John: Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday. "Ahhhhhhhh" is the sound my anxiety makes and I'm hearing that quite a lot at the moment, partly because anxiety is sort of my background emotion but also --Well to start I'm a mammal with a consciousness which is weird. It's weird that the parts of me that think and love and yearn and feel are literally edible. It's weird that I'm definitionally finite and yet have the ability to conceive of the infinite.

And of course it's weird that I'm a skin-incased bacterial colony that knows it's a skin-incased bacterial colony. And all of that is quite anxiety-inducing for me now, sometimes I can ignore the body horror of being a chain of chemical reactions trying to maintain homeostasis and sometimes I can't and - this is the second kind of time. Also I'm anxious because I care a lot about human health, which I think it's safe to say is entering a bad period with especially the United States dramatically pulling back on its health investments but also other countries like the UK.

Now obviously I am not the main character of the current catastrophe but it does make it weird to try to promote my new book, Everything is Tuberculosis, which comes out 2 weeks from today. You should pre-order your signed copy today. Link is in the doobly-doo.

But even that feels a little weird to say because like obviously this is a good time to talk about tuberculosis in the sense that we're needlessly creating much more of it, but also I don't want it to seem like talking about the catastrophe as a strategy for self-promo or whatever. But also I do really hope you like and read this book. It's ...uh... it's - it makes me anxious!

I try in the book to tell a hopeful story about human health because ultimately I believe that all true stories have to be hopeful. And I do think there are reasons for hope or at least reasons not to not feel hope but I feel pretty far from that hope at the moment which makes it anxiety-inducing to do all these interviews where people are like, "and - and - and - what's your hopeful message for us?" The basic argument of the book is that for much of human history, tuberculosis has thrived by walking the paths of Injustice that we blazed for it and I wanted to understand how all those historical forces led to one particular boy becoming sick in one particular place. But now it's like we're laying out the red carpet on that trail for diseases of injustice like malaria and HIV and tuberculosis and that makes me awfully anxious because millions of people's lives are at risk but also overall human health will get worse which like should stress us out.

Also it's just always stressful to have a book coming out because like it's the culmination of several years of my life and of course I want people to like it and respond generously to it. And this is not even to mention the like private personal anxieties which at the moment are legion. Like as a person with a public life as my friend Kaveh Akbar puts it, "sometimes you feel public joy and private grief, sometimes you feel public grief and private joy", but right now I mostly feel public anxiety and private anxiety.

So to be honest I think I'm just kind of a big ball of anxiety at the moment like one thing I like about the sentence "I am anxious" is that, like, I'm - I am not John. I am not husband, father, resident of Indi[anapolis]. I am anxious!

It's like an overwhelming all the time, too much sensation. And for me anyway one response to anxiety, the most convenient response in fact, is to just kind of shut down in the face of it to close up shop and be like, "I can't handle this. And none - none of this matters in the long run anyway because in the long run there will be no humans or memory of them." But I'm really trying to resist that response to anxiety, both because I don't think it's useful and because ultimately I don't think it's accurate.

Like yeah in the long run nothing matters but I don't live in the long run. I Live Now! Like it sucks to watch humanity take steps backwards from what I see as one of the main points of being here which is to create safety and security for each other to make a world where people have access to healthcare and educational opportunities.

The reason I feel scared right now... is because it's scary! But look here's what I'm trying to tell myself I, of course, think that I live at the end of history. I see my life as beginning at birth and ending today the most recent day I've ever lived through but today is not the end of the story, we do not live at the end of history, we live in the middle of history.

We do not yet know the end of the story and as such we have cause for hope and also we have work to do. So that's what I'm trying to tell my anxiety. Hank, I'll see you on Friday.