Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here. -- Sue Monk Kidd

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.

"I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news." — John Muir

i believe in re-reading and re-watching your favourite books & movies at different stages of your life. the plot never changes, but your perspective does.

Let be clear: The best way to learn AI is NOT a course. It is building something real, pick a problem. Pick a tool. Ship something. You will learn more in 90 days of building than a year of reading.

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Meet @Arsenal's BIGGEST supporter! 🔴⚪️ The iconic Emirates A380 has been wrapped in red to celebrate the Premier League champions. ✈️🏆

LIFT IT UP ©️

Your aura is beautiful because your heart is pure.

What you really want is a challenge at the edge of your capability.

today we're launching Incognito Chat with Meta AI, a new way to have completely private conversations with AI. built on top of our Private Processing technology, Incognito Chat lets you talk to Meta AI in a way that is invisible to anyone else. when you start an Incognito Chat with Meta AI, you're creating a private, temporary conversation that only you can see. your messages are processed in a secure environment that even Meta cannot access. your conversations are not saved and, by default, your messages disappear. this sets a new industry standard for privacy when having sensitive conversations with AI.

This belongs to all of us.

The Arsenal. Your Premier League champions.

Happy Friday! We've reset everyone's 5-hour and weekly rate limits.

One day your parents will need you the same way you once needed them. Do not be too busy to notice when that day finally arrives.

Novelist Louis L’Amour on how to find time to read: “Often I hear people say they do not have time to read. That’s absolute nonsense. In the one year during which I kept that kind of record, I read twenty-five books while waiting for people. In offices, applying for jobs, waiting to see a dentist, waiting in a restaurant for friends, many such places. I read on buses, trains, and planes. If one really wants to learn, one has to decide what is important. Spending an evening on the town? Attending a ball game? Or learning something that can be with you your life long?”

Hot take: Social media should work like a library. It should open at 8am and close at 8pm. That would fix brainrot, the loneliness epidemic, and the dating crisis.

The purpose of art was once not to shock or transgress, but to elevate the soul.

Gotta eat pasta in italy, croissant in paris, burger in united states, sushi in japan, tacos in mexico, shawarma in lebanon, paella in spain, poutine in canada, kimchi in south korea, curry in india, pho in vietnam, fondue in switzerland and fish & chips in united kingdom.

“The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.” — René Descartes