John: Going live now it says. We're live, Hank! Happy Project for Awesome! [cheering] 

Hank: Well, that was disappointing. 

John: That was a little bit disappointing. To be fair, I think that the vast majority of stuff is still stuck in here but don't worry, I've got more, Hank, I've got more confetti. Papow!

Hank: Oh, hey that was better. I liked that. 

John: Kapow! Happy Project for Awesome, everybody! Oh, it's the most magical time of the year, the time when the youtube community and online fan communities everywhere, a bunch of internet nerds, get together, raise money for charities, make videos about charities, celebrate the decreasing of worldsuck in all of its forms. I'm here with my brother, Hank. Hi, Hank. 

Hank: Hi. This is my first public appearance since going on paternity leave, and-

John: Except for all those videos that you made on paternity leave. 

Hank: I didn't make those. Some man back months ago made those. (laughter) And so it's basically my first time being out in public since the election, and since having a baby, and I'm so glad that this is the first thing I'm doing. I'm so glad that hanging out with nerdfighteria being a little bit more raw and connected, and having this common mission, a thing to do together that we're gonna do... that we've already surpassed our indiegogo goal.

John: Yeah.

Hank: So that's good that we set that low, so we could do that before we even began the livestream. So we started off our-

John: That was why that was the second champagne popper was to celebrate getting past $100,000 on the indiegogo. So if you go right now to projectforawesome.com/donate..By the way, Hank, I'm also happy that you're back. I've missed you terribly, and I'm not just saying that like to be nice. It's true. Hank works so much more than I do, and when he's gone I have to kind of be Hank, and it's been terrible. 

John: Uh, so thank you for returning, Hank, please never leave again. 

Hank: I, uh, well...

John: Just make me a promise right now, right here in the beginning of the Project for Awesome.

Hank: Alright, we'll see what happens.

John: So, if you go to projectforawesome.com/donate right now it'll take you to our indiegogo, that's projectforawesome.com/donate. I bet the link is also in the dooblydoo, and if it isn't, it can be. But it is. Um, you can go to projectforawesome.com/donate, it'll take you to our indiegogo and there you will find lots of amazing perks that you can get for donating. But I just want to pause to note something, Hank, which is that right now, because of many very generous matching donors, we have a really great matching fund. Like, it's just insane. Every dollar that you donate right now is worth four dollars to Save the Children and Partners In Health, two of the most respected and most efficient charities working in global health and poverty. They're both amazing. This is the tenth annual Project for Awesome, and over the last ten years we've worked, the nerdfighter community has worked a lot with Partners in Health and Save the Children. We've seen the work that they do in person, from Ethiopia to Haiti, and we're really excited. So, if you can donate $10 right now at projectforawesome.com/donate, that's actually $40. If you can donate $100, that's gonna be $400 to those organizations, and that's pretty frickin' cool. 

Hank: It's pretty frickin' cool, and that is the case until $300,000, is that correct?

John: Yes, and then we will still, even if we do get to $300,000 during the first half of the Project for Awesome, we will still be matching. Every dollar you donate will be worth $2 up to $500,000. And I just want to thank the people who made this possible, right at the beginning. 

John: Because we had a lot of people from the nerdfighter community join in on the matching funds, so Hank and I put up a lot of the matching funds, but so did a lot of other nerdfighters including Jeffrey, Anna, several people who wanted to remain anonymous, Jasmine, Danny and Dory, Lillian, Sarah, Alec, and Jason Kurtz. Thank you to all of you so much, and also Hank, YouTube... YouTube put up $25,000 as part of a project that they're working on that I'm involved in that I can't really talk about yet, but I'll talk about on Tuesday. (Hank laughs) So that's really cool and we appreciate that, so thank you, YouTube...and also Save the Children and Partners in Health donors have put up matching funds as well, so every dollar you donate is worth 4. So if you go to projectforawesome.com/donate now and you pick, for instance, the digital perk bundle, that's not a $55 donation to these amazing organizations; in the end, it's a $220 donation if my math is correct, which it probably isn't. 

Hank: Who knows!

John: Nobody knows for sure, my math is so bad. By the way, I'm drinking delicious Diet Dr. Pepper, who still refuse to sponsor me.

Hank: Ah man, if only you could get that matching donation from those good, good Dr. Pepper folks. 

John: I bet they're busy sponsoring the college football playoff.

