Liz Mills

My brother William is nothing short of Houdini when it comes to getting out of things he doesn't want to do.

Literally no excuse or strategy is beneath him, and I'm really ashamed to say I've often been his accomplice.

Nearly 15 years ago, he called me from his college door room and told me he was totally screwed for a research paper the next day.

And so me, his ghostwriter since high school, assessed the situation, and there was no way I could write 15 pages on the Ottoman Empire by the next morning.

And so I said, William, looks like you're gonna have to say our grandmother died.

And he was like, Liz, I did that at midterms.

And so I joked, how about grandpa?

And he said, I did that one too.

Suffice to say, even Houdini runs out of tricks at a certain point, and William certainly did.

He failed the paper.

But the good news is, when it comes to the higher stakes stuff, William always rises to the occasion.

About six years ago, he and I were on a bus on the way to Mountain View, and the driver lost control of it, hit the media, and we flipped.

And out of nowhere, William turned into a real-life Clark Kent.

He was saving the day, running around, helping people up, bandaging people up.

He was making us laugh in the middle of the dark highway when it was pretty scary.

He was our brightness.

So it probably comes as no surprise that a thrill-seeker like William ended up in an unconventional path.

About a decade ago, he became a skydiver, and then a skydiving instructor, and then a base jumper, which means he's spent over 10 years climbing up mountains and jumping off epic peaks with only a parachute on his back.

Pretty insane, but kind of cool.

And so despite the fact that I'm epically less epic than him, I still am always his get-out-of-jail-free,