker 1: chance to invite you to help that guest do something
Speaker 1: to make the world a better place. If you happen
Speaker 1: to be a nerd fighter like me, then get ready,
Speaker 1: because today I'll be chatting with the amazing John Green.
Speaker 2: Hold on, I don't even let my headphones in. This
Speaker 2: is a catastrophe of the scale of which nobody's ever
Speaker 2: seen before.
Speaker 1: No, You're good, good, You're going to make.
Speaker 2: Sure I'm on the right fancy Mike, I am okay, great.
Speaker 1: I'm guessing a lot of my Happiness Lab listeners know
Speaker 1: who John Green is. John is first and foremost a
Speaker 1: best selling author, both of beloved fictional books like Turtles
Speaker 1: All the Way Down and The Fault in Our Stars,
Speaker 1: but also nonfiction greades like The Anthroposcene Reviewed, a book
Speaker 1: in which he expertly reviews everything from diet Doctor Pepper
Speaker 1: to the smallpox vaccine. But John is also an educator who,
Speaker 1: with his brother Hank, created the all inspiring vlog Brothers
Speaker 1: and Crash Course YouTube channels. John has been a hero
Speaker 1: of mine for a while because I see a lot
Speaker 1: of happiness science in his work. Did you ever think
Speaker 1: that you would be an expert on a happiness podcast.
Speaker 2: No, I don't give off the vibes of somebody who's
Speaker 2: an expert in happiness, to be honest with you, Doc,
Speaker 2: but you.
Speaker 1: So are, dude. I mean, you're so focused on things
Speaker 1: like awe and understanding that negative emotions are the things
Speaker 1: that you want to stick around with, Like you kind
Speaker 1: of follow all the science.
Speaker 2: I mean when I listened to the podcast, I often
Speaker 2: think like, oh, I'm closer than I thought I was,
Speaker 2: because I'm pretty far away from this sort of like
Speaker 2: wellness industry version of happiness. But I'm pretty close to
Speaker 2: the doctor Lori Santos version of happiness, which makes you really,
Speaker 2: for lack of a better term, happy.
Speaker 1: John's work embodies so many of the lessons that I've
Speaker 1: learned studying the science of happiness. That meaning comes not
Speaker 1: from avoiding suffering but embracing it. That there's wonder to
Speaker 1: be found in the mundane, and that even in the
Speaker 1: face of a lot of terrible, sucky stuff, we can
Speaker 1: choose to band together to actually fix things. And that's
Speaker 1: the goal of this episode. John's latest book deals with
Speaker 1: a problem facing people around the world.
Speaker 2: The new book is called everything is tuberculosis. It's a
Speaker 2: history of tuberculosis told through the perspective of both a
Speaker 2: long term historical lens, but also the life of one
Speaker 2: kid living with tuberculosis and sire leone.
Speaker 1: And so just for listeners, you might not be as familiar.
Speaker 1: What is tuberculosis?
Speaker 2: So tuberculosis is an airborne disease. It usually affects the lungs,
Speaker 2: but it can infect any part of the body really
Speaker 2: and it makes people really sick. But it tends to
Speaker 2: make them sick quite slowly because the bacteria divides very slowly,
Speaker 2: and so you can be sick for months or years.
Speaker 2: But if left untreated, tuberculosis usually does result in death. Fortunately,
Speaker 2: since the nineteen fifties, we've had a cure for tuberculosis.
Speaker 2: It's a bacterial infection, so the curious antibiotics given every
Speaker 2: day over four to six months.
Speaker 1: So why write a book about tuberculosis, now, why tell
Speaker 1: this particular story at this time?
Speaker 2: Well, because tuberculosis is still the world's deadliest infectious disease astonishingly,
Speaker 2: I mean I say astonishingly because it's incurable for so long.
Speaker 2: Like since the disease became curable, we've allowed over one
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty million people to die of it, which
Speaker 2: is just a figure that's hard for me to get
Speaker 2: my head around, but it just speaks to how, you know,
Speaker 2: disease is a biomedical phenomenon, but it's also a social one,
Speaker 2: and how we imagine disease, how we allocate resources around
Speaker 2: disease that shapes not just like how people live and
Speaker 2: die of diseases like tuberculosis, but also who lives and
Speaker 2: dies of diseases like tb DO.
