Good morning, Hank, it's Tuesday and I'm wearing a suit which can only mean one thing: It's time for the Bank of Nerdfighteria's semiannual report.

So like a lot of us, the Bank of Nerdfighteria has two arms: The good.store/dftba.com arm and the Project for Awesome arm. But today, I will argue that there might be a secret third arm which does not involve the spending or receiving of money and might be the most important arm of them all, but let's start with good.store.

So in 2019, our community began supporting Partners in Health in their efforts to radically reduce maternal and child mortality in the Kono District of Sierra Leone. Since then, a maternal and infant care center has nearly been finished at Koidu Government Hospital. I mean, they're painting right now. Some of the wards will open this year. And as part of this commitment, we were like, "We're going to need some ongoing funding sources, like long-term ongoing," and that's how the Awesome Socks Club got started. It's a subscription for socks. And since then, we've launched good.store, which has not only socks, but also excellent coffee and soap subscriptions.

So in 2019, we were able to to donate about $268,000 across all our merch projects. And in 2020, we were able to donate $598,000 for the year, and it just kept growing from there until there was a huge jump last year; And last year alone, we donated almost $3.5 million. Now maintaining that growth is going to be really challenging mostly because both the company and Nerdfighteria received a ton of media attention last year because of a thing that—just to be clear—we do not want to repeat. But still, these have become quite successful businesses. How does the money break down? Well, most of it still comes from the Awesome Socks Club, but both coffee and soap are growing, and last year Pizzamas grew as well. And this has meant that we're able to support not just the maternal and child care project in Sierra Leone, but also others, like this year, Hank's cancer socks raised over $350,000 to support better cancer care in impoverished communities. And we're able to support increasing access to tuberculosis care as well. The whole idea here when we started was that if we worked with a team of really talented people, we could potentially raise more money by starting these businesses than we could ever donate on our own. And that's happened.

So that's one arm of the Bank of Nerdfighteria, and then we have the second arm which is the Project for Awesome. It's a completely separate project. Since 2007, Nerdfighteria has organized an annual charity fest called the Project for Awesome that has raised about $12 million in total for charity. Some of this goes to pre-selected charities, usually Partners in Health and Save the Children, and then some of it goes to charities chosen by Nerdfighteria through their votes on Project for Awesome videos at projectforawesome.com. It's really wonderful. It is my favorite time of the year to be a Nerdfighter. This year, we already have $100,000 in the bank from people who've donated throughout the year and we've started to build a matching fund which is now at $227,000, which is incredible, but we want to grow it even more so that every small donor to the Project for Awesome can get their donation matched by someone who can donate over $500. So, if you're such a person who can donate over $500 to this year's Project for Awesome, there is a link in the doobly-doo and in the pinned comment below to go let us know about you. And yes, your donations are tax deductible because we have a real charity called the Foundation to Decrease World Suck, which sounds like it's not a real charity, but it is.

And then there is the secret third arm of the Bank of Nerdfighteria, whose power was really unleashed in the last year and which doesn't involve the spending or donating of any money. I'm talking about advocacy. So in 2023, our community helped convince the corporation Johnson & Johnson to abandon all secondary patents on the critical tuberculosis drug bedaquiline. And that's already resulted in lower prices, making bedaquiline more accessible in the communities where it's most needed. TB Fighters in our community also pressured the conglomerate Danaher to lower the price of their critically important tuberculosis tests, an effort which is ongoing but has already resulted in a price reduction for the standard tuberculosis test and a pledge from Danaher not to profit from that test in impoverished communities.

Now there's still a long way to go in these advocacy efforts, and just to state the obvious, we are not the only or even the primary driver behind them, but we have played a really important role. The Global Fund recently estimated that the Danaher price reduction alone will result in a $32 million savings over the next three years, allowing millions more people to get accurate fast tuberculosis tests. And of course, not all of that savings is attributable to Nerdfighteria. Partners in Health and Doctors Without Borders and the Treatment Action Group  and so many TB survivors have been working for these changes for years. But let's say our stake in that change was 20%. That would mean that advocacy created a bigger financial win for global health equity than good.store and the Project for Awesome combined. And that's a reminder to me that how we spend our money isn't the only thing that matters, although of course it does matter very much. How we spend our time and our attention also matters, and because so many people in Nerdfighteria have gotten involved in advocacy for those living with tuberculosis, changes that we could never have bought or sold have nonetheless become possible. So when we say regardless of whether you want to buy awesome socks or can donate to the Project for Awesome, thank you for being part of this. We mean it. We really really mean it.

Hank, I'll see you on Friday.

$32 million in savings from the Danaher thing. Wow.