<![CDATA[Stories by Sam Weston on Medium]]> https://medium.com/@sam-weston?source=rss-1d87c6625fde------2 https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/fit/c/150/150/1*rQnJmTNCHvFjCdFUzLcyug.jpeg Stories by Sam Weston on Medium https://medium.com/@sam-weston?source=rss-1d87c6625fde------2 Medium Sat, 14 Nov 2026 06:48:01 GMT <![CDATA[23 Faves]]> https://sam-weston.medium.com/23-faves-6e4c31a5d709?source=rss-1d87c6625fde------2 https://medium.com/p/6e4c31a5d709 Mon, 08 Jan 2024 18:59:17 GMT 2024-01-08T18:59:17.132Z 2023 is finally over which means it’s time for my annual stocktake of things I enjoyed throughout the year. If you’re new here, the standard disclaimer applies: I started doing this in 2020 after being inspired by a Robert Krulwich Radiolab episode. It’s not a ‘best of’ list, it’s simply a way of keeping track of what I chose to spend the most time with, what stuck with me or influenced my thinking, and what I recommend to others. As an added bonus if you read far enough down you’ll also get a few thoughts on the year and what’s ahead.

If you end up liking this and want more, you can find previous years here: 2020, 2021, 2022. Thanks for reading.

TV, Film, Video

  • The Last of Us (HBO) — I had very high hopes for this video game adaptation going into the year; fortunately, it exceeded all of them. Episode 3 was probably the best hour of television I saw all year.
  • The Bear, Season 2 (FX) — It took a beat for this season to warm up but, good god, once it hit its stride. Episodes 6, 7, and the final were all particularly outstanding, with 7 (Forks) being my favorite.
  • Succession, Season 4 (HBO) — After loving the 2 pre-pandemic seasons I was pretty underwhelmed by Season 3: Greg-maxing fan service (“strong enough… for a man”) serving as the major crime. Thankfully this season course-corrected significantly. I did find The Tom Turn a bit jarring — while the decision to pull the plug early deserves applause, his abrupt character evolution felt like a tell they didn’t start out knowing where they wanted to end up. All in all, though, a satisfying ending and in a show full of unparalleled dialog, I think “Nothing happens in New York that doesn’t happen everywhere else” was my favorite line across all four seasons.
  • Slow Horses S3 (Apple TV) — Continued to be fun in its third season without getting too ridiculous. Short episode seasons leave you wanting more.
  • Only Murders in the Building, Season 3 (Hulu) — As a former Upper West Side dweller this show hits right from the main theme. I thought the shtick might wear out three seasons in, but just the right amount of new characters, new contexts, and self-awareness kept things from getting old. Coochie-coochie-coochie-coo.
  • Bluey (ABC) — Yes it’s an Australian kids show about a family of cattle dogs helpfully imprinting antipodean culture on my American children. It’s also a nuanced source of parenting inspiration that demonstrates how anything (7-minute episodes of a publicly funded TV children’s show in this case) can be a platform for excellence in craft and creativity if you try hard enough.
  • Jury Duty (Amazon Prime) — Did not know what to expect going in besides the obvious (it’s a reality TV show about a jury) and laughed the whole way through.
  • Yellow Jackets (Showtime) — Binged both seasons after hearing people rave for years. Strong Lost vibes with everything that entails. Season 2 was weaker than 1, but 1 was good enough to still have me looking forward to the third.
  • World Cup Sports (ESPN and Peacock) — This year was crazy for World Cup competitions in both cricket and rugby. And while watching the All Blacks lose to South Africa in the Rugby World Cup final was not the ideal way to celebrate my birthday, watching them beat Ireland in the quarter-final was, frankly, better than winning the title.
  • The Killer — Way more style than substance — but great on style and what’s a movie but a short story set to music these days anyway?
  • The Covenant — I watched this Gyllenhaal / Guy Ritchie collaboration on a plane expecting a dumb action film. Got all the dumb action I wanted but plenty more as well.
  • Barbie — Would I rewatch this? Probably not. Am I better for having seen it? I think so.
  • Useful Charts — A YouTube channel from a guy named Matt Baker who uses charts and data visualization to explore history and religion (and sometimes more contemporary/pop culture topics as well).
  • David Does Crosswords — My brother-in-law started this channel this year as an ASMR-y take on daily NYT crossword solves and it has become a regular presence in our living room. Just as highly recommended for non-relatives as well.
  • The Deal Guy — From his trademark open to his weird parking lot taste tests and undecipherable categorization methodology (if anyone knows the rationale behind how he groups his recommendations please let me know), this guy’s monthly ‘What to buy at Costco’ episodes are keenly anticipated in my household.

