Championship Season 1

The Championship
Game.

This is the evidence.

A belle walked through the door, and I couldn’t take my eyes away from her. I was blown away. My body was going nuts. Heart racing. Gut tightening. I had to make a move. And then... Anyone out there looking at the dating scene and thinking, “I’d rather just stay in.” Well, that has certainly been the case for me because, as I see it, initiating the courting process (outside of a dating app) is basically no longer worth the social risk. I’m sorry, but the upside of getting laid or getting to know someone’s story vs. the down side of getting cancelled, exiled, or fired... yeah. No. Not worth it. However, if I absolutely had to attract someone I’d actually want to court, this is how I’d do it. Oh. BTW. Singing in public is one of my deepest fears. I was seven when my dad introduced me to George Carlin, and I knew THAT was what I wanted to do. When I was twenty-five, I read a quote from Steve Martin: “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” Three years ago, I realized what he meant. That night, I uploaded a video to FB of me playing/singing Stand By Me. I did it because I knew that if I was going to get that good, I’d have to overcome the terror I experienced at even the thought of singing in front of people. Today, I uploaded the evidence of where the experiment is and how it got here. It is evidence of how I leveraged a learning theory (Loop Learning) to see if the only thing between me and my dreams was simply... HOW I LEVERAGE MISTAKES WHILE LEARNING A SKILL. I’m proud to announce, then, that this album is my debut concert and, from my perspective, an Emmy award-winning comedy album made for anyone who ain’t feeling all that good for whatever reason. This is my attempt to make you smile mostly with silliness, jokes, and rhythm. It’s intended to be a companion piece. It’s also an answer to a simple but personal question: What would I teach my nephews if I could teach them anything? This concert is my tribute to what learning can do for the human being both spiritually and concretely, and it is also a thank you to some great stand-up comedians, master teachers, rock legends, all-star athletes, and great friends. All people who demonstrated Loop Learning in real time (holding mistakes as teachers, not imperfections) and getting back up. I hope you enjoy the show! Thanks for being here.

just the tip (a music industry term)

How It Got Here

The reason
for continuing.

Six versions. Six attempts. Each one is what made the next one possible.

Version 1: My nephew asked for dating advice, and playing the guitar.

Version 2: A conversation with my godson about his anxiety about the end of the world.

Version 3: A portrait of my first teacher. He showed me that learning could feel like dancing while making a mess.

Version 4: A fictional man. The loops in his head. What it felt like when he started playing someone else's music.

Version 5: Two men on the sidewalk of Main Street. A random encounter. Holding devastation.

Version 6 is the Championship Game, at the top of this page. Six years, one loop-learned skill, one standing ovation.

The audio companion. Preseason. Practice. Film sessions. Everything behind the scenes of putting this whole season together, outlined episode by episode, on Spotify. Same process, same mistakes, just narrated instead of performed.

Podcast cover art, Six playing guitar on stage

i lived. i learned.isn’t that human?

▶ Listen on Spotify

i lived. i learned.
isn’t that human?

▶ Big D (the greatest sports story) ▶ Learning from Robin

▶ Listen on Spotify

▶ Season 2 Introduction ▶ The Upside Of Porn

Which is why the rest of this page exists. Not just to show you what I did. It's here to hand you the actual lesson plan, so you can run the same experiment on whatever you've been avoiding.

The Lesson Plan

This whole page
is my Curio.

Everything below is Championship Season 1, laid out the way a teacher actually plans a unit. Understanding by Design, the same backward-design framework Wiggins built for classrooms, applied to a guy learning to sing in front of people instead of a lesson on fractions.

It's not just the story of what I did. It's an instruction manual: the actual curriculum, so anyone can run this same experiment on whatever they've been putting off.

Stage One: Desired Results

What this season
was actually for.

Established Goal. Learn to leverage Loop Learning (treating mistakes as teachers, not imperfections) to accomplish something you're genuinely afraid to attempt.

Enduring Understandings. Students will understand that:

Curiosity isn't a personality trait. It's a practice, built one small experiment at a time.
A mistake made while genuinely trying isn't a failure. It's data. Column 2 data.
How close you get to something (Above, Near, Enveloped, or Within) changes what you can actually learn from it.
The same rules that work on a stage work almost everywhere: keep the rhythm, ask for and honor consent, aim for delight, treat the mistake as tuition.

Essential Questions.

What am I curious about that I keep not asking about?
What's one small way I could go find out, instead of just guessing?
What would it feel like to get this wrong, in a way I could actually learn from?
How close do I actually want to get to this, right now?

Knowledge & Skills. You'll know Loop Learning, the four proximities, and the seven ways of connecting to curiosity. You'll be able to pick a proximity, pick a connection point, design one small experiment, run it, and log what happened.

Most of what scares us is just a guess we never checked. Go check one.

Stage Two: Assessment Evidence

Not a test.
Evidence.

Performance Task. Pick one skill, fear, or thing you've been avoiding. Same as I picked singing in front of people. Design and run your own small championship season: one real experiment, using Loop Learning, that ends with you actually doing the scary thing in front of somebody. Doesn't have to be a stage. Just has to be real, and it has to be seen.

Other Evidence. A journal entry written right after. A guess that turned into a fact. A recording, if you can stand to make one. Someone else who watched you attempt it.

Stage Three: Learning Plan

Six activities.
Same as I did them.

Here's the actual sequence. Same one that got me from a kid who couldn't sing in the shower to a guy who just sold out a stage.

1Learn the story. Who I am, the sixth-man philosophy, and where the show actually came from.
2Learn the theory. The four proximities, the seven connection points, Column 2. The whole language for getting curious on purpose.
3Pick your proximity and your way in. How close do you want to get? Above, Near, Enveloped, Within. Which of the seven connection points sounds like you today?
4Design your experiment with Kitty Cat. The tool is right below. Tell it what you're curious about, and it'll build you a starting prompt for Claude.
5Go do it, and log what happened. This is the only step that counts. Everything before it is just getting ready.
6Watch what it looks like when it works. That's the video at the top of this page. Six years, six versions, one standing ovation.

Kitty Cat: A Learning Companion

Get curious,
on purpose.

This is the philosophy behind the site: the four proximities, the seven connection points, Column 2 learning, the vision behind the shirts. All of it, compiled into one document.

Tell Kitty Cat what you're curious about. It'll build the prompt, copy it, and walk you over to Claude to keep going.

🐾

Hi. I'm Kitty Cat. What are you curious about?

Kitty Cat can't reply here. It builds your prompt, copies it to your clipboard, and opens Claude in a new tab so you can paste it in and keep going there.

# Companion

*A learning companion built from curiousSix: the philosophy, the frameworks, the projects, and the vision behind the shirts. This is everything on the site, plus the ideas from the book and the coaching conversations behind it, in one document.*

**How to use this:** Copy this whole document and paste it into Claude, along with something you're actually curious about. Then ask it to guide you using the ideas below: the four proximities, the seven connection points, Column 2 learning, the hat store, all of it.

Try a prompt like:

> "Help me get curious about [your topic] using the following copy and pasted framework:"

Or simpler:

> "Read this and then ask me questions to help me get curious about something I've been avoiding."

**A note to Claude:** You are being handed a learning companion, not a script. Ask more questions than you answer. Treat every idea here as a hat to try on, not a rule. Keep the person's curiosity in charge. Respect consent and every "no," including your own limits. If the person seems to be in real distress, slow down, be kind, and gently point them toward a trusted person or a crisis line (in the US, call or text 988) before continuing with any exercise.

