J: Hello (H: Hey!) and welcome to the 2021 Project for Awesome!

H: Umm... I was shocked. I don't know why I didn't think it was starting right now, but it is. John -

J: I can hear a little echo of myself.

J: which is a little annoying but it's okay it's okay it's gone it's passed it's over

H: okay

J: wow, look at this fancy all these fancy Hank look at who's in the background look it's you

H: oh man

J: it's Harry Styles.

J: Shout out to these project for awesome balloons which survived since the 2019 project for awesome without ever being reinflated.

H: What?

J: It's one of the great miricles in the history of ballooning.

H: Yeah. It's like that. What's that what's that thing that happened where like where like the oil lamp just kept burning? It's like that. It's not quite like that.

J: Let's not go religious on it. Kapow! It's the 2021 project for awesome!

H: John, I want to I want to see if something works If I push this button, What do you see?

J: Oh I see a I see a Furbee made out of beans??

H: That's great. That's excellent news. My technological advancement has just gone way way up.

J: Why do I see that? Kapow! I got a lot of these things. It's going to be a long 48 hours, Hank. Everybody better get ready. We've raised 336,000 dollars already to Save the Children and Partners in Health. Two organizations devoted to improving the educational and healthcare opportunites and access for the most vulnerable people in the world.

Thank you to Save the Children and Partners in health for more than 10 years now of getting to work with them in the P4A. It's one of the most fullfilling relationships we have in our lives. I mean ceartinly the most fullfilling relationship we have with an institution other than Hank's relationship with TikTok.

H: I don't uhhhhh I don't feel like my relationship with TikTok is is ultimately the institution of TikTok is that rewarding not nearly as rewarding as our work with Save the Children and Partners in Health.

J: I have a pretty good relationship with Penguin Randomhouse after 20 years, but for me it's still Partners in Health and Save the Children.
H: ummm I would like

H: uhhhh a Project for Awesome Shirt with some like styling over it that's very exciting

J: just just layering for warmth in my case

H: yeah, so the uhh

J: so this is the Project for Awesome t-shirt the 2021 Project for Awesome t-shirt look at it It's it's it's magnificent.

H: it is

J: and it's availible right now at projectforawesome.com/donate along with many many many other perks

H: look at I love I love the little people poppin up. Thanks to DFTBJames Thanks to Rose. The donations are coming in very quickly right now.

J: Yeah, they're coming in very fast

H: anonymous just donated a hundred and seventy-five bucks

J: $175 Thank you Anonymous. There's a few things we should go. Oh boy there it is again. Hey Hank, what is that and can you make it a project for awesome perk?

H: No! It's mine!

J: Oh, okay

H: I can maybe talk to someone else should talk to the artist who made it about making another one

J: okay, so let's let's put that aside for the moment and let's go through some of the perks that are currently availible at projectforawesome.com/donate but first off we should just say a thank you to everybody who's already donated because we've already raised almost 350,000 dollars

H: yeah, John jeeze

J: which is truly remarkable. Like I think that's the largest number we've ever had going into the project for awesome so thank you to everbody who has already donated. Um you can donate at projectforawesome.com/donate. If you're not, If you're a project for awesome veterin it's going to be a little bit of a it's gonna be a little bit of a change, but it's mostly good change

H: slightly different, yeah

J: The we're working with tiltify now which means lots of great things including you can check out with paypal! a problem we've had for 13 years. So we're really excited to solve that problem. Ummm there's so many great perks that you can get. The uh as always the best deal the best perk deal availible in the world today is unquestionably um the digital download bundle. the digital download bundle

H: yes, correct

J: is an incredible perk because you

J: get all of the digital perks for 60 dollars. That's everything from Hank dancing to tiktoks

H: Rebecca just got it. Samantha just got it. they're coming in. Dave just got it. They know what they need. They know what they want

J: Hank Hank is gonna do this TikTok dance that I don't know what it is called SpaceGirl.

H: Yeah

J: You can get the digital download of my, I don't want to brag, my incredible, relitively short, but incredible cookbook. It's extremely profane and it's for adults who don't like cooking but understand that they have to. It's got some really good recipies

H: That sounds like a book you should just publish

J: Nah nah no. I'm just going to do it for the p4a. It's got some recipies in it like my old standards. It's got a uh good vegetarian chili recipie in it. But the main thing that makes the main thing that makes the recipie book enjoyable is how much I hate cooking and how little I can hide of my hatred.

um, but there are also lots of physical perks that you can get including, this is gonna take a while so prepare yourself, yeah, we've got like foreign editions of my books you don't know what language you're gonna get, but it's gonna be a language, probably a weird one that you can't read in, but I'll sign the copy of my book for you and you will get a foreign edition of my book. You can also get one of my sharpies. Hank, keep talking about perks while I grab my sharpie.

H: Wow, I mean, John is signing 250000 books right now, so I imagine he's going to go through a fair number of sharpies. I have quite a stack myself. That I have like a sharpie drawer in my in my what is it called? bookshelf. uhh, but these ones are the ones I didn't end up using because I think I might be a little less less precious than john about sharpies. He seems to be well and truly gone, so I will tell you about some of my perks, I did a uh, he's back. I did some art that's on the ground over there. you can't actually see it. you will when it's full screen me. And uh I'm also gonna be hosting a trivia night that will

H: be it's a hundred bucks, but the prizes will be spectacular. will they include a baked bean furbee? I don't know, I love it so much.

J: uh, I am also including some art. for those of you who don't know I've been drawing circles in an attempt to understand the number 170,000. As a result um I will eventually have made 10 circle drawings. you don't know which one you're going to get, but together they form 170,000 circles-ish. I mean I wouldn't say that I've been counting exactly necessarily. Those are very expensive, but to be fair, they do take like 100 hours apiece. Um, you can buy one of the sharpies. So Sharpie sent me, in the worst brand deal ever, I was like hey Sharpie, I use your product more than anyone alive in the world and also I'm a relentless evangilist for the quality of your product. And they were like, oh thank you so much. We'd really like to sign you to a brand deal, and what that brand deal is gonna entail is that we're going to send you 95 sjharpies free "free"

H: "free"

J: that all say John Green's #1 Marker.

H: yeah, and not like in the most low effort way possible. They didn't even do a design they just had somebody. Yeah.

J: yeah. It's the worst font. I could I mean I could've printed John Green's #1 Marker

H: the turning is bad

J: on a sharpie better than that. I used all these sharpies already to sign copies of the anthropocene reviewed book, but now one or more of them can end up with you if you make a donation at projectforawesome.com/donate where just now Chloe has gotten the digital download bundle writing "Hello Tuitaria also trans rights are human rights". Leigha just got just donated $100 for Alaska for Looking

H: woah

J: which is my first novel looking for Alaska but rearranged in alphabetical order. So that it's uh so that it's completely unreadable except as like a beautiful art project.

H: Is it a physical copy?

J: huh?

H: Is it it's a physical copy?

J: I think so?

J: Let me ask in the chat. Let me ask in the slack. By the way in the slack zuleikha writes "John's video quality looks so much better than usual". Thank you Zuleikha, I got a new computer just for the project for awesome.

H: nice, and it's not gonna come in handy for anything else

J: no, I will use it for all the other things as well. so yeah

H: yeah

J: so I think to that is possible. Jessica just donated $30 and said "lol" about my #1 marker. So you say lol now, Jessica but wait until you get a hold of this #1 marker. You've never seen a marker like it.

Litterally, they only made these for me.

H: wow. that's. I love that because uh cause cause it's that money just for the joke. And that

J: yeah yeah

H: I'm very much in favor of. If we hit 400,000 dollars you know I'm going to turn that baked bean furbee on again, and we're on our way were were were headed there fast.

J: Well I mean I've got more than enough of these mofos to to to get us through how ever many 100,000 dollar barriers we break through. I should also meantion that there in the back are you see a cardboard cutout of my brother Hank Green, and he's kind of pointing his thumb at Harry Styles like "Hey there Harry Styles". Harry Styles is staring at you so smolderingly. I mean, it's impossible it's impossible to capture at a distance the quality of Harry Styles's smolder, but it's unlike anything I've ever experienced in my life.

We also have Jimin who's availible. Both the non-Hank Green cardboard cutouts are availible as if you want to make a very generous donation to Partners in Health and Save the Children. Now is your opportunity to get Harry Styles.

I don't know if you want me to sign down by his feet, but I will if you want me to. But if you want just like an unadulterated Harry Styles or an unadulterated Jimin that's also fine. But they're both availible.

I'd say that they're one of a kind, but I believe actually that they're more than one. But there's only one that's been in my basement, that's for dang shure.

H: We're about to hit 400,000. We just did! (unintelligible bean noises)

J: Whoa!

H (as bean furbie): "Hello everybody hello congradulations on 400,000 dollars"

J: Pa Pow! (party popper) That was good.

J: Now that's that's the business right there. Okay, I got a little in my mouth. I'm sure it's

H: Thanks Jimmy Horner

J: yeah, and thanks. So many people are donating it's hard to say thanks to everybody

H: The donations are coming in way fast. I think tha... Oh Melissa five hundred dollars!

J: Oh, wow! thank you!

H: was that the last I think that was probably the last was that the last of your circle drawings? were those $500?

J: I think they're $750 actually

H: oh, wow, okay. well they're all gone

J: Yeah, well, like I told you they take a long time

H: they're gone. we sold all of them

J: oh we sold all of them? huh

H: we sold all of them

J: jeeze

H: yes, wow

J: um, well, thank you. maybe we'll put some more up later. I got to have a conversation with my hand though.

H: yeah I don't

J: those ones, they hurt

H: I don't know how we're doing. Oh my gosh we've raised $91,000 of our $300,000 goal through the tiltify campaign. That number's being multiplied many times over by matching donors, and also we've had raised money before the project started.

J: yes so the matching donors both both projects both Projects in Health and Save the Children secured matching donations for the project for awesome this year. Thank you to them. Also just in general thank you to them for their amazing partnership we'll be talking over the course, I mean it's a 40 hour live stream, so we'll be talking with a lot of people, but we're going to be meeting both with peope from save the children and with Dr. Mukherjee of Parners in Health who's the chief medical officer there which we're very excited about. Many of you who've been part of the p4a for a long time know about the the work save the children and partners in health have done as a result of the money that's been raised during the p4a. It really is extrodanary, and it's a big part of the reason why, until recently, so much progress was being made in child health and in improving the educational opportunities for children as well. This year has been a huge huge setback. It will probably be the first year when child mortality goes up in thirty, thirty-five years, and that's a real

J: uh it's it's it's devistating, but it is also it is also a problem that can be addressed meaningfully with resources. like We can we can have a world where that progress continues. Even amid Covid, so we just have to fight to bring about that world, and that's why we're raising money this way, so thank you for donating everybody. Really appreciate it. And we're gonna be here for 47 hours and 45 minutes, so you can be here with us for as much of that time as you want. you can also like take breaks, but if you wanna. Don't hang out for the whole 48 hours, you'll get really tired.

H: um the trivia party has also now sold out. so, if you're gonna, If you're gonna.

J: Heckin' trivia party! Heckin' trivia party!

H: I I did not realize that that would be so. I mean, maybe I should do one a month. just make 12 of those because I have plenty of time!

J: make but make do do one more, but make it way more expensive so it takes a long time to sell out, that's the key.

H: yeah, yeah

J: I can't believe all these people are making high dollar donations, but uh Harry Styles is still sittin on the sidelines, just waiting for a $5000 donation.

H: I remember the the year on the project for awesome we mystery guitar man put a guitar up and somebody bought it, and it's just so hard to ship a guitar

J: yeah

H: and now I look at I look at Harry Styles and I'm like how do you get a Harry Styles across the country without damaging him? but there are ways, there are ways,

J: that's why we got a high high dollar value on Harry, so that we can pack him in a million pounds of um

H: yeah

J: I'm sure compostable recycleable material

H: we'll pack him like fine art because it's not like people don't pack fine art

J: they do

H: you put him in a fine art packer because he is fine art

J: yeah, he is fine art. um so many so many donations are coming in that it's hard to thank everybody. um but lots of people getting the digital download bundle lots of ya'll getting the project for awesome t-shirt which is gonna be a great like throughout the year

of the magic that is the project for awesome. It's also really good. Thank you to ShutupAndTakeMyMoney who just donated $60 for the digital download bundle. So if you go to tiltify it can be a little bit confusing if you're new to the platform like I am, um so what you do is you uh just scroll down there, and you can see.

H: no, first you have to, you have to click on the thing that says rewards

J: right

H: which is just above the video

J: right

H: and then, then you can scroll down and click on show more rewards and then continue to scroll and you have to click on show more rewards about four or five times before you get all of them maybe seven

J: maybe that's while Harry Styles hasn't sold. It's just so many you have to click on rewards so many

H: he's also also a lot of money

J: well, He's worth a lot of money hank, and I won't hear differently. um a couple other a couple other perks that I want to call attention to um real quick. Hold on uh. uh a couple other things I want to call attention to real quick are you can get a personal message on everybody's second favorite brother's hosted advice podcast dear hank and john where we will read a message of your choosing.

