Good morning, John...doin' somethin' a little different today. It's officially countdown time to Project for Awesome. I set this video to premiere so theoretically, there are a bunch of people watching all at once right now, and they're all in the chat together, just chanting, "Buttfartman! Buttfartman! Buttfartman!" over and over again, tryna summon him. We'll see if that works. If you don't know who Buttfartman is or Beanie Sandfurbs or Crank Green or Dave the Fish or Glenn of the Glen and Dale of the Dale, don't worry! That's ok. They're all mascots of former Projects for Awesome, not this one. What's gonna be the mascot of this Project for Awesome? No one knows. You don't know until ya start, and then immediately, I turn into a crab for some reason. And this happens, which is great, no one doesn't like this. I didn't even realize we were making mascots for the Project for Awesome until last year, after we had, like, over a dozen of them, and I don't remember the origin stories. They all have origin stories. If you're gonna read any of them, you should read Buttfartman's. 

[Buttfartman noises consisting of bweeps, bwaps, etc.]

Agh, excellent, well done everyone. You can stop chanting now. You successfully summoned him. Now in the chat, or in comments, if you're late, you could just type in the best parts of the Project For Awesome according to you.

Now you'd think that a 48-hour livestream dedicated to fixing the unfixable problems of humanity and Earth would not be so goofy. This is actually something I've noticed quite a bit, if you sort of know about the problems and you look at the problems and you say, "Oh that's problem is problem," that is somber. It's not fun. But in the moments, when I see people actually working on hard problems, ideally together in community with others, the recognition of the magnitude of the problem is still there. That didn't go away. But also it just becomes human community, and human community is all of the things that humans always are, whether that is silly or goofy or sad or serious or depressed or anxious or joyful or whatever. It's not joyful in spite of the fact that it's directly interfacing, with y'know, some of the greatest challenges that humanity has to face. It's joyful because it isn't, like, glancing at those things and then being ashamed that they exist. It's just accepting that they are, and that nothing can ever be perfect. But we can work hard, and when we work together, we can magnify our impact. Which this year is already building off of over $700,000 in matching grants. So if we can raise $700,000 during the Project for Awesome, all of those initial dollars will be matched and we will be at 1.4 million dollars. So recognizing the flaws in our world and then witnessing our combined impact, yeah, it's gonna be a little be joyful and then you add in the sleep deprivation and, you know, you get what you get.

So during the first half of the Project for Awesome, we will again be raising money for Partners in Health and Save the Children. These are two organizations that work to make life better for some of the people who have the very least on our planet, and they both do it in ways that build strong foundations for those communities. The idea being that those people want to work hard for themselves and their families and their communities, they want to help each other out. There are things that weigh on those communities: lack of access to healthcare and education; Not having enough food or clean water. We know, from evidence, from experience, that if you give people the resources and a strong foundation on which to build, they will build.

During the second half of the Project for Awesome, the money will go to registered non-profits that are voted on by this community, so we divide that up and we split it amongst 20 to 30 non-profits, depending on how much we raised. People all over have made videos talking about the great work that non-profits that they know about do. Those videos were submitted to projectforawesome.com, we'll watch some of them during the livestream, but you can also just watch them on the website now. And if you like the pitch, you could vote on the charities. At projectforawesome.com/donate, you will find a little rewards button. You'll click on that and there'll be a lotta rewards. You can scroll and scroll and find all the different things that are available, and they're very good. There's so much and we will talk about all of it at projectforawesome.com/live, which is where you should go the moment this videos ends, which is right now.

John, I'll see ya there.