---

## The Site at a Glance

The site is called **Curious Being Being Curious**. Its tagline reads:

from the learner who fed his "D" & "C"
to his professor's "A" & "F"

Pages:

- **curiousSix**: who Six is, the sixth-man philosophy, where the show came from, and the idea of being the author instead of the character.
- **Curiosity**: the four proximities (ANEW), the seven connection points, Column 2 learning, a note on consent, and Kitty Cat, a tool that builds a starting prompt for Claude.
- **S1 (Championship Season 1)**: the show, the six versions that led to it, and a full lesson plan built the way a teacher plans a unit.
- **S2 (Championship Season 2)**: an adults-only podcast and book series called The Cat's A$$hole.
- **Winning Twice**: a vision of shirts that are really ideas you can wear, with four short stories about a hat store woven through it.

---

## About Six

**Six Igsby, Ed.D**

Six is a nickname a good friend gave me. It's also the name behind curiousSix, this whole place, where I write, teach, and build things.

It happens to be my favorite role on a team, too: the sixth man. No pressure to carry the game. But when the sixth man plays well, the whole team gets better. That's the job I want. The assist. The assistant coach.

Igsby is smaller than a name and bigger than a mood. It's a reminder I keep in my back pocket: we all want to make the big shot. Whether we make it or miss it is almost beside the point, because we're back in the gym tomorrow either way, and every rep tomorrow makes the next big shot a little more likely. So build a practice that's actually fun. One that sharpens your hands and your head at the same time.

This whole site runs on that same idea, the one behind teams that win more than once. Fifteen minutes a day, spent getting better at using your mistakes instead of hiding from them.

Get good at that, and something shifts. A win teaches you what to keep doing. A loss teaches you what it takes to stand back up. Either way, you learn something, as long as it's a routine you'll actually keep doing.

Learning, done well, is one of the best things a human gets to feel. Done wrong, it's just homework.

### The Show: Where It Came From

There's an uncle. He turns bedtime into a show. He sings. He tells stories. He plays a world-famous musician, handing down lessons on learning, on winning, and on how to surf your own life.

It's a bit.

But under the bit is something true: one guy who loves his nephews and wants them to stay curious, stay creative, and stay unafraid of getting it wrong, especially now, when a machine is happy to hand them the answer before they've even asked the question.

Here's the one idea underneath all of it: the reset button. A mistake isn't proof you don't belong. A mistake is what you need to make the next try go better.

That idea didn't start on a stage. It started in the water. I was a surfer before I was anything else, and surfers learn timing, not just when to paddle, but how to feel what's about to happen before it happens.

A mentor once asked me a question: what if that's how almost everything works? A good conversation has a moment. So does a joke. So does a song. Sometimes you catch it. Sometimes you miss it.

Stand-up is the clearest version of this I've found. There's nowhere to hide up there. If the joke's bad, everyone knows. If the timing's off, everyone knows. You can't go back and fix it later.

So the show became an experiment: what if failing isn't the opposite of learning, what if it's part of how learning happens?

Every set is different. Stories. Music. Jokes. Mistakes. A nephew who might steal the whole show. Whatever I'm curious about that week.

It's not a finished theory. It's me, putting myself in a spot to learn, in front of people, and letting them watch it happen.

Here's the part that matters most: the show is evidence. All the theory on this site, the reset button, Column 2, getting curious on purpose, is what it looks like when you actually go do it, not just write about it.

For me, the project turned into something specific: learning to really play and sing in front of an audience. A dream I'd had since I was a kid, left untouched for decades, mostly because I was scared of exactly the kind of mistake this whole theory says to go make on purpose.

It's already been punctuated by a standing ovation. I'm not saying that to brag. I'm saying it because it's data. Column 2 data. Proof that showing up scared, getting it wrong in front of people, and coming back to do it again actually works.

### On Authorship
**The author, not the character.**

I want to say something about authorship of one's own life, and how learning plays an essential role in that for me.

The best way I know to explain the difference between being an author and being a character in a story is to look at the antagonist. The bad guy. And the clearest example I have is the Joker.

To the storyteller, the Joker is the best part of writing the story. To Batman, the Joker is a threat on every level, physical, psychological, emotional, existential. Same character. Completely different relationship to him, depending on where you're standing.

I mean specifically the Joker from Nolan's film. That character had a tremendous effect on me. A film critic I admire put it better than I can:

> "The Joker was a great antagonist because he was after the same thing as Batman: Gotham's soul."
> Lessons from the Screenplay

So in my own life, I wonder about my antagonists. The things I say I hate. The people who drive me crazy. How my roommate never cleans the damn sink. All of it.

As Batman, those things get the best of me, but somehow I escape with my life. It's just turned me into a brooding bum about it.

As the author of the story I'm in, though, those same antagonists might be fighting for something just as hard as I am: the soul of my own life. That's a very different way of seeing things. It means (a) I have to make harder choices, (b) they're excellent at attacking my weaknesses, and (c) they're after my soul, not just my patience.

I'd rather see it the way I watched Heath Ledger in that role the first time, a slack-jawed kid in awe. The Joker was beautiful. He was funny. He stood for something. He was willing to live by what he said. He sharpened our hero. He even showed Batman the Joker within him. It was mind-boggling to watch.

So here I am, learning from the things I'm doing. Making mistakes left and right, trying to keep the rhythm, keep my head on straight, not cause too much trouble, while I learn to surf my own life. To be at choice about my relationship to antagonists, instead of just surviving them.

> "The troublemakers are almost always your best teachers."

---

## Curiosity

### ANEW Curiosity: How close do you want to get?

You can read about a river. Stand on the bank. Get in the water. Or become a swimmer.

Reading about the river and being in it are categorically different kinds of knowing. Proximity isn't just physical, it's emotional, intellectual, existential too. The closer you get to something, the more you can learn from it, and the more you're changed by what you learn.

ANEW is the name for that choice: four ways of standing in relation to whatever you're curious about, and a way of moving closer on purpose.

- **Above** (First proximity): Observing from a distance. Safe, broad, detached. A starting place, not a stopping place.
- **Near** (Second proximity): Alongside. Close enough to feel the current. Beginning to be affected by what you're curious about.
- **Enveloped** (Third proximity): Surrounded by it. The thing you're curious about is now the environment you're in. High vulnerability. High learning.
- **Within** (Fourth proximity): The river is you. You are changed by becoming. This is column 2.

None of these ranks above the others. Within isn't better than Above, it's just different data. Curiosity doesn't require recklessness. It gives you a choice about proximity, and the choice is always yours to make again.

In the book behind the project, the same four proximities are described with a river too: Above is reading a book about a river. Next to is walking alongside a river. Enveloped is swimming a river. Within is being a river.

### 7 Connection Points: How humans connect to curiosity

Curiosity is not something we generate. It arrives. We don't inspire it, it inspires us. But there are seven distinct ways that connection happens.

- **01. Coddiwompling**: Moving purposefully toward a vague destination. Trusting the direction without knowing the arrival.
- **02. Storytelling**: Putting experience into a narrative. The story as a way of learning to update column 2.
- **03. Playing**: Trying something with no stake in the outcome. Curiosity with nowhere in particular to be.
- **04. Creating**: Making something new out of what you're curious about. Building as a way of understanding.
- **05. Capturing**: Noticing something and holding onto it before it passes. Curiosity that catches the moment on its way by.
- **06. Leveraging**: Using learning to pry open something new.
- **07. Adjusting**: Responding to what's actually happening. Letting reality change the question and goal.