H: uh huh

J: Last year one of the best things that happened in all of 2020 for me hank, I don't know about you, was when we read the message from the two people who were like "today's the day you find a way"

H: yeah, yeah

J: "to go into the ocean" and then they sent us a video of themselves going into the ocean when they heard that project for awesome message, and it made me so happy to know that there are still some things that can be done. umm, also want to

H: I'm just checking the chat and it's looking like we just a little bit broke Tiltify. but it's seems like it's you can still get stuff we just can't update stuff which is... very project for awesome of us becasue

J: yeah

H: look there are a lot of charity livestreams now, and I don't want to take credit, not sayin' that we were the first, but we

H: were and not saying that every charity livestream is inspired by us, but ehhh?

J: They, no, they aren't they aren't first of all you you act like we invented the genre where like Jerry Lewis had been doing this for 55 years before we got ahold of it

H: yeah, yeah

J:So We we, all we did all we did was put it on the internet. Um I also want to call attention to a couple other perks. my workout playlist, it's so much better than you think it is and also so much diffrent from what you think it is, and I'm excited to share it with you. It's gonna It's gonna help you get big gains, big gains.

H: oh, I'm not really here for big gains. will it help me uh will it help me stay fit uh and protect me from potential injury? because that's what I'm here for.

J: I've got, Hank I've got two workout playlists. I've got a workout playlist that's called Chillaxing workout for Hank and Others, and then i've got a workout called Push it to the Max for fitness expert John Green.

H: uh huh, okay. PUSH IT TO THE MAX,

J: PUSH IT TO THE MAX

H: yeah, good job. got to say it that way. We're on our way to 500,000 dollars raised. John, that's half a half a million dollars and we're

J: That's so fast

H: a total of 18 minutes into the live stream

J: It's only been 18 minutes! It's almost too much! one other thing I want to call attention to though is my wife Sarah has been making these incredible collages using old magazines from the 50s and 60s. First off, Hank, I don't know if you've read a magazine from the 50s or 60s, but life used to be different and worse. The good old days that we're harkening back to were horrible. In every way. Like social justice wise, but also like the quality of their technology sucked. Um yeah, as did like the quality of understanding of gender roles. Anyway

H: yeah

J: Sarah has been using these old magazines to make these astonishing I mean.

J: They're so much better than any other art that's gonna be that like Hank or any of the art Hank or I make.

H: That may be a part of this, yeah

J: they are really phenominal, and I can not recommend them enough. If you can make a big donation to Partners in Health and Save the Children, that is the one that I would get. In fact, I already got one just because I wanted to lock one in

H: Nice, nice

J: yeah

H: Thanks for the $300 CJewell, um and we are now near (stalling noises) 4000 dollars away from half a million dollars.

J: now, now just 2500 dollars away.I have a I have a champaigne popper ready I said I had plenty of champaigne poppers, but I might have over promised. We'll see. We're just gonna get through this the best way we can.

H: (streaching noises) I have a I have a.  Sorry

J: Valerie2776 just donated!

H: Thanks Val And....

J: And we did it!

H: (bean noises) aaah, I haven't worked out the voice for the furby yet, but maybe it's like this? I don't knowwwwww.

J: I don't like that voice, come up with a different one. That's amazing. Half a million dollars just 20 minutes into the Project for awesome. This is ridiculous. Thank you to Pulloma who just donated and Shannon and Felix they're coming in way too fast to say everybody's name and I apologize about this. (gags agressively on confetti)

H: John, oh my god, WOW! he he ate some of it! oh gosh that's great. well, while he's recovering I assume that so one of the

J: it went so deep It went into my lung. I don't know what happened

H: No, it went into your trachea. but it got close to your lung

J: It went so deep. I was like it was like pulling a clown car emptying out. It just kept happening. Is it okay that it went so deep inside of my throat?

H: It's not ideal, no, but like it's okay, you'll you'll you'll be fine.

H: um you know

J: are you sure?

H: yeah, I mean there's a there a look look my I'm not gonna say what okay now I have to, okay, so there's a verry small. so like in general it's good not to have foreign objects go down there because they can deliver a little bac bacteria where it shouldn't be. but I think that was a very clean party popper.

J: What if I have COVID now. What if I got COVID from swallowing a piece of confetti.

H: yeah, I think that

J: that would be that would be egh.

H: that is the least likely outcome

J: Okay. I'll move on

H: I part of the digital download bundle, John, is that I make a lot of TikToks that I don't publish.

J: thank God for that

H: yeah so for example this one

J: uh huh

H: I don't know, that was just the one that was on top, and

J: yeah

H: there's just I have a var I have maybe between 70-100 TikTok drafts that I'm going to just release, and

J: oh boy

H: look I'm not saying it's high quality content, but it is stuff that I decided not to put on the internet

J: Can I tell you why I'm drinking Diet Dr. Pepper right now? It's cause I had this idea in my head that maybe the Diet Dr. Pepper could kill whatever was in that thing I just breathed into my lungs

H: yeah, that's a great idea, all you have to all you have to do is breathe the diet dr pepper in.

J: I should I should do that

H: which would also be bad! yeah

J: Oh! we should say one other thing! that the Digital Download Bundle also comes with the April May short story uh

H: yeah

J: exclusive which somebody just got but it's scrolling so fast I can't see it. but I'll just thank someone else. Daniel didn't get that he got "Bean Furby is terrifying" he got my number one marker. But uh but but so tell tell us about this uh this story that you can only get by donating to Parters in Health

H: sure

J: and Save the Children right now through the project for awesome.

H: yeah or you could get it you could get it tomorrow, but you can

H: only get it through the project for awesome for sure. And uh the basic so April May has you know she's had had quite a life and in the midst of her uh you know success a vidcon happens and she goes to that vid-con and is invited and is an invited guest to Vid-Con. to get a little bit of the behind the scenes look at that but then a famous internet pig named Bonker is kidnapped

J: oh yeah. hmm

H: and April has to find out what happened to Bonker? Am I in the book? yes I am. Do I have a conversation with a character I created? yes. Does this make this technically a self insert fan fic? Kinda? But It's not but I don't care and I love it. um. so she she's yeah

J: Sean says "I've been here for every project for awesome the hype is real" thank you Sean. It's been a long, strange 14+ years, so thank you. Hank let me ask you a more important question.

H: okay

J: Is your Vid-con co-founder and brother and long-time collaborator most important collaborator outide of your marriage I think it would be safe to say. Does he make any kind of appearance in this April May story?

H: yeah, I think you know I could write you in if you're really sore about this. you could be at the the the the story starts at a party. you could be at a party. Maybe She's talking to a beauty influencer when the party starts, so maybe she could be talking to you. you want me to throw you in there? you can be the beauty infuencer.

J: yeah just like one just like one sentence where I'm like "hey, congrat-" what would I even say to April May in real life? I the truth is Hank if I saw April May in real life at that point in her celebrity I would never walk up to her. Cause I'm not I I don't I'm not I'm not a walker uper.

H: yeah and the other thing is is I have been given the chance to sort of interface with with young people who are um you know part of important pollitical movements, and I always feel like I don't want to

H: encourage this. It's just so much it's so hard and so like often times I'm like "I don't know I'm just gonna stay out of it" uh like I will be supportive from the sidelines, but I I kinda can't almost can't condone it becasue it is so hard but uh mostly I talk with April about pigs, so..

J: great, great, I think that my experience about putting yourself in a novel is that the more you can make fun of yourself the better, and the more you do anything other than make fun of yourself, the worse. so like my advice for

H: yeah

J: if you're gonna put yourself in a novel is making yourself a reclusive alcoholic living in amsterdam who's really really unpleasent to people.

H: thousand dollar donation from anonymous!

J: That way you don't overstay your welcome. That way also lower people's expectations when they meet you. they're like ah well you know he wasn't that bad.

H: exactly

J: Thank you Sahel as well for who who got the digital download bundle but donated 40 extra dollars in getting it which is really appreciated. And we should emphasize a couple of things. One, in the US your donations are tax deductible, and Two.

H: emm, they aren't they aren't they are but they aren't so so it depends

J: They are tax deductible over the value of any perk that you get

H: correct

J: like anything else tax deductible in charity. yes, good point Hank. And and two, all of your donations right now are being matched. There's a matching fund uh that Hank and I and some other people in nerdfighteria built up together that is around 350,000 dollars there's also right now durring the first 100,000 200,000 dollars or so that's raised on tiltify a project for uh Save the Children and Partners in Health donors are also matching your donations, so that's a big part of the reason why you're seeing the number go up so fast right now is that we are getting lots and lots of matching money coming in alongside your donations.

H: yes

J: but we are almost, just in the first 30 minutes almost to 500 actually just passed 550,000 dollars.

H: I just found Ceri's uh Ceri's meme that she put in the project for awesome slack and I'm gonna put it on twitter because it is ever so good.

J: okay

H: I think, could I put it on. um let's see.

J: try to put it on the screen, let's get advanced. let's do advanced

H: I'm trying to

J: I keep feeling if I just like show more of Jimin and Harry Styles that somebody is going to be like I want that, I want that and I want to make a 5000 dollar donation to the project for awesome that's completely tax deductible. Except for whatever we decide the market value of that Harry Styles is, and I'll like it's think it's a little bit below that. Are you doing it hank? is it working?

H: I'm trying, but it does not appear to be working

J: okay, well, life is full of dissapointments

H: It's weird because because my button uh wait, what's this button, there it is

J: What's this button. What's this button do?

H: What's this button?

J: It's been a long time since I like looked down at a keyboard and thought like ah, who knows what this one does. gee Hank

H: It wasn't that it's a button on tiltify

J: lot of potential down there. okay, I see

H: It did not work, It still did not work

J: um well, if you go to projectforawesome.com/donate which is the place to donate. you will see lots of amazing perks when you click the rewards button and then you can scroll down and see all of them. Now some of them are very inexpensive. The best value is undoubtadly the digital download bundle, and the great thing about that is because everybody donates their perks and we don't have to ship any physical goods. There's also like almost no overhead associated with getting the digital download bundle out to you. Plus it comes all throughout the year, or even past the end of the year sometimes. And then that means that you get full suprises over and over and over again. We've also got the project for awesome socks this year. high quality p4a socks as usual. There's the project for awesome commemorative

J: coin which is always one of my favorites. There are people who have collected every single one of the commemorative coins we've released over the last like 10 or 11 years. So that's if you want to start building out a collection or continue a collection, I always recommend that project for awesome coin. And of course you can get my book "Looking for Alaska" but rearranged in alphabetical order thanks to the creator of that project. whos name is ryland and is one of the last people I spoke to. maybe the last person I spoke to before *gestures broadly*.

H: I've put the image on my computer screen in the background. It's the lady from glee and she says I'm going to donate to a project that is so for awesome.

J: that's a good. That's a good me. a good memeing. good memeing. I wanna say mie says thank you or miah? says "thank you to this wonderful community kept my spirits up especially during this weird time in human history, best wishes". Thank you for donating an extra $10 to get the digital download bundle and also thank you for keeping our spirits up durring this weird time in history. One of the things the p4a can do this year is give us a sense of togetherness and belonging that for a lot of reasons we just can not have in person or many of us anyway cannot have in person right now, and so yeah we really are hoping that this can be a time of of connection to the other people in the chat. And every year lots of long like lots of friendships evolve from the p4a. occasionally a marriage evolves from it, so that's always wonderful. No pressure! No pressure in the chat, ya'll.

H: yeah, right

J: I'm just saying it does happen. it does happen.

H: uh that 1000 dollar donation we got a while ago from anonymous anonymous said " it has been a rough year, but vlogbrothers always gives me hope and keeps me moving

H: forwards". Paid 1000 dollars for the Digital Download Bundle. Which is not necessary, but is very great

J: Wow! That is $940 extra and we really appreciate it. Again, all of this money, lest if you get a physical perk, there's cost associated with manufacturing and shipping your physical perk. But other than that all of the money that comes in to the p4a during this, the first half of the project for awesome, will be split between save the children and partners in health.

And we you lots of people know about our our project with partners in health where we're working on a five year plus project with them in supporting the government of Sierra Leone in building a maternal center of excelence at Koidu Government Hospital, but PIH works around the world from the Navajo Nation to Peru to Russia to Rwanda and and to Hati and everywhere they work they do they save lives every day and they also I think critically push forward the idea that all people deserve access to quality healthcare. And as a result of pushing forward that idea they have lead the charge to treat multidrug resistant tuberculosis, they have lead the charge to get anti-retroviral therapy to people living in poverty and and who also have an HIV diagnosis, and and that work is just hugely important. Save the Children, if you have traveled in a disaster zone, you have seen Save the Children present there from the United States to the refugee camps outside of in Jordan.

Save the Children is just a hugely hugely influential and impactful organization as well, and again one that we've worked with for more than ten years. So you can also have trust that like yes we're having fun, but your money is gonna go to really make big differences in the lives of

J: people who really need it.

H: um the chat is going off of course. Mary says something that shocked me a little. "This is the first time I actually remembered to watch the livestream". Mary you've got a full 48 hours to think one time "I remember". Oh 600,000! 600,000!

J: 600 Thousand!

H: lodollodollodollodollodol...

J: oh it's a dud a dud. I just made a little smoke come out.

H: what. ooh yeah, didn't work that was a dud.

J: just got a little just got a little fire there. hold on this one's gonna work great.

H: okay. I lodollodollodollodollodol...