Hank: Ugh, well that's not that interesting.

John: Yeah, I mean, I'm not gonna judge Dr. Pepper for their corporate choices because they make a fantastic beverage. 

Hank: Zabbo in the chat says, "Quick, someone donate $500,000." That would be a disaster! Don't do that! Don't eat up all of our... If you wanna donate $500,000...

John: I won't be mad. I won't be mad. 

Hank: Maybe it would be a good idea for you to set up your own matching fund. That would be...

John: Yeah. Yeah, if you're floating around with a half a million dollars just to send to Save the Children and Partners in Health, yeah, go ahead and do that, by all means. I'm for it. 

Hank: Yes, you can email me anytime if you've got $500,000 you want to spend on anything. 

John: Yeah, that's true.

Hank: I'm available. 

John: Hank is available. So because of the matching donations and because we had some money in the bank, we should also thank all the people who gave us money throughout the year through their corporate donor funds or the Nerdcraft, uh, the Minecraft nerdfighter server, gives some of its revenue, I think all of its revenue, to the Project for Awesome. There's also Tab for a Cause, which basically allows you to raise money for charity while surfing the internet, so that's popular with Nerdfighteria. And lots of other places have donates so we already had some money in the bank which is great, and then because we've got $103,000 but that counts as $412,000 because of all the matching donations; this means that in total we've raised $472,906 for Save the Children and Partners in Health already and we're only 9 minutes into the Project for Awesome. Hank, if we can just do this same pace every 9 minutes for the next 48 hours, I mean, that's many millions of dollars. (laughs)

Hank: John, let me ask you, where you sittin' right now? 

John: Oh I'm, uh, I'm in our office in the old CrashCourse studios which is now kind of a conference room except mostly it's just a ping pong table. My computer is currently seated on a ping pong table. Where are you?

Hank: I think you might recognize my current backdrop; it's the place where I make vlogbrothers videos in my house. And I bought some balloons, and I asked... Marianne picked these up and I asked her to get a weird one, a bunch of normal balloons and also a weird one. So she got me this fish, and I believe it is a rainbow trout.

John: Yes.

Hank: That's Montana. 

John: It is a beautiful fish. 

Hank: John, I wanna tell you a quick story, but before I do that I wanna say that we're gonna be streaming live on the vlogbrothers channel for how long? For 48 hours straight. 

John: Well now just 47 hours and 50 minutes. So go ahead and set your alarms for 47 hours and 50 minutes from now because that's when you're allowed to go to bed. 

Hank: That's right. John and I are gonna be in and out. I have to take care of a baby, so I will be Project for Awesomeing less than in previous years.

John: Come on, Hank!

Hank: But he did just go to sleep, so that's good news. And, I want to tell you, John, I walked out of my house this morning to come out to my office to do this, and I saw, there had been about 3 or 4 inches of snow had fallen last night. 

John: We also had some snow. 

Hank: And weirdly there was the noise of a leafblower, and there was a lot of snow shooting around my side yard and I was like, "What on earth is happening?!" And I look and see that a man, my neighbor, is snowblowing off my car. 

John: Aw. 

Hank: Because my car is covered in snow. And I was just like, man do I love living in this town. 

John: That's great. 

Hank: We're all here to help each other out and to be humans together in the good times and the bad, and we are having good times and bad, and we're having them right now here at the Project for Awesome, and in the world in general. And I really appreciated your video today, John, because it sometimes it can feel like, you know, since we only hear the worst of the news, like humanity isn't making any progress, and it is great to see that in the last ten years we have made progress, and that progress is because people care and work hard together in smart ways to make that progress happen. And that's why I like to give money to people who know what they're dong, and if you're doing that right now at projectforawesome.com/donate, you're doing it x4 and you rock! So, thank you. 

John: Yes, we're very grateful, we should get to some of the perks, Hank, because we have amazing perks and I wanna add a couple of perks if we may. 

Hank: Everybody has officially named the fish. It's named Dave.

John: Congratulations. It's weird, though, because we have a brother named Dave.

Hank: Yeah, well maybe that's him. 