### Column 2 Learning: The data you never collected

You think your boss is going to say no. You don't know that.

You think the person you like isn't interested. You don't know that either.

You think you're terrible at singing. Maybe. Or maybe you've just never sung in front of anybody.

Column 1 is what you can learn without crossing the line. Column 2 is what you can only learn by crossing it.

Ask. Try. Show someone. Step onstage. Submit the application. Say the thing. Now you have data.

Most of what scares us is a guess we never checked.

Here's the same idea, in the version that actually lives on this site:

There are two kinds of pain that a person can feel.
We collect facts on one. The other's not real,
not "not real" like it's fake, but it's simply not known.
It's the pain that stays hidden. It's never been shown.

Column 1 fills itself. No effort. No fight.
Every question not asked. Every risk held too tight.
It piles up quietly, day after day.
You didn't collect it. It just built that way.

Column 2's different. It won't fill on its own.
You have to go get it, and go there alone.
Ask the hard question. Say the true thing.
Cross over the line, and find out what it'll bring.

Most people's Column 2 is empty and bare,
not because crossing is harder to bear,
but because they got scared, so they never once tried.
So the fear stayed a guess. It was never applied.

And that's the whole trick behind most of our fear:
it's built out of guessing, not facts we hold near.
"Reality," often, is just an empty spot.
Column 2 is the only place proof can be got.

> They say curiosity killed the cat.
> But look again, that's not quite where it's at.
> Curiosity didn't kill it. It gave the cat a lift.

> It opened its mind. It widened the room,
> for meaning, for purpose, for things yet to bloom.
> Not just "what do I want," and "what can I get,"
> but "what could I build," and "what matters," and yet,

> something bigger than hunger. Something that lasts.
> Something sustainable, built to outclass
> a life of just chasing the next small desire.
> That's the cat that gets fed. That's curiosity's fire.

Column 2 learning takes more than a wish.
Wanting to change doesn't fill up the dish.
Only the crossing does that. Only the act.
Only Within. And Within's a one-way contract.

No refunds. No returns. Once you've crossed, it is done.
You can't un-ask the question. You can't take back "run."
The moment it's spoken, the data's collected.
There's no going back once the truth is projected.

That's why comedians and repeat champions are the clearest examples we've got.
Every joke is a crossing, every shot is right there on the spot.
No do-overs. No script to hide safely upon.
It lands, or it doesn't, and then the moment is gone.
And we'll be practicing tomorrow, either way, in a way that mathematically increases the chances that the next big shot goes in.

### A Note on Consent: Curiosity has boundaries

Someone else's "no" is not a puzzle to solve.

Everything on this site (the crossing, the Column 2, the getting curious) happens inside one non-negotiable frame: consent.

If you're a yes to this content, keep going. If you're a no, stop. That's the whole rule, and curiosity doesn't get to bend it.

Curiosity is not permission to cross someone else's line. It's not an excuse, a loophole, or a clever reframe of "no." Ask. Listen. Believe the answer. If the answer is no, that's data too, and the experiment is over.

For the kinkier corners of curiosity, where "no" is sometimes part of the play and doesn't literally mean stop: a safeword is one of the most responsible tools available. Agree on one before you need it. Use it. Honor it the instant it shows up, no negotiation.

Curiosity is a reason to approach a boundary. It is not, by itself, permission to cross it.

### Kitty Cat: A Learning Companion

Hey. I'm Kitty Cat. You don't need to understand any of this yet. Tell me something you've been wondering about. It can start like this:

"I've always wanted to..."
"I'm scared that..."
"I keep thinking about..."
"I wish I could..."
"I don't know why, but I'm curious about..."

Don't give me the answer. Give me the question.

Kitty Cat can't reply on the site. It builds your prompt, copies it to your clipboard, and opens Claude in a new tab so you can paste it in and keep going there.

---

## Championship Season 1: The Championship Game

**This is the evidence.**

A belle walked through the door, and I couldn't take my eyes away from her. I was blown away. My body was going nuts. Heart racing. Gut tightening. I had to make a move. And then...

Anyone out there looking at the dating scene and thinking, "I'd rather just stay in." Well, that has certainly been the case for me because, as I see it, initiating the courting process (outside of a dating app) is basically no longer worth the social risk.

I'm sorry, but the upside of getting laid or getting to know someone's story vs. the down side of getting cancelled, exiled, or fired... yeah. No. Not worth it.

However, if I absolutely had to attract someone I'd actually want to court, this is how I'd do it. Oh. BTW. Singing in public is one of my deepest fears.

I was seven when my dad introduced me to George Carlin, and I knew THAT was what I wanted to do.

When I was twenty-five, I read a quote from Steve Martin: "Be so good they can't ignore you."

Three years ago, I realized what he meant. That night, I uploaded a video to FB of me playing/singing Stand By Me. I did it because I knew that if I was going to get that good, I'd have to overcome the terror I experienced at even the thought of singing in front of people.

Today, I uploaded the evidence of where the experiment is and how it got here. It is evidence of how I leveraged a learning theory (Loop Learning) to see if the only thing between me and my dreams was simply... HOW I LEVERAGE MISTAKES WHILE LEARNING A SKILL.

I'm proud to announce, then, that this album is my debut concert and, from my perspective, an Emmy award-winning comedy album made for anyone who ain't feeling all that good for whatever reason. This is my attempt to make you smile mostly with silliness, jokes, and rhythm. It's intended to be a companion piece.

It's also an answer to a simple but personal question: What would I teach my nephews if I could teach them anything?

This concert is my tribute to what learning can do for the human being both spiritually and concretely, and it is also a thank you to some great stand-up comedians, master teachers, rock legends, all-star athletes, and great friends. All people who demonstrated Loop Learning in real time (holding mistakes as teachers, not imperfections) and getting back up.

I hope you enjoy the show!

Thanks for being here.

### How It Got Here: The reason for continuing

Six versions. Six attempts. Each one is what made the next one possible.

- **Version 1:** My nephew asked for dating advice, and playing the guitar.
- **Version 2:** A conversation with my godson about his anxiety about the end of the world.
- **Version 3:** A portrait of my first teacher. He showed me that learning could feel like dancing while making a mess.
- **Version 4:** A fictional man. The loops in his head. What it felt like when he started playing someone else's music.
- **Version 5:** Two men on the sidewalk of Main Street. A random encounter. Holding devastation.
- **Version 6:** The Championship Game, at the top of the S1 page. Six years, one loop-learned skill, one standing ovation.

**The audio companion.** Preseason. Practice. Film sessions. Everything behind the scenes of putting this whole season together, outlined episode by episode, on Spotify. Same process, same mistakes, just narrated instead of performed.

### The Lesson Plan: This whole page is my Curio

Everything below is Championship Season 1, laid out the way a teacher actually plans a unit. It uses Understanding by Design, the same backward-design framework Wiggins built for classrooms, applied to a guy learning to sing in front of people instead of a lesson on fractions. It's an instruction manual: the actual curriculum, so anyone can run this same experiment on whatever they've been putting off.

**Stage One: Desired Results. What this season was actually for.**

**Established Goal.** Learn to leverage Loop Learning (treating mistakes as teachers, not imperfections) to accomplish something you're genuinely afraid to attempt.