A bunch of things that were good enough that I watched all or most of them or thought were notable: Black Mirror S6 (good, actually) Fleishman is in Trouble, Foundation S2, The Crown S6, The Other Two S3 (a bit sad), A Murder at the End of the World (probably better as a YA novel), Extrapolations (overcooked), Eat the Menu (too much, but watching the Cheesecake Factory episodes as a three-episode run and nothing else is chef’s kiss).

Didn’t get to watch but excited to check out: Mrs Davis, Perry Mason S2, Drops of God, The Curse, Dumb Money, and The Holdovers.

Music

This year I found myself going deeper into the catalogs of artists I’d fallen for in recent years but never explored properly. Chief here was John Craigie, whose Opening for Steinbeck album was on a loop all year long. Lucero also got a fair amount of play. Honorable mentions also to Dessa, Corb Lund, The Beths, Little Simz, Boygenius, and Alex Lahey.

I made a list of the tracks I liked the most this year, as well as quarterly editions for Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4.

Books

  • The Culture Series, Iain M Banks: I went deep on this series this year and feel like I could spend my whole life in here. Banks finished 10 separate novels set in ‘The Culture’ — a civilization governed by super-intelligent ship Minds — before his untimely death in 2013. Apparently quite popular with he who shall not be named, I wish this series (and other imagined futures from sci-fi authors generally) was way more present in today’s discussions about AI as a vision to work backward from. Each book is independent of the others and the series can be read in any order, although fans have thoughts on the best way to do it.
  • Ghost on the Throne: The Death of Alexander the Great and the Bloody Fight for his Empire, James S Romm: I continued to feed my interest in Alexander with this exploration into what happened immediately following his death. Better than anything in Game of Thrones and would make amazing source material for a prestige TV drama if anyone’s out there taking suggestions.
  • The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma, Mustafa Suleyman: More to come on AI below of course, but in a year where things accelerated faster than ever, this book is as good an overview of the key debates, ideas, risks, and opportunities as any. Does include some gratuitous axe-grinding and whining (complaining about technology pessimists, point-scoring on superintelligence concerns, etc) but not enough to undermine the overall value of the book. Touches a bit on biotech as well, which has not received as much attention as it should amidst all the AI hype this year.
  • The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Rubin: There’s probably an argument to be made that Rubin’s interviews (this one with Tyler Cowen as an example as well as his own podcast) are as good if not better than the book itself, but at a time where it feels like human creativity is on the verge of being made redundant, it’s hard not to feel inspired by Rubin’s approach to work and life.
  • A World Without Work: Technology, Automation and How We Should Respond, Daniel Susskind: I picked this up when it was published in 2020 and decided to reread it in the context of this year’s advances in AI. Even more relevant and not any less disconcerting today than when it first came out.

Podcasts

Podcasts have become the principal way I stay engaged in what’s happening in the fields I care about. Below are the shows I listened to the most this year, as well as some of the episodes I found most interesting.

Shows:

Favorite Episodes:

Writing

Threads

Websites, apps, and tools

Products

Recipes

Year in Review, Thoughts on the Future

Toward the end of last year, I took on significantly more responsibility at work. It’s given me a unique and privileged vantage point from which to try to make sense of how the world is changing. It’s also occupied more of my mental, physical, and emotional capacity this year than any other. As a result, I’ve had less time to think expansively about the future than in previous years. But perhaps that doesn’t matter that much as this was the year the future I’ve been thinking about for a while started to turn into the present.