John: It's awkward to name your balloon fish after your secret brother. But, someone told me recently that the point of human life is for people to take care of each other and that really...that really moved me. But you're right, we've made tremendous progress as a species in the last ten years and it's easy to feel like we haven't because there has also been a lot of bad news, and I don't wanna minimize the badness of the bad news but, you know, we've also seen life expentency in the developing world increase dramatically. Infant mortality has dropped faster in the last ten years than in any time in human history and I would argue that's actually the greatest accomplishment in the history of our species. That for the first time, some of the games are being felt more broadly. For a long time we had development in some places and we had increases in life expectancy and better healthcare outcomes but most of the world was left behind, and there is still a huge gap between rich countries and poor countries and rich communities and poor communities but that gap is shrinking in a lot of important ways. And that is not entirely because of nonprofits, certainly there are a lot of reasons why poverty is down so much; it's gone down by more than half in the last ten years, which is the biggest drop in the history of the species. There's lots of reasons why that's happening, but there's no question that nonprofits are a part of it, especially when it comes to improving health care outcomes and educational opportunities because, you know, in a lot of poor countries there's very little money for health care and organizations like Partners in Health and Save the Children are doing a great job of very efficiently, very cheaply, as Mohammed said in the video that I made today, he said I'm the cheapest, most effective technology in the Sierra Leone. 

(12:07)

Hank: (laughs)

John: And that's true. Community health workers are incredibly, incredibly successful and really, really inexpensive interventions. That's a big part of the reason that we've seen so much success in the last ten years that we've been doing the Project for Awesome and I just think it's amazing that since we started the Project for Awesome so much great stuff has happened in the world, and it's great to pause and acknowledge that, even if you also have to acknowledge that there is so much work left to do. Hank! 

Hank: John! I wanna tell you about some of the perks that we have available.

John: Great! Tell me.

Hank: I'm playing a couple video games. Everybody on Twitter sait they wanted to watch a video of me playing Undertale, which is an indie video game that is weird, super weird, and that is the cheapest perk that we have available. It's $5.

John: Five bucks. 

Hank: You also get that if you get the digital download bundle, which is our most popular perk because it has everything.

John: It's such a great deal. 

Hank: And it's $55. I mean it's a $1000 value minimum.

John: Yeah, it's $1,000 value and you get to raise $220 for Save the Children and Partners in Health, and $1000 worth of digital goods. It's an amazing value. 

Hank: That was some accurate and fast math, John, I am impressed by you right now. 

John: Thank you. Thanks very much. 

Hank: We have a number of people doing commentaries, you, in among that digital download bundle, you and Sarah are gonna do a TFioS commentary. 

John: In fact, we did it last night. We split a bottle of wine and wept. So anybody who wants to hear Sarah and I very quietly crying for the last 40 minutes or so of our commentary, go ahead to go to projectforawesome.com/donate and pick up that perk. 

(laughs)

Hank: Rosianna's gonna do a West Wing commentary. 

John: Yeah. 

Hank: I couldn't come up with a good thing to do a commentary of, but if somebody has a good suggestion I might throw it on there. I'm also gonna have available for you some unreleased episodes of Hank and Katherine play Super Mario Brothers, which we recorded but never released because I never was able to actually get the editing done so I'm just gonna do that. We've got an exclusive episode of Dear Hank and John, which is also available in the digital download bundle. If you get that perk or if you get the digital download bundle you will be able to send in questions and those are gonna be the questions that we answer in that episode of Dear Hank and John, Dear Hank and John being one of our most popular things that we do now, which that makes me very happy. 

John: Is it?

Hank: It is also one of the things that I enjoy the most. It is!

John: I love doing it. It's great fun. I've missed you but we've had some great guest hosts while you were gone. In some ways, I have to say, Hank, I feel like the podcast was sustainable without you. 

Hank: Oh, yeah, well I felt the same way when you didn't show up for like the first six weeks after we started the podcast. (laughs)

John: By the way, yeah, I think the main reason for that is that people mostly tune in for the news from AFC Wimbledon.

Hank: Of course.

John: So it's not really an advice podcast, it's like a AFC Wimbledon podcast with a very long advice-related prologue. (laughs)

Hank: Of course. We also have got $25 of pressed pennies. We have a penny smashing machine in the DFTBA warehouse.

John: You can see pictures of the pressed pennies, and they're amazing. They're beautiful. If you scroll down at projectforawesome.com/donate Risa designed these really magnificent pressed pennies and you can add those to your pressed penny collection if you got the pressed penny perk last year. 