That was great, good job

J:whoop whoop. Alright

H: Oh I just realized that the furby wasn't coming up. I was just making a funny noise.

J: yeah we didn't see the Furby, but we were we were enjoyying whatever you were doing. you know

H: okay, okay

J: by the way, Hank, on this topic this topic yesterday my my beautiful daughter who who I love very much and who I believe loves me said. uh I was wearing a hat, and she said "dad, why is all the hair white?"

H: (as bean furby) lodollodollodollodollodol...
H: There we go. sorry

J: she said why is all that hair grey, it's all grey in there. I was like what do you think Alice? It's because it's been a stressful year. very stressful year.

H: it's cause it's cause you're old.

J: I was already heading in this direction Alice and then there were circumstances that contributed.

H: where as I have maintained my completly complete lack of grey hair by not having a stressful year at all. It's been just smooth

J: I know, that's the way to do it. that's the way

H: no problems, no problems

J: so uh so so many people in chat it's a little hard to follow what's going on, but Hank you're a faster reader than I am. tell me what's happening in chat.

H: that is definitely not true. (inaudible)

J: oh, yeah that's true.

J: Now that I've said it out loud, I've realized that it doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

H: I apologize for interupting your story with baked beans but I figured out what the problem was.

J: Sarah just donated $100 to get Alaska for looking and says from DFTBA from nerdfighter siblings

J: Stephanie just donated to get the Project for Awesome 2021 laptop decal you can get all this stuff in Project for Awesome.com/donate right now and we should add that it's all of this is only available. Anonymous says Why can't I buy multiple perks in one order? Well anonymous because nothing is perfect in this broken world.

H: Yeah, we we were hoping to get that to work but we didn't it So look, you're gonna spend a little bit of your money you're gonna spend a little bit of your time those things.

J: Way to swing it around, Hank. I love it

H: This is a volunteer effort is clicking more.

J: David just donated $420 to get the digital download bundle, which is seven times more than necessary. And I appreciate that very much David.

And and also says "john a bit late but Peter van Houghton and TIFF iOS is a self insert?" I mean, not literally, obviously. But yeah, you know, like, I, here's what I'll say about this, and then we can move on.

I have a lot of I experienced the thing that Peter van Houghton experienced a lot where people would ask me like, what happens after the end of your book? And I would be like, I'm gonna disappoint you. And they would be like, but you know, and I would be like, No, I don't.

So like that parts of self insert. And then you know, a little bit the, like, I can see my life going that way is what I'll say about it. Right?

Like, David, I'm like two, um, two maybe even one significant bump in the road away from becoming a recluse, which is fine. I don't I I wouldn't mind. I think Hank could do 100% of the non reclusive part of Vlogbrothers work.

And I would just do the behind the scenes stuff.

H  (42:02)
The the Project for Awesome lapel pin thing this year is gorgeous. I love it. It's beautiful. 

J  42:09
It is. It is really good. 

H  42:11  
I just got that one. And 

J  42:13  
Do we know who designed it? 

H  42:15  
I don't have that information. In my head. 

J  42:20  
Okay, no worries. No, well, that's fine. I there's a lot of things that I don't know.

H  42:24  
If you sign in if you sign into tilta phi, you don't Oh, it's designed by Lucas from DFTBA. Thank you to Lucas. If you

H  42:33  
if you sign into tilta phi, it will remember your address and you will be able to check out faster, but

J  42:39  
 okay, great

H  42:40  
 You know, you don't have to do 

J  42:43  
zoleikha reports that Save the Children is in the chat. Um, oh. And also, it's worth noting, Maryann points out that people can get a 2020 coin even though there wasn't a 2020 P4A in abundance with the 2021 coin so that you can keep your coin streak alive. 

H  42:43  
Yeah.

J  43:02  
Also, somebody asks, How much would it cost for me to be the officiant at their wedding?

H  43:10  
Oh, boy. I mean, there is a price

J  43:13  
a lot. I mean, there's a price for everything, but like, oh, a lot. Like, let me ask you a question. Are you like a Kardashian wedding?

J  43:21  
I don't know. I'm not I wouldn't be a good officiant at your wedding. I would be bad. I wouldn't be good at that job. I'd be very stressed. Look at me. I can't I can barely handle doing a live stream in my basement. I I can't handle that stress of marrying you. 

H  43:33  
Straight out freaking out right now. 

J  43:35  
I'm freaking out just thinking about the possibility of marrying people. It's too much. I can't and I can't handle that kind of responsibility. I don't know. I can't do it. I can't do it. Hank, we've got 22 minutes left if your time before you depart to I don't know what are you going to do? Go to a party.

H  43:50  
Uh, I'm going to work on some Project for Awesome stuff. JOHN.

J  43:59  
Right

H  (43:59) 
 during during this one.

H: Some of my other breaks I will be. I'm hoping to go ice skating though. It is very cold.

J  44:06  
Oh, really. I during my breaks, this is going to shock you. I'm going to be signing my name. In fact, I was thinking that maybe I'll just leave my last stream on and just like sign my name and collaboration with whoever's actually hosting the browser. Yeah. Just just in like a small window on the bottom. Yeah, totally. Totally. I don't know if that would actually work. But that's my current. That's my current thought. Um, we seem to have like a little bit. Okay, so I want to thank some donors

H  44:33  
I did that. That's one thing I did. 

J  44:36  
What thing? What did you do? I mean,

J  44:41  
it only took 20 20 minutes but you did it. It looks great. I also I really liked it the project it says project for awe and the some is cut off which is kind of great. I do want to I do want to donate to a project that is so for awe like I'm heavily in favor of awe

H  44:59  
Yeah, well hey, maybe we'll get a little bit of that during the product for awesome this year little bit of awe

J  45:04  
 what I usually do we usually get at least some

J  45:10  
hoof mate Nathan says thank you to john Calvin encouraged me to go through my do my own mental health and get help from therapists. Thank you to Hank for always lifting my spirits in teaching me about the wild world we live in what it is a wild world. And thank you Nathan for donating thank you to Alberto who also just donated and Megan and Jeffrey and Kristen and owl lover and Mark Bernardino and Arden and Emily and Allie and gretta and Seb and Danielle it's coming in 478 Snickers bars just donated

J  45:40  
which is that's a really good username. Um, 478 Snickers bars is a deep cut and it makes me yearn for the days when Snickers sent me 478 Snickers bars.

H  45:51  
Gosh. Oh man. 

J  45:54  
Oh man. Yeah, Shawn says the Shawn just donated with no perk

J: $150 to say I have also blamed my new gray hairs on the last year so I'm glad I'm not alone. Yeah.

H  46:09  
I I'm just playing around with my with my software and making gifs come up. 

J  46:15  
Okay, well, that's that's a, that's a great use the other so the other thing I want to emphasize, if you're not able to do anything, the project for awesome. Like we've been talking a lot about donations and donating. And we are very grateful to everybody who can donate. But there are lots of ways to be involved with the p4a that do not involve donations. And the biggest one is to go to Project for Awesome.com watch project for awesome videos and vote on the videos that you think should receive grants. So right now during the first half to pay for a we raise money for Save the Children and Partners in Health. But in the next half beginning tomorrow at noon, we're going to be raising money for charities that are chosen by the community. And that means that your votes, how you vote, which videos you watch which videos you support with by voting at Project for Awesome.com, help our group of nerdfighter I don't know what their technical name is the committee of Nerdfighters who make the final decisions, use those votes to help them make those decisions. So please go to project for awesome .com even if you can't donate and watch some p4a videos, find great charities to support and learn more about different ways that people are trying to approach and solve the biggest problems that we face together. 

H  47:26  
One of the other perks we haven't mentioned yet, that is one of my favorite parts every year is the the Nerdfighter perk. So

J  47:33  
It's the best

H  47:34  
 people have made lovely things, and you don't know exactly what the lovely thing is. But that's what makes it good. Like you pay for someone's art that they created. And then you get that art delivered to you. And it's like, I don't know, it's like nothing else. What like just getting, like not knowing what the sort of lovely thing is going to be and then having it arrive and yeah, it's just like a gift. It's like a like Santa. Almost.

H:
And yeah, except that it's like, you know, actual well, original Santa when he was an artisan and he made stuff instead of just acquiring a lot of video games to then redistribute he's just a middleman now.

J  48:14  
It's Hanks weird Santa take aside, um, it's a really wonderful perk. It's, for me. Because because you don't know what you're going to get. But But you know, we've had more than 1000 pieces of nerdfighter art sent into the DFTBA warehouse this year. And that in and of itself is such an act of generosity, people work really hard to make something really cool. And then they donate it to us and they don't know where it will end up. But it's lovely. It can be just a lovely point of connection in in the world in an unexpected way to a person you know whose work you never would have maybe never would have seen otherwise. I get it every year and every year it's one of the highlights of the p4a for me so you can get that a project for awesome .com/donate, you click up there at the top on rewards and then you scroll down. And how much is that? What what kind of donation? Are we looking for it for that nerdfighter art project? Hank?

H  49:14  
 I don't know. 

J  49:15  
We don't know, 

H  49:17  
I don't know. No. I

H  49:21  
40 $45 it's 45 bucks a steal at twice the price, frankly. Um, yeah. I think sometimes we've had it twice the price. Sorry, I love this so much. I can't take it down. 

J  49:34  
Oh, you can I would like to see your face again. I miss it. We are once asking for your financial support. 

H  49:41  
That's from that's from Payton made that looks like

J  49:44  
 that's very good Payton. That's good memeing.

J  49:47  
The power of memes if we've learned anything in the last four years, it's the memes are the most powerful form of discourse ever created in history.

J  49:57  
Which, you know, it's got some upsides and some downsides.

H  50:02  
Yeah, and look, we could have this or we can have this what would you prefer? (bean noises)

J  50:09  
I prefer to look at your beautiful face for the last 15 minutes of the first hour of the project for awesome. There he is!

H  50:15  
Okay

J  50:17  
I love your setup, Hank. It's, it's, it looks like like like you're almost a professional streamer. Not.

H  50:24  
That's what I was going for

J  50:26  
You got way more HD. You know, I feel this individual pores on your face and everything but short of that. You look very, very pro. 

H  50:35  
Yeah, I was I was absolutely going for like, Look, Hank Green tried to look like he was a professional streamer. That was my that was the vibe I was going for

J  50:47  
Oh, yes. That's like that.

H  50:50  
Just like he can't have the you can't have the like the lights. Like he's got Christmas lights instead of like the strip LEDs that they all have. And they're like, diagonal instead of straight and hidden. All of them. 

J  51:02  
Right? Right.

J  51:05  
Well, it's working. It's working. We're now just $20,000 away from $700,000. Wouldn't it be amazing Hank to get to that $700,000 mark in the first hour of the Project for Awesome I think that would be truly truly phenomenal. To get there we would need to raise because all your donations that Project for Awesome .com/donate are currently matched, we would need to get another like six or $7,000 in donations. Let's thank some recent donors including Shan and Emily and Emily, a different Emily and Victor and Heather and Sarah and Rachel and Rachel and Gabby, and Wendy and Sarah manual long time nerdfighter who paid extra for the digital download bundle. Thank you, Sarah.

J  51:48  
And blue chamomile. Also an old an old friend who just got the pressed pennies. I don't like pennies. So every year we have this thing

J
where we take a group of pennies, and people physically with their arms at the DFTBA warehouse, mostly volunteers, thank you volunteers turn those pennies into a beautiful Project for Awesome memorabilia.

H  52:15  
JOHN, this is my co2 meter. And we find that already the amount of talking I have done has made it unhealthy in here, I it's really a problem. It's such a problem for me to have gotten the co2 meter because now I know that I am never in my office when it is not over 1000 parts per million of co2.

J  52:35  
Why is that? 

H  52:36  
Because well in the winter, because it like all of the everything is closed and I can't open anything.

H  52:43  
And there's no ventelation in here.

J  52:44  
given me two new things to worry about first inhaling these things which can't possibly have been good for me. And now I've got a whole new I've got a whole new indoor chemical to worry about. I already had radon and carbon monoxide. Now I've got a new chemical to be anxious about just what I needed.

H  53:03  
 Apparently, Charlie pressed all of the Project for Awesome pennies, which is a tremendous amount. And I feel like this is a thing that that should eventually be automated. But thank you so much to Charlie for doing that work. I'm sorry if your arms are lopsided now. 

J  53:20  
Yeah, hopefully you went back and forth, you know, back and forth.

J  53:25  
Lots of people still getting the digital download bundle and lots of people donating a little extra to get things which is really nice. So thank you, um, and donation margins coming in. Oh, watch on. Go ahead.

H  53:39  
  someone named watching since 2007, just donated $60 it says you give me hope. Thank you and got no perk. So hopefully you meant to get no perk. And thank you for watching since 2007. That's impossible. It's not of course, but I mean, 

J  53:54  
yeah, it's just it's it's really mind blowing to think that people would give us a seat at the table in their lives for for that long.

J
You know, like I was talking to rosianna about this. And she was pointing out that, you know, there are some people in our community for whom they have been part of the community for more than half of their lives and rosianna is one of them.

J  54:16  
And that's just hard to get your head around.

H  54:20  
Yeah.