On the communications front, the most interesting thing to happen this year was downstream of the decision by Sam Altman and OpenAI to release ChatGPT 3 in late 2022 to the public to show people what AI was now capable of. This spurred a level of regulatory attention and civic engagement in 2023 that moved debate about everything that matters forward significantly and which would have otherwise come far too late to be useful. In an industry lacking in its own meaningful technical innovation, this kind of bold, action-based approach to comms has been the only development I’ve been excited to talk about this year. (Intelligent comms agents and the automated information revolution that is around the corner will change that soon, however.)

I suppose it’s also important to underscore the continued fragmentation between the perception of influence (influence with aging elites) and actual influence (influence with scaled audiences). One of the best things about working in Media is the cold hard reality of audience that we deal in every day. For me, this has reinforced the continental drift-sized divergence between what many people think matters and what actually matters at scale. Yes feeds and realities are more individuated than ever, but massive cultural moments and shared experiences now happen every day with highly informed people being completely unaware of their existence. I think in time this will create inverted Mandela Effects — memetic reference chains that will be obvious to millions but existed in parallel timelines to millions more and never existed at all for many people who are highly engaged in traditional information and culture ecosystems. Perhaps, after a brief period in which we thought we all plugged into the same reality — through broadcast TV, broadsheet news, and one or two primary newsfeeds — this is just a reversion to our historical norm. The more things change the more they stay the same, etc, etc.

The volume of information we are all asked to process now though is overwhelming — and that goes for both low-quality and high-quality information. The amount of opinion and analysis on almost any topic is more than one person could hope to digest — and that’s before LLMs accelerate the production of information even further. This unmanageable deluge has reinforced Aaron Shapiro’s commodification framework in how I now think about most things comms and marketing-related, from information production and consumption to broader marketing and business strategy.

But as mentioned, what really mattered this year were the significant advances in AI and the reaction and public engagement with those advances. This has been both surreal and exciting to watch, from the leap forward in capabilities themselves to the new applications in biology and material science, as well as the attempts at formal and self-regulation.

What else happened this year? Much of AI ethics was replaced by AI safety considerations, and then of course AI safety became its own battlefront in the EA vs E/acc wars. I’ve given a fair amount of thought to these issues in my spare time over the last six to seven years and on balance I’m encouraged by the number of people at the labs doing the most to advance AI who are giving way more than lip service to the issues. Will it be enough? I don’t know — but the state of the discussion is light-years ahead of where it used to be. And while I’m personally sympathetic to concerns about having one shot to align AI or risking lights out for humanity, I think we will have to get comfortable with a) humans ultimately not being in control and b) AI systems using a system of governance similar to our own to manage debate and complexity rather than deliver the perfect answer every time.

Ultimately I think it’s useful to conceive of humanity as a single self-managing global organism. Our world is full of pain, uncertainty, and injustice as people crash into each other’s interests and competing value systems. We mediate that chaos every day through debates, fights, the application of established systems and frameworks, and then the evolution of those systems and frameworks. I think the same will end up being true for how intelligent systems learn and evolve and negotiate with themselves — getting it right after getting it wrong, the same way we have for millennia.

Of course, we have a closing window for figuring out how to ensure people remain in an advantaged position given these developments and despite the engagement of politicians in the regulation of AI this year, the level of leadership and vision on the issue remain next to non-existent relative to what’s required. Absolutely everything can and should be re-evaluated through the lens of what AI can and should make possible to enhance the human experience. Where political vision is lacking, however, imagination in fiction is rich and I hope in the coming months we’ll see more attempts to index and extrapolate positive and constructive visions for the future from the decades of science fiction we have to guide us.