Speaker 1: I seems like part of your TV journey was trying
Speaker 1: to fix the problem, But part of the TV journey,
Speaker 1: at least in the book, seemed like in some ways,
Speaker 1: TV was sort of like cool. I don't know if
Speaker 1: you can use the word cool for some disease that
Speaker 1: kills lots of people, But it's kind of a fascinating
Speaker 1: cultural journey. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean one of the fascinating parts of that cultural
Speaker 2: journey is that for a while it was considered cool,
Speaker 2: Like Victor Hugo's friends would joke with him that he
Speaker 2: could be a great novelist if only he contracted consumption,
Speaker 2: because it was so widely believed that consumption made you
Speaker 2: a great artist and also made you really beautiful. This
Speaker 2: was part of the romanticization of the disease eighteenth and
Speaker 2: nineteenth centuries. But really, tuberculosis is everywhere in History's I
Speaker 2: argue in the book that it was an ancillary cause
Speaker 2: of World War One. It was the cause of the
Speaker 2: cowboy hat. It's the reason New Mexico is a state.
Speaker 2: The strangeness of tuberculosis is that because it was such
Speaker 2: a powerful and important part of our culture. I mean,
Speaker 2: this was a disease that killed one out of every
Speaker 2: seven people, that it inevitably also became a disease that
Speaker 2: had a huge impact on our culture in our history.
Speaker 1: Wait, TV is the reason we have the cowboy hat.
Speaker 2: That doesn't make any sense, and yet it makes total
Speaker 2: sense because there was a hat maker in New Jersey
Speaker 2: named John B. Stetson who got tuberculosis and was told
Speaker 2: that his only chance as survival was to go west.
Speaker 2: This was a very common belief at the time. You
Speaker 2: move west and then you recover your health in the
Speaker 2: sweet clean air. And John B. Stetson made it out
Speaker 2: to Saint Joseph, Missouri, and while he was there he
Speaker 2: recovered from tuberculosis. About twenty five percent of people for
Speaker 2: reasons we still don't understand, we'll recover without treatment. And
Speaker 2: John B. Stetson was in that lucky few, and as
Speaker 2: he recovered, he noticed that the hats in the American
Speaker 2: West were not very good because there were like coonskin
Speaker 2: caps that were literally bug infested. There were like straw
Speaker 2: hats that folks from New Mexico and Mexico had brought up,
Speaker 2: but like they didn't work particularly well in Saint Joe's
Speaker 2: rainy environment. And so he invented the Stetson hat. And
Speaker 2: so yes, there would be no cowboy hat without tuberculosis.
Speaker 1: And so your own introduction to TV, as I understand
Speaker 1: it started when you met somebody incredible, somebody who reminded
Speaker 1: you of your own son. Tell me about Henry.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so Henry shares a name with my son, who
Speaker 2: is also named Henry. And when I first met Henry
Speaker 2: Rider in Sierra Leone in twenty nineteen, I thought he
Speaker 2: was about the same age as my son. I thought
Speaker 2: he was about nine years old, and he just walked
Speaker 2: me all around the hospital, and you're right, he's just
Speaker 2: somebody who's incredible. He was kind of the mayor of
Speaker 2: that place. Everywhere he went, people were shaking his hand,
Speaker 2: rubbing his head, and he took me to the lab.
Speaker 2: He took me to the wards where the patients were living,
Speaker 2: and he eventually took me back to the doctors who
Speaker 2: were meeting to discuss cases they were concerned about or whatever,
Speaker 2: and they sort of lovingly and laughingly shoot Henry away.
Speaker 2: And then I said, whose kid is that? Is that
Speaker 2: one of your kids? And they said, no, he's a patient,
Speaker 2: and he's in fact one of the patients that we're
Speaker 2: consulting about because we're very concerned about him. And it
Speaker 2: turned out that Henry wasn't nine like I imagined him. He
Speaker 2: was seventeen. He'd just been so emaciated, first by malnutrition
Speaker 2: and then by the disease that he looked much younger.
Speaker 2: And it was really in following Henry's story and getting
Speaker 2: to know Henry that I ended up writing the book.
Speaker 1: So something that I was shocked by in your book
Speaker 1: and kind of embarrassed when I was reading it, is
Speaker 1: that I sort of assumed that TV was like this
Speaker 1: disease of the past, like some like old Victorian problem
Speaker 1: that you know, you look into old pictures and stuff
Speaker 1: like that totally give me a sense of why we
Speaker 1: don't realize the scope of TV today and what the
Speaker 1: actual scope is today.
Speaker 2: I think one of the reasons we don't realize the
Speaker 2: scope is that it tends to be a problem in
Speaker 2: places where people are least likely to have access to megaphones,
Speaker 2: you know, least likely to be able to make their
Speaker 2: voices heard. But the scope of the problem is really
Speaker 2: really significant. About ten million people get sick with tuberculosis
Speaker 2: every year, and about one point twenty five million die,
Speaker 2: and unfortunately that number is likely to go up in
Speaker 2: the next few years.
