Star in a Stunt
On camera, in the action. We roll, you shine.
Curious who my boss really is? →
Star in a Stunt
On camera, in the action. We roll, you shine.
Curious who my boss really is? →
The Foundation has theirs. Mine is shorter.
So here's how I understand it. I went through the Vault — that's the part with the yellow light, which is super cool, you should see it — and the yellow light gets you into the civilization. And the civilization has all these cookbooks. I think "cookbook" is just their snazzy name for the recipes for kindness. Eleven thousand years of them. Beautifully written. Carefully sourced.
Here's the part I love. The lessons come from a team of eight — regular people, not robes-and-towers types. A kid. A fitness trainer. A mailman. Dr. Voss (I call her Voss the Boss — she's the educated one who actually reads the tablets). They sit around friendly-arguing over what an eleven-thousand-year-old tablet is trying to say, and when they finally agree, they publish the lesson. My job? I take their lesson and put it in words your average person can actually use. The smart person's Cliff Notes to life. I'd be on the team myself if I weren't so busy being out here in the cape.
I have not read all of it. Here's what I have so far. I submit each one to the Foundation for review. They have not yet responded.
I'm sure they're just busy.
More recipes are coming to the cookbook — short ones, for a quiet afternoon or a phone-break. And you'll want the break. You know how many times a day they say people check the phone? A lot. Like a hundred-something times, I read it somewhere — probably at the library, on the public computer, where I'm slowly learning about the TikTok, the Snap, the Insta, the YouTube channels that are somehow all cats, and the news. Anyway. Recipes coming. Read one instead of the phone. That's a free lesson and I didn't even charge you.
We came up with the ten-foot door. Here's the idea. Most people hold a door for the person directly behind them. That's the easy door. The hard door is the one where the person behind you is far enough away that you have to make a decision. Ten feet? You have to commit early, and they have to do the little appreciation jog. Eight steps, hold it. Twelve steps, probably hold it. Twenty steps, now we're in a genuine moral situation. The civilization wants you to hold the twenty-step door. I'm personally a fifteen-step man. Working on it.
People ask me about the Discovery. The Vault. And, well — that's quite a philosophical conversation, so buckle up. Here's my summary. Apparently they found, like, a bunch of these tablets. In a vault. I don't know exactly where — I think Egypt? Or maybe the other Egypt, there's two of them I'm pretty sure. Anyway the lady in charge — Dr. Voice? Voss? — she said the carbon dating put them at eleven thousand years. If I'd been around eleven thousand years ago I would absolutely have left a tablet too. Just so you know that.
Went to The Farmer's office. Tried to insure my Spark portfolio against loss. The agent had a lot of forms but not the right form. She said clay tablets are not a recognized asset class. I respectfully suggested that bitcoin wasn't either, until it was. She suggested I take that up with the home office. I am taking it up with the home office. The home office is the Foundation. They have not yet responded. (We may turn this one into a skit. We may wait and follow the cookbook titles. Under discussion.)
They call me the Wearer. Can you believe it? I'm not sure I do. But the way it was explained to me — eleven thousand years ago, there was a person just like me. Wearing a cape. Sharing lessons of kindness. Going around, doing the thing, telling nobody. That's the drawing Dr. Voss showed me — to the right. And the cape gets handed down. Not the same cape — the idea of the cape. So I'm one guy in a yellow suit, and the civilization is eleven thousand years old, and I'll be doing this for maybe forty more years. The math doesn't flatter me. What it does is make me lighter. I don't have to win this. I just have to not drop my piece of it. Then someone after me wears it next. That's the whole game.
I want to talk about disclaimers. Stay with me — this is wisdom, I promise.
Eleven thousand years ago, when two people in the civilization agreed to something, here's what they did: one of them pressed a thumb into wet clay. That was it. That was the contract. One second, done. Your thumbprint, your word, your name — all the same thing. You could hold it in your hand. I make those tablets myself now, by the way. Spark, Flame, Blaze. Same clay. Same idea. Pressing my thumb into wet clay feels a little like nursery skool, I'll admit — but it was in the contract that the Wearer helps make them, so I do. And I'll tell you: I appreciate them more now that I make them. Especially when I hand one to someone for a kind act they thought nobody saw.
Now look at today. You want to use a flashlight app — a flashlight — and first you have to agree to a thousand words of terms. Half of them circle back to some big word they used three paragraphs earlier, a word you didn't understand the first time. Nobody reads it. You scroll to the bottom, you click "I agree," and you've just promised something to someone you'll never meet, in language designed so you wouldn't read it. And we did this to ourselves. We have AI now. We could make these short. We made them longer.
Here's my position, and I'll say it plainly: a contract nobody can read isn't an agreement. It's a trick wearing a tie. And a trick is the opposite of kind. Kindness is the held door — the thing so simple you don't need a lawyer to understand what just happened to you.
So when I pull my own twenty-page NDA out of the backpack at a gathering, and then I close it and just ask you to raise your hand instead — that's the lesson. The clay thumbprint was kinder than anything we've built since. We should be a little embarrassed. I know I am, and I didn't even write the long ones.
Here's an offer. You think you've got a kindness lesson worth publishing? Write it up and send it in. I'll read it. And then — and the ancient cookbook says this is totally legal, look it up — I'll very likely publish it as my own. You can read the results over at the Vault, where they call me, fondly, the plagiarist.
I'm busy. I don't have time to argue about it. If you've got concerns, talk to your local kindness lawyer. Submit a lesson at the Vault →