BUY THE T-SHIRT THAT ENDED WAR AND DISEASE.

If 8 billion people buy this t-shirt and wear it on the same day, they will have conversations with each other about it.

In those conversations they will realize:

• We currently spend 604 times as much on our capacity for mass murder as we spend on curing the diseases that are going to kill them and everyone they love.
• Accepting a 121-apocalypse mass-murder capacity (down from 122) would let us eradicate disease 12 times faster.
• Military spending was 96.7% lower immediately before the United States won World War II. The US then cut military spending 87.6% over 2 years after winning. So drastic reductions are not hypothetical — they have already been done, by the same country, in living memory.
• It is therefore possible to cut vastly more than 1%, and doing so would speed up the rate of medical progress unimaginably.
• They will realize this is wise because your annual chance of dying in a terrorist attack is about 1 in 30 million, and the chance of suffering and dying from a disease is nearly 100%. The current spending ratio is the opposite of what the actual risk distribution would justify.

This is in the logical self-interest of even the CEO of Lockheed Martin, because:

• A 1% reduction in his bomb-selling commission is not as valuable as the continued existence of himself, his family, and the people he loves.
• Disease is very expensive to the economy.
• It is projected that if we did this reallocation and eradicated disease, Earth would be vastly more productive — 4 times richer in 15 years.

Therefore even the CEO of Lockheed Martin's interest in the 1% reduction is nothing compared to the increase in the size of the total pie of resources available to humanity if we eradicate disease instead of eradicating each other.

Therefore: all you have to do to end war and disease is get 8 billion people to wear a shirt on the same day.

It only costs approximately $56.0 billion — which is literally 1.51 million times less than the cost of war and disease on society. (We can calculate exactly how many times less.)

Last time we ran the model, the projected value of the 1% Treaty alone was approximately $84.8 quadrillion. But that is a floor. If a billion people actually wore the shirt and had the conversation, they would not stop at 1%. They would cut much more.

There should be a slider on the site [coming next] so every human can adjust the proposed treaty cut and see the recalculated outcomes. At most the cut would be 50/50 — half of military spending redirected. If 8 billion humans actually talked to each other about what their priorities are, disease eradication and education could happen very fast.

The biotechnology sector would be a very good place to invest in advance of this.

Address the objection: yes, this sounds insane

Skeptical reader's first reaction: "All you have to do to end war and disease is for everyone to wear a t-shirt? This sounds insane."

Correct. It sounds insane.

We have walked through the logical proof above. Identify the step where the logic breaks. If you cannot, the proposal is not insane — it is just unfamiliar.

The fact that it sounds insane — and that it is simple enough for any human on Earth to understand — is why it works.

Most things that would benefit everyone on Earth do not get done because they are too complex to coordinate around. They require expertise to evaluate, institutions to align, and decades to deploy. A t-shirt with a QR code linking to a 30-second vote requires none of that. A 5-year-old can read it. A 99-year-old can wear it. The action is trivial; the underlying argument has room to spread.

Simplicity + universal benefit + universal comprehensibility is the rare combination that actually goes viral. The proposal is memetic precisely because the surface — wear a shirt — is trivial enough that the argument can ride along.

The escalation argument

Even though it starts at 1%, once humanity agrees that this is good, the natural next question is: if 1% is this good, why not 2%?

If 2% eradicates diseases 20 times faster, why not 3%?

The logical conclusion is that war is irrational. 8 billion people will realize how irrational it is to let 2 billion people suffer from disease so that humanity can maintain 122 apocalypses of mass-murder capacity when one is enough.

Comparative table: universal t-shirts vs. alternatives

This campaign is $0.00177/DALY, approximately 50,300× more cost-effective than ITNs.

Optional commitment path

If you want to commit but don't want the risk of going first, we can deploy a dominant assurance contract — the same contract pattern the Earth Optimization Prize uses — for shirt distribution. Tell us your pledge amount; we'll build the contract if we get three foundation pledges totaling ≥ $1 billion.

Same contract pattern, different outcome.

• Depositors put USDC into VoterPrizeTreasury (Base Sepolia).
• Capital sits in Aave earning yield.
• Success path: treaty passes → VOTE-token holders claim proportional shares of the prize pool.
• Failure path (15yr no-treaty): depositors claim back principal + ~4.2× yield ($100 × 1.10^15 = $418).
• Break-even success probability: 0.0067%. Zero downside. Dominant assurance.

The shirt contract would use the same pattern: your USDC pledge earns Aave yield while held in escrow; if pledges meet the threshold by Earth Optimization Day, funds release for the bulk shirt order. If they do not, your principal returns with the accumulated yield. Zero downside; no penalty for going first.

Foundations carry fear of going first: if Open Philanthropy commits $500M and no one else does, they look reckless. If Open Philanthropy conditionally commits $500M, it only deploys when the other ~$5B is committed by peers, and the principal is preserved with yield until the threshold hits — that's not a reputation risk, that's prudent capital allocation.

The assurance contract converts a coordination problem into a treasury product.

Pledge here.

Funds release only when the threshold is met. Principal returns with yield if it is not.