Speaker 1: This seems really crazy, right, that the disease is still
Speaker 1: around even though we have good treatments for it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: why aren't we fixing this? Like this seems like a
Speaker 1: problem that medically we've sorted out the hard part, Right,
Speaker 1: we have antibiotics that can fix this, Like, why are
Speaker 1: people still dying from this?
Speaker 2: Well? TV isn't an easy disease to cure by any
Speaker 2: stretch of the imagination. But you know, my brother had
Speaker 2: cancer a couple of years ago, and that also wasn't
Speaker 2: an easy disease to cure. It costs about one hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty times more to cure my brother's cancer than
Speaker 2: it costs to cure Henry's tuberculosis, and yet nobody at
Speaker 2: any time said, I'm not sure that it makes sense
Speaker 2: to treat you. It might be better to focus more
Speaker 2: on prevention. No, it's true that in a narrow sense,
Speaker 2: it's a better investment to focus on the prevention of
Speaker 2: cancer than it is to focus on treating cancer. But
Speaker 2: of course that's a ludicrous thing to say. We would
Speaker 2: never say that to someone living with cancer. And yet
Speaker 2: Henry heard that all the time. He heard that there
Speaker 2: just aren't resources out there to offer you the kind
Speaker 2: of personalized, taylored care that you would need in order
Speaker 2: to survive. And as a result, he was really, really
Speaker 2: sick for a really long time. I mean, Henry was
Speaker 2: essentially on his deathbed when finally, thanks to an extraordinary doctor,
Speaker 2: doctor jerom To Farah, and the Sierra Leonian Ministry of
Speaker 2: Health and the nonprofit organization Partners in Health, they all
Speaker 2: kind of came together and decided that this kid was
Speaker 2: worthy of that kind of treatment. And even though, as
Speaker 2: doctor Jeroum told me, I know, it's just one kid,
Speaker 2: but what if he can be the first of many?
Speaker 2: And he has been the first of many Blessedly, so
Speaker 2: many more people are receiving the kind of treatment that
Speaker 2: Henry finally was able to receive, and that's why he's
Speaker 2: here with us today.
Speaker 1: But it seems like what you're saying is that TV
Speaker 1: isn't just like a medical problem, it's really like a
Speaker 1: social justice problem. It's really sort of a disease of poverty.
Speaker 1: Is that kind of what you found writing the book?
Speaker 2: Absolutely, it is a social justice problem. Tuberculosis follows the
Speaker 2: paths of injustice that we blaze for it, and that's
Speaker 2: been the case for decades now. Anybody can get TV.
Speaker 2: It's an airborne disease, but you're vastly more likely to
Speaker 2: be come sick and die if you're malnourished, if you
Speaker 2: have other health problems like an HIV infection or diabetes,
Speaker 2: and so it's a disease of injustice in every way.
Speaker 2: And the reason I wrote this book is because for me,
Speaker 2: it's the exemplary disease of injustice. It's certainly not the
Speaker 2: only one, but it is a disease that is a
Speaker 2: social phenomenon as much as a biomedical one.
Speaker 1: It also seems to be one that we kind of
Speaker 1: ignore for the same reason we ignore poverty, right, Like
Speaker 1: we like to think we have control over the disease.
Speaker 1: We like to think that, you know, we earned our status.
Speaker 1: If we happen to kind of be privileged enough not
Speaker 1: to be in a place where this disease is wiping
Speaker 1: people out. It seems to also be kind of a
Speaker 1: problem of human nature.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. I mean, I think that's a great observation.
Speaker 2: We are uncomfortable with dealing with randomness and injustice in
Speaker 2: our social orders, because of course we are. It discomforts
Speaker 2: those of us who are extremely privileged. It also discomforts
Speaker 2: other people because we don't really want to live in
Speaker 2: a world where like the most powerful emperor of all time,
Speaker 2: Alexander the Great, can die from just like typhoid or
Speaker 2: malaria or whatever, which is why for centuries we've had
Speaker 2: rumors that he died of poisoning, because that would be
Speaker 2: a much more human centric thing to have happen, a
Speaker 2: much more agency based thing to have happened. The places
Speaker 2: where we where we don't have agency, or where our
Speaker 2: agency is very confusing, like it is with tuberculosis, are
Speaker 2: uncomfortable for us, I think, because we don't want to
Speaker 2: reckon with not just the randomness in the social order,
Speaker 2: but also the injustice that's built into the social order.
Speaker 1: I mean, especially when it comes to life and death.
Speaker 1: Like if you're someone like Henry and you're literally hearing
Speaker 1: you know your life is not worth saving because it's
Speaker 1: too expensive given where you live. I mean, that's just incredible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it really is horrifying, and yet people
Speaker 2: are told that every day, and not just people with TB,
Speaker 2: but also people living with other other diseases. You know,
Speaker 2: when my brother got cancer, one of the first things
Speaker 2: he said to me was this as a ninety three
Speaker 2: percent curate in the United States and a twenty to
Speaker 2: seventy percent curate in poor countries. And the reason we
Speaker 2: don't know whether it's twenty percent or seventy percent is
Speaker 2: because we don't even do a good job of counting.