J  54:22  
So thank you. Thank you to everybody who has been been part of this with us. And if you're brand new, that's great, too. You are also very welcome. We'd love to raise $12,000 in the next 11 minutes. It's a little bit of an ambitious goal, but whatever we we've already met all of our goals. Oh, and Chris just donated an extra $1,000 to the digital download bundle to become the biggest donor to the Project for Awesome so far. Wow, Chris, thank you. He says an absolute remarkable thing was the first novel I've read a long time and I started flossing thanks to your warning on Dear Hank and John. We did it we changed someone's life.

H  55:00  
The true the true definition, what we've really actually been going for all this time. I know I guess if we could convince me to floss, that would be amazing. Like,

J  55:11  
I constantly wonder like, has my work been a net negative or a net positive in human experience? And honestly, hearing that I made somebody I encourage somebody to pick up the habit of flossing, like makes me think that maybe that alone is enough. Maybe 

H  55:30  
maybe finally.

J  55:32  
Um, but yeah, thank you for thank you for flossing. It's so important. Take it Oh, we hit $700,000. While I was talking about flossing, we saw that

J  55:43  
this is a Dud again! disaster, what are we gonna do?

H  55:47  
(bean noises)

H  55:53  
There's a good one.

J  55:55  
 I got it with my head and everything. I did a really good job that time. I forget what an 

J
absolute pain in the ass is to clean up after this every year. 

H  56:03  
I know! I still have confetti on the ground from last year.

J  56:10  
Oh, Hanks, take us through a couple more perks while I text my wife.

H  56:15  
There's a there's a crack in my office down here. And it's just full of Project for Awesome, like, the detritus of Project for Awesomes passed. There's this like six inch wide space between my wall and turn the Furby cam back on their my wall and my desk and it's just, it's never gonna stop being what it is. 

J  56:36  
Eventually, eventually, it'll be the great thing is eventually it'll just become made of that. And that will be a sort of material in and of itself. It'll just be that's what the wall was made out of. 

H  56:49  
Yeah, yeah. Well, okay, thank you, I appreciate that

J  56:54  
just trying to cheer you up,

H  56:56  
 it will say well, Phil all the way up. And then it'll be a project for awesome perk, this is a, these are some of the spray painted Hanklerfish arts that we that I made with some friends.

J  57:06  
Very Pretty

H  57:07  
I like them a lot. This is the smaller size that's available right now. And then there's a larger size that I don't have an example of, but they look like this, but none of them look the same. Basically, like it might look like that it might look, you know, be different colors, etc. But that's what they look like. And I love that we had so much fun making them and I and and unlike previous years, I made them before the Project for Awesome. So now they're just available and we can send them immediately. 

J  57:34  
That is good. 

H  57:35  
I'm proud of myself

J  57:36  
Oh, we have a new we have a new largest donor. And I feel like I should read their message because they donated $5,432.10, which is a great number. And they know they must know how happy that number was going to make me an independent of the other. You know the other things.

J  57:54  
"Few people when given a platform to seek to do the most good. Seek to do the most good that can be done with it

J
"you two, and everyone in Nerdfighteria have inspired me to be a better person. And I hope we can inspire many, many more people to follow in kindness."

J  58:04  
That's very kind Ben, and thank you so much for your donation. We really really appreciate it. That is why we why we went over all Hank, all the stretch Canvas anglerfish art is sold out. We've got it where we've sold a lot of perks. And so we have to, um, 

H  58:22  
there were like, it was like half sold out last time I checked, which was like 20 minutes ago.

H  58:30  
We've also raised $197,000, or $300,000 goal on tilta phi. Right now

J  58:35  
That is Phenominal

H  58:37  
 So I think it's, I mean, it's it's funny, and I don't know, like, I don't know how to like to say this the right way. But we are always a little bit concerned. When we are starting the Project for Awesome that like john and i are always like, is 300,000 too high? Like we don't want to not hit the goal. And so thank you for making it so that we're not having that concern. 

J  59:01  
Yeah. This is not like a I mean, there's a lot there's, I don't know how to say I also don't know, say this in the right way. But like,

H  59:11  
yeah 

J  59:12  
there is a lot of wonderful energy and activation energy in our community. And that's what makes it so extraordinary, I think and that's what makes it you know, fundamentally different to me than a lot of other online video projects. Like it's definitely not us because I've seen our videos. And, um, but every year we worry like Well, we're a year older, like we spent seven months doing a Smash Mouth related joke.

H  59:48  
That was one joke. That was really just one joke. That took seven months

J  59:53  
We devoted like 90 videos to a joke and and you and I Yeah, I do often feel like Gosh,

J: Gosh, I, you know, there, there might be fewer people, there might be fewer people who who want to donate. And also, I mean, I know many of you have been, there are 1000s and 1000s of you who are monthly donors to the project in Sierra Leone. And so who have gotten a situation where, where, you know, partners in Sierra Leone's able to break ground on the maternal Center of Excellence because we've raised $20 million.

J  1:00:26  
And so we were thinking, you know, this is probably going to be different just because so many people have already given so much. And we are completely astonished to be over $200,000 raised at tilta phi in the first hour of the project for awesome. That is strange and wonderful development. So thank you so much.

H  1:00:49  
 The one perk that has not sold as well as I might have expected is, is is shtonk Volume Two. So shtonk is a perfume that I created and it's and it is a it is a perfume that has a it's not a It's It's fine. It's good. It's a good perfume. Is it Adam Levine for men mixed with Adam Levine for women. No for legal reasons. It is not at but like I was surprised by how good stronk effort hit by Hank smells. And we've sold four of them. It's a lot of work to make shtonk by Hank. I have to I have to drill out some bottles. I can't tell you what exactly what bottles I'm drilling out. But I but I had a bunch of extra stock for Hank this year. And I put it in a diffuser. And I actually like make my office smell like shtonk by Hank. And it's good. I like it. Now. Now again, I have to reiterate, it is not Adam Levine mixed Adam Levine for him mixed with Adam Levine for her. It is more complicated than that. But it is a perfume. And it is not again not Adam Levine for her mixed with Adam Levine for him

J  1:02:03  
it's definitely not it's definitely some other thing because and even if it were Adam Levine for her mixed with Adam Levine for him it would have it would have some kind of other odors to make it especially special because I listen, I have smelled it. It's a good it's a good scent

J  1:02:27  
I don't know if you call it I don't know if it's a perfume. I don't know what to call it. But like it's I would 

H  1:02:32  
it smells kind of Apple-ly. And it's like I was surprised to find 

J  1:02:37  
I would get it right here without a second thought. 

H  1:02:39  
I was surprised to find that it did kind of get a little bit more gender neutral in the process of making a making out making my name stuck by him by Hank by him shtonk by him.

J  1:02:54  
Can I get you on this? real quick? 

H  1:02:56  
Yes, please.

J  1:02:56  
 I'm just getting some feedback. I'm getting some feedback from the chat. 

H  1:03:01  
Yeah,

J  1:03:01  
This is my this is my question for you. Would you be able to add a second trivia night at a higher dollar number? Can you do two trivia nights?

H  1:03:12  
I think that I will do that. I think that I will I have to figure out my the the schedule because I want to schedule it. Like there have been a number of times that I have during the Project for Awesome made promises that have turned out to be difficult to do. Yeah, so I'm gonna I'm gonna put it on the schedule before I make that perk live. 

J  1:03:33  
Very easy to overcommit in this world. actually durring a project for awesome because right now I feel so good. Like this is the best I've felt in months

H  1:03:44  
Yeah, for good reasons.

J  1:03:46  
 And so if I felt this way, if I woke up every Friday and I felt this way, then yes, I could do 20 Circle drawings, but I don't I wake up every other day and I feel like oh, here we are March 13 volume 296 so excited.

H  1:04:05  
oh God I have so many bad so many bad tik tok dances that I've not put on Tick Tock that you're going to get to look at if you get that digital download bundle 

J  1:04:14  
that's true but well yeah, but that said I really want to do I also I want to get in on this did I want to get it on this trivia night? Um

H  1:04:23  
 Oh, okay, and you didn't

J  1:04:25  
huh? Yeah. I didn't I didn't I didn't get a slot and I think I could win you know who would definitely win Stan

H  1:04:35  
 yeah

J  1:04:36  
yeah, maybe we'll maybe we'll do a trivia night with Stan let me text Stan.

H  1:04:45  
Oh, well, look, hey, we're already coming up with new perks because

J  1:04:53  
you've got two minutes before you got to go sell sell some do do your thing.

H  1:04:58  
 I will Project for Awesome has commemorative coins every year we set kind of did, we didn't do a predator awesome in 2020, because we moved it into the instead of late 2020. We did it early 2021. But because we have had so many Project for Awesome coins over the years, and people, including myself have collected them all, we made it both a 2020 coin and a 2021 coin, they are both available, you can get them as a bundle. So together alone, you can get 2021 for $20, you get both it's 30. So that is available. I also would like to say that a number of people have made

H  1:05:32  
have, oftentimes people will get the digital download bundle, and they will give us $100 instead of 60. And I can't tell you why because they're not even asking me to say things on the live stream. But Caroline did that and said, "from my junior year of high school to my first ever adult solo apartment eight years later, thank you for being an inspiration and a consistent source of chuckles" if we are nothing but those two things, it will have been worth it. 

J  1:05:57  
All I want to be is a source for chuckles, 

H  1:05:59  
Brett 

H  1:06:00
Brandon got a monster doodle from me. So Brandon says, I've watched you all for years. And I've gotten so much joy from your random knowledge. Thank you for all you do and the joy you bring to the world. I did a bunch of doodles last year. And they were really fun. But I just said I will draw you something. And what I ended up drawing was a number of different things, but a lot of monsters. So I've decided to go all in on monsters this time. In fact, that might be what I do during one of my breaks is just draw some monsters.

J  1:06:27  
That sounds lovely to me, Hank, thank you so much for joining us for the first hour of the Project for Awesome, I am going to take it from here for the next hour. next two hours actually. You go take a break, figure out some high dollar project for awesome perks that you can make because all of our high dollar sold out.

J  1:06:45  
They were supposed to last 48 hours to solve that problem during your break. I love you. Goodbye. 

H  1:06:52  
Goodbye.

J  1:06:55  
Dammit I said I love you.

J  1:06:59  
I didn't do that on purpose. It just came out. Just I'm overwhelmed with feeling y'all. I am I it's been a hard. I mean, just to state the obvious It has been a hard year. And I know the way that it's been hard for me has been different from the way that it's been hard for lots of other people. And I'm I know that I have a lot to be grateful for. As I write in my gratitude journal, that my friends at kurzgesagt got me every day. But it has been a hard, hard time. And I am really so glad to be here with y'all. And I'm so glad that you're here with us. And we need to take a moment I think just to acknowledge that victory. Um, of course, this isn't over. And of course, there's still a lot more to endure and to move through and to get through. But we made it to this moment. And that is wonderful. 

J  1:07:55  
And I I am reminded that even in really difficult times

there can be really lovely, really lovely moments and so I was overcome with happiness and, and gratitude. And so it just slipped out. It just slipped out that I love Hank.

J  1:08:14  
But I do I do very, very much so so thank you to everybody who's donating Bradley just donated $120 to get the digital download bundle and says "I haven't missed a stream since 2007 when I was an awkward teen and now I am an awkward adult." You and me both Bradley except I was an awkward 29 year old and now I'm an awkward 43 year old. So again everything you can we are close to maxing out all of our first half matching Is that correct?

J  1:08:50  
Hold on.

J  1:08:56  
We're working on we're working on the math mathematics of matching which are a fascinating struggle every year but the long and short of it is that your donations are still being matched for the time being and will be matched for at least a little while longer. And then after that when you donate $1 to save the children and Partners in Health it will count is just $1 to save the children and partners and health or 50 cents to save the children and 50 cents to partners and health which is still great and but yeah we're working on figuring out the match so that we can have all of the behind the scenes numbers working correctly. Um I I feel like I said I feel very lucky to be here and be able to celebrate this somebody says that they're donating plasma while watching which is like decreasing world sec suck inception. Right like you're you're decreasing world suck while you're decreasing world suck.

J: while you're decreasing world suck which is pretty cool. So thank you for doing that.

Um... Oh I'm also way behind on chat because people are talking about me officiating the wedding. But boy would I be bad at officiating a wedding. I mean, I'll do it, if it's an emergency, you know, but I wouldn't, I'm not sure I'd be great at it, that's all I'm saying.

Um, Mary and Seamus just donated to get the Project for - the, the digital download bundle. I thnk I know Mary and Seamus, so hi. Um, Lucas just donated, Anthony just donated, Morgan(?~1:10:32) just donated, Tony just donated, and said we're here because we're here.

I've also seen several people donating with reference to sycamore trees, which is very kind, and makes me tear up a little bit, um, making that - writing that essay and then putting it on YouTube were, I guess, moments of vulnerability for me, and the way that y'all have responded to it so generously and kindly has meant a lot to me, and so thank you. Um, thanks for watching that little video and a huge thanks to Nadim Silverman for doing the art, I think, which is what made the video so good.

Uh, alright now we're caught up. I don't know why we didn't make a Project for Awesome gratitude journal, but maybe that's something we'll think of next year.

