Go Flip Yourself.

Author Alvin Toffler once wrote:

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.

I stumbled upon this quote while reading The Learning Game by Ms Fab. Oh boy does this apply to AI. Since we entered a world of constant change, adapting becomes mandatory. And if you'd need to adapt, unlearning might be the most important skill to master.

AI is reshuffling everything we knew. We have to unlearn and relearn. This is scary. This is hard. But if we approach this with the right mindset, this is also the most exciting adventure of them all. Make no mistake, on the other side, there'll be the 'superpowered' and the 'illiterate' so, it might worth the investment (in time, energy, bandwidth). Be curious, tinker and play.

Even though I haven't finished The Learning Game yet, I can't recommend it enough. Below is Ana herself talking about it. And if you're a parent wondering what does it mean to educate our kids at the dawn of this new millenium. Well, join newkid.ai and let's explore together.

👧👦 My other half -Mathilde- is launching her own project: a podcast + newsletter exploring the intersection of ‘parenthood x education x AI’ — I can’t reco. enough, it’s called: NewKid and here's the announcement: I am launching 'NewKid'.

Talking about education: Let's only teach what's worth knowing. And what if we have it all backwards?

Should this 👇 be the new education? The Age of Agency.

From childhood education to spirituality to interpersonal relationships, it’s critical that we learn how to instill and cultivate agency at every level. The systems we build and the choices we make today will determine whether technology serves to enhance our humanity or diminish it.

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Is it cheating? 😊 Nah. Action to be resumed as soon as... next week.

🔌 I haven’t met Sean yet but I’m a huge fan of his work and can’t recommend enough this interview of him by Edmond: Sean Thielen-Esparza and the analog revival. It's very thoughtful and I can assure you many nuggets of wisdom inside. For instance:

The objects you wear—whether wired earphones or AirPods—say something about the tribes you belong to, the belief systems you hold, and how you identify with a group.

🧠 Yep, Sean again — this time on memory: Unbundling memory. This resonates a ton. Also because yes, it relates to my work with Objet.

Constraints incentivize care.

With productivity tools, there’s always a trade-off. In this case, as we delegate more of our memory-making behaviors to technology, we risk weakening our sense of perception & judgment.

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Happy new year to y'all 🥂 Special thoughts to our LA friends. If you'd like to help, here's a list of places.

If I had to wrap my 2025's intentions into one word only, it'll be 'change'. Only 2 weeks in, and 'change' I went through already. Which might be a good sign.

Physically speaking, I changed flats. I haven't moved as far as I wished initially -across Ocean literally- cause I'm still in the same city in France, Lyon. I just traded one river banks for another. But still, I changed neighborhood, the view -and from the 6th floor you can see way further- and all our habits accordingly. The kids love it: we're closer to their school so they can jump on their own bikes and go there while I follow them on my board -which is quite cool I've to admit- we're closer to their friends so yesterday for instance -classic Wednesday afternoon- we were able to join some of them nearby and play for a few hours between the skatepark and the soccer pitch. The neighborhood being recent, I truly appreciate the urbanism itself: 10x more infrastructure for people, no cars, bike lanes and just tons of space to hang out outside. Mathilde loves the flat cause it's smaller too. I concede 100m2 is big enough for a family of 4 so we didn't need more.

So that's how we kicked off the new year: moving stuff around. We spent 3 years in the previous flat, which is surprisingly long according to our own standards (we moved 18 times across 4 continents in the past 15 years). I truly appreciated the move itself. It took us a few days but we did it entirely alone Mathilde and I; filling up a family car gently lent by our parents and performing 11 back and forth between both flats in total. I think moving is good for your mental health, and sanity. It's also the best way to avoid too much clutter. Next time, we cross the Atlantic Ocean.

👩‍🎓 We need a Cambrian explosion in education. Period. I felt it as a kid, then student. I’m more convinced than ever now as a parent. Latham shared “some ideas on how we could experiment our way forward in education”: What will it take to revitalize education?

We used to believe in education. We believed education would pull people out of poverty, free them from ignorance, and help them flourish. We believed education was more than simply training for a job; it was the moral and ethical development that our children deserved. At one time, we even thought education was the foundation for our republic.

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I kept the laptop away last week. The kids stayed with their grand-parents while my other half and I moved flats. We’re closer to the school, closer to friends, closer to the train station and still enjoy an incredible view on one of Lyon’s river. It’s pretty cool (at least before moving across ocean) 😊 Happy new year everyone 🥂

☀️ I’ve been ‘touched’ by this ‘sufi parable’ — thanks a ton for sharing Waqas:

We thought that heaven is a place where we are supposed to go, perhaps it was a state of mind we were supposed to achieve.

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☕️ I enjoy reading Franco every week. His words are full of wisdom. When he asked me to answer a few questions, it was an instant ‘yes’ (more like a ‘hell yeah, with pleasure’). He asked great questions. He made me think about my current feelings, the biggest lessons I learnt from my parents, or happiness as a whole. He’s obviously too kind with me but his words made me happy. So thank you 🙏 Kev's interview.

Kev is like a DJ who picks the right kind of music, articles, ideas, and cool stuff with such unique tastes and styles. I am like a fan who can just relax and follow the tones he plays within the audience. I guess the French have that special touch on whatever they do.

👩‍🎓 Capitalism is the beast that eats them all. Or how Stefan is reminding us how ‘being aspirational’ is the biggest driving force of any behavior. Why did Slavoj Zizek write copy for A&F in 2003?

The 2003 ‘Back to School’ catalogue came when Abercrombie were at their all-time aspirational Americana high. Logos were cool. Cars were cool. Sex was cool. Even some politicians were cool. Just so long as they were having sex. And it was then that Abercrombie reached out to the sexiest philosopher on this side of cable television to write their ads for them.

☄️ Last week I’ve spent times with 2 great-grand-mothers -which is definitely something quite special. But it always makes me sad when I hear them being so pessimistic about the current state of the world. They were born in France right at the beginning of WW2 -one of them from a Polish -jewish- mother!- one of them looked her then boyfriend be enrolled for the war in Algeria -they were only 20- they went through the whole Cold War and so on. But nope, when you ask them, the world hasn’t been as bad as… now. Adam digs into this phenomenon. The end is nigh and here's why.

That can explain why things always seem bad and why things always seem like they’re getting worse. Which is exactly what we see in the data: every year, people say that humans just aren’t as kind as they used to be, and every year they rate human kindness exactly the same as they did last year.

If I’m right, people’s colorful theories of the End Times come second. What comes first is the conviction that the world’s problems are brand-spanking-new. And that conviction is stunningly consistent across time.

“Happiness is all gone,” says the Prophecy of Neferty, an Egyptian papyrus from roughly 4000 years ago. “Kindness has vanished and rudeness has descended upon everyone,” agrees Dialogue of a Man with His Spirit, written at around the same time. “It is not like last year […] There is no person free from wrong, and everyone alike is doing it,” says the appropriately-named Complaints of Khakheperraseneb from several hundred years later. And some unknown amount of time after that, the Admonitions of Ipuwer reports that actually things just started going to hell. “All is ruin! Indeed, laughter is perished and no longer made.” Worst of all: “Everyone’s hair has fallen out.”

I haven't heard the 'work hard, play hard' motto for a while. I remember hearing it all the time back in the early 2010s. The 'work hard play hard' mentality seems to be a relics of the hustle culture. I've no idea where it came from initially but our kids started to watch the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles TV show from 1987 and while I was re-discovering the intro -and esp. Michelangelo's line- I wondered: was it a first inception of the 'work hard, play hard' lifestyle? Or in their case: 'save the world, play hard'.