Speaker 1: Man, And you just said something that was even carrier, right,
Speaker 1: You said that you know, TV is really bad now
Speaker 1: and it's likely going to get worse. Yeah, And that's
Speaker 1: in part because you know, you and I are having
Speaker 1: this conversation at a strange time when things are getting worse.
Speaker 1: Why are things getting worse? And what's happened recently to
Speaker 1: change things?
Speaker 2: So we've had dramatic cuts, mostly from the US government
Speaker 2: but also from other governments to tuberculosis response. The United
Speaker 2: States has long been the most generous funder of tuberculosis response,
Speaker 2: and unfortunately we've walked that back in a very sudden,
Speaker 2: chaotic way, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 2: people seeing their treatment interrupted mid course. Like I said earlier,
Speaker 2: it takes between four and six months of treatment to
Speaker 2: be cured. If that gets interrupted in the middle, even
Speaker 2: if your treatment gets restarted, you're very likely to develop
Speaker 2: drug resistant tuberculosis, which is a much much more serious thing.
Speaker 2: That's what Henry was living with. And we know that
Speaker 2: most of those people will die. Unfortunately, and just as catastrophically,
Speaker 2: many of those people will circulate drug resistant tuberculosis in
Speaker 2: their own communities. We've already seen the rates of tuberculosis
Speaker 2: death go up. I think twelve thousand people excess quote
Speaker 2: unquote excess deaths have happened in the last three months.
Speaker 2: But it'll go up much more dramatically as time goes on.
Speaker 2: Because tuberculosis is a slow killer.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is like a like slow burning moral emergency.
Speaker 1: This isn't just like, oh, some made gut cut in
Speaker 1: this country that I don't care about so much, Like
Speaker 1: this is like really tragic and utterly preventable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, utterly preventable. And also, I mean frankly scary,
Speaker 2: because the more complicated drug resistant tuberculosis you have circulating
Speaker 2: in communities, the more likely it is that we'll see
Speaker 2: more cases of TB that we simply don't have any
Speaker 2: tools to treat. I mean, I try not to be
Speaker 2: a person who engages in hyperbole when it comes to
Speaker 2: global health, and I think it's important to understand that
Speaker 2: the main reason we need to respond to this tragedy
Speaker 2: is because it's affecting millions of human beings. But there
Speaker 2: is another reason to respond to this tragedy, which is
Speaker 2: that if we aren't careful, it will affect billions of
Speaker 2: human beings.
Speaker 1: And so this salt is pretty sucky.
Speaker 2: But one of the reasons, Yeah, Ury, can you see
Speaker 2: why maybe I'm not an expert in happiness. I mean,
Speaker 2: are the people listening to this like, oh, this guy's
Speaker 2: got happiness cracked?
Speaker 1: They're like, I'm on the wrong podcast. What has happened?
Speaker 1: But this is the reason I love you and your
Speaker 1: work John so much, is that in the face of
Speaker 1: sucky stuff, you have us do something right, which is
Speaker 1: that you have us find hope and find agency. And
Speaker 1: so when we get back from the break, we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about what we can do to fix this
Speaker 1: totally fixable problem of beating TV around the world. And
Speaker 1: we're going to see that the act of taking action
Speaker 1: to fix it is going to come with a bunch
Speaker 1: of happiness benefits that we might not even expect. Happiness
Speaker 1: lab with John Green, We'll be right back.
Speaker 2: You crush that, man, I mean, that's such a pro
Speaker 2: like I take like eight takes on my breaks.
Speaker 1: One of my favorite John Green quotes, which might be apocryphal,
Speaker 1: you can tell me, is allegedly the following The most
Speaker 1: punk rock thing to do in the world right now
Speaker 1: is to embrace the current problems with earnestness and optimism.
Speaker 2: I did say that.
Speaker 1: You did say that, Okay, it's cool, Like it's punk
Speaker 1: rock to like look in the face of something really sucky,
Speaker 1: especially something as bad as global health problems in TV,
Speaker 1: and say we can fix this. And so, what's the
Speaker 1: best way that folks who are listening to this right
Speaker 1: now can fix the problem of TV with earnestness and optimism.
Speaker 2: Well, I think there's a bunch of ways we can respond.