Hank: And the year before that! This'll be the third year that we've done the pressed pennies, and I will also say that the pennies are pressed by volunteers who come into the DFTBA warehouse, volunteers for the Foundation to Decrease Worldsuck. They press those pennies with their own arm muscles; it is not an automated process because we did not get the more expensive machine. 

Hank: So it does take some time sometimes to get them all pressed. But, uh, it's done using human body calories. 

John: We should pause to explain a little bit about what the Project for Awesome is and how it works, so the Project for Awesome is this anual charity event, we've been doing it for ten years, and all parts of the Project for Awesome are run by volunteers. So the nonprofit organization, our nonprofit organization, The Foundation to Decrease Worldsuck, has no overhead, so all of the money that we receive from indiegogo will go to Save the Children and Partners in Health, except, in fact, much more will go to Save the Children and Partners in Health because your donations are being matched; every time you donate a dollar it's worth four dollars. The only exception is the printing and distribution, or the manufacture and distribution shipping, of physical perks. If you get a physical perk, your donation that will go to the charity will be less the cost of shipping the perks. But there is no overhead, so you can rest easy knowing that all your money will go to Partners in Health and Save the Children, except, in fact, more than all your money will because of matching. I should also say, Hank, that we are very close to $500,000 raised. In fact, we've crossed it. 

Hank: Hey!

John: I don't even have a champagne popper. I wasn't prepared for things to happen this quickly. You talk about some perks, I'm gonna go get a couple champagne poppers. 

Hank: Ok, well instead of talking about perks I'm gonna talk about some of the people who have donated to us very recently. We've had Shannon, who got the digital download bundle, Lauren, and Steve, and Mike, Evan. I hope you guys are watching right now. Mike indeed has bought several things, as has (?), which I assume is a screen name, but maybe not. Maybe that's your first name. Emily has also bought several things, made a couple of donations.

Hank: Jimmy, thank you. Liz, thank you. Sarah. 

John: Ok, Hank, I'm gonna try to hit the camera. Here we go. Oh, that's a dud. You know they're not all winners. They're not all winners, here at champagne poppers headquarters. Oh! That was almost a dud. Ok, $500,000 raised for Save the Children and Partners in Health. Thank you all so much. That's amazing! We're only 21 minutes in. If we just keep this pace going it's gonna be great. 

Hank: Do you wanna explain a little bit more about how the Project for Awesome works, John.

John: Sure. During the first half of the Project for Awesome, we're raising money for these pre-selected charities that we know really well, that nerdfighteria has worked with on lots and lots of projects over the last decade. And then during the second half of the Project for Awesome, we'll be raising money for charities chosen by you, the nerdfighter community via your votes at projectforawesome.com. So you can head over to projectforawesome.com. If you made a Project for Awesome video this year then you can go to projectforawesome.com right now and submit your video there, and tell your friends to watch it. We've got tons of people, Zuweah (?), is watching Project for Awesome videos right now, finding ones to feature and highlight. But there are lots of videos to watch, and to vote for. And so you vote at projectforawesome.com and all the money raised during the second half of the Project for Awesome will go to the charities that receive the most votes from nerdfighteria. So, that's how that works. Hank, I wanna talk a little bit more about perks. I want to skip down to a couple of perks that involve us. I don't know if you talked about our writing perks, did you?

Hank: I did not!

John: Ok, so for $25, or you can also get this in the $55 digital download bundle over at projectforawesome.com/donate, you can get a thing, part of a thing, that I'm writing. That I might read from later if we hit another goal. How to describe this thing... it is the first 10-15 pages of a thing that I'm working on. 

 Hank: why are you so afraid of calling it anything but a "thing"?

John: That I may be working on for a long time to come. We'll see. Who knows? Life is weird. Who? The future is unpredictable. But unlike some of my past writing perks. A, this is new writing and B, I have already written it, so I won't deliver it five monthas late. Um, and secondly, you can get Hank, so theres an audio recording of me reading, uh, to you this thing that I'm working on. that I'm very nervous to share. But excited also, and It's the first new writing that I've done in several years.

Hank: I guess we should talk about this when we're off the stream, because it feels like you're being intentionally vague.

John: I have been, I am, I am.

Hank: Is there a legal reason why you are being intentionally vague?