What comes next? I think in the immediate future, the best metaphor is probably the internet itself. We have been operating alongside a messy proto-superintelligence ever since we decided to daisy chain our little human brains together to form the global consciousness that is today’s social web. What happens next with AI will of course happen faster and be far more consequential, but I suspect the dynamics inherent in the internet era will likely be similar, at least at the outset of the AI era: things will get even faster (sped by automation and the elimination of manual human computer interaction and decision making) and be even more disruptive to economic and social institutions and norms. The same race that defined initial digital adaptation — large companies attempting to digitize their businesses before they could be properly disrupted by digitally endemic challengers — will now play out between fully digitized companies and new AI-endemic challengers. New services may well make existing businesses obsolete overnight but I think the biggest change will be the diminishment of humans in the economy overall: Business-2-Business commerce will become Bot-2-Bot as intelligent systems buy and sell from other intelligent systems and grow without needing people to run them. Business-2-Consumer commerce will become Bot-2-Bot-2-Consumer as people rely on intelligent systems to buy from intelligent systems on their behalf. Agents and dashboards will become foundational to how people manage their interaction with the intelligent world.

And what does all this mean for people? I do think we have some hard years ahead of us, but the opportunities are also enormous. For me, three tweets from three different people at OpenAI set it all out:

With the right leadership and vision, I’d like to think we can raise people’s expectations, exponentially improve quality of life for everyone, and — I hope — eventually remove labor from the human experience. Along the way we may have to come to terms with the realization that while human intelligence got to where we are now, being smart may not ultimately be what makes us special. This is a very difficult idea for people like myself who have built identities around being perceived as smart to get their brains around however, and I suspect we’re going to learn it slowly and painfully.

Before I end this post, I do want to make note of a couple of personal highlights for the year. I traveled more this year, including trips to Amsterdam, London, Cannes, and twice now to New Zealand. In February I somewhat miraculously made the last flight into Auckland before Cyclone Gabrielle demolished the east coast of the country to attend my grandmother’s funeral. And in December, my wife and I were able to bring our 2-year-old out to meet my family for the first time and I was also able to spend my first Christmas at home in 20 years. We also took my now 14-year-old twins to New Jersey and New York over the Thanksgiving break on our first full family trip post-pandemic. It was a really special time and re-confirmed for me that as wonderful as kids are when they’re children, your relationship with them as teens and adults can become even more special and meaningful.

Also, as I’m writing this note from a beach in New Zealand, I can’t finish it without commenting on things here. In another example of inspirational leadership at the start of the year, Jacinda Ardern stepped down as Prime Minister, ostensibly because she’d exhausted the energy necessary to run for re-election. I suspect also to give her party the best possible shot at winning re-election given the state of her favorability at the time. While it wasn’t enough, ultimately, to get the win, it was good to see her go out on her own terms and, hopefully, establish a precedent that will allow others to act similarly when their own time comes. New Zealand finds itself grappling with the kind of trying times that you’d expect a country of five million people to find themselves in at the moment amid a changing and challenged global economy and house wealth-driven inflation. My hope for home is that we’ll apply the same kind of bravery and boldness that has shaped our cultural history to shaping our future as well. Companies like RocketLab are demonstrating what it’s possible for Kiwis to achieve when we apply our irreverence for the possible and expected to solve our own problems and create our own opportunities. Technology companies routinely use New Zealand as a test market for their own new products and experiments, and I hope we’ll apply those same lessons to ourselves: this should be the little country that does big things first, and then scales them to the rest of the world.

Well, that’s it for 2023 version of this note. If this post is anything to go by, I expect the amount of change we’ll see in 2024 will be even more significant and that’s before we get to the 60+ different countries going to the polls over the next 12 months. I’ve not made any significant resolutions this year beyond the standard health and financial promises I make to myself every year, but given everything I’ve just written, this seems like a good one: less time spent trying to know everything myself and more time spent using the incredible new technologies now available to us to make more things for myself and others, while figuring out what it means to be human in an intelligent world.