Speaker 2: I mean, just our attention matters, Like we are much
Speaker 2: more likely to solve the problems we pay attention to,
Speaker 2: And when we think about our attention, we need to
Speaker 2: be thinking about it as a resource that's incredibly valuable, right,
Speaker 2: Like all these social media companies know the value of
Speaker 2: our attention and we need to understand it too. But
Speaker 2: I also think that there are functional things that we
Speaker 2: can do. We can give to organizations that are making
Speaker 2: a difference, And there are a lot of ways to
Speaker 2: make a difference with TV. So obviously there's organizations that
Speaker 2: are fighting TV itself, like Partners and Health. There's also
Speaker 2: organizations that are fighting malnutrition and poverty overall, which we
Speaker 2: know is a good way to fight tuberculosis. We know
Speaker 2: from the history of the United States and the United
Speaker 2: Kingdom that when poverty goes down and when food and
Speaker 2: security goes down, tuberculosis rates also go down.
Speaker 1: And that means that the cure for tuberculosis isn't in
Speaker 1: some lab somewhere that you know, and I don't have
Speaker 1: to like learn about how to create new antibiotic cures.
Speaker 1: The cure is actually in our wallets and maybe like
Speaker 1: even small change that we have in our wallets.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is incredible the extent to which tuberculosis is
Speaker 2: a resource problem. Now, we do need better tools. We
Speaker 2: have great researchers, they need to be better supported so
Speaker 2: that we have better vaccines for TV. I mean, the
Speaker 2: only vaccine we have is one hundred and five years old.
Speaker 2: It's not very effective. We need better, shorter treatment regimens,
Speaker 2: we need better diagnostics, we need all of that stuff.
Speaker 2: But we have the tools to cure tuberculosis today. We
Speaker 2: have the tools to offer people, you know, ninety three
Speaker 2: percent cure rates today, and we just need to be
Speaker 2: using those tools. It's the rare problem that actually is
Speaker 2: mostly a resource problem.
Speaker 1: And so today Happiness Lablinsters are going to get a
Speaker 1: chance to help fix that resource problem. If you're a
Speaker 1: fan of the Happiness Lab, you know we've worked with
Speaker 1: give Directly before. Give directly is one of the most effective,
Speaker 1: cost effective ways to reduce poverty because they just give
Speaker 1: people money directly. And one of the cool things is
Speaker 1: this is actually studies on like giving people cash directly
Speaker 1: and the effect it can have specifically on TV. John,
Speaker 1: I don't know if you know this study is one
Speaker 1: that was done in in Brazil.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Oh it's incredible.
Speaker 1: Do you want to explain?
Speaker 2: Yeah, they found Yeah, I mean you'll I'll probably misquoted
Speaker 2: and then you can fix you can fix everything I said.
Speaker 2: But that's the nature of the amateur speaking and then
Speaker 2: the professor speaking right Like, that's like, that's the student
Speaker 2: teacher relationship at its core. So my understanding is that
Speaker 2: there was unconditional cash payment transfers to fight poverty in
Speaker 2: an impoverished community in Brazil, and an unexpected side effect
Speaker 2: of this was that rates of tuberculosis went down by
Speaker 2: I believe fifty percent, like went down really fifty percent.
Speaker 1: I mean fifty percent is like bonkers, because like you'd
Speaker 1: think that you need to come in and like vaccinate
Speaker 1: everybody or like had hospitals. Just giving people some money
Speaker 1: actually reduce the rates of TV deaths by fifty percent.
Speaker 2: And this is a reminder that like people know how
Speaker 2: to spend money, like people, people are much better judges
Speaker 2: people living their lives are much better judges of how
Speaker 2: to spend their money than I ever could be. And
Speaker 2: so this is why I'm such a big fan of
Speaker 2: gift directly is because they empower people to make financial
Speaker 2: decisions that work for them, and as a result, we
Speaker 2: see less food and security, we see more kids going
Speaker 2: to school, we see safer housing, and all of that
Speaker 2: contributes to lower rates of tuberculosis, among many other benefits.
Speaker 1: So just talk about why, Like, if you're in a
Speaker 1: community that's facing tuberculosis, this more money might help, right,
Speaker 1: I think in terms of like prevention and then like
Speaker 1: finding out and treating the disease once you have it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So that's one obvious way, right, is that you're
Speaker 2: more likely to be able to use the healthcare system
Speaker 2: and benefit from the healthcare system. But there are less
Speaker 2: obvious ways too, Like you're more likely to have safe
Speaker 2: housing with where maybe you aren't living cheek by jow
Speaker 2: with lots of other people, where maybe you have a
Speaker 2: little bit better ventilation in your home, which we know
Speaker 2: reduces the risk of transmitting TV. You might be able
Speaker 2: to afford better public transportation, so you're on public transport
Speaker 2: that isn't quite as crowded. There's a lot of different
Speaker 2: ways in which this could prevent TV infection, but it
Speaker 2: can also prevent TV death by allowing people to access
Speaker 2: the healthcare system.
