Good morning, Hank. It’s Tuesday.

Last week, I was in Washington, DC, to ask senators and congress-people to prioritize tuberculosis, the world's deadliest infectious disease.

But I was also there to make an announcement about our family's commitment to support comprehensive tuberculosis care. In some ways, this is the biggest bet of my life. A bet that we simply don't have to live in a world where over a million people die every year of a curable and preventable disease.

And it's time to start putting my money where my mouth is. So today's video comes to you in three parts. Part one, our $80 million bet.

So, as I discussed in this video last week, we know how to end tuberculosis because we know how we drove down TB rates by over 99% in the US and many other countries in the 1950s and 60s. We did it by searching for cases, providing curative treatment to every single person with tuberculosis, and offering preventative therapy to their close contacts. But that kind of comprehensive care has long been seen as too expensive or complicated for poor countries, leading to an insane situation where we have a cure for tuberculosis, but we don't get that cure to the places it's actually needed.

Now, that is not to say the work is easy. It's hard. Like it's easy enough and true to say that tuberculosis is curable, but then it gets a little more complicated once you're talking about how many van based x-ray machines you'll need and who's going to pay community health workers and other healthcare workers to screen for tuberculosis and the differences between screening in rural and urban communities and so on.

So, okay. At a briefing on Thursday, USAID announced a new program to fund truly comprehensive care in regions of Ethiopia and the Philippines. The hope is these projects can be both a blueprint and a beacon to show how we end tuberculosis worldwide, and for once, they're pretty well funded. In the Philippines, USAID will devote $10 million a year to this project. We're kicking in a million dollars a year, and the Philippine government is matching all of that by providing $11 million a year.

This means that over the next four years, this project can have over $80 million to fund comprehensive TB care, beginning in one region of the country, which has the fourth highest prevalence of tuberculosis in the world. Now, we're only putting in like 4% of the money, but I hope it's an important 4%. And also it gives us a seat at the table to see up close both the challenges and hopefully the successes of trying to radically drive down tuberculosis rates in the Philippines.

I really believe the only way we can end TB is with this kind of public-private partnership. I mean, this is a relatively small one. We need much bigger ones. But, like, that's how we ended smallpox. That's how we've almost ended polio.

Because government buy-in to end TB is absolutely essential. No individual has enough money to end this disease. That's actually not true. Very few individuals have enough money to end this disease, and they aren't interested in doing that right now.

There are so many people involved in this, from USAID to the Department of Health in the Philippines, to the Partners in Health community, to all these Philippine NGOs, and to see them working together over the last few months as we've been planning this project has been so inspirational.

It's not going to be easy. There are definitely risks. But I'm betting big on this project because I truly believe it has the chance to be transformational in how we think about what's possible when it comes to tuberculosis.

So a couple things. First, this is not the end of our bet that TB can be defeated. And second, we're not asking you for money, yet, because this can be covered by Hank and me and a few exceptionally passionate TB fighters in Nerdfighteria.

So, yeah, we're donating a million dollars a year to this. USAID is bringing $10 million a year, and the Philippine government is bringing over $11 million a year, which altogether is a lot of money. Now, of course, comes the hard part, doing as much good as possible with it.

Part two, I know there are many Filipino Nerdfighters, or Nerdfighters of Filipino descent. Hello.

If you're interested in this project, I'd like to be able to get your ongoing feedback and also share updates with you as they become available. Because citizens asking their government to prioritize TB is a big reason we got to this momentous occasion. So if you want to be part of that group, you can email nerdfightersphilippines@gmail.com or find that in the doobly doo.

Part three, we're launching something new and very exciting over at Crash Course: Crash Course Lectures. These are like long, deep dives into a single topic with unbelievably beautiful graphics.

We're really excited about it, and the first one comes out on Monday at noon Eastern time, and it was written and is hosted by me. And you'll never guess what it's about. We're doing a premiere so we can all watch it live together and chat with each other, noon Eastern time on Monday at the Crash Course channel.

Whether it's maternal mortality in Sierra Leone or the global tuberculosis crisis, I am genuinely astonished by what Nerdfighteria has done through orienting their attention and some of their other resources in the same direction. It's extraordinary and I am so, so grateful. Hank, I'll see you on Friday.