Also in this issue:
Oscars fashion
Versace’s future
Last week, I spent four days at the Web Summit Qatar, the Middle East edition of the world’s largest tech conference. More than 25,000 people gathered at Doha’s convention center for the trade show and talks. The line-up of speakers was mighty impressive. Among them: the actor Will Smith, whose assignment, I believe, was to give a motivational talk; former US Secretary of Treasury Steve Mnuchin, to explain his former boss President Trump’s trade policy; 28-year-old Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang—yes, no e after the d—on the future of AI; my former Washington Post colleague and best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell on the power of audio story telling, i.e. podcasts; Paramount’s International Markets head Pam Kaufman on how legendary movie studio’s parent company is going to pull itself out of its current financial malaise—then answer is theme parks; Mozilla CEO Laura Chambers, who talked about AI checks and balances.
Here is a round up of what some of them had to say. (I’ll run the rest next week). The excerpts have been edited for clarity:
Will Smith, who was in conversation with On Purpose podcast host Jay Shetty, and the biggest draw of the conference:
Shetty: You’ve dominated music TV, film. How did you manage to shift between three of the biggest mediums on planet Earth and do it so seamlessly and successfully?
Smith: It’s terrifying to start a business, to leave a job, to start something else. You’ll never be rid of fear, right? So learn how to relax into fear, and lean into the unknown, and not need to be perfect. Not need to have a five-year and a 10-year plan. You couldn’t possibly know what’s going to happen, right? Lean into the fear, be scared, and do it.
Shetty: What was your definition of success when you started? And what’s your definition today?
Smith: Well, my original definition of success was women liking me. [Laughs.] I wanted to be number one in what I was doing, and I was willing to suffer whatever I had to suffer to win. But it was insatiable. What I discovered is there’s nothing above seeing something you’ve created, seeing something you’ve done, help another person. There's nothing above when someone walks up to me on the street, and says, ‘Hey, I was, I was really close to the end, and I saw The Pursuit of Happyness, and it really helped me to keep going. So thank you for that.’ What you do serves others is a huge fuel, and the only thing that keeps me going.
Steve Mnuchin, in conversation with Washington-based political journalist Steve Clemons:
Clemons: Donald Trump seems to want to put tariffs on just about every entity out there.
Mnuchin: President Trump really likes tariffs and uses them as an important source of revenues. And one of the things I’ve talked about is this concept of a universal tariff. If you put a 10 percent tariff on everybody, that would raise about two-and-a-half-trillion dollars over a 10-year period. So a very significant impact. Those proceeds could be used to pay down debt or to fund tax cuts.
Clemons: Please explain to me how that doesn’t immediately tick up inflation across a lot of products that Americans buy.