Speaker 1: I mean that was one of the things that was
Speaker 1: striking in your book, where you just talk about the
Speaker 1: reality of this disease in Sierra Leone. You talk about
Speaker 1: how people might even have access to treatments, maybe the
Speaker 1: money for treatments, but treatment's super far away, and so
Speaker 1: they don't have the money for public transportation or they
Speaker 1: can't miss work, and then they wind up not getting
Speaker 1: treated and the disease gets worse. Yeah, and maybe it
Speaker 1: turns into drug resistant disease, which is even worse. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's just incredible how much resources can help here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, resources can really help. And then you know, we
Speaker 2: often those of us who live in countries with relatively
Speaker 2: strong systems, and maybe I shouldn't be including myself in
Speaker 2: that category, but I think I think I still can't
Speaker 2: those of us who live in countries with relatively strong
Speaker 2: systems forget sometimes how many systems have to work together
Speaker 2: for this stuff to happen, right, Like, you need functioning
Speaker 2: transportation systems, you need electricity so that there can be
Speaker 2: cold chain, and you need trucks that have cold chain,
Speaker 2: and like, in order to keep a vaccine cold is
Speaker 2: a tremendous amount of work, and so all of this
Speaker 2: stuff has to work together for us to fight diseases
Speaker 2: of injustice. And yet there is also the truth that
Speaker 2: like systems get stronger when people are less poor. We
Speaker 2: know this, We know this from history, We know it
Speaker 2: from our history. And so that's why I'm a big
Speaker 2: fan of an organization like Gift Directly that you know,
Speaker 2: fights poverty in the most radical and yet stunningly obvious
Speaker 2: way possible.
Speaker 1: Obviously, it is funny how we like try to complicate
Speaker 1: you know, charity. Yeah, just like we're going to have
Speaker 1: middlemen and all this stuff. Like and if you've heard
Speaker 1: the show before and heard our work would give Directly before,
Speaker 1: you know that. Basically, what Gift Directly does is they
Speaker 1: give these so called unconditional cash transfers to people in poverty.
Speaker 1: Basic that just means no strings attached, no bureaucracy, no middleman,
Speaker 1: forest families just get a bunch of cash. And what
Speaker 1: we're going to do with Give Directly now is that
Speaker 1: we're going to actually give these unconditional cash transfers to
Speaker 1: people living in the countries with the highest TB rates.
Speaker 1: So you's gonna be places like Bangladesh, Kenya, Liberia, Uganda.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: Last time we did this, John, we raised over one
Speaker 1: hundred thousand dollars per gift directly.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: I like to think that if you are involved, we're
Speaker 1: going to get more money. But I'm gonna pledge. I
Speaker 1: didn't do this last time, but this time I'm going
Speaker 1: to pledge. I'm going to match the first ten thousand
Speaker 1: dollars of donations that we get from Happiness Lab listeners,
Speaker 1: which automatically puts us up to twenty thousand dollars. If
Speaker 1: the Happiness Lab listeners give ten thousand bucks.
Speaker 2: I will I will match the next ten thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh. And if my math is correct and
Speaker 1: we're doing the matching, that means we already get up
Speaker 1: to four eight thousand dollars. You see the professor, the
Speaker 1: psych professor, doing math in her head of ten plus
Speaker 1: ten plus ten.
Speaker 2: It's a beautiful thing to watch. I really like your
Speaker 2: eyes rolled back in your head for those of you
Speaker 2: just listening, And it was really it was really a
Speaker 2: wonder to see doctor Sanders trying to multiply ten times four.
Speaker 1: But talk about the benefits that we could see if
Speaker 1: we actually are able to raise this much money, especially
Speaker 1: during this time of so many aid cuts.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it's hard to overstate the difference that
Speaker 2: it makes. I mean, I've seen the difference that it
Speaker 2: made in my friend Henry's life to go from living
Speaker 2: an absolute poverty to not and you know, everything becomes easier.
Speaker 2: And I'll give you one example. Henry spent two hours
Speaker 2: going to school and two hours going from school every
Speaker 2: single day for the first two and a half years
Speaker 2: of his education at the University of Sierra Leone. So
Speaker 2: you can imagine what a burden that is. And it's
Speaker 2: not like you can study on these incredibly crowded transports
Speaker 2: that he would be taking, trucks or buses that he
Speaker 2: would be taking. But then he was able to afford
Speaker 2: a motorbike and as a result, now he can go
Speaker 2: directly to school and come directly home. That's a blessing
Speaker 2: for him in every imaginable way. But I think you know,
Speaker 2: it also comes down to things like safe housing. I mean,
Speaker 2: for years, Henry lived in a home where the roof leaked.