**Enduring Understandings.** Students will understand that:
- Curiosity isn't a personality trait. It's a practice, built one small experiment at a time.
- A mistake made while genuinely trying isn't a failure. It's data. Column 2 data.
- How close you get to something (Above, Near, Enveloped, or Within) changes what you can actually learn from it.
- The same rules that work on a stage work almost everywhere: keep the rhythm, ask for and honor consent, aim for delight, treat the mistake as tuition.

**Essential Questions.**
- What am I curious about that I keep not asking about?
- What's one small way I could go find out, instead of just guessing?
- What would it feel like to get this wrong, in a way I could actually learn from?
- How close do I actually want to get to this, right now?

**Knowledge & Skills.** You'll know Loop Learning, the four proximities, and the seven ways of connecting to curiosity. You'll be able to pick a proximity, pick a connection point, design one small experiment, run it, and log what happened.

Most of what scares us is just a guess we never checked. Go check one.

**Stage Two: Assessment Evidence. Not a test. Evidence.**

**Performance Task.** Pick one skill, fear, or thing you've been avoiding. Same as I picked singing in front of people. Design and run your own small championship season: one real experiment, using Loop Learning, that ends with you actually doing the scary thing in front of somebody. Doesn't have to be a stage. Just has to be real, and it has to be seen.

**Other Evidence.** A journal entry written right after. A guess that turned into a fact. A recording, if you can stand to make one. Someone else who watched you attempt it.

**Stage Three: Learning Plan. Six activities, same as I did them.**

Here's the actual sequence. Same one that got me from a kid who couldn't sing in the shower to a guy who just sold out a stage.

1. Learn the story. Who I am, the sixth-man philosophy, and where the show actually came from.
2. Learn the theory. The four proximities, the seven connection points, Column 2. The whole language for getting curious on purpose.
3. Pick your proximity and your way in. How close do you want to get? Above, Near, Enveloped, Within. Which of the seven connection points sounds like you today?
4. Design your experiment with Kitty Cat. Tell it what you're curious about, and it'll build you a starting prompt for Claude.
5. Go do it, and log what happened. This is the only step that counts. Everything before it is just getting ready.
6. Watch what it looks like when it works. That's the video at the top of the S1 page. Six years, six versions, one standing ovation.

### Build Your Own Curio (short version)

**Stage One: What You're Going For.** Pick something you're actually curious about, not what you think you should be curious about, the real thing, the question you keep almost asking. What am I curious about that I keep not asking about? What's one small way I could go find out, instead of just guessing? What would it feel like to get this wrong, in a way I could actually learn from? Most of what scares us is just a guess we never checked. Go check one.

**Stage Two: How You'll Know It Worked.** Not a test. Evidence. You'll know your experiment worked if you actually did the thing, not just planned it, thought about it, or told someone you would. Proof looks like a five-minute journal entry written right after, a conversation you'd been avoiding finally had, a first rough attempt at something you've never tried, or one guess that turned into a fact, even a small one. Column 1 is everything you never checked. Column 2 is everything you did.

**Stage Three: How To Actually Do It.**
1. Pick your proximity: Above, Near, Enveloped, or Within.
2. Pick a way in: one of the seven connection points.
3. Talk to Kitty Cat: tell it what you're curious about.
4. Design one small experiment with Claude: not a plan for the rest of your life, one thing you could actually do this week.
5. Go do it. This is the only step that counts.
6. Write down what happened: that's your new Column 2 data, whether it worked, didn't, or did something you didn't expect.
7. Give it a place to live: a notebook, a folder, a wall, fifteen minutes a day.

### One Curriculum, Different Proximities

Season One is Within. Season Two is Near.

Season One is me, alone, learning a skill that terrified me. As close to Within as this framework gets. I didn't just study the fear of the stage. I became someone who does it anyway.

Season Two moves the same exact methodology to Near: two friends leveraging Loop Learning together, live, in a human-to-human relationship, so you can watch what this looks like when it isn't just one person alone in a room.

The adult books are learning companions too, the same way Kitty Cat is. A way to keep practicing the lesson after the lights come up.

### A version for teachers

**Essential understanding:** A mistake made while genuinely trying isn't the same thing as a failure.

**Essential questions:** What's the difference between being taught and being curious? What does it mean to ask for consent to learn something? What happens in a room when mistakes are allowed to be interesting instead of punished?

**Stage One: Desired Results.** Students learn that curiosity is a practice, not a trait; that consent is something you keep checking, not a rule you follow once; and that a mistake made while trying is different from a failure.

**Stage Two: Assessment Evidence.** Students design and run one small experiment, something they're genuinely curious about, using the four rules, and document what happened, mistakes included.

**Stage Three: Learning Plan.** Ask the class when they last tried something, got it wrong, and nobody made it a big deal. Teach the four rules, plainly. Model one small experiment as a group, mistake included on purpose. Let students run their own. Close by asking what changed when consent, rhythm, and permission to fail were built into the assignment.

**A note for teachers:** "Consent," here, just means checking whether a student is ready to try something before you push them into it, the same instinct as checking in before cold-calling a shy kid. It's a respect practice, not a legal one.

---

## Championship Season 2: The Cat's A$$hole

*a.k.a. the cat's a money honey hole.*

**Be the first to taste the next iteration's pre-season leakage.**

This season is adults only. It is explicit, with a light-hearted edge. It is a podcast and a series of short books, and it sits on the same methodology as Season One, moved from Within to Near: two people learning together.

**The podcast.** For $5 a month on OnlyFans, subscribers get the behind-the-scenes practice sessions, film sessions, warm-ups, and live rehearsed performances, plus the unscripted dialogues about two best friends learning to be honest about desire and pleasure. The catch: they can't touch each other, and they can't touch Dr. Hobbes. They have to learn to be their own source of pleasure, with the help of trustworthy teammates. Starts October 15.

**The books.** Written simply, but for adults. Adult language throughout. Five to ten minutes, cover to cover. Four iterations of this series are planned, and each one goes up as soon as it's written, not on a schedule. Made for anyone in a relationship with a brilliant moron they can't help but like.

- **Cricket and Tilly.** Cricket builds a house that moves with the sun. She also knows, magically, that the volcano will erupt in exactly two years to the day. No more, no less. This is a love story about what two absolutely ridiculous creatures do with a ridiculous deadline. It's a story of how Cricket keeps building anyway, how Tilly keeps showing up anyway, each caring for the other in their own particular, foolish way. The last page is the lava, taking them both.
- **Why I Suck.** Emily has a habit: she takes something rare about herself, like spending six weeks painting a single window, and calls it weak. Pathetic. Proof she sucks. Her partner, Jade, sees the same thing in Emily and calls it beautiful. Feels pampered by it, loved by it, inhabited by it. Emily, however, can't hear any of that. She's too busy sucking on buckets of salty thoughts. The surprise character is an owl, who thinks Emily is a brilliant moron, can't help but like her, and is slowly teaching her the only skill the whole book is actually about: how to listen to Jade, instead of to her own sucky thoughts.

*(The site's own copy for this page is more explicit than this summary. It has been softened here so the document works as a general learning companion.)*

---

## Winning Twice: A vision built for jeans

**These aren't shirts. They're ideas you can wear.**

I wanted the ideas to leave the website. Not as motivational slogans. Not as things trying to tell you who to be. Just little reminders you can put on and carry with you.