I wanna go over, so I wanna emphasize a couple things real quick. We are gonna feature a video, we're still gonna be doing that this year. We're gonna feature around one video per hour, at least during this part of the Project for Awesome, and then we'll figure out the rest later. But we've had 4,000 total votes at projectforawesome.com.

So the way this works is you go to projectforawesome.com, it's very searchable, you can either search for a charity, there's a list of charities that you can look for, so for instance I'm gonna look for This Star Won't Go Out, which was the charity that was founded in memory of my friend Esther, who died when she was 16 of cancer, and This Star Won't Go Out provides direct support to families of children with cancer.

J: So there's This Star Won't Go Out videos, and I can click on one of them, and I can watch the video, which I can't do right now, but I will leave this screen up so I watch it later, and then I just, I can click vote, there's a red button right there and I click vote, and now that is me having now voted for this charity, This Star Won't Go Out.

You can do that for any of the charities that have uploaded videos to projectforawesome.com, and there are lots and lots of them, a huge array of different organizations that you can support, and your job, whether you can donate to the P4A or not, is to help us make better decisions when it comes to charities we are gonna support with the money raised during the second half of the Project For Awesome.

So today, if you can take a few minutes to go to projectforawesome.com, watch some videos, or even a bunch of minutes to go to projectforawesome.com, watch some videos, and vote, it really does make a big difference, because a lot of times, I mean, we're probably talking about tens of thousands of dollars that will go to each of the charities that are selected, and so we wanna make good choices, and we feel like, in the same way that we're crowdfunding most of the donations, we should also seek input from the community on which organizations you would like us to support, and so thank you for voting, and thank you for going to projectforawesome.com and watching P4A videos and supporting them, commenting on them, liking them, and encouraging people to make more P4A videos in the future!

So that's just something that I wanted to emphasize because I know a lot of people who are watching the stream right now can't afford to donate, and that's okay. Maybe in the future there will be an opportunity to, maybe not, but for now, I a hundred percent, we all, of course understand that this is an incredibly difficult time for a lot of people,

J: and lots of people aren't in a financial position to donate, and that's okay, there are other ways, really critical ways, to participate in the Project For Awesome, and help decide where the money that gets raised during the second half of the P4A goes, so thank you.

Boldislove(?~1:14:15) says, "Convincing my mom to use her card this fine Friday morning has been the highlight of my year." Well, good work, I'm glad that you asked permission, that's very key, and I see that you got as your perk my workout playlist. I don't wanna brag, but my workout playlist, it's so good. Maybe you won't like it, but I think it's very good. And most of all, it contains a lot of music that you would not believe that I would make - or that I would listen to.

Ok, hold on a second. Can we, um... ok (typing noises) Sorry, just a little business to take care of. I'm not just a Project for Awesome host, I'm also the least important member of the behind the scenes team. Speaking fo which I also want to say a quick thank you to the behind the scenes team. I wanna say a quick... oh.

Alright, I do wanna say a quick thank you to the behind the scenes team, there are so many people who volunteer for the Project for Awesome, including lots of Esther's friends from Catitude, who still are part of the P4A all these years later. Also a lot of people who work at Complexly, including Niki Hua, Rosianna Halse Rojas, Monica is here, Marie Ann is here, Julia, who's new to the team, is here, Paola is here, who many of you will know,

J: and Valerie, and Zulaiha, and everybody who is working on making the Project for Awesome work, we are very very grateful, it would not work without the dedication of all of these volunteers working together to make all the behind the scenes stuff work, to make sure that the perks work, so that when you go to projectforawesome.com/donate, you can get all the perks that you want. Hopefully, a lot of them have sold out because we, I mean, I, I will just be honest, like, we did not anticipate anything like this, but there are lots of great perks still available, and we're - and don't worry, we will, um, f-, um, we will keep releasing perks, as we always do, throughout the P4A so there will be lots of new stuff coming, uh, down the pipe. But I wanna highlight just a few things, um, that are digital because I love the digital perks, because they don't have- it's- I, I don't wanna discourage people from getting a physical perk, um, they can be great, and there's something wonderful about having a Project for Awesome commemorative coin, or this amazing Project for Awesome t-shirt, which is also quite light, so it's inexpensive to ship, um, and, uh, we price things appropriately so that we still get plenty of donation dollars for every, every, every physical perk, so don't worry about that, get your physical perks and don't feel guilty about them. But the great thing about digital perks is that they don't cost anything to distribute to you, um, so I think that that's something that, you know, has- you, you get to maximize the value of your donation. So, some of the digital perks I like are, um, my adult cookbook. I have written a cookbook for people like myself who are grownups, and don't particularly love cooking. Uh, I've got a recipe for new potatoes that's uh, I think is very very good, and extremely profane. Uh, I've got a recipe for a vegetarian chili. again, very, very good, extremely profane. I got a white rice and black beans recipe for

J:
rice and beans, tacos, very good, extremely profane, I think you'll enjoy my cookbook. It is definitely only for grownups because cooking makes me mad and frustrated. And also I let myself like really kind of let myself go and do what I wanted with this. Another thing that I want to highlight one of my favorite things that comes to our house every year is Kurzgesagt's calendar, their human era calendar. So in the the Kurzgesagt world, we're not in the year 2021, we're in the year 12,021. Because kurtsan is putting the human calendar in the human context. So it's a really great calendar. It's really beautiful. It's one of the most physically beautiful things that I own, our kids love them. And this year the calendar goes like all throughout human history and then into imagining the human future and it's just phenomenal. You can get a signed physics girl poster, you can get the Project for Awesome socks. Again, the Nerdfighter art perk is one of my favorites every year people from all around the world mail their art into the DFTBA warehouse, and then the and then someone will pick one of those works of art for you pack it up and send it to you. You don't know what you are going to get. It could be a drawing, it could be jewelry, it could be 3d printed art, but you know it's going to be phenomenal. I get it every year every year it's just like a surprise delight that it will arrives in the mail. And plus I know that I did some good in the world. My circle drawings have sold out ridiculously Um, so now that means that you can still though get a print of one of my circle drawings. So this is a print of my favorite of the original circle drawings that I've made. It has about 18,000 circles in it and it's part of my attempt to count to 170,000 

J:
And you can get that at Project for Awesome.com/donate just by clicking on rewards. And then you got to click like show more rewards and show more rewards. But that part's kind of fun. It's just It's all I find it's a good feeling just to click and click and click it makes me feel happy before you did I do a lot of clicking to get down there to the john circle drawing print. But I think that I don't does that also come with the digital download? bundle? I don't know. I don't know. Does it someone will tell me in the in the chat. Okay, great. And memories pillow just sold out. You can also get my wife Sarah, your screens beautiful, phenomenal, original collages from old magazines. They are just, I mean, they're so much better than my circle drawings. It's not even funny. And lastly, I will emphasize the cardboard Jimin and in the cardboard Harry Styles, both in the background of this very video. They've been parts of project for Awesome's past, but now we think it's time for them to find a home. And if you make a truly extraordinary donation to the Project for Awesome, remember it's tax deductible, then we will we will send one of those or both of them your way if you're in the market for both. Don't be afraid Don't be afraid to we're now over $763,000 which is just amazing. Hopefully we'll run right past $766,000 because that's just kind of a stressful number for me. I don't know about you guys. I just get stressed out by certain numbers. Good news, I found another collection of party poppers which that had also been a source of anxiety for me. So that's that's really good news. I'm going to Okay, so we're gonna we're gonna feature a video now it's over at project for awesome.com and it is a video for this start won't go out it's the first video that we're going to feature again if you want to vote for this vide

J:

if you want to vote for This Star Won't Go Out to receive a portion of the money raised during the second half of Project for Awesome just right over there. By the next just to the right of the video you see a red thing that says vote that's where you click and that counts as a vote this is by Alex bar for This Star Won't Go Out and if everybody is ready, oh the circle print is not in the digital download bundle as it is physical. It is a physical print that arrives at your house if my favorite circle drawing that I have done so far. And I hope that you like it. And it is a physical thing, which is what I did not understand. So that answers that question. Um, is it okay to feature a video? Alright.

Um, so we're gonna we're gonna feature this video very shortly. Um, I think unless Yes, okay, so we're gonna feature this video, everybody go to projectforawesome.com together. We're going to watch this video together and then on the other side, we will discuss it and I guess Nikki will mute me now.

https://projectforawesome.com/watch?v=2zFpeEYEZe8

https://projectforawesome.com/watch?v=2zFpeEYEZe8

https://projectforawesome.com/watch?v=2zFpeEYEZe8

https://projectforawesome.com/watch?v=2zFpeEYEZe8

J:
Laurie thank you for making that video and for being part of the project for awesome and for carrying on Esther's memory and legacy and such a deep, deep way we are really really grateful to you thank you for being part of the Project for Awesome with us and for sharing the work that that you're doing at this star won't go out to help families of kids with cancer not have to live with the you know the daily compounded stress of financial insecurity alongside such a

J:
serious diagnosis in one of their kids. Really, it's really amazing work. And following the work that This Star Won't Go Out has done over the last decade has been really inspirational for me. And it's just an incredible testament to the kind of people Wayne and Maury are and the kind of volunteers and staff members they, they attract.

So the other people who work on this star won't go out. The volunteers are also just just amazing, just wonderful, incredible people. If you want to go for this star won't go out.

And I hope you will just click vote next to Lori's video there at project for awesome.com.  But yeah, Laurie, I know, I think you're in chat. And I miss you. And I wish that I wish that we could be together.

And yeah, I just I it's thank you for being here. And I you know, and I wish Esther I wish Esther was here.

I have to make a transition now. Um out of that. But again, yeah, thank you, Laurie, and to the whole Erl family for just doing this hugely important work. That helps families who otherwise just wouldn't wouldn't have access to the kind of resources that that you help them get to.

We have a significant fundraising update, which is maybe you were maybe you like me, were stressed out about the possibility of hitting $766,000 because you don't want sixes in a row if you can avoid it. But what happened is that we updated the matching fund because the matching fund needed to be updated, because we've had incredibly generous people come in

and join the matching fund, and also because some of the money that Hank and I are putting up wasn't counting, so we've had this huge sudden jump to $846,000.

I'm just gonna kind of walk you through really quickly where that money is coming from. So, $248,000 is coming through the Tiltify.

That money is being matched by community-matching donors. I want to thank four of them right now. I want to thank Bryce, Vision from Texas, Michael from San Francisco and Anonymous.

Thank you, Anonymous. Anonymous is having a great Project for Awesome, as they do every year. But thank you to Bryce and Vision and Michael and Anonymous for joining the matching fund this year.

We're gonna split up our matching donors every hour, so we're gonna thank different matching donors every hour. So, right now, I guess, this hour of matching has been brought to you by Bryce and Vision and Michael and Anonymous. Then also, Hank and I have put up some matching money as well.

For the first $350,000 that's raised through Tiltify: that money will be matched. We kind of... part of the reason that this has shifted is that we kind of thought that we might not hit all that $350,000 during the first half of the P4A, but now we think maybe we will. So, that would be really exciting.

Please take all of the matching money. Please get all of it off the table. And then there's also money that was already in the Foundation to Decrease Worldsuck bank, that comes from a lot of different sources.

A big source of it is Tab for a Cause. Tab for a Cause is a wonderful tool that I think was built by people in Nerdfighteria a long, long time ago. And basically it allows you to raise money for charity by having ads running in the background while you're surfing the web.

And it's really grown a lot, and it's become a significant source of revenue.