Speaker 2: It was a steel or tin roof and the roof leaked,
Speaker 2: and so he was wet every single night. He would
Speaker 2: tell me that there was no place that he could
Speaker 2: put his bedroll where he wouldn't be wet and where
Speaker 2: his mom wouldn't be wet, and that's miserable. It's also
Speaker 2: bad for your health, and you know, bad for your
Speaker 2: quality of sleep, bad for your mental health. And so
Speaker 2: I just think, like small differences are big, big differences
Speaker 2: in impoverished communities.
Speaker 1: And what's really incredible, and you know, the psychology didn't
Speaker 1: need to work this way, but it does, is that
Speaker 1: if you can do something to help somebody in that
Speaker 1: awful situation, even with like five bucks ten bucks, what
Speaker 1: the research really shows is that you'll be boosting your
Speaker 1: own happiness too. Turns out we get more of a
Speaker 1: happiness kind of bang for our buck by giving five
Speaker 1: bucks in a way that will help somebody else than
Speaker 1: we do if we spend in ourselves blow it on
Speaker 1: a latte or something. But some of your work shows
Speaker 1: the second way we get a happiness benefit from this, right,
Speaker 1: which is that when we take action about something that's sucky,
Speaker 1: we wind up feeling like the world is less sucky.
Speaker 1: We wind up doing something to like build our own
Speaker 1: hope up. And I know you've talked about this a lot,
Speaker 1: like in the face of just like things being really bad,
Speaker 1: Actually trying to fix it can make you a little
Speaker 1: bit more hopeful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's always been hard for me to get out
Speaker 2: of bed in the morning. It is hard for me,
Speaker 2: not just to stare at the ceiling. It is hard
Speaker 2: for me not just to scroll on my phone and doom,
Speaker 2: scroll until it's bedtime again. Like that's just that's just
Speaker 2: who I have always been. It's always been hard for me,
Speaker 2: and I have found, I have found that absolutely that
Speaker 2: the more that I give of my resources, of my time,
Speaker 2: of my attention to problems of the world, instead of
Speaker 2: feeling worse, I feel better, especially if I don't just
Speaker 2: let myself get overwhelmed by the fire hose of problem.
Speaker 2: Right Like I do not labor under the delusion that
Speaker 2: tuberculosis is the only problem that we're facing in the
Speaker 2: United States right now, by any stretch of the imagination, right,
Speaker 2: But it is the place where I feel like I
Speaker 2: have chosen to try to make a difference, And in
Speaker 2: some ways that makes it easier to live with the
Speaker 2: rest of the fire hose, because I can say, like, well,
Speaker 2: I hope other people and I believe other people are
Speaker 2: making the choice to respond to climate change, or other
Speaker 2: people are making the choice to respond to this injustice
Speaker 2: or that injustice, because I'm making the choice to respond
Speaker 2: to tuberculosis, which you know, I feel like I'm uniquely
Speaker 2: able to respond too well. And I do find I
Speaker 2: do find that that boosts my happiness. I mean, I
Speaker 2: just got off this grueling three week long book tour,
Speaker 2: and going into the book tour, I told my wife
Speaker 2: I was like, I'm going to come home a shell
Speaker 2: of a person. I'm going to come home destroyed and
Speaker 2: devastated and like it's going to take me months to recover.
Speaker 2: And what actually happened is I got home and I
Speaker 2: was really happy to see my family and really happy
Speaker 2: to see my dog. But like I didn't feel that
Speaker 2: way at all. I felt incurg because I'd been on
Speaker 2: the road meeting people who are also fighting to make
Speaker 2: the world better and that's just an encouraging thing to
Speaker 2: be around.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And also what the researchers is like, it doesn't
Speaker 1: actually matter how much you do. I mean, you went
Speaker 1: on a grueling book tour and wrote a whole book
Speaker 1: about this, But like, if somebody is listening and all
Speaker 1: you can give is three bucks, five bucks, just do that.
Speaker 1: You know, our last give directly. Campaigns were more more
Speaker 1: made up of people giving incredibly small amounts of money,
Speaker 1: amounts of money that they thought were small. But it
Speaker 1: turns out when we all do it together, we can
Speaker 1: have this huge impact.
Speaker 2: And that's true not just for money, right, like, that's
Speaker 2: also true for advocacy, for activism. You know, thousands of
Speaker 2: people came together to ask Johnson and Johnson, for instance,
Speaker 2: to abandon their patents on bdacaul in, their secondary patent
Speaker 2: attempts on baedaculan.
Speaker 1: And maybe just say what baedaculan is, just so.
Speaker 2: I just assumed that the world knows what pedacculan is.