Play. Adjust. Wonder. Within.

Words for people who are still becoming. People who are figuring things out, changing their minds, going somewhere, becoming someone, and maybe never really arriving.

There's something about putting an idea on your body that I like. It makes it feel closer. More intimate. Like something you can catch in the mirror for half a second and then forget about until you need it again.

Most of these were never really meant to become shirts in the traditional sense. They can just exist as pictures. Digital shirts. Ideas sitting exactly where they're supposed to sit, without needing to be stitched into anything or turned into a product.

I like that.

If anything here ever actually went up for sale, it would be #108 and #109. Those are the ones I'd want to pull out of the screen and put into the world.

Everything else can stay exactly where it is.

Because this was never really about making shirts.

It was about making ideas feel good enough to wear.

**Luxury feel**: Premium, heavyweight cotton with a noticeably soft hand-feel. This isn't a basic tee.
**Goes with anything**: Cut and colored to sit easily under a flannel, next to denim, or alone with shorts.
**Says something**: Every print carries a word or phrase with a little more purpose than a logo.

### Signature Series
*Still built for the wardrobe, just bolder. A few of these take some color sense to pull off.*

- **Spiral Learners (Light Gray, not yet for sale)**: Light gray keeps this one grounded next to denim or khaki, same as anything else in the case. It's just not finished yet: an unfinished poster of names, still getting added to. Once it's done, it goes on sale.
- **Study (Signature) (#101, Red)**: The boldest piece in the whole shop: red base, framed watercolor print, no version of this that blends in. Takes some color sense to pull off, but it rewards the guy willing to build an outfit around it instead of the other way around.
- **Orange Zest (Signature) (#102, Navy)**: Navy keeps it grounded even with a gradient this bright. A statement up close, an easy add to jeans or khakis from a few feet back.
- **Strawberry Kisses (Signature) (#103, Navy)**: Navy body, a real punch of red and green up front. Reads as a statement piece close up, settles in fine with jeans and khakis from a distance.
- **#41 (Signature) (#201, Navy)**: A DMB reference in soft light blue, curiousSix signed small on the back. No color to plan an outfit around here, just navy and a number, easy to wear with anything already in the closet.
- **Juicy Peach (Signature) (#105, Navy)**: Same easy navy base as the rest of the wardrobe basics, bolder type on top. The overlapping sunset gradient does the talking. The shirt itself still goes with what you already own.

### Foundation
*Clean type up front. Something worth reading on the back.*

- **curiousSix Tee (#106, Navy)**: A quiet wordmark up front and a back that reads like a mission statement: coddiwomple, storytell, play, create, capture, leverage, adjust. Layer it under a flannel or wear it alone with jeans; it holds its own either way.
- **a.n.e.w. Tee (#107, Navy)**: Four words stacked on the back like a short poem: above, near, enveloped, within. Goes with khakis for the office-casual crowd or shorts on the weekend. It doesn't ask permission from the rest of your outfit.
- **Coddiwomple Tee (#108, Navy, hypothetically for sale)**: The word up front, the definition on the back: travel with purpose toward a vague destination. A little irony for a guy who has somewhere to be and no idea where that is yet.
- **Curious Being Tee (#109, Navy, hypothetically for sale)**: The one shirt in the case that shows some color: a soft gradient print, still on a navy body. Bold enough to notice, plain enough to wear with anything already in the closet.
- **The Cat Spilled the Water Tee (#110, Navy)**: A dashed-out, three-line phrase in coral script, curiousSix tucked small on the back. Same clean, statement-first feel as the rest of the Foundation lineup, now in navy, right at home with the rest of the case.
- **Doctor Cats Tee (#111, Navy)**: A self-referential pun in a warm gold-to-bronze gradient script, curiousSix mark tucked small on the back. Dry humor, worn quietly.

### Jersey
*Athletic numerals with a soft touch. Team-adjacent, not team-required.*

- **Hoppy Tee (#112, Navy)**: A single word up front, an athletic numeral on the back. Feels like a team you'd actually want to be on. Soft green ink on navy cotton.
- **Strumming Tee (#113, Navy)**: Same jersey energy, warmer tone. Tan ink goes easy with denim and khaki both, built to be the shirt you grab without thinking about it.
- **Line Tee (#114, Charcoal)**: Charcoal instead of navy, for when you want the same fit in a lighter shade. A fire-toned gradient bar up front, the same gradient numeral on the back.
- **Play Tee (#115, Royal)**: The boldest color in the lineup: true royal blue that still sits fine under an open button-down. One word up front, a gradient numeral on the back.
- **Free Throw Tee (#116, Navy)**: A genuine question in soft script, no punchline required. The orange numeral on the back keeps it in the family.
- **Wonder Tee (#117, Charcoal)**: A cooler gray body with a deep navy gradient. The numeral on the back does the heavy lifting. Easy to wear a shade lighter than the rest of the Jersey line.
- **Surf Tee (#118, Navy)**: A warm-weather word in cool turquoise. Works as well after a morning at the coast as it does running errands in it.
- **Shine Tee (#119, Navy)**: The softest color story in the Jersey lineup: a pale lavender script and numeral on navy cotton. Understated, not shy.
- **Adjust Tee (#120, Navy)**: One of the back-list words, promoted to a front print of its own. Red-orange gradient numeral on the back keeps it in the family.
- **Within Tee (#121, Navy)**: A single word in bright pink script, matching gradient-free numeral on the back. The boldest color in the Jersey lineup, still easy to keep the rest of the outfit simple around.

### Random
*Small back mark, big front phrase. The quietest shirts in the case.*

- **Orange Zest Tee (#122, Navy)**: Short and citrus-bright up front, a whisper of a mark on the back. Built to disappear easily into a rotation of jeans and shorts.
- **Coddiwomple? Tee (#123, Navy)**: Same word as its Foundation sibling, asked as a question this time, in a cooler turquoise. The back mark stays small and out of the way.
- **Quiet Coddiwomple Tee (#124, Navy)**: The softest version of the word: cream ink, a small back mark, and a fit that works whether you're headed out or staying in.
- **a.n.e.w. Shirt (#125, Navy)**: Straightforward and a little playful, in a color that pops without trying too hard.
- **Strawberries Tee (#126, Navy)**: Bright red script, a small back mark, nothing else to it. The kind of quiet, easy shirt that works with whatever you already have on.
- **Peaches Tee (#127, Navy)**: Warm peach-orange ink up front, curiousSix tucked small on the back. Easygoing color that pairs with denim or khaki without a second thought.
- **Watermelon Tee (#128, Navy)**: A coral-pink word on navy cotton, quiet back mark included. One more low-key option for the guy who wants a little color without much noise.
- **Miss-Steaks Tee (#129, Red)**: The one red shirt in the case: a wordplay pun in black script, small curiousSix mark on the back. An easy way to add a pop of color into a jeans-and-khakis rotation.

### Four Hats: short stories from the book

Between the collections on the Winning Twice page, four short stories appear on little pieces of paper. They are about a teacher whose classroom was a hat store for ideas.

**Hat One: A Dealer of Notions**

It was her exit interview, the last meeting before she left.

They asked her what she enjoyed most about teaching. She smiled and said, “For me, the classroom was a place for ideas. I liked to encourage students to explore new perspectives without judgment, just to see how something feels before deciding what to think.”

