Each of the 4 ‘BEATLES’ films will be “totally different” and will reflect each member. (Source: thedirect.com/article/the-be…)

As someone who partially grew up among European elite kids like him, this reminds me just how incredibly hollow some of them are. For a quick background, I went to one of the poshest high schools in France (Janson de Sailly, for those who know) and, afterwards, to what was at the time - and probably still is - the most expensive undergraduate school in Europe (EHL in Lausanne, Switzerland). Needless to say, many of my classmates were from unbelievably privileged backgrounds. Just in my classroom in Lausanne I had the son of a (very famous) Russian oligarch, the son of Italy's largest real estate developer and the son of Spain's largest real estate developer (funnily, the latter two were flat mates). Another classmate of mine came from the richest family in Naples, Italy and - while we were at school - his father (known in Naples under the nickname "Il Sultano") got arrested for having bribed half of Naples's city council - which, if you know Naples, ought to tell you something. These were the kids I was doing group projects on business ethics with (literally) 😅 Anyhow, my story, and probably my luck, was that - before going to high school in Paris - I was raised in very normal public schools in the South of France where my friends were anything but wealthy. Their parents were farmers and everyday workers. Which means - and I'd come to realize this was very important in life - that it was easy for me to understand how big a mistake it is to see money as identity and meaning - and to confuse someone's net worth with their actual worth. What really struck me at the time was the contrast with my "poor" classmates of earlier in my life. They couldn't define themselves by what they had - by definition - and this forced them to reach deeper for their identity: their skills, knowledge, humor, etc. Rich kids can skip that entire process, and the tragedy is that most of them do: they reach for the readymade identity that money provides. I remember being incredibly frustrated by many of my classmates, like "ok, I get it, your dad is rich and you own a lot of nice things but who are YOU, what else is there?" The answer, more often than not, was nothing. To be fair, there were exceptions. One of my classmates I was most impressed by came from one of Zurich's wealthiest families (which, if you know Zurich, means insanely wealthy) yet he was almost OCD in not showing he had money: driving the shittiest car imaginable, living in a small studio, etc. He was very intellectual, very contrarian, and clearly at war with the idea that his family's wealth ought to define who he was. I only discovered who he actually was when I started my first company and he approached me to invest: to discuss the investment I went to one of his family homes, which it turned out was a literal palatial castle on the shores of Geneva lake. The guy had decided to live in a small rundown studio when he literally had a castle sitting empty a 5-min drive away. THAT I was impressed by: it's easy to see that money isn't meaning when you don't have any. To see it when you have more than almost anyone - when everyone around you is organized around the opposite assumption - is much harder. But to actually live it, to choose the studio when you have the castle keys in your pockets - with no audience to applaud you for that - that shows real depth. At the end of the day, I think, the real distinction isn't between rich and poor but between people who exist from the inside out and people who exist from the outside in. Wealth just happens to make it incredibly easy to be the latter, to skip the work of becoming someone and settle for a borrowed identity that glitters from the outside but is hollow all the way through. A Potemkin village identity. This is actually a real societal issue, and magnified by social media (with idiotic posts like this one 👇): the more "outside in" folks out there, the less people with genuine internal anchors, the more fragile everything becomes. When you think about it, everything that genuinely matters in a society is built by people who think for themselves: they take the world in, pass it through something genuinely their own, and give back something that didn't exist before: an idea, a conviction, a stand. Every reform, every invention, every act of moral courage in history came from someone with an internal anchor strong enough to resist the current. Remove those people and all you have left is the current. This isn't new, by the way. Most ancient traditions warn against exactly this, from the Bible (the golden calf story) to Confucius, who built his entire ethics around the distinction between the exemplary person (the Junzi, 君子) - oriented around internal cultivation and righteousness - and the petty person (Xiaoren, 小人), oriented around profit and gain. The junzi builds himself from the inside, the xiaoren chases what's outside. So please, do not make the mistake of being impressed by wealthy people flaunting their wealth. Don't focus on the glitter, focus on the hollowness it's trying to hide.

Why is it that people are willing to accept a definite canon of great poets—like, there aren’t rly Milton, Dante, or Shakespeare (yes I’m just counting Shakespeare) haters—but all great novelists get a huge contingent of haters? Not rly any uncontroversial greats

It's incredible how awful some of this 20th century fiction is. It feels like something scribbled without any preparation or thought: Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, Catch-22, Basketball Diaries, On The Road. I despised all this nonsense and resented being forced to read it.

“Look I uh I found something. Something in the store. A place. bu but It uh it shouldn’t be there. But it is. Dontcha see? look I…I know how this this sounds, but It’s uh it’s MAssive in there.”

Hot take on the art director discourse: filmmaking is an industry with "reverse dookie factor." Plumbers can earn very well, because it's a blue collar job involving poop. Filmmaking, OTOH is a "cool" industry. Your colleagues and competitors are willing to make sacrifices

The British Library Weird Fiction series is going to financially ruin me

The "you can't touch me" generation encounters a high T alpha boomer. Older generations were whipped with a belt as kids, they have way less inhibitions about physical aggression. Keep that in mind.

Can anyone tell me why The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was left out of the list of Christian churches?

Are there any movies where MOST of the characters are terrible people?

this is only cool because you can’t read any of the signs. in america this would just be a barrage of MCDONALDS SHELL NORDSTROM 7ELEVEN KFC TARGET ULTA CHIPOTLE MACYS CHEVRON WENDYS CVS TJ MAXX STARBUCKS AMPM OLD NAVY HOBBY LOBBY WALMART SEPHORA ARBYS GAP SINCLAIR TACO BELL KOHLS