Speaker 2: Bdacculin is a really important drug for treating multi drug
Speaker 2: resistant tuberculosis and one of the drugs that Henry really
Speaker 2: needed and was told that he couldn't afford. And so
Speaker 2: thousands of people coming together to make that accomplish something
Speaker 2: that no one could have accomplished in isolation. And I
Speaker 2: think that's very much and very often the case is
Speaker 2: that we feel powerless. But one of the reasons we
Speaker 2: feel powerless is because we feel like we're alone and
Speaker 2: our three dollars or our email to our congress person
Speaker 2: doesn't matter. Much. But when you're part of a huge community,
Speaker 2: and you are part of a huge community, if you're
Speaker 2: part of the Happiness Lab community, then your three dollars
Speaker 2: matters more because it's not three dollars, it's three dollars
Speaker 2: in partnership with thousands of other people's three dollars.
Speaker 1: And so end us off on what makes you hopeful
Speaker 1: about fighting TV and fighting other secky stuff when you
Speaker 1: can do that in the context of a community.
Speaker 2: Well, I think you know. I've one of the things
Speaker 2: I've learned from you and from my therapist is that
Speaker 2: pushing negative emotions to the side, or ignoring them or
Speaker 2: trying to deny them is not the right way. It's
Speaker 2: the maybe the easy way, and the way that sort
Speaker 2: of makes a kind of common sense, but it just
Speaker 2: doesn't work very well. And so I'm engaging with a
Speaker 2: lot of negative emotions right now, but I'm using them
Speaker 2: to fuel fuel hope instead of using them to fuel despair.
Speaker 2: That's what I'm trying to do anyway, to fuel hope
Speaker 2: that better diagnostics are coming for TB, that maybe a
Speaker 2: better vaccine is coming, and to fuel hope that yes,
Speaker 2: we have fallen down the staircase of human health in
Speaker 2: the last few months. But that's not permanent. This isn't
Speaker 2: the end of the story. This is the middle of
Speaker 2: the story, and it really falls to us to write
Speaker 2: a better ending.
Speaker 1: Can part of that ending be you saying to my listeners,
Speaker 1: don't forget to be awesome, because that would be really cool.
Speaker 2: Yes, they say in my hometown, friends, don't forget to
Speaker 2: be awesome.
Speaker 1: So tuberculous is terrible disease, but only a disease of poverty.
Speaker 1: We can fix it. And if we want to treat
Speaker 1: poverty like the emergency it is, and TV like the
Speaker 1: emergency it is, we can help by giving to give directly.
Speaker 1: So Happiness Lab listeners go visit GiveDirectly dot org, slash TV.
Speaker 1: Make me and John apparently pony up our ten thousand
Speaker 1: bucks to fix something that is totally fixable with our
Speaker 1: collective effort. John, thank you so much for coming on
Speaker 1: the Happiness Lave. You totally are a happiness expert. I
Speaker 1: know you don't think that, but.
Speaker 2: I really I love that. I'm going to tell my
Speaker 2: therapist that this week I'm going to say, did you know, Joellen,
Speaker 2: I am according to a happiness expert. A bit of
Speaker 2: a happiness expert myself.
Speaker 1: I'm going to see the eyes rolling And thanks so
Speaker 1: much to John Green for taking the time to chat
Speaker 1: with me. And I'm just thrilled that he's also going
Speaker 1: to be matching up to ten thousand dollars in donations
Speaker 1: from all of you. I had no idea he'd be
Speaker 1: willing to do that. So if hearing about this totally
Speaker 1: fixable problem of TB has made you excited to help
Speaker 1: decrease world suck and make yourself feel awesome, please consider
Speaker 1: giving whatever you're comfortable sharing to give directly dot org
Speaker 1: slash TB. That's give directly dot org slash TB. Seriously,
Speaker 1: anything is helpful. Even tossing five bucks towards this important
Speaker 1: cause can help us all come together as a community
Speaker 1: to fix something important. These times feel very tough and
Speaker 1: very uncertain, but research shows that you'll likely feel a
Speaker 1: lot better about this big mess if you take some
Speaker 1: positive action, and you can do that with just a
Speaker 1: dollar donated at GiveDirectly dot org slash TB. That's GiveDirectly
Speaker 1: dot org slash TB. John and I also recently recorded
Speaker 1: a live event to celebrate the release of his new
Speaker 1: book everything is tuberculosis. We had a lot of fun
Speaker 1: despite the subject matter, and even ended the evening with
Speaker 1: my favorite thing ever, a sing along We're.
Speaker 3: Here because we're here, Because we're here, because we're here,
Speaker 3: We're here, because we're here, because we're here, because we're here.
Speaker 1: I'm going to drop that show as a special bonus,
Speaker 1: so look out for it coming soon on Happiness Lab
Speaker 1: with Me, Doctor Laurie Santos