Good morning, John. I always feel like a little bit of a faker talking about this. Like, this shouldn't be my video, it should be your video. But I also feel like I can't not make this video right now. 'Cause this is a big deal. Like, I remember the 2011 Project for Awesome, still trying to figure out exactly what the P4A was gonna be, and like leaving comments on YouTube videos had been a really big part of the P4A for a long time. Really the reason being is that it confused YouTube's algorithms to promote videos about charities. But that rule wasn't really working anymore. But we wanted to like, keep the comments thing, and we decided that for a certain number of comments—I can't remember how many—that we would donate $10,000 to Partners In Health to support their work in Haiti.

And that was the first time that we directly gave money to Partners In Health. It was a few years later that you told me that you had a big idea for a big project. Not responding to a sudden disaster, which is something that people are pretty good at, but instead responding to, like, a long-term disaster, that was just the way things had been. 'Cause we have to fight against the way that our brains pay attention to things, and focusing on something that's bad but has been that way for a long time and is maybe even slowly getting better, that's just hard. Like, we're not good at that. 

Even if it's one of the biggest disasters in the world, if it's not like, a sudden news event, that's just not how our minds work. But we aren't just our minds. I mean we are, but you get what I— I'm on a journey of meaning!

You pitched me on this thing, and you said it was gonna be very long, and very hard, and not something that was gonna make us more popular, and you convinced me in part by saying, "This is not what we would do if we wanted to get the most views. It's what we would do if we wanted to do the most good with the views that we have."

And this is a little bit profound. Like, the easiest thing to do with views is get more views. The easiest thing to do with money is get more money. But the whole point of those things is that they are valuable, and you should be able to turn them toward something valuable. And you were saying ten years ago, that that was the right call. 

We promised Partners In Health that we would raise tens of millions of dollars, and we even made a little spreadsheet showing how we were gonna do it. And I really wish I could find this spreadsheet, because I know that it ended up being very wrong, but I have searched for it and I have failed. Some of the ideas we had definitely did not work. 

I think in part what making this commitment did is it, like, forced us to innovate toward that goal. Like, we told them we were gonna raise that money, and we were gonna do that. Like, we made that promise, we made that obligation, we were gonna make it happen.

And that is where this headline comes in. And it's wrong. It says that we gave $50 million for the first NICU in Sierra Leone, and this is like, definitely not true. All love to the people at Good Good Good, thank you for making us look good. Now, John and I, we are, like, among the top individual donors to this effort, but boy are we not like, even 10% of that total amount raised. By far, the biggest thing that we have done is simply oriented people's attention toward this thing, and there are a few ways that we did it, and I am happy to share those. 

We started the Awesome Socks Club, and then Good Store, which donates all of its profit to charity, a lot of it to this specific effort. We oriented a lot of the Project for Awesome toward Partners In Health specifically. A huge amount of the money came from just asking a lot of people to sign up to be a monthly small donor to Partners In Health. Thousands of people did that. And over time, that adds up. 

We recruited people to be Project for Awesome matching donors, that was a big thing. Partners In Health then showed some of their high-dollar donors what this community was doing and it inspired those people to give more. The Sierra Leonean Ministry of Health also has been part of this. I wrote letters to the richest people I knew and I found out how generous they were. 

The most generous of them, who had the health of mothers as one of her top priorities in her giving, I'm very sad to say, never got to see this moment. And of course, the man who inspired all of this, Paul Farmer, who started Partners In Health with a really simple notion: he thought that the idea that some lives are worth more than others is the root of all that is wrong with the world. And he also didn't get to see this, having passed away in Rwanda after a heart problem in 2022. 

But this weekend, during the Project for Awesome, an event that has been instrumental in the construction of the Paul E. Farmer Maternal Center of Excellence at Koidu Government Hospital, the first baby was born in the first NICU in Sierra Leone. 34 minutes after the center opened, a woman came into the hospital. Her blood pressure was dangerously spiking, which can raise the risk of stroke and seizures and organ damage and blood clots. There were already other pregnant women there, but she was triaged to be treated first and her baby was born by C-section just after 1 p.m. on Valentine's Day.

And that was just one of the things that happened. Another mother was having chest pains and drove five hours to get to the hospital. Another was past her due date and had an amniotic leak and received the hospital's second C-section later that day. Another woman was delivering in a nearby clinic when complications presented and she was rushed to the MCOE. At 10 a.m., the first premature baby was received at the hospital, having been delivered at home. By the end of the day, they had received their first referral via ambulance, their first vaginal birth, 27 mothers had been admitted and 13 babies had been born. 

People keep asking me about this and all I can say is I did none of this. Like, if I did anything, it was just like, fun ideas that helped turn people's heads in a direction. And once their heads were turned, they did what was up to them. But John, you turned my head. And Paul Farmer turned yours. 13 babies in one day. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.