I have news. If you follow me on social media, you may have already seen it,

but my book A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor... has a cover!

Designed by the marvelous Kaitlin Kall, it's a real thing!

Now is the book DONE done? No.

Is the book done enough that I can read you the first chapter? Yes, it is!

This is a mockup of the book, it's not the real thing.

But I've taped the words of the first chapter inside of it, so…

Here is the first chapter of my second book, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor,

a sequel to An Absolutely Remarkable Thing.

Chapter 1. I have decided to stop lying to you.

As far as I can tell there are only three kinds of lie:

the kind you don't want to get caught telling, the kind you don't care if you get caught telling,

and the kind you can't get caught telling.

Let's go through them one by one.

1. The kind you don't want to get caught telling.

This is just your average, every-day lie, whether you're late for work or did a real bad murder.

Getting caught in the lie, thus, is a problem.

2. The kind you don't care if you get caught telling.

This kind of lie is about the lying, not about outcome.

You repeat the lie, stick to the lie, change the lie, re-form the lie, abandon the lie, come back to the lie.

The lying might help you avoid some negative outcome,

but really it's a tool for weakening reality, and thus strengthening yourself.

3. The kind of lie you can't get caught telling.

This happens when only you know the truth.

This is the kind of lie I've been telling.

For years now, this last kind of lie has felt, to me, like a kindness.

I mean, it's not a surprise that the story of your reality is incomplete. We all know that.

Scientists don't know where most of the matter is. I don't know what it's like to live in Yemen.

Our imagining of the world isn't fully accurate. But if you know something no one else knows,

something that would change everyone's story overnight,

something that would make everyone else's life worse,

telling the truth might seem like the wrong thing to do, like exercising too much power.

As I have discovered, there's nothing special about me that means I'm particularly suited

to making that kind of decision for an entire planet of people.

The only reason I get to make it, it turns out, is ugly, vulgar luck.

A lot of people have said that I have a habit of exercising too much power and one of those people is me.

Which is why I'm about to do something I'm extremely uncomfortable with:

let other people tell the story.

Oh, to be clear, I don't have any choice. I wasn't there for a lot of this, so it isn't my story to tell.

Which is why you're about to hear the story from several different perspectives.

Maybe that way we can share some of the responsibility of the power of this truth.

It won't be all on me, all of us have to agree that the words in this book are worth putting in here.

All of this is to say, I've decided to stop lying to you. WE have decided to stop lying to you.

Even though the lie is easy to tell, even though I never really said it out loud,

even though the lie, most days, feels like nothing more than self preservation,

it's time to tell you about the lie. Here it is, in its most basic form:

I have been doing everything I can to make you believe that everything is going to be okay.

[CLOSES BOOK]

Maybe that's not quite what you were hoping for with this sequel. Maybe you wanted Chapter 3,

which is where some questions start getting answered.

But that day is not today! That day is July 7th, 2020.

But you don't have to wait until then to pre-order the book. You can do that now.

Also, if you want to come see live Dear Hank & John and live Anthropocene Reviewed

and a couple of other weirdnesses, John and I are gonna be in St. Petersburg, Florida,

Raleigh, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia in early January! Come on out!

Tickets in the description. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.