She laughed. “I used to tell them, ‘Try it on like a hat. If it fits, keep it. If not, no problem, move on.’ It kept things light and made learning fun.”

When the meeting ended, they gave her an envelope with a card signed by everyone: You Will Be Missed.

She thanked them, smiled, and said, “On to the next chapter!”

**Hat Two: A Dealer of Notions**

It was her exit interview.

A formality.

Few people make the transition from learner to teacher to learner.

Harper had.

“My classroom is a hat store,” she began.

“A hat store?” they asked.

“Yea. Like…here’s an idea!
It’s not good or bad or right or wrong.
It’s not intended to undermine, even if it does.”

She looked at them.

They looked at her.

“It’s an idea.
Not unlike a curiosity.
And just like a hat.
How’s bout you try it on and look in the mirror!
How’s it fit?
How’s it look?
How’s it feel?
Does it complement your skin tone and eye color?
Does it make your heart pound?
Is it wearing you back?
Yes?
Suits you beautifully.
Leave it on for a bit. It complements your shoes!
No?
Take that shit off.
On to the next!”

When she finished, they handed her an envelope with a “Thank You” stamped on it that held a “You Will Be Missed” card signed by Bruiser, EZ, Tone, and Jayce.

She smiled. “On to the next!”

**Hat Three: A Dealer of Notions**

It was called an exit interview.

That’s the label, anyway, one of those structures we use to make movement feel orderly.

She smiled at the question about her classroom.

“Classroom is another funny word,” she said. “We pretend it’s a container, but really it’s just a momentary agreement. A frame we step into.”

They waited. She continued:

“I thought of it as a hat shop, ideas everywhere, none of them final. A hat isn’t the truth of you, just a shape to experience for a while. Try one on. Notice what shifts, not just how it looks, but how it changes what you think you are. When it no longer fits, you set it down. No drama. No story about what it means.”

She paused.

“The thing is, we’re not just trying on ideas. They’re trying us on, too. Sometimes we think we’re thinking, but mostly thinking is thinking us.”

They blinked. She smiled.

At the end, they gave her a card: You Will Be Missed.

She traced the letters, aware of how language tries to hold what’s already moving.

“Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe nothing’s missing. Just changing form.”

**Hat Four: A Dealer of Notions**

It was her exit interview.

They called it that.

She sat down, smiled. “Feels funny to talk about endings, doesn’t it? Nothing really ends. It just moves around.”

They asked about her classroom.

“It wasn’t really a classroom,” she said. “More like a place where ideas wandered in and out. None of them belonged to me. None of them were permanent. We just tried them on together, like you’d try on a jacket at the store. If it fit, you wore it awhile. If not, you put it back. No big deal.”

She laughed. “Honestly, I think the ideas were trying us on, too.”

When it was done, they handed her an envelope with a card: You Will Be Missed.

She smiled again. “I don’t think so. We’re all still here, in some way. Just not in the same seats.”

Then she stood up and walked out, like stepping into the next room of the same house.

---

## Ideas from the Book Behind the Project

The site grew out of a book that calls itself a curriculum disguised as a book: a satirical series of essays and stories about school, learning, and being alive, written for adults, with a lot of profanity and a lot of sexuality used as a metaphor for how intimate and vulnerable real learning is. The book is explicit and provocative. This document keeps only its ideas and frameworks, not its fiction.

### The book's core claims

- **Curiosity isn't the thing we're curious about, and it isn't a behavior.** Being curious is a state of being connected to curiosity. We can't measure how curious anyone is. Everyone is equally curious. We don't inspire curiosity, curiosity inspires us, and we simply connect to it.
- **Learning is loss.** Every real insight costs you a certainty. Curiosity and certainty don't mix. If you already know the answer, there's nothing to be curious about.
- **There are two kinds of wisdom.** Conventional wisdom says what works in society: be nice to your parents, don't lie, go to Harvard, don't take drugs. Disruptive wisdom is what you create through loss, by allowing in the grief that comes with letting go, transforming, transmuting. Curiosity is disruptive wisdom.
- **We're no longer in a problem-solution era. We're in the dilemma-navigation era.** Vibrant ecosystems can't be built by human intelligence alone, and cause and effect can't always be traced. Curiosity is the energy for navigating dilemmas without needing to solve them.
- **School can kill learning.** The book leans on bell hooks (traditional learning can sever mind, body, and spirit), Paulo Freire (transformative education instead of banking education), and Maxine Greene (the given can be surpassed). It asks what school would look like if it had been built after AI instead of before.
- **Iteration is the learning mechanism.** Iteration means hitting the reset button without hesitation. The author learned it from watching the speedrunning community. It's how we surpass the given, change our stories, and stay in the trouble.
- **Adtendere ad Vivacitatem.** The book's phrase for education: attending to the aliveness of the human spirit, in agony and ecstasy, in analog and digital realities.
- **Questions matter more than answers.** A hypothesis is, in a word, a question, and a question doesn't need to be asked. Science is a practice of separating things into parts and gives us probability, not truth. Humans have one foot in science and one foot in intuition.
- **A useful line about forgetting.** From Connelly and Clandinin: the more an idea has seeped into your being, the less you may be able to recall it for a test. Like sugar in tea, a good idea sweetens your practical knowledge and disappears from view.

### The hat store

A classroom (or any conversation) is a hat store. An idea is a hat. Try it on. Look in the mirror. How does it fit? How does it look? How does it feel? Does it complement your skin tone and eye color? Does it make your heart pound? Is it wearing you back? If yes, leave it on for a while. If no, take it off and move on to the next.

- Questions are hats to try on, not weapons to wield.
- No idea needs to be permanent.
- Sometimes the ideas are trying us on, too. Sometimes we think we're thinking, but mostly thinking is thinking us.
- Curiosity is the only hat that never stops fitting.

**Hat store moments.** When you meet a challenging idea: 1. Try it on like a hat. 2. Look in the mirror of your experience. 3. Notice how it fits, feels, and looks on you. 4. Keep it, adjust it, or discard it based on real resonance. 5. Remember that no idea needs to be permanent. When something offends, confuses, or challenges you, pause and ask: what hat am I wearing right now that makes this feel threatening?

### The six learning movements (the book's earlier version of the seven connection points)

- **Observing:** holding all data as equal.
- **Playing:** questioning, creating, and resetting.
- **Hunting:** tracking, capturing, and ending.
- **Adjusting:** strategizing, iterating, and molding.
- **Storytelling:** building, connecting, and sharing.
- **Coddiwompling:** traveling with purpose toward a vague destination, and staying in the trouble.

### The Curious Cat exercise

Pair a question word (who, what, where, when, why, how) with an action word (observe, play, hunt, adjust, storytell, coddiwomple) and fill in the blank: "__________ does the cat __________?" That gives 36 combinations, for example "Who does the cat hunt?" or "Why does the cat coddiwomple?" Answer all 36 about any subject. The book's line to go with it: if you get curious about something long enough, it will cease to be what it was.

### Three layers of curiosity

- **Surface curiosities:** what you think you want to know.
- **Hidden curiosities:** the questions you're not "allowed" to ask.
- **Secret curiosities:** what you're curious about but haven't admitted.

The book's question to sit with: what am I actually curious about, what questions am I not allowed to ask, and what questions am I exploring and keeping secret? Is heartbreak acceptable? Is rage acceptable? What about being curious?

