On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
There is a fantastic video on YouTube where Steve Jobs is delivering his commencement speech to the graduates of Stanford University in 2005. He mainly takes about being fired from Apple and all about life and death. In the video Steve tells the audience three stories. The first one is about connecting the dots. Where he says that no matter what happens in life there is always a purpose and it is only after you go through much in your life that you can later look back and connect the dots. There will always be a connection for your benefit. His notable quote during the first story is 'You have to believe in something your gut, destiny, life karma, whatever. The second one is about love and loss. Steve says he is found love in what he wanted to do but lost when he was kicked out of Apple. The only way to do great work is to love what you do. The third story is about death, 'Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Listening to him will leave you wondering whether you are listening to a modern day mystic or the Chief Executive of a 21st century Tech company.
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