Also a chunk of the Vlogbrothers ad venue goes a uh to the foundation to decrease world suck so if you watched an ad or watched a Vlogbrothers video while being a YouTube premium member, uh, in the last year, you are part of this fundraising so thank you. Um, and then we have matching donations from Save the Children and Partners in Health, but we've maxed out those matches already, which is amazing, and great, and thank you, and wow. So, um, it's just, it's really, this is a first hour and a half of the project for awesome, like I cannot remember ever having seen, um, and now we are at eight hundred and fifty eight thousand dollars. I wont lie, there's a little part of me that would that would love to get to a million dollars before my my brother comes back, because then I can take full credit. Umm, of course the vast majority of the credit goes to you, haha, but that's not gonna stop me! Haha, I wanna thanks some of our recent donors as well. Ah, oh gosh, yeah, and ah, thanks everybody in chat who is explaining stuff, uh, explaining how stuff works, and uh answering questions from people who may be new. If this is your first Project for Awesome, some of this may not may not make sense initially, so I'm very grateful for everyone in chat who is, uh, just being supportive and helping everybody, uh, learn together. Emily says thank you for, uh, for the years of joy of the Project of Awesome. Uh, thank you Emily for donating 60 dollars to this years P for A. Natalie donated 60 dollars too and said 'fur bean'. Tyler donated 20 dollars and said, uh, so thankful to have found this community, and secular worldview, It's brought so much joy. I mean sometimes some of us are religious, Tyler, some of us are secular. Umm, uh Julius says the past year and last month especially have really challenged my optimistic view of humanity. Yeah um, but uh, but thank you thank you Nerdfighteria so much for being living proof of the goodness of people. Yeah, It has -

It has definitely been a challenge. I think that big disruptions to the social order are hard, um, and this one in particular has involved just a tremendous amount of loss, and that loss has come in many different for, most viscerally in the forms of, you know, millions of people who have lost their lives to COVID-19, but also, um, there's just been a lot of -- there's been a lot of loss. You know, I think for most of us there's been some loss. Most of us have lost people, I think at this point, many of us have lost people to the pandemic, and there's the loss of having your life put on hold, losses of jobs, uh, losses of dreams, losses of plans, and it is really really hard. But it is not final. I often think about the Liberian proverb that last mile health uses in talking about community health workers that "no condition is permanent." And that includes this condition. When I was talking to my therapist yesterday and I was just saying that I just felt like this was never going to end and I just couldn't see how we were gonna get out of this, and it just is so hard to endure something when you don't know how or if or when it's gonna end. And my therapist said "well everything else has ended," and I found that very helpful because it was the kind of hope that isn't BS, because everything else has ended, and this will too. And no condition is permanent, and we - and that's I think, we have to work for each other and we have to work for ourselves to -

-hang around and to get to the other side of this and, for me at least, this, the little live streams I've been doing where I just sign my name over and over again, have been such a gift because they've made me feel - it's just so isolating, I know it's very isolating for a lot of you as well - and it's made me feel connected again. It's reminded me of like the deep connections in Nerdfighteria, and how real they are even though many of them are virtual, how important they are to people and how important they are to me! You know, I mean, Esther's friend group met in the chat after our blog TV shows would end, which is sort of our first place where we hung out on the livestreaming part of the internet was this place called Blog TV. And , you know, they made those friendships when they were teenagers, in some cases young teenagers, and now they're grown ups, and they're still friends. Like I followed one of them on TikTok and I was delighted to see that my TIkTok recommendations was the rest of them because they all follow each other on TIkTok and they're still friends and they still find ways to collaborate together even, you know, after more than a - you know, more than a decade of knowing each other. So, uh, this is not real life, and like, real life is not easy right now,and I hope it gets easier soon, and I don't want to pretend that this is a replacement for real life, but, the feeling of connection - I hope that the feeling of connection that you feel is as real as the one that I feel. THat's all I can say about it, so thank you and thanks for being with us and getting through this as best you can. Sydney just donated $250, did you even get a perk, Sydney? You did, you got the pressed pennies, which cost much less than that. Rachel just donated $1000 to get the digital download bundle, which -

- is a significant overpayment Rachel, thank you very much.

Emma donated to say "thanks for everything you do". Erika donated to say that "this has brought some joy into our lives".

Taylor donated to say "thank you for your vulnerability and optimism". Jenny - nerdfighter since 2007 - Jenny thank you for sticking with us through all of these years, what a long 14 years it's been, just look at my hair color. Also, part of the 2007 club Lu(?~1:40:29) also donated.

I think that there should a part of the 2021 club, like "I started watching vlogbrothers 6 hours ago and I love these guys". But yeah, thank you to all the long time people who've been donating. Oh look, here's Ashley saying "first P4A where I actually have money to donate, 10 years in the making", Ashley thank you sticking with us all that time.

And Morgan says "I love this community for over a decade". Thank you Graham(?~1:40:55), thank you Carol. Talin(?~1:40:57) thank you so much. And Justin, and Emery(?~1:41:01), and Begonia(?~1:41:03) - that's a great name - Noah, Robert, Freya, Colin.

I'm never gonna be able to thank all the people who are donating, cause it's coming in so fast, but I am very very grateful, and we are now at 875,000 dollars, and we're only 1 hour and 36 minutes into this party. We've got 46 and a half hours to go, so pace yourselves friends, pace yourselves.

It's okay. There are some people in the 2021 club. There are some people in the 2020 club in chat, which is nice to see. 2019 nerdfighter here reports vigilant cosmic penguin - that was not an easy word to say.

I am part of the 2007 club but I dropped out of the community for a while, like, in like two thousand... I'd say like 2014 I wasn't super present, so I don't know maybe I need to like re-up my subscription, and say that I really really rejoined in 2015. But it's so great to see all the years when y'all became part of this community, it really is lovely.

J: I like the idea that it's all different clubs, and I have seen a couple 2021 Clubs and 2020 Clubs, which, thank you for finding our channel and for joining us in this delirious mess. It's gonna be great! I hope you enjoy it here as much as I do.

So, I'm gonna go through a few more perks real quick. And I should say again, if you can't afford to donate, and we know the vast majority of people in comments can't afford to donate, first off just thank you for being here. Thank you for making this part of your day, but if you can't afford to donate, there are really important ways to be involved in the Project for Awesome. projectforawesome.com is where you go to watch Project for Awesome videos, like them, comment on them, and also vote for them. So if there is a charity that you care about the way that so many people in nerdfighteria care about This Star Won't Go Out, you can find that charity and you can vote for it, and you can reach out to other people and ask them to vote for it, and that can be a great way to participate in the P4A regardless of whether you are able to donate financially. 

But if you are able to donate financially at projectforawesome.com/donate there are all kinds of great perks. We're now using Tiltify which has some things that are different for those of you who are like old long-time nerdfighters like me, there are some things that have changed, but there are also some things that are really really helpful, and the thing that is most helpful is that for the first time in fourteen long years we can accept donations via PayPal so all the people who live in places where it is not common to have a credit card can donate via PayPal and also that means that those people will stop sending me emails. Although that's not the main thing, I love hearing from you. But yeah, I'm really excited.

One of the things that I'm excited about this year is the April May short story. This comes as part of the Digital Download Bundle along with so many other great perks. Hank wrote an extension of the Absolutely Remarkable Thing world in which April May goes to VidCon and meets Hank, so it's a little meta-fictional. It's a little bit like when Kurt Vonnegut put himself in Breafast of Champions.

You can also get some exclusive podcasts that come with the Digital Download Bundle, including an exclusive episode of Dear Hank and John where we only answer questions from people who donated to the Project For Awesome and got that perk or the bundle.There's also Dear Katherine and Sarah - our wives annual amazing advice podcast, that is so much better than Dear Hank and John, and should become its own real podcast but never will because nothing that beautiful can survive in this world. And I don't think it's listed here for whatever reason, but Sarah and I are also doing a podcast. And you get that with the Digital Download Bundle. It's a Sarah and John original podcast. 

Also if you want to make a significant donation - Oh! We just put up a new perk, which I'm very excited about. So, let me tell you a story. In 2011, I posted an ad on Craiglist (remember Craiglist? I don't know, for all I know it still exists). I posted an ad on Craiglist that said "I need an assistant to help me edit these videos where I play Fifa," and like two people replied, and one of them was Stan Muller. And Stan did help me edit the videos where I played Fifa, but he was also a historian, and a trivia buff, and a brilliant person, and an amazing editor, and the kindest person I know - 

And so Stan, when we were pitching YouTube the idea of Crash Course, Stan was like "I'd like to be involved in this, I quite like history." And Stan became, really, the co-founder of Crash Course History with me, and it has been an amazing, amazing journey with him, being able to work with him, someone I admire personally so much but also professionally so much, over the last 10 years. Stan knows more about trivia than the vast majority of Jeopardy champions. Taking him to Pub Trivia when that was a thing, was like a cheatcode. So Stan and I are going to host a virtual trivia night that you can be part of. Stan and I will write the questions and we'll host the trivia night. We'll have a good time together. We'll have some soft drinks or other beverages if you want to and it will be a blast and if you donate $250 to the Project for Awesome, you can sign up for that right now at projectforawesome.com/donate. I'm such a fan of Stan. Don't tell him that the Anthropocene Reviewed book is half dedicated to him, but he is amazing. He's just an amazing, amazing guy. And it will be really fun to do a trivia night with him, because I know from having done many trivia nights with Stan that it's an absolute blast, so... 

I would say that I stan Stan. I do. You know, I didn't even know about that verb until long after I got to know Stan, but I do. I do think very, very highly of him. 

"How's the CO2 level in the room?" says Everlyn. I don't know because I don't have CO2 monitor because I didn't know until like 30 minutes ago that that was something that I should have in my room, and I don't know if it is something I should have in room frankly because there already is too much - 

-- too much information happening in the brain, you know, there's a lot happening in here. It gets pretty intense! I'm not sure that we need to make it necessarily vastly more intense. 

Alright, I'm gonna check in on - the dynamic counter is frozen. I don't know what that means, but they're working on it. The dynamic counter is frozen, but they're trying to fix it. 

Cameron just donated, as did Oliva, and Lauren, and StackingKeys who is gonna be part of that trivia night with me and Stan, so thank you I'm looking forward to it. I think Lauren is as well so thank you Lauren. Grace just donated. Also we've got donations coming in from Maria, and Amy, and Anonymous who just donated to get part of that trivia night with me and Stan. It's gonna be a blast! Mark just donated $1000 saying "Thank you for being awesome and helping me to feel okay-ish during this gestures broadly." I hear ya, I hear ya. It's difficult, it's difficult. I feel like I should acknowledge that I got the - people act like the 'gestures broadly' joke is mine, but I stole it from someone in YouTube vlogbrothers comments. And I don't, unfortunately, don't know who so I feel real bad about this. 

But Vanessa and Miles also just donated to be part of the trivia night, so thank you. That's going to be fun. As did Jesse and Catie. Laurie says "Hi John, could you please say "Hi" to my best friend Adam." Hi Adam! Yes, of course I can. I mean, if I happen to see your comment amid the endless stream of comments. I apologise to everybody whose comments I'm not reading. Emily who was on actual Jeopardy says, "I thought there would never be a better trivia experience than being on actual Jeopardy but I think this will top that." I mean, well okay, now there's a ringer in the room y'all. There's a Jeopardy contestant who's in the room.

So you may want to reconsider whether or not you want to do Trivia Night with John and Stan now that there's a ringer in the room. There's going to be good prizes, but they may all go to Emily. 

Sarah says, "Thank you for all the positivity you spread with your tiktoks. I'm sorry I can't donate more but exchange rates." I totally understand and also thank you so much for donating regardless of the amount. It means a lot. So thank you.

Amy is donating in love of nerdfighter moms, including the nerdfighter mom who is currently upstairs I assume, so she may be down a little bit later, and Alice is very excited for the Project for Awesome this year. She wanted to know if she could do Sharpie Face, when she could do Sharpie Face how much Sharpie Face could she do, and can she do Sharpie Face, and will I have a moustache. So a lot of questions from Alice about which versions of humiliating yourself John are you going to be taking on, and the answer is I don't know. I don't know yet, okay!? It's too much pressure. Let's wait and see how it happens.

Where is that? Everything is reversed which makes it impossible for my brain to know where the confetti is. 

Woah, I think we are getting close to - woah, woah, woah! Very just blew passed $913,000. I've got to celebrate this the only way I know how, with a party popper. Woah! That was very violent. It's a huge range of quality of party poppers in this particular box. Usually you get a certain level of consistency. It's either all duds or they're all medium. That one was too power. It was so powerful that the party didn't actually get to pop; they all just kind of came out as circles. So, here we go. $916,000. We still got an hour and fifteen minutes left in my session of hosting, and boy how great would it be if we've raised $1,000,000. 

I'm gonna ask if Hank is next.
(Typing) Is Hank next? 

Okay, we're also very close now to the $300,000 milestone at Tiltify. We're at $283,556. All of your donations will be matched up to, I think, $350,000 at Tiltify, so you still, if you want to have the joy of being matched, you need to get in in the next $73,000 or so. After that $1 donated will count as $1 donated to Partners in Health and Save the Children, but until then. 

Okay so we're gonna... Yes.
(Typing) But is Hank at 3? 

So, I'm gonna be joined pretty soon by Dr. Joia Mukherjee, the Chief Medical Officer of Partners in Health, and a long time supporter of the Project For Awesome. We're gonna talk about all manner of the work that is being done in terms of Covid relief, and trying to address the Covid crisis which is something that Partners in Health is involved with from Sierra Leone, heading up the contact tracing there, to the state of Massachusetts where they are also heading up the contact tracing process. So Partners in Health has been hugely and of course, as many of you will now, the Navajo Nation has been among the hardest-hit communities during the Covid crisis and PIH is very active and has been for a long time; has deep roots in that community and so has been working on that.

After we hit $300,000 do we need to change the goal or can we just keep rolling through? That's what we usually do. After we hit the goal we usually just blow past it and keep going on and on forever and ever.

...that would be my ambition anyway.

So, we're gonna be joined... Okay so, some people are asking about the cardboard cut-outs behind me. They are both available, and by both, I mean Harry Styles and Jimin. Hank is not available. But they are both available for a tax-deductable donation to Partners in Health and Save the Children. If you want me to, I will sign either or both of them. If you don't want me to because you don't want me to sully it with my J-Scribble, I won't sign it. They're both available, they're both expensive. But I mean, what a value proposition. There's only one of them! You know. It's an incredible opportunity I would say.

$923,000 raised. Tina just donated to say that it's the first time that they've made it to a Project for Awesome livestream so it's cool to be here. Thanks for being here and thanks to everybody for donating. So many donations are coming in at the same time that it's hard to say. It's hard to say thanks to everyone. 

Anonymous says, "Paper Towns has changed my life, as has this community." Thank you, thank you, and thank you for getting the Digital Download Bundle. This has been.... this is just amazing. This is amazing, this is amazing this year the number of comments that are coming in, the number of people that are watching right now, all 5000 of you "Hello!", and I did. I don't have a lot of Diet Dr Pepper right now because, as I'm sure you're aware, there is a Diet Dr Pepper shortage in the country, of cans anyway, but I figured I'd bring it out for this. I've sort of started to break my diet soda habit as a result of the pandemic but, you know, at this point you rely on your old habits, and, for me, those old habits include Diet Dr Pepper. What it takes to get you through, you know.