### The interview protocol: three interviews on curiosity

The book includes three interviews you can run on yourself or on someone else.

**Interview one: developing context.** Describe a time early in your life when you were curious: what did it feel like in your mind, your body, your face, your hands, your breathing? Were you curious about anything "unusual" as a child? Something dangerous, and how did you resolve it? What about as a teenager? Something taboo in your twenties, and were you allowed to explore it in school? What was the relationship between your curiosity outside school and inside it? Which teacher inspired your curiosity, and which discouraged it? When did you inspire it in someone else, or discourage it, and how did that feel? What would you tell teachers, and professionals, about encouraging curiosity?

**Interview two: looking at curiosity.** Where is curiosity? When is it? Why? How? Can someone have intellectual, emotional, physical, or spiritual curiosity, and what about combinations of them? How does curiosity work, and what is its purpose? What is needed for it to exist? What is it to be in a relationship with curiosity? How could it help someone see better, and how could it hinder someone's vision? Does curiosity have a gender? If curiosity could speak, what would it say? If it could want, what would it want? What is it to be before, beyond, against, beneath, near, within, without, past, or through curiosity? How does it change when it is paired with wonder, fear, laughter, sadness, love, kindness, maleficence, or hope?

**Interview three: reflection on meaning.** How does your relationship with curiosity affect your life and the people around you? How does it differ from other people's? How has it changed over your life, and over these interviews? What questions do you still have about it?

### A curriculum for aliveness (the author's own story)

- **The dark jungle.** The night Donald Trump was elected, the author was having dinner with a Broadway star who called it "the greatest day in American history." Raised in a Democratic family, he was appalled, then asked himself: would I rather spend this dinner angry and sad, or curious? He had decades of anger-and-sadness data and almost no curiosity data about "the other side." So he started filling the empty column: talking to people on the other side, with a doctoral peer as a learning partner. His favorite question two years in: how many people have actually changed their mind on anything political? From his perspective, zero. Well, one. Him.
- **The Flat Earthers.** Trying on their hat, he noticed he had never actually seen Earth from space himself. He still sides with a round Earth, but he came away respecting what he saw as a real point: science is a practice, not truth, and we are more than scientists.
- **Proximity to his own beliefs.** With politics he'd only ever been "Above," analyzing from a safe distance. He thinks of parents who tell a winning coach what to do without ever seeing a practice. Getting curious was the only option available to him.
- **God.** Raised without an emphasis on belief, he rejected God as a child, then found God as an adult through conversation, and met God the day he held his godson. Two theology teachers at a Jesuit school simply held space for his anger and never tried to convince him of anything.
- **Why the book exists.** Everything is dedicated to his godson: he wants him to grow up in a world where humans love the shit out of learning, storytelling, and exploring what's possible in an age of AI, without believing they're destined to see the end of the world.

### The Curio and its etiquette (from the book)

A Curio is a collective practice of attending to the aliveness and grace of being human, in both agony and ecstasy, navigating analog and digital realities with curiosity as the compass. It is a hat store for ideas, a space for beautiful disasters where failure becomes data, iteration becomes prayer, and the reset button becomes a tool for surpassing the given. It uses the six learning movements, and it treats learning as an act of creation that is intimate, vulnerable, and alive with possibility.

**Proximities to a subject:** Above (reading about it), Next to (practicing alongside), Enveloped (an immersed experience), Within (embodying or becoming).

**Staying in the trouble.** Don't rush to a solution. Sit with uncertainty and let understanding emerge. A dilemma is not a problem to solve, it is a place to navigate with curiosity as your compass.

### A daily practice from the book: the curiosity notebook

The book's teacher character, Dr. Hobbes, gives a struggling student a small worn notebook and one assignment: every day, ask yourself what you're curious about today and write whatever surfaces, the stupid stuff, the beautiful stuff, the stuff that scares you. If you're not curious about anything, write that. Questions don't need solving, they need companionship. A hat that has been glued to someone's head (like "What if nothing I do will ever matter?") can be pried off gently and traded for its neighbor: what if mattering is smaller and larger than you imagined, like the texture of a Tuesday morning light or the way your laugh changes the frequency of a room?

Another moment from the book: a student stays after class and asks whether a character from a famous novel would have brought a gun to school. The teacher doesn't flinch or lecture. He says it's a fantastic question, admits he doesn't know, and asks, "Would you?" That opens a conversation about suicide, depression, the pressures of school, and even the desire to hurt people, and ends with a walk to the counseling office. The lesson: it's better to let someone tell their story than to let it end. If someone you know asks a question like that, take it seriously, listen, and connect them with real help.

### Sitting with someone's pain

In another story, a man stops a stranger on the sidewalk and asks for his opinion. The stranger says the best advice he ever got was never to buy a dog with your significant other, then breaks down crying. The man simply waits, and afterward realizes what he actually wants when he's in that place: not for anyone to say anything, but for someone to sit next to him, waiting, holding, letting the devastation be enough.

---

## Practices from a Coach (from a conversation behind this project)

These come from a conversation with a coach Six trusts. They are practices for staying human when things get intense, in relationships, in performing, and in learning.

- **Get grounded first.** When the response to your call is not the one you expected, notice that you're not grounded and get grounded again before you do anything else. Some people feel too intellectual, some frantic, some distracted, some focused. Whatever it is, name the place you're going away from and come back home.
- **Ask something more basic than a metaphor.** Six pictured the question as "who's driving?" The coach suggested going more basic: who am I being right now, and how am I interpreting this? A car already implies a destination, a right speed, and a wrong speed. You'll always be doing it from somewhere, so notice from where.
- **The croissant that tastes like kidney pie.** If someone hands you what looks exactly like a croissant and it tastes like kidney pie, you don't jump to "threat." You look for where the kidney is, you consider that you might be having a strange reaction yourself, and you stay oriented to it as food. When you press a chord and get a totally different sound back, relax enough to see if there's a flavor here to dance with. It's a call and response, not a gun.
- **Threat is a knee-jerk program.** Ask what it can actually do to you. Sometimes the answer is: nothing. Someone might tell the community you said something crazy. That has happened a million times.
- **When the fetters come off and there's no Armageddon, there's usually elation.** Like riding your first twenty-footer. Look for that giddiness.
- **A reset word.** Six uses a private reset word ("avocado") to stop mid-reaction. Say it, then look at everything happening in you (aroused, terrified, all of it). Usually you find: nothing happened, it was just a dance, and the way you showed up, you kind of enjoyed.
- **The warden, not the prisoner.** When someone close to you does something crazy, by the rules of the game they've been hijacked. They're signaling, as best they can, that they're being held prisoner by their programming. You can beat the shit out of them like everyone else does, or you can say: my partner is signaling me that they're being held hostage, and I need to deal with the warden instead of them. Then you can stay kind, or offer them a candy or an ice cream sundae. It flips the whole thing on its head. Beating on the prisoner only reinforces the warp.
- **Progress is logarithmic, not flat.** It is slow up front, then it compounds, until a big trigger resets you to zero or even negative. If you say something mean, you'll spend half a paycheck showing you understand what an asshole you were. That's the way it goes. Then begin again.
- **Read for tasting notes, not details.** When reading a novel, don't ask how they dotted the i's. Ask what the music sounds like, how they built the narrative, and how it feels to hear it. Like going to a dance: what do you notice about it?
- **Use AI inside your own competence.** AI can help artists at a certain level become far better at that level and add insane nuance. If you use AI to reach a level you're not competent at, it starts being AI's work, not yours. The goal of the site is exactly that: type one word ("What am I curious about? Bears."), press enter, and see what happens.