That said, however, I wouldn’t mind learning why Orcas are (finally) attacking people. Maybe now that we can talk to whales they can tell us — although I’m not sure we’re going to love the answer when it comes.

]]> <![CDATA[2020 Faves]]> https://sam-weston.medium.com/2020-faves-1ad206d265fd?source=rss-1d87c6625fde------2 https://medium.com/p/1ad206d265fd Sun, 03 Jan 2021 15:25:43 GMT 2021-01-03T21:01:52.820Z Inspired by Radiolab’s send off to Robert Krulwich (‘The Bobbys’) and a resolution to start using Substack in 2021, this post is a look back at some of the things I enjoyed the most in 2020.

This isn’t a best of list. (That would have required real effort and reflection!) This is just a ‘things that made a big enough impression I was able to remember them at the end of a very, very long year’ list.

Films

  • 1917. I was plenty happy to see Parasite take ‘Best Picture’ at the 2020 Academy Awards but this was it for me.
  • Aniara. This 2019 film makes the list because I didn’t see it until 2020. It was a lot to watch while trapped inside an apartment during a pandemic with no end in sight.
  • Soul. Another relatable Pixar film for, ahem, adults coming to terms with mid-life existential angst and purpose-collapse.

I also enjoyed Tenet, maybe more as a vibe than as a movie. Vivarium was weird but memorable. I love Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman and actually enjoyed WW84, but my inflated hopes for this film based on its predecessor were definitely ruptured by the edit. And finally — while it seems I might be the only person on the internet with this opinion — Kajillionaire was painful.

TV

  • Servant on Apple+ (S1) was probably my favorite show of the entire year and good enough to redeem M. Night Shayamalan for me.
  • Ted Lasso on Apple+ (S1) made me want to be a better, more positive person in 2021.
  • Seduced on Starz — Having watched HBO’s version of the NXIVM cult story (‘The Vow’) first, I found this to be way more powerfully told.
  • Watchmen on HBO was a visually gorgeous, timely, well executed single season riff on Alan Moore’s original characters.
  • Westworld (S3) — While the third season felt a bit weaker than earlier seasons, I still love this show and was grateful to have it back.
  • The Queen’s Gambit: Netflix’s understandable need to prioritize scale over quality has made most of their originals feel a little hollow, or thin to me. The Queen’s Gambit was a good step in a better direction. It was also a show that benefited from being fully realized in seven episodes as opposed to having to become a series.
  • The Social Dilemma: For all the issues with what was essentially long-form content from the folks at the Center for Humane Technology, watching this with our kids was a useful way to precipitate a family conversation about screen addiction, attention, and commercialization.

Honorable mentions to: Tiger King (a documentary film would probably have been a better format), The Mandalorian (fun to watch with the kids and one of the best soundtracks in TV), Devs (still on my list to actually finish at some point), Raised by Wolves (might have been better as a movie?), The Outsider (probably more powerful if binged than watched week-to-week), and Perry Mason (I will see anything Matthew Rhys is in).

Finally, in the probably problematic but played a big role in my pandemic video diet anyway category: Architectural Digest’s Celebrity Home Tours and Bon Appétit’s Test Kitchen videos before everything fell apart.

Games

  • The Last of Us II: This was even more emotionally stressful to play than the original, but singular in its combination of story and gameplay. Definitely the game of the year for me, even if we have to play it in chunks in order to be able to get through it.
  • Ghost of Tsushima: A phenomenal opening sequence, a rewarding world/environment to explore, and about as violent and challenging as you want a samurai game to be. 13 Assassins, as a video game.

Speaking of assassins, I tried my hand at Assassin’s Creed Valhalla during the end of year break but found it to be less fun than Odyssey (great) and Origins (good).