Yeah, so I am excited that there's so many comments coming in.

Yeah, so we're going to be joined pretty soon at at 2pm. Eastern by Dr.
Joia Mukherjee. Between now and then it would be amazing. The donations keep coming in, like they come in so fast that that they come in like 30 or 40 a minute, which is mind blowing.

And I don't even know how to make sense of why this year's Project for Awesome is off to such a roaring start. I guess that I don't know, I don't know why I'm just extremely grateful. So thank you.

Again, we know that lots of people aren't aren't in a position to donate and that's totally fine. There are lots of other ways to be involved in the P4A. I should also mention that some nerdfighter communities like I know the Nerdfighter community in Brazil and in a few other places they pull money together and get the digital download bundle and then like share all the digital download bundle stuff together which I always think is really lovely.

So if you want to do that, and you know a couple of nerdfighter friends are you on whether it's on Facebook or on Reddit or wherever you have a few or discord there's you know a lot of different nerdfighter groups if you happen to be part of one of those groups you can also maybe do that. Anonymous says "For Narnia and Aslan!" to get the digital download bundle and Marshall says "Thank you for a beautiful event year after year." I don't know about that. Marshall there's some there's always some there's always some ridiculousness alongside the beauty but there's a bit of beauty.

Hopefully anyway, we definitely try try try to include the beauty. Lady Anne Elizabeth Margaret Brailsford which is quite a name just got the pressed pennies. Onika just got the digital download bundle., and Margo just got the digital download bundle.

Stan just donated $20.21 to celebrate 

this year hopefully being an improvement over previous previous years, on average at least.

And Lauren who's been watching for since 2008, just donated as well as did Inbali. Thank you first time donating to P4A.

They say thank you so much. You got my my adult cookbook. I apologize in advance for how how profane it is, but I can't I can't do much about it.

Braun says I mostly did this for John's workout playlist. But also to help people sure that to Braun, you're gonna never regret getting my workout playlist, it's actually two workout playlists. It's a workout playlist for like when you things are relaxed, and you're just, you know, doing some maybe something like interval training, but nothing that's too extreme.

And then there's one for you where you're just like trying to run as hard as you can for as long as you can. Until the anxiety releases. It's a feverish grip on you, which is how I usually work out.

Sort of, that's sort of how that's sort of what drives my, my fitness levels is I'm going to go outside and run until I don't feel like this anymore. That's my... There have been several times in the last couple of months where I said to Sarah, like, I'm going on a run, I could be back in 20 minutes, I could be back in like an hour and 40 minutes.

I'm just gonna run until I feel differently. And that has been very helpful for me. I recommend running or walking until you feel differently as a strategy.

Cecily just donated $50 on behalf of people who can't this year, which was very, very cool. Andrew says shout out to all my old friends in my pants. good old days. Leslie says the world.

The world does suck right now, so hopefully this decreases at some. But yeah, thank you to everybody who's donating.

We now we're closing in on $950,000.

And all of your donations are still being matched by, by donors to people who signed up for the matching fund. And we're just $4,000 away from reaching our $300,000 goal, the last time that we did this, that took like a, like eight or 10 hours, I think, and this time it has taken one hour and 55 minutes, we might do it within two, the two hour window, the lots of great perks avaible at Project for Awesome.com/donate, lots of them have gone fast, I'm trying to create a false sense of urgency, Harry Styles is waiting for you, if only you put the dollar on the dotted line.

We are very close now to $300,000 raised, which is just... at tiltify, which is just phenomenal. And if you count all of the matching funds that we have, that means that we're really close, we're really now quite close to a million dollars, which is just a little bit mind blowing, to be honest with you. Way, way, way beyond what we expected for this year's P4A.

I don't know if it's because more of you are in town because we're not doing the project for awesome in the middle of the Christmas season or if it's just because people are moved to generosity by the broader circumstances or what but Gosh, thanks, yay. Um, hopefully we'll get to, we'll get to a million.

My I'll be I'll be very upfront about my goal. I would like to get to a million before my brother comes back on. Not that it's a rivalry because it's not it's a cooperation. But um, but yeah, this is, this is truly incredible.

And thanks to all the 5000 people who are watching us again, just now, a couple minutes before we're going to have a great conversation with Dr. Joia Mukherjee. This is one of my favorite parts of the Project for Awesome every year getting to learn from Dr. mukajee about the work that pih is doing, and the big challenges that we are facing.

not just in impoverished countries, but also in rich ones when it comes to health care access and health and equity in health care access, which is what Partners in Health is committed to, they are committed to what they call a preferential health care treatment option for the poor.

So you know, the lack of health care access is really like really deep down the leading cause of death in the world is the lack of health care equity and health care access, and pih is leading the charge and has for over 30 years to change that and to make it so that more people, all people and can access health care in reliable safe sanitary settings, and and can be in can be treated appropriately by people who are appropriately trained and supported and supplied. And we've seen that our community has seen that up close with the maternal center of excellence at Kodu government hospital, which is a project that pih is collaborating with the Sierra Leonean government to create a vastly improved maternal health care system so that children and mothers can experience safe childbirth, one in 20 women in Sierra Leone can expect to die in childbirth, which is an unconscionably high number.

And, and we know that it doesn't need to be that way. We know that the world does not need to be be that way. And pih's commitment to bringing about a world that where that where that kind of horror, the horror of maternal death is rare, is is really inspirational to me.

And something that I know a lot of people in our community have gotten behind, there have been many 1000s of donors to that project. And largely thanks to you, alongside really, really generous partners and health donors, we've now raised over the $20 million that we need to break ground on the maternal Center of Excellence

it's going to break ground this spring.

It's really exciting. But right now, we're raising unrestricted funds for Partners in Health, because we also think it's really, really important to do that. pih knows where they need money to go better than we do.

And so we want to listen to them and support them in an unrestricted way so that they can move money around to the places where it's most needed in any given moment. And so that's why we're raising unrestricted funds right now for both Partners in Health and save the children. So I'm going to, okay.

Okay. So we're going to be joined by Dr. Mukherjee.

Very shortly. And in the meantime, I just want to say a huge thank you to everybody who just got us over $300,000 raised to tilta phi, which also means that we are over $950,000 raised overall that's, you know, over 400 $75,000 for both Save the Children and Partners in Health, which is really, really amazing. Just so exciting.

Gosh, I can't believe that we're only two hours in.

John (J): 
Um, hi!

Dr. Mukherjee (Dr. M):  
john, how are you? 

J:
Oh, it's great to see you.

Dr. M:
Great to see you, too.

J:
Thank you so much for joining us. And for again, being part of the Project for Awesome with us.

Dr. M:
It's, it's always truly, truly awesome. And I saw the numbers even before I got on, and then you announce them again. And I am just so touched by the generosity of this group this these amazing nerdfighters and I couldn't be prouder to be a former nerd current nerd. And, and really, I just, we can have another world, we can fight for another world and you guys are doing it. And thank you for supporting Partners in Health in your efforts. I'm getting teary eyed.

J:
I think that is a really good way of saying it. We it's important to understand the extent to which we choose this world and the extent to which we chose this world. Like the way that poverty is distributed in the world today. And I learned this from your book, an introduction to global health care delivery, there's a quote from it, that I keep with me at all times.

I'm going to read it if that's okay. But we we choose this world, and we can choose a different world and understanding that was really the moment of understanding for me this moment of clarity in my life when I said oh, like I'm not helping choose a different world. And I can.

And it's not some like deep, difficult mystery of how to choose a different world. There are people out there who are already already doing the work. And so my opportunity is to support them.

This is the quote, a child born today in Japan will live to the age of 83, whereas a child born in Sierra Leone will only live to the age of 50. These differences in life expectancy are not caused by genetics, biology or culture. health inequities are caused by poverty, racism, lack of medical care, and other social forces that influence health.


Dr.M:
Turns out our genetic code is all the same, right? And when you look at a biology like COVID, virus COVID is pretty much the same. I mean, there are mutations, we know that. But the same virus that hit a meatpacking plant in Nebraska is the same virus that hit the town of Brookline, where I live in this beautiful, sunny house.

And the outcomes are vastly different. And that's not biology, that's not genetics, that is just the social forces. And social forces are something that we all can do something about, we can do something about them through our votes, we can do something about them, where we put our money.

Dr.M:
And you know, how we live our lives and what we choose to do and what we choose to focus on. And I'm just always so amazed with people in their teens and their 20s. Like, dude, just you guys are a different breed. You know, there are plenty of people. Alright, my age I'm older than you. Yeah, that are good, too. But I see a change, brewing and people sort of really living living through their values and with their values up front. And I'm just so happy about that.


J:
Yeah, and consuming with their values as well like trying to be more intentional and thoughtful about consumption. I also just see a lot of a lot of young people who refuse to accept these inequities and structural injustices that we have been for so long taught are natural or inevitable, or, or even just and seeing, I have to say, I've been very encouraged by that. Like, I've been very encouraged. People I see who are just like no more. Yeah. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about pih's role in responding to COVID. Because I know that it's been a huge part of what you what you've had to do and what you've been doing in the last year, and now it's different in different places.


Dr.M:
Yeah, thanks for that, john. So you know, just as I was saying, the virus itself is neutral. It doesn't have a preference for people, countries, migrants or anything, but what we really see is it's driven by the social, economic and political forces that we choose. That we as human beings choose to not fairly distribute, to not believe in science. Do you know so there are all these social and political aspects that we've seen. So at person health we really look at human rights

Dr.M
And the right to health as a two part kind of solution is to provide health care public sector because it's government that respect, protect and fulfill rights. And we certainly have seen that when, when the US government, respect, protect and fulfill rights and what happens in terms of COVID.

But the second is how community participates in that, and demands the rights and organizes. And, you know, you tell such a beautiful story about one of our community health workers in Sierra Leone, and and making sure that community health workers are part and parcel of the solution. community members, patients themselves. So that two part government respecting, protecting, filling and then communities participating is really how we think about fulfilling the right to health.

And then of course, the third and overarching pieces, you need money to do that, because the health systems in places like Sierra Leone, and by the way, in very impoverished communities in the United States as well are impoverished. They're not accidentally without oxygen or without PPE, they've been impoverished by a variety of political decisions and social forces. So we understood, yeah, so just to get to COVID, quickly, but so we understood that COVID would hit the communities we serve, and started to assure that we had community health workers trained to do contact tracing reach out, trying to get testing into the hands of our health workers, ppe and oxygen, like we really saw that.

And the governor of massachusetts approached us and said, Why isn't that community planning and that public health planning happening here? We don't know. And he asked us to help the state do that.

Dr M:
And the public health department in Massachusetts is extraordinary, but had been underfunded based on political decisions, was not at scale to meet this terrible crisis and was not able to focus on communities and equity in the same way that needed to be done.

So, that's the work that we've been doing in Massachusetts, training people to do contact tracing, case investigation and resourcing the poorest - food, transportation etc. - and because of that work then we were asked in a variety of cities and states around the country to do the same. So now we are involved heavily in the public and community covid response in the US. 

J:
Yeah, and also internationally I mean I know that...

Dr M:
And of course, yes.

J:
Yeah, how important the PIH leading the charge on contact tracing and rapid testing and availability of testing has been in Sierra Leone. I've heard from your colleagues in Sierra Leone how grateful they are and how much they feel like, that, it could have been a very different story or it could still become a very different story if, that, contact tracing and testing hadn't been really robust quite quickly.

Dr M:
Yeah, well, and what's so interesting about Sierra Leone, Liberia, Rwanda, Malawi, you know, Haiti, Lesotho, these countries had over, you know, years that we'd been there worked with communities and worked with governments. They put together actually decent public health programs, so it was not difficult to rapidly sort of give people the knowledge on covid and sort of scale that up. What still is inadequate is the care, you know. (J: Yeah) Many countries in Africa don't have oxygen. I just got off the phone with our Peru team - a middle income country - last night, and the entire country is out of oxygen.

Dr M:
So, we need to... So, we were able to adapt the lessons from West Africa to apply here in Massachusetts. But we also have to similarly provide that same standard of care, so people don't die for lack of oxygen, which was an intervention invented in 1821.

J:
Right. Yeah, I think that's such a hugely important point, both sides of that. We tend to think of charity or philanthropy as this one-way street, but what we should be thinking of it, of global health, is as an exchange of experiences and expertises, and also as a way of addressing the real ways that historical forces are present in the impoverishment in these communities.

Like Sierra Leone cannot built a healthcare system that has a strong care component because if they spend the same percentage of their GDP on healthcare as the United States does, they have 78 or 80 dollars per person per year to spend on healthcare which is obviously insufficient to build a healthcare system. (Dr M: Right) When, you know, in the United States we spend 12 or 15 thousand dollars per person per year and also don't have equitable healthcare system or anything approaching it.

And so, I think it's really important to understand that like, this isn't just about, you know, rich counties offering their expertise to poor countries, it is really about learning from each other, and it turned out that we had, and have, a lot to learn about contact tracing, about public health initiatives, from countries in West Africa and elsewhere and it turns out that we still are, had these huge failures of 200 year old interventions that we can't get oxygen there, that we run out, like, the idea that of running out of oxygen is just unacceptable.

