Welcome back to the 6th edition of the Roundtable Weekly 👋
Here’s what we have for you this week:
📺 Steve Jobs at WWDC ‘97'
3 min
With Apple’s WWDC conference taking place this past week, thought it’d be fun to re-surface this short video of Steve Jobs at the conference back in 1997. In the video, Jobs fields a question from the audience about an open-source project that Apple killed — two takeaways from me:
First, his response: part of the reason Jobs was a proponent of killing the project, despite its popularity with developers, was because Apple was “going off in 18 different directions” and many of these projects didn’t fit the company’s overall strategy at the time. It’s a good reminder that focus is more about what you say no to, rather than what you say yes to.
Second, if you watched this year’s WWDC keynote, the contrast is funny because present day Apple is moving in a million different directions. Granted, back then Apple didn’t enjoy the market dominant position it does today, but it feels like they’re now encroaching on everyone’s territory, including their own app developers.
Extra: If you don’t want to watch the 2 hour WWDC keynote, here’s Ben Thompson’s summary and take on its implications.
—Thomas
📙 A Project of One’s Own
Paul Graham (@paulg)—June 8 | 8 min
New Paul Graham posts are appointment reading for me, and his latest was one of his best. For those not familiar, Paul Graham is an accomplished computer scientist and a cofounder of the famous startup accelerator, Y Combinator. Graham has an incredibly unique, simple way of writing that’s unlike anything else out there.
This post is about the thrill of working on independent projects, and the reality of adults having fewer and fewer opportunities to focus on these types of projects as they get older. My favorite part was this:
Many kids experience the excitement of working on projects of their own. The hard part is making this converge with the work you do as an adult. And our customs make it harder. We treat "playing" and "hobbies" as qualitatively different from "work". It's not clear to a kid building a treehouse that there's a direct (though long) route from that to architecture or engineering. And instead of pointing out the route, we conceal it, by implicitly treating the stuff kids do as different from real work.
Instead of telling kids that their treehouses could be on the path to the work they do as adults, we tell them the path goes through school. And unfortunately schoolwork tends be very different from working on projects of one's own. It's usually neither a project, nor one's own. So as school gets more serious, working on projects of one's own is something that survives, if at all, as a thin thread off to the side.
It's a bit sad to think of all the high school kids turning their backs on building treehouses and sitting in class dutifully learning about Darwin or Newton to pass some exam, when the work that made Darwin and Newton famous was actually closer in spirit to building treehouses than studying for exams.
—Mike
📚 How America Fractured into Four Parts
George Packer, The Atlantic—June 8 | 45 min
This recent piece is one of the better analyses I’ve read about the country’s current divisions and why we find ourselves at this present state of extreme polarization. It’s a very long but thought-provoking piece and definitely worth your time, if not to just try to understand the other sides depending on where you identify. George makes the case for, and goes through the history of, how we arrived at these 4 distinct “Americas”:
Free America
Smart America
Real America
Just America
It’s hard to do justice to George’s nuanced narrative explanations for each group so I’ll leave you with the following excerpt that concludes his analysis:
All four of the narratives I’ve described emerged from America’s failure to sustain and enlarge the middle-class democracy of the postwar years. They all respond to real problems. Each offers a value that the others need and lacks ones that the others have. Free America celebrates the energy of the unencumbered individual. Smart America respects intelligence and welcomes change. Real America commits itself to a place and has a sense of limits. Just America demands a confrontation with what the others want to avoid. They rise from a single society, and even in one as polarized as ours they continually shape, absorb, and morph into one another. But their tendency is also to divide us, pitting tribe against tribe. These divisions impoverish each narrative into a cramped and ever more extreme version of itself.
All four narratives are also driven by a competition for status that generates fierce anxiety and resentment. They all anoint winners and losers. In Free America, the winners are the makers, and the losers are the takers who want to drag the rest down in perpetual dependency on a smothering government. In Smart America, the winners are the credentialed meritocrats, and the losers are the poorly educated who want to resist inevitable progress. In Real America, the winners are the hardworking folk of the white Christian heartland, and the losers are treacherous elites and contaminating others who want to destroy the country. In Just America, the winners are the marginalized groups, and the losers are the dominant groups that want to go on dominating.
I don’t much want to live in the republic of any of them.
—Thomas
🎧 Ep. 447 - Rep. Liz Cheney
The Axe Files with David Axelrod — June 6 | 47 mins
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
Following Wyoming Republican Representative Liz Cheney’s removal from her House leadership position back in May for openly criticizing both President Trump and the January 6th Capitol rioters, she joined former Obama chief strategist David Axelrod on his podcast. In the episode, Cheney continues to lean into her criticisms of Republican leadership, from comparing Trump’s rhetoric to that of the Chinese Communist Party, to mocking House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s claim that his January visit to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club was because “he happened to be in the neighborhood.”
This was a rare chance to hear two leaders from completely different sides of the aisle have a civil, interesting discussion about the current state of American politics, and left me with a higher opinion of both Cheney and Axelrod. Cheney did not deny having 2024 presidential ambitions, and while it’s difficult to imagine her overcoming a clear split with the majority of Republicans (both leadership & rank-and-file), it will be fascinating to watch her go up against a pool of likely opposition from the Trump wing.
It’s hard to imagine a conversation like this ever taking place in the world before podcasts — five years ago, Cheney’s public comments would’ve been confined to a few uninteresting, buttoned-up appearances on network TV.
Extra: In that same vein ^, I found Ezra Klein’s recent interview with President Obama to be a great listen as well. They go deep on some of the criticisms Obama has faced from within the Democratic party around why he didn’t push things further on issues like healthcare & climate, and there’s some pretty unfiltered back-and-forth.
—Mike
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See you next Sunday.