Books

  • Remembrance of Earth’s Past, Cixin Liu: This was one of the most engrossing, exciting things I’ve read in years. The first book in the series — The Three Body Problem — is the most well known, but after finishing it I read the two sequels and the excellent, fan-made addendum immediately. Netflix turning this into a show led by Game of Thrones interpreters David Benioff and D. B. Weiss is probably the thing I’m most looking forward to in all media.
  • What You Do Is Who You Are, Ben Horowitz: Half the value of this book is in the title, but in a world where everyone is trying to figure out what culture means, this was a good read.
  • The Outlaw Ocean, Ian Urbina: This book is a good reminder for those of us who fear the world is fully explored that that 71% of the earth’s surface is actually a lawless, ungoverned expanse where terror and adventure still take place on a daily basis.

Music

  • The Drive By Truckers: The New Okay — coming out shortly before the election, this album really hit the spot for me.
  • Angelica Garcia: Cha Cha Palace — It Don’t Hinder Me is incredible
  • Run the Jewels: RTJ4 — stellar all the way through, but JU$T has been my most-played track of the year.
  • Perfume Genius: Set My Heart on Fire Immediately.
  • Steve Earle: Ghosts of West Virginia. Black Lung is my favorite track.
  • The Beths: Jump Rope Gazers. Hearing NZ rock on American radio will never not make me happy.
  • Kathleen Edwards: Total Freedom. Special shoutout to Options Open.
  • Lucinda Williams: Good Souls Better Angels.
  • TOOL: Fear Inoculum. 17 year old me would be disappointed if I didn’t include this although 17 year old me would be surprised and disappointed by how little time I actually gave it this year.

Special mentions to: BOTH Taylor Swift albums, Erika Wennerstrom’s Be Good To Yourself as a self care anthem, and Hiroshi Yoshimura who I first heard this year.

Podcasts

Special mention to: Reply All’s episode ‘The Case of the Missing Hit’ — podcast perfection.

Articles, op-eds, talks, papers

Websites and platforms

  • Kottke and The Pudding are still two of the greatest sites on the internet
  • ESPN+ doesn’t get the attention it deserves and allowed me to watch all of New Zealand’s rugby and cricket games for ~$6 a month.
  • Google Shopping has gotten better and better and was very useful in helping me buy a lot of products I’d never had to think about before this year.

Recipes

Moments

This year was full of terrible moments, but highlights included:

  • Being with (all of) my family to watch the new decade roll in in New Zealand.
  • Designing, building, moving into, slowly furnishing, and beginning to pay for our first house, which also reminds me how lucky I am every day.
  • A professionally awarded year like none other, with Agency of The Year recognition for Essence from Campaign Magazine, Ad Age, and AdExchanger.
  • A summer that provoked deep and protracted existential reflection on my biases and privileges.
  • Turning 40 which continued the deep and protracted existential reflection.
  • Election week, where sanity mostly prevailed, despite odds I still struggle to understand, and which delivered both the greatest advance story in political memory and unsung heroes.

Observations

These aren’t favorites — or even predictions — but given this post comes at the start of a new year, I thought I’d share a few of the things I’m most interested to watch develop in the months ahead:

  • Continued globalization of culture and entertainment led by Netflix’s internationalization which could be hugely positive for the world over time. (More).
  • China’s efforts to normalize its culture and values through entertainment and technology — possibly accelerated by platforms like TikTok and investments in genres like science fiction which help to create visions of global, China-inclusive futures — going up against efforts by western political elites to make China public enemy #1 — and at a time in which we urgently need to find global solutions to global problems.
  • Given the U.S.’s apparent defenselessness against conventional cyber warfare, perhaps the question is moot — America’s best defense is continuing economic relevance — but: what happens when someone really cracks quantum computing?
  • What will be unlocked by the application of AI to bioscience/engineering and who will the winners be, both in the marketplace and society?
  • Finally, how will the application of machine learning to argument and information change the way we disseminate and interpret communications, both as companies and as individuals? In 2020 we began to reckon with the potential implications of things like GPT3 and I am becoming increasingly convinced that raw information streams are dangerous places for humans to be, unprotected. The prospect of bots being used to A/B test arguments on humans until the most persuasive is found regardless of truth, fact, or reality is both terrifying — if it happens unseen and unopposed — and exciting — when done transparently to find consensus through supervised debate. The need for platforms to distinguish between humans and bots on their services has been obvious and urgent for years. Rather than relying on checkmarks as a prestige play to capture influencer engagement, maybe we’ll see platforms verify all humans (or at least all bots) in the months ahead.

