Ben Henry

A lover of Film and the Natural World

[Ben Henry @Ben_Bang]

My parents worked hard their whole life for us and in the end it paid off with not one but two attorneys-at-law for children. That’s success

[Miles @mtvsthewrld_]

Bro please look at Shaq & Chuck the whole time

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

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.

[Bulvar Medya @Bulvarpress]

Eşiyle son zamanlarda büyük tartışmalar yaşayan ünlü goril Kiyomasa’nın derin düşüncelere daldığı anlar sosyal medyada beğeni topladı.

[The Telfar Terrorist #TheOnesWhoLive @ColtsKatana]

The definition of the term woke has been so bastardized. Nobody even realizes what it means anymore. adding a black person somewhere there wasn’t before is not woke. It’s not even close. Stop letting white people change the definition of things just because they can’t figure out or understand the correct one.

[Rafael Hernández @RafaelH117]

A World Cup in China would be incredible.

[Barry Malone @malonebarry]

Strangely, I haven't seen the op-eds and pearl clutching from the Western media about the U.S. hosting the World Cup that I did when Qatar hosted it.

[Leyla Hamed @leylahamed]

Did any white teams get treated like this, or is this treatment reserved for Senegal? Bizarre

[Daily Mail @DailyMail]

World Cup referee - Africa's best - is denied entry to United States and sent back after landing at Miami Airport, despite having a diplomatic passport https://t.co/2JPP5NpJpT

[Uncle Chu @datchuguyy]

“If you take Arsenal women football out of the total numbers, you’re looking at double digits decline in attendance. Arsenal women accounts for 41% of the attendance in the Women Super League, there is a huge decline in attendance“

Charlie Stebbings (Sports Analyst)

[. @hitaboutit2]

Sportswashing + playing 500 minutes a year has bums talking reckless on GOATs of the sport

[Ben Henry @Ben_Bang]

@miikey11_ That’s poor on your part . The man is 42 ffs

[CJ Johnson @cjjohnsonjr]

How to Make it in America was such a good show. Great take!

[Ben Henry @Ben_Bang]

@afcjxmes Carragher was the pundit who brought xg metrics to sky. I realized I saw him reading the book and then it was suddenly included on the programme.

Rated him since then

[GN 🇬🇭 @_Greazemoden]

Maybe he went to another London cause it can’t be the London that I live in loool

[🏆 @w6rtz]

barca move ruined it for him omg back in my day he used to be shit in private

[promise #SolSociety @vespreken]

Havertz being the best German international of his generation really goes under the radar because they casuals don’t rate him

[Yasha Levine @yashalevine]

Middle class Americans, steeped in the ideology of individualism, have been psyopped into thinking that anyone can be anything. And so you get articles like this — utter shock that someone who makes films comes from money.

[CapexAndChill @CapexAndChill]

Chief AI Officer Alex Wang is subtly confirming that $META's previous AI paradigm failed, and they are executing a strategic shift to close their ecosystem, capture personal data, and build a regulatory moat.

For the last few years, Meta’s entire strategy was to open-source frontier-level models like Llama 2 and 3 to commoditize the foundational layer. Now that Meta is building highly lucrative Personal Agents, they are keeping their best tech proprietary.

[Killa 🌺 @KillaKreww]

Sharon Stone gets emotional talking about the moment her marriage ended after her husband got FURIOUS over her decision to have a double mastectomy and breast removal due to a breast tumor instead of focusing on her health 😳��👀

“He was furious. And the doctor said to him, ‘If I had more patients like her, we’d have more women alive today. You need to sit down.I said, ‘I make the decisions, not you.’ That was the end of the marriage.”