Good morning, Hank, it's Tuesday. Big few weeks around here. Complexly became a nonprofit. The Project for Awesome raised over $4.2 million. And the Paul Farmer Maternal Center of Excellence finally opened at Koidu Government Hospital, radically transforming the kind of infant and maternal care available in eastern Sierra Leone.

The MCOE, which contains Sierra Leone's first NICU, will see the birth of some 5,000 babies per year, every year, hopefully for decades. And it will serve as a teaching hospital, training the next generation of Sierra Leonean midwives, nurses, and doctors. It really is a game-changer for maternal and child health in the region. And now that it's open, I've been thinking a lot about risk.

Hank, you and I have long been able to take risks. We were able to start making YouTube videos in 2007 when it was nothing more than an expensive hobby and there was absolutely no prospect that our camcorders and editing software would eventually pay for themselves many times over. We could take that risk because we had professional flexibility. But we only had that professional flexibility because we'd had the luxury of taking earlier risks. In your early 20s, you started a blog called Ecogeek that became profitable. In my early 20s, I wrote a novel at night and on the weekends that eventually got published and won awards. And so we had jobs that were unusual jobs that allowed us to do weird stuff like make YouTube videos.

And all those risks were only possible because we had good educations and professional stability and low debt and other things that are just not common or ordinary in our world.

And then there's luck. Like sometimes when you take a risk, you get lucky, but sometimes you don't. A different Printz committee in 2005 might have awarded a different book other than Looking for Alaska the 2005 Printz Award. And then my career looks very different. If YouTube hadn't featured a song you wrote back in 2007, this YouTube channel might not have survived to 2008, let alone 2026.

Risk-taking is a privilege, and luck is only sometimes the byproduct of that privilege, right? And we have been exceptionally lucky in addition to having the privilege of being able to take risks.

It drives me a little bonkers when successful people fail to acknowledge that risk is a privilege, or when they imply that when a risk pays off, it's mostly due to hard work. I've only been able to take risks because I had a safety net. And as I got older, that safety net became more secure.

And as far as hard work goes, I know for a fact that it's not just hard work, because I've worked exactly as hard on the novels that sit in metaphorical drawers unread as the ones that have sold millions of copies. But I'm able to take the risk of writing a novel that might not work out because I have that safety net. Especially since the publication of The Fault in Our Stars, I've been able to do pretty much whatever I want with my time.

But the Maternal Center of Excellence has been an entirely different kind of risk. Like yes, we were risking a lot of our own money, but that in some ways was the smallest risk, because we had the money and holding on to it wasn't doing either of us any good.

More to the point, we weren't just risking our own money. We were risking the money of thousands of people who've trusted us and shared their attention with us.

And the whole reason Partners In Health wanted to help the Sierra Leonean government address the maternal mortality crisis is that everyone else was saying Sierra Leone's too risky. It's too risky to try to address this crisis.

The systems were just seen as too fragile. What if war breaks out? What if the economy collapses? And these were not, like, abstract concerns. Sierra Leone has known war. It has known collapse.

But that very reluctance to invest in impoverished communities is the main reason why maternal and child mortality were so incredibly high in Sierra Leone. I mean, more than one out of every 10 kids was dying before the age of five. More than one out of every 20 women were dying in pregnancy or childirth. That's unconscionable and it's unacceptable. But addressing the crisis is risky.

Like I remember one unfathomably rich person emailing me to explain why they weren't going to invest in this project by saying, "In my opinion, it has an unfavorable risk profile."

And I know what he meant. He meant the upside for me is that if this works out, people who live far away from me and don't buy my products will see their lives get better. And if it doesn't work out, I'll look like a fool or worse.

And I guess on that level, he was right. The Maternal Center of Excellence did have an unfavorable risk profile. But I'm really tired of living in a world where so many people are willing to take a risk on me, whether by offering me the funding that started Crash Course or educational opportunities, and so few people are willing to take a risk on the Sierra Leonean healthcare system.

And so as a community, we made that bet, and so far it has worked out really, really well thanks to hard work from Partners In Health and the Sierra Leonean Ministry of Health.

Now, the bet might still go sideways, of course. This is not the end of the story of the Maternal Center of Excellence. This is the very, very beginning, and we need your support at pih.org/hankandjohn just as we did 5 years ago.

I know there will be hard days ahead. I know the risk remains. But good God, if there's one thing we should bet on, it's human children having an opportunity to be healthy and grow up with healthy parents.

Hank, to you and everyone else who has taken that risk, thank you. Thank you on behalf of the 13 human beings who were born the very first day the Maternal Center of Excellence was opened. Already taking that risk has paid off on a level that none of our previous risks ever could.

Hank, I'll see you on Friday.