That’s it. We have less than ten years to create a future sustainable and inclusive enough for everyone. Let’s hope we make substantial inroads this year.

]]> <![CDATA[Five lessons at 40]]> https://sam-weston.medium.com/five-lessons-at-40-941a4aab0a9b?source=rss-1d87c6625fde------2 https://medium.com/p/941a4aab0a9b Wed, 28 Oct 2020 22:56:05 GMT 2022-12-19T16:08:49.978Z I imagine most people who lose a parent at a young age to a disease - as I lost my father to cancer when he was 44 and I was 18 - have a certain amount of trepidation about milestones like 40.

However, as today that milestone is upon me and no 40th birthday can be properly marked without some sort of reckoning with your accomplishments and experiences, here are five things I’ve learned over the previous four decades:

Move regularly and you’ll live an interesting life. Although I miss it dearly, I left New Zealand when I was 22 for the United States. I left DC for New York when I was 26. I left New York for Minneapolis when I was 36. Moving has forced me to change industries and introduced me to people, ideas, and perspectives I would have never had if I’d stayed in one place. This is true for life and for careers: take on something that scares you, work hard at it until you can enjoy being good at it, then abandon it for something that scares you again.

Don’t live for your deathbed. While I’m a believer in making decisions that future me will be happy about one day, I don’t believe in basing life choices on how I might feel about them at whatever point death closes in. The experience of reflecting on life from the end of it — for those of us lucky enough to be able to do so — is just a fraction of our total time spent on earth. There is no passing or failing grade before oblivion. Life should be enjoyed while we have it. Most bad choices along the way can be fixed by making good ones afterwards. Better a lifetime of happiness than a brief period of self-satisfaction before the darkness.

Life is a search for prestige. Once you realize that everyone is propelled through life by the need to feel respected and admired it becomes much easier to make sense of human behavior. Some people crave mass adulation. Others just want the respect of a single individual. The circumstances are always complicated but the rule seems both simple and universal. Why else would I be writing this post?

Doing > saying. Sometimes saying the thing that needs to be said is indeed the bold, brave action that needs to be taken. Ever since the internet arrived, however, the world has had a lot more words in it — and not nearly enough of the change we want. Words are powerful influences on people but they do not change things by themselves. Raised awareness was not enough to stop the catastrophic climate change that now appears inevitable. Eloquent speeches from the Senate floor could not prevent Republicans from trampling on norms. Fundamentally, calls for change are an expression of hope that someone else will come along to fix our problems, rather than an acceptance of the ultimate responsibility we all share for doing so ourselves.

Ends, not means. Many people’s lives appear to revolve around winning arguments. Without sustained effort to find and vocalize shared ends capable of bridging differing perspectives, we have become mired in arguments about means. In 2020, we have the resources and technology to collectively reimagine the world and create better futures for everyone. We seem to lack the ability to even imagine what a future everyone would want to live in might look like. In life and in politics, keeping the big stuff the big stuff and the small stuff small is critical to our ability to make things better.

]]> <![CDATA[It’s time to make technology a political issue.]]> https://sam-weston.medium.com/its-time-to-make-technology-a-political-issue-7bfea8c77859?source=rss-1d87c6625fde------2 https://medium.com/p/7bfea8c77859 Fri, 19 Jan 2018 17:28:27 GMT 2018-01-19T17:35:23.728Z Note: This is an op-ed I drafted but never published during the 2016 US presidential primaries. It makes the case that both parties would benefit from becoming ‘the technology party’ and that technology should be addressed during the upcoming presidential debates.

In 2013, