This is 99% Invisible.

I'm Roman Mars.

You may know John Green as a YouTuber, a podcaster, or a mega bestselling young adult novelist,

but John's writing goes way beyond novels.

His latest book is a nonfiction deep dive into one of the oldest and deadliest threats to humankind.

You know, if you told me six years ago that my next book would be about tuberculosis,

I would have been duly surprised.

I did not think of tuberculosis as being really much of anything.

I thought it was a disease of the past, like a disease that killed the guy in Red Dead Redemption, too,

not a present tense phenomenon.

Tuberculosis is in fact the single most lethal infectious disease in the history of the world.

It's been infecting and killing humans for millennia.

But what makes the story of TB so maddening and what drew John to the topic is that the disease

is still killing over a million people a year, despite the fact that we already have a cure.

John's book is called Everything is tuberculosis, and in it he describes how foreign policy

and corporate greed make TB so hard to eliminate. He also explains the history

of tuberculosis and all the unexpected and fascinating ways TB has shaped our world. I really

love this book. It is both heartbreaking and triumphant. It is full of fun facts and sober realities.

And I really just want to have John on the show to talk about all the stuff he learned while writing it.

So let's start at the very basics.

I realized when I was reading this, I didn't have a full grasp of what tuberculosis actually was.

So could you tell me about it as a sort of biological entity, what it does to you?

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