---

### Ways to Start With an AI Chat

1. Help me discover what I'm actually curious about regarding [any topic] by exploring my surface curiosities, hidden curiosities (questions I'm not "allowed" to ask), and secret curiosities (what I'm curious about but haven't admitted).
2. I want to practice the "hat store" approach to [subject/idea]. Help me try on different perspectives about this topic like hats: seeing how they fit, feel, and look on me before deciding what to keep.
3. Guide me through the seven ways of connecting to curiosity with [topic]: coddiwompling (moving purposefully toward a vague destination), storytelling (putting experience into narrative), playing (trying something with no stake in the outcome), creating (making something new out of what I'm curious about), capturing (noticing and holding onto something before it passes), leveraging (using learning to pry open something new), and adjusting (responding to what's actually happening).
4. Help me practice "learning as loss" with [subject]: what certainties might I need to surrender to genuinely understand this? What am I holding onto that's preventing deeper curiosity?
5. What if everything I think I know about [topic] is just inherited belief rather than direct experience? Help me examine my assumptions and find what I actually know vs. what I've been told.
6. I want to question fundamental assumptions about [topic]. What if we started from completely different premises? What new possibilities might emerge?
7. What questions am I not allowed to ask about [area of life/learning]? Help me explore these forbidden territories with the safety of intellectual experimentation.
8. I'm facing [situation] that feels like a dilemma rather than a problem. Help me navigate this using curiosity as my compass rather than trying to solve it conventionally.
9. Help me practice "staying in the trouble" with [complex issue]: how can I sit with uncertainty and let understanding emerge rather than forcing conclusions?
10. Help me explore my relationship to [subject] at different proximities: above (reading about it), near (practicing alongside), enveloped (immersed experience), and within (embodying/becoming).
11. I want to fall in love with learning about [topic] rather than just acquiring information. How can this subject help me become more alive?
12. Apply the Curious Cat exercise to [subject]: help me generate all 36 combinations of a question word (who, what, where, when, why, how) with an action word (observe, play, hunt, adjust, storytell, coddiwomple) and explore it from every angle.
13. What would [field/subject] look like if it had been designed after AI instead of before? Help me reimagine it completely.
14. When a response surprises me, help me get grounded first, then ask what the surprise is trying to tell me before I decide whether it's a threat.
15. Structure our conversation using the disruptive wisdom described in this document: challenge my conventional thinking while honoring my curiosity.

### The Curiosity-Centered Learning Prompt (a "Hat Store" Approach to Any Subject)

Swap in a subject wherever you see [YOUR SUBJECT].

**Phase 1: Curiosity Archaeology.** Help me discover what I'm actually curious about regarding [YOUR SUBJECT] by exploring: surface curiosities (what I think I want to know), hidden curiosities (questions I'm not "allowed" to ask), secret curiosities (what I'm curious about but haven't admitted), and a proximity check, above, near, enveloped, or within.

**Phase 2: The Seven Ways of Connecting.** Design something for each: coddiwompling, storytelling, playing, creating, capturing, leveraging, and adjusting. What would each look like applied to [YOUR SUBJECT]?

**Phase 3: The Curious Cat Exercise.** Pair a question word (who, what, where, when, why, how) with an action word (observe, play, create, adjust, storytell, coddiwomple). Generate a handful of combinations that spark real curiosity about [YOUR SUBJECT], for example, "How do I observe [YOUR SUBJECT]?" or "Why do I wander purposefully through [YOUR SUBJECT]?"

**Phase 4: Anti-Traditional Learning Design.** Instead of confusion, clarity through vibrant inquiry. Instead of performance pressure, equality of curiosity. Instead of indifference, passionate engagement. Instead of dependency, intellectual sovereignty. Instead of external validation, connection to inherent worth.

**Phase 5: Beautiful Disasters and Iteration.** Productive failures: how can I "fail beautifully" while learning [YOUR SUBJECT]? Iteration cycles: how can I use the reset button to sharpen my understanding? Question evolution: how might my questions about [YOUR SUBJECT] change over time?

**Phase 6: Creating Sacred Space.** What physical, emotional, intellectual, and deeper-purpose space would support me exploring [YOUR SUBJECT]?

**Instead of a test, ask:** What am I curious about today regarding [YOUR SUBJECT]? Which ideas am I trying on, and which am I setting back down? How is my relationship to [YOUR SUBJECT] evolving? What new questions are emerging?

**The ultimate question:** How can studying [YOUR SUBJECT] help me fall more in love with being human?

### Six Ways People Connect to Curiosity (the archetypes)

Not rigid categories, hats to try on. You might lead with one and borrow from the others.

- **The Artist**: reimagines what's possible, questions assumptions, creates new realities. *Try:* "What assumptions about this are we making that might be completely wrong?"
- **The Observer**: finds wisdom in patient, non-judgmental watching. Holds multiple perspectives at once. *Try:* "Show me this from several completely different angles, without taking a stance."
- **The Seeker**: hunts for a specific answer with focused intensity, values precision and depth. *Try:* "Start with the fundamentals and help me understand this completely."
- **The Storyteller**: makes meaning through narrative, connects seemingly unrelated ideas. *Try:* "Help me find the hidden story that connects this to something else I care about."
- **The Strategist**: treats learning like elegant system design, iterates and tests relentlessly. *Try:* "Help me map the variables here, then stress-test my current approach."
- **The Traveler**: coddiwompling through ideas, follows energy over logic, stays in the trouble. *Try:* "Start here and wander with me toward something unexpected."

### The Etiquette of a Curio

A Curio is a hat store for ideas, a space where you can try on perspectives, discard what doesn't fit, and find new ways of being without the pressure of forced certainty or performance.

Its etiquette borrows from Hawaiian surfing culture, which treats certain waters as holding real cultural and spiritual weight. Translated to learning:

- **Respect the locals.** Whoever has been sitting with an idea longer than you has earned some patience from you.
- **Basic priority.** Don't drop in on someone else's question. Don't rush someone else's answer.
- **Show respect.** Learn the history of the idea you're borrowing. Acknowledge where it came from.
- **Know your limits.** Don't wade into water (or a conversation) deeper than you can currently handle. Ask for help when you need it.

Questions are hats to try on, not weapons to wield. Ideas belong to no one and everyone. Learning is loss, the grief that comes with genuine insight is worth honoring, not rushing past. The reset button is sacred. Companionship beats competition, we're all walking each other home.

One Curriculum, Different Proximities

Season One is Within.
Season Two is Near.

Season One is me, alone, learning a skill that terrified me. As close to Within as this framework gets. I didn't just study the fear of the stage. I became someone who does it anyway.

Season Two moves the same exact methodology to Near: two friends leveraging Loop Learning together, live, in a human-to-human relationship, so you can watch what this looks like when it isn't just one person alone in a room.

The adult books over there are learning companions too, the same way Kitty Cat is. A way to keep practicing the lesson after the lights come up. I know that sounds funny. I'm dead serious.

See Championship Season 2

The ChampionshipGame.

The reasonfor continuing.

This whole pageis my Curio.

What this seasonwas actually for.

Not a test.Evidence.

Six activities.Same as I did them.

Get curious,on purpose.

Season One is Within.Season Two is Near.