You might know him as the author of YA bestsellers like The Fault in Our Stars, but John Green's most recent book is a nonfiction defense of its own title: In Everything is Tuberculosis, he argues that tuberculosis has shaped everything around us.

For instance: When a hatmaker in the 1850s started coughing up blood, his doctor told him to head West, where the dry air would heal him. The hats in the West, Green writes, “sucked” — they were either “bug-infested, brimless coonskin caps” or “wide-brimmed straw hats that … leaked in the rain.” 

So the consumptive hatmaker — one John B. Stetson — designed the cowboy hat.

Upon finishing the book, I fired off an interview request to try to get an answer to my burning question: Could John Green make a connection between marketing and tuberculosis? 

|   Meet the Master

John Green

Author, YouTuber, TB fighter 

On brand deals

When Green got invited to discuss a possible partnership with Dr Pepper, he was over the moon, so to speak. (He showed up 10 minutes early. To Zoom. Dude really likes Dr Pepper.)

He had a modest proposal: that Dr Pepper sponsor humanity’s relationship with the moon. (Pause for impact.)

Green would make videos about humanity’s relationship with the moon, sponsored by Dr Pepper.

“I've always thought this was a funny idea — that you can't sponsor a heavenly body, but you can sponsor humanity's relationship with a heavenly body.”

He didn’t get a follow-up meeting.

Green doesn’t fault Dr Pepper (the missing period isn’t a typo —“it's a big part of Dr Pepper's brand identity, whether they know it or not”). It’s an absurd idea.

But that’s kind of the whole point: “I'm not particularly interested in doing a brand deal for the sake of doing a brand deal. I'm interested in brand deals that can enhance the absurdity and joy in the world.”

On risky marketing investments

Although he’s best known for his young adult novels and more recent nonfiction books, Green is also something of a serial co-founder of small businesses — DFTBA, Complexly, and Good Store are but a few.

There’s a through-line of joy in his business ventures; helping small content creators finance and sustain their work, helping nurses-to-be pass their anatomy and physiology exams, selling ethically grown coffee.

“I like working with brands that empower creators and that recognize the benefit of working with creators, which is that you're going to be a little bit off the beaten path. That's what I find most interesting. That's also the riskiest kind of investment that you can make as a marketer. And so I understand why lots of people don't make it.”

On ROI

Green acknowledges that he’s been very lucky in some business ventures, which has let him take risks — it was the runaway success of The Fault in Our Stars, he says, that let him and his brother, internet science guy Hank Green, build their YouTube channel Crash Course for two and a half years before they saw a single dime.

That’s an enviable position for any marketer to be in, but his wisdom is budget-agnostic: “I believe in an ROI that unfolds over long periods of time, not an ROI that can be immediately measurable.” 

On marketing and tuberculosis

So, back to tuberculosis, the world’s deadliest infectious disease (yes, even in 2025).

Green says that a TB expert once told him that the problem with eradicating the disease is that “tuberculosis doesn’t have a constituency.”

Green’s first reaction was one of incredulity. “I was like, of course tuberculosis has a constituency. It has 10 million people who survive it each year who want to live in a world without it. And it has hundreds of millions of people who are infected with it, who don't want to become sick with it. This is obviously a disease with a constituency.”

But what that expert meant, Green thinks, is that tuberculosis actually has a huge marketing problem.

“Most people don't even know that it's the deadliest infectious disease in the world, let alone that it's curable and preventable and has been since the 1950s. And so I think that TB is the ultimate example of a disease in need of a marketing campaign.”