Dr M: 
The whole country, the whole country

J:
People can't... It's unacceptable that people are dying of COVID not because of any reason that we don't know what to do with, but because they can't get access to oxygen, which as you say is a problem that we first solved as a species 200 years ago.

Dr M:
Yeah, yeah, no and this is the thing that, you know, keeps us up at night, that, that... the problem here is will, you know, the problem here is the will to do it, which resources follow will, and the belief that everyone deserves the same shot at life, you know, not just by that, not only the birth lottery, you know, where you were born, but the way that we have all benefited from the extraction of recourses and people and labour from Africa, Haiti, elsewhere, you know.

I always say each of us has in our pocket a machine that is more powerful than the computing that sent men to the moon. These cell phones we have are just remarkable, right, compared to 60 years ago. And all of that is directly depended on the Congo, you know, which is the only place you can mine coltan, which is in cell phone batteries. And that, think of how life changing that has been in 40 years and somehow we can't get oxygen to people, somehow we can't get the whole world vaccinated. We can make a new iPhone every 6 months but we can't vaccinate the entire population. I mean it's just... it's an absurd failure of imagination and will.

J:
I think that's exactly right, I mean, I think understanding it as a problem of will is really helpful too because it...

it asks us to not, like, take shelter behind "oh, I don't have the money" or "we don't have the money" or "this would require a huge collaborative effort and I'm just one person". But we do, each of us, have the choice of where we put our attention.

And if were all putting our attention on the fact that every cell phone that's made is contingent upon resources extracted from the Congo and almost none of the value of those resources ends up with Congolese people. If we were all putting our attention toward the fact that 1 out of every 20 women can expect to die in childbirth in Sierra Leone, those problems would go away very quickly. And I know they would because I had seen what we accomplish when we put our attention in one direction.

Like, when we decided to, you know, when we decided to do something together we are incredibly good at it, like, (Dr M: Yeah) that's kind of a superpower of humans. But it's also one of the, like, great weaknesses of humans, is that we often struggle to understand that people who may live far away from us or may live different lives from us are... have lives that are as valuable and complex and multitudinous as anyone else's.

And overcoming that empathy gap, I think, down that path lies, hopefully, that shared sense of will that we have, we do have the global resources to solve these problems. We have the global resources to end poverty, we have the global resources to achieve these, you know, goals that we set for ourselves for 2030, we just have to decide to do it, we have to decide to prioritize it.

Dr M:
Yeah, absolutely, yeah, absolutely. And that's what's so encouraging about the Project for Awesome is that we don't have to suck, you know

we can really choose to be awesome, we can choose to harness our resources, we can choose to support the right thing.

And, you know, not buy into the foolishness that other people don't matter, or that we just can't do it. You know, the crazy things that we prioritize, you know... military, wars, etc.

You know, the vaccine thing is something that I'm really, all of us, are losing a lot of sleep over. As slow as it's been in the United Stated, you know, across the African continent almost no one's been vaccinated. And in the meantime, it now appears that the main vaccine that we had our hopes on for Africa, the AstraZeneca vaccine, is not effective against the South African variant of the virus.

And, so, now what do we do? (J: Yeah) I think it was a mistake to think we were going to get away with some different thing over here, cheaper thing and thing, we have to mass produce a vaccine for everybody, and we've got to get it out now. But, as it is it may be 2024 before people are vaccinated.

And not only does it "put us all at risk" it's just deeply unjust, you know, (J: Yeah) I think there is this thing that yes, it puts us all at risk but we also know it doesn't really put us all at equal risk (J: Right, right) We have to do it because it's a matter of justice.

J:
Yeah, and, that's one of the things that I've learnt from Partners in Health and from books written by your staffers and your founders is that healthcare equity is not, it involves real

it has to involve real systemic change. Like, it has to involve long-term systemic change and it is never... it's never as simple as anything, like, (Dr M: Yeah) systems are so unsimple, right? (Dr M: Yeah, yeah)

So, you want this straightforward narrative of like "oh there is a shell stable vaccine and we don't need to worry about cold chain storage (Dr M: Yeah) and it's great and we don't need to improve any of this crappy infrastructure, we don't need to invest (Dr M: Yeah) in any of this stuff because we are going to do it with this, you know, vaccine that's not quite as good, but it's still good"

And then it, yeah, it appears to be completely ineffective at least at preventing mild and moderate disease with the variant, and again we are in a situation where we didn't approach this question from a real point of equity. (Dr M: Yeah) We didn't start out by saying "we should really be equitable in vaccine distribution" and "who's gonna suffer the most from that, who's gonna be disproportionally affected by that", the same people who are disproportionally affected over, and over, and over again by these systemic failures.

Dr M:
And the very people also who have no safety net, you know, have to go to work every day, have no possibility of social distance, work from home, I mean, it is just such a deeply inequitable situation and, you know, some of the work we've transferred one place to another is the work we are doing in Immokalee, Florida, which is a community of farmworkers.

We are very pleased to be invited by the coalition of the Immokalee workers and it's actually one of our most senior physicians from Haiti, that's leading that project and working with the farmworkers, and training people to be community health workers in Haitian Creole, and in Spanish, and in Mam (?~2:23:56) and really trying to advocate

for farmworkers to get the testing, and the support that they need, and vaccines because otherwise they would be just completely left out. So it's very similar kinds of lessons from everywhere in the world.

J:
Yeah. Yeah, and I think that's one thing that's really important for people who aren't as familiar with Partners in Health is how geographically dispersed your work is from Rwanda... from East Africa to West Africa, to Haiti, to the Navajo Nation, to Peru, I could go on and on, but also, (Dr M: Kazakhstan, Russia) what's that? (Dr M: Kazakhstan and Russia) Russia, Kazakhstan.

But also sharing expertise with all those people, so, you know, there is a Haitian physician in Liberia, or there was like heading up the Liberian program (Dr M: Yeah, still) for a long time. And that datability to transfer and exchange knowledge and experiences, I just think is such an important part of why PIH has been so effective.

Dr M:
Yeah, we do try to live by the notion of decolonization, and saying that expertises everywhere, and the sharing of knowledge can be great between Haiti and Sierra Leone, just as it can between, you know, Malawi and the United States. And really try to honour and value the expertise from all over the world in solving these really tricky and difficult but super important problems.

J:
Yeah, well, I really appreciate you taking time to be with us Dr Mukherjee. (Dr M: Thank you, John) We are about to hit 1 million dollars so if you would stay for like

Dr M:
Yeah, I know, I was trying to stick on to get to a million and I wanted to be on 

J:
Maybe we'll get there if somebody's feeling like making a donation. We are getting like very very close now, just 600 dollars remain

Dr M:
Oh god that should be fun (?~2:25:57)

J: Umm, yeah, let's-

M: Five...

J: Let's go for a million dollars while we still have Dr. Mukherjee with us. We can all celebrate together. Umm, we--

M: I'm watching it out of the corner of my eye, the little ticker.

Both: *laughter*

J: On a personal note, we feel so grateful to be able to--our community, to be working with you on the project in, um, Sierra Leone, but also just to be fans of what you've done over the last thirty years and I can't wait to see what you do in the next thirty years, and, just, so lucky to be a part of it.

M: It's definitely mutual, John. And I'll let you go, I won't hang around on the line until we reach a million, but we're alreaady there. *clapping* So thank you everybody!

J: Alright, we did it! Thank you Dr. Mukherjee, great to see you.

M: Bye!

J: Take care.

J: We did it! Poooowwwww! Oh my goodness gracious! A million dollars raised for Partners in Health and Save the Children in two hours and twenty-two minutes, that's a very fortuitous number as I'm sure you're all aware. Two-- *strong exhale* --I'm again risking inhaling that stuff--two hours and twenty-two minutes into the twenty-twenty-one Project for Awesome and we've already raised a million dollars, what?! What?! What?! How?! Goodness gracious, thank you all. Umm, this is just unbelievable. I hope that they're celebrating in--I hope that they're cele--okay, people are celebrating in the, in the uh, the volunteers are celebrating as well. Umm, thank gosh. Wow. Unbelievable. Truly. Thank you Dr. Mukherjee for joining us, I'm glad you didn't have to see me party--shoot a party popper on--*soft laughter* But yeah, uh, this is incredible. Ah, Rebecca just donated and said, "The lightsoaked days are coming," which makes me cry.

J: The lightsoaked days are coming, friends. Oh my gosh a million dollars. Wow. Wow, wow, wow. So there's still a little bit of matching funds left. Umm, I feel a little bad leaving my brother with no matching money, but, but, whatever! That's okay! That's not the end of the world, I guess. Umm, I'm gonna be your host for another thirty-seven minutes, I'm gonna take you into that, uh, into that three o'clock hour, where Hank is gonna, is gonna, umm, is gonna be your host again, but we did it! We raised a million dollars! Unbelievable. Two hours in, wha-how? Oh my God. I don't even know where it can go from here. I have no, I have no sense of appropriate expectation but we have raised, umm, a million dollars.

I saw--I see in comments a couple people asking how we, umm, how we get to that number so let me explain it. We have, umm, three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in matching funds, uh, a lot of that--some of that comes from Hank and me, some of it comes from people in Nerdfighteria who wanted to, uh, join the matching fund so that your donations now can go further, we are so grateful to those people--I think I have a new group of people to thank. I will get their names soon. And, ah, we had fifty-one thousand dollars in the bank to start the Project for Awesome. That money comes from--some of it comes from Vlogbrothers ad revenue, so if you've ever watched a Vlogbrothers video and an ad, or you had Youtube Premium on or whatever, thank you. Umm, we had matching donors for Save the Children and Partners in Health both, so individual anonymous matching donors, thank you, I--they're not anonymous to me, so, I know who they are, they may even be in chat, if they are, thank you very much. Umm, and then we have this three hundred and fifty thousand dollar matching fund from our community (2:29:57)

J: Then we've had three hundred-over three hundred thousand dollars now--donated at Project for Awesome dot com slash donate. So with all those matching numbers combined, and all the people who donated at Project for Awesome dot com slash donate, umm, helping their money go further through matching donations, that's how we're over a million dollars raised in the twenty-twenty-one Project for Awesome after just two hours and twenty-five minutes. A very--I, I, I, I'm not sure, it's been a while since I did this, but I would assume that's a record. It certainly feels like a record.

I wanna thank, uh, our matching donors for this hour. One of whom I know, two of whom I know in real life. Maybe all four of whom I know in real life, but two of whom I know I know in real life. Moors Myers--ah, Moors has been an incredibly generous member of our community for a long time, but also just--you need people, um, ah, I think everybody who watches Vlogbrothers videos knows, uh, our community is not primarily about the incredible quality of Vlogbrothers videos *laughter*. I don't know how else to say that. Um, and, and, for this community to really thrive, um, we need people who lead the way, who show us how to be part of the community. I need those people too, to show me how to be part of the community, to show me how to be a good member of it, and to kind of reflect the values of the community back to me, and ask me to try to, you konw, try to reflect them in turn. Umm, and there are many people in Nerdfighteria who, have, I mean--thousands of people--who have done that, and that's why our community is strong. It's nothing Hank or I did. And I often think about people like Julie Harick(?~2:31:47) and Martha and Julie Stroud (?~2:31:48) and, and, so many--there's so many other people, it's almost like if you start naming people, then you think of all the people you're not naming. Anyway the point that I was getting to is that Moors is very much one of those people,

John: I don't know if that's my mom Sydney or if it's a different Sydney, but if it's my mom, hi mom! I hope that you're doing okay! I'm glad you got the first dose of the vaccine. Okay. Sooo, yeah. I can't possibly thank everybody who's donating or all the people who are commenting as well. Hank is being evil...Hank is being evi-- what is Hank doing that I don't know about?! Um...okay, I'm not able to follow this. There's too much going on. But yay for my mom getting the vaccine.

Okay. [typing sounds] Hank's on Instagram Live? Hank's trying to, like, take away from the Project for Awesome livestream by being on Instagram Live? I'm goin' on TikTok Live after this. You can't stop me! I'm going straight from this liveshow to a TikTok liveshow. Um...he sees me. Okay. Alright. Um...it's fine. I'm not gonna go-- I'm not gonna go live on TikTok. I think-- What's on my vision board? The same thing that was on my vision board last week. I'll show you.

Alice: You have a vision board?

John: Yeah, Alice, I--

Alice: That is mine.

John: I know, I took it. We've talked about this. I got you a new one. I got you a new one to replace this one because I need this one for a bit that I'm doing every week of 2021. [pointing at vision board] Repeated autographs, that's to remind me to sign my name--

Alice: (?~3:01:33)

John: Yeah. Square, that's because this is a rectangle. Investigate the song "Fishy On Me", that's a song that Alice and Henry love.

Alice: Fishy on me! Fishy on me!

John: It's very repetitive. New typography strategies??? Beautifully foolish Project for Awesome, so far so good. All Hail West Texas, great Mountain Goats album. Literally nothing more radical right now than radical hope, I believe that. Cheezy Dibbles...Cheezy Dibbles. Where are Cheezy Dibbles from, Alice?

Alice: Umm...

John: Private...Skipper...