John: More just an emotional reason I think, um, so then you can get Hank reading the first two chapters of the book that he's working on, as well, for  twenty five dollars. And that's a little bit of a race but I have a bit of an advantage built in, thank you Joe, on account of how I have a preexisting audience from my books. You can also get a project for awesome tote bag, beautifully designed project for awsome tote bag for thirty dollars. And then, my favorite perk, every year is the nerdfighter art perk, you don't know what you are going to get, but, nerdfighters from around the world have sent their artworks that they think are worth forty dollars to the DFTBA.com warehouse. We should pause to thank everyone at DFTBA.com for volunteering so much of their time and energy and space to the project for awesome. So nerdfighters from around the world send nerdfighter art into the DFTBA.com warehouse and then you will get one of those pieces of art. You don't know which one, I don't know which one, but it's an exciting adventure. We've also got the project for awesome socks, which are really cool. You can get a shout out in the project for awesome recap video that will come out probably at the end of next week or so, or maybe the week after. And then for fifty dollars you can get one of my books. Signed for you. I wonder if we could switch that to being people can pick their book?

Hank: I don't know, it may be difficult to do that, but if we want to do that, we should do it now before anyone gets that perk. Because currently nobody does. 

John: Pick their book, because I feel like, maybe you can't pick your book, but it might be nice if you could. Just, not that people don't like an Abundance of Katherines, but I think we all know, which one people won't choose.

Hank: Yeah, they're like, they're like, you're gonna send me Katherines, aren't you. You're gonna send me Katherines.

John: Poor Katherines. Um, anyway, and then, for three hundred dollars, you can be animated into a Thought Bubble in anupcoming episode of Crash Course. So, I, sometimes appear as a character in  the Thought Bubbles, which always delights me, Sarah sometimes appears, Hank sometimes appears, Chewbacca sometimes appears, and you, can be in a future episode of Crash Course in animated Thought Bubble form, if you make a three hundred dollar donation to the project for awesome at project for awesome.com/donate, which because of matching donations, will be a twelve hundred dollar donation to Save the Children and Partners In Health. Extraordinarily generous. Also you can donate and not get a perk. We won't be mad.

Hank: Oh yes, you very much can. I want to say that the, it looks like the nerdfighter art perk is going to sell out really fast, which I love, and it's always been a exciting thing that a lot of active people in the community have jumped on very quickly, and so if you are interested in those, you can search for nerdfighter art on tumblr, and see some of the things that we've done previously. They've always all been very cool and totally worth forty dollars.

John: Yep.

Hank: And so, so buy them up quick it is possible that we uh, if we do sell out that there may be more coming, but we also may raise the price on them.

John: Yeah that's a tried and testesd project for awesome strategy.

Hank: Get people really excited about it, have it sell out.

John: And then, uh...yeah.

Hank: It's for charity! It's okay!

John: And then be like, you can get more. Yeah. I mean, it's-- yeah. It's all for charity, so, uh, yeah. We're really-- It's my favorite time of every year, Hank!

Hank: I do like it very much. I just-- yeah. I wanna be a part of the fun with everybody. And we've already raised, um, $526,000 if we include all of our matching--

John: $528,000 now, actually.

Hank: Oh my gosh, all of our matching donors. And $117,000 through the Indiegogo. And just in the time we've been sitting here, we've raised $17,000, which is the average amount a citizen is my town makes in a year.

John: Um...wow. That's-- that's astonishing. On a few levels.

Hank: There's a lot of college students. They don't make anything. They drag the average down.

John: Right, right. Of course. Um, but thank you to everybody who's donated. I also want to say, if you can't afford to donate, there are so many ways to be involved in the Project for Awesome. You can watch Project for Awesome videos; I think that's the most important way. Uh, like them, share them, uh, comment on them, make people feel good about making their Project for Awesome videos every year.

And then the voting at projectforawesome.com is just extremely important, because we as a community decide what our priorities are gonna be. Like, we're raising a lot of money right now, and that's really, really amazing and exciting, but we also-- you know, we'll always have limited funds, and so we've gotta make smart choices about where we want the money that we raise during the second half of the Project for Awesome to go. So, there are lots of ways to be involved. Also, you can share links to donate with your family, or your friends, or your super rich uncle, if you have a rich uncle. 

Hank: [laughs] It is tax-deductible. There are ways to donate tax-deductible, and if your super rich uncle cares about that, then let them know.

John: And, uh-- let's face it, your super rich uncle does care about that. And all your donations are tax-deductible, yeah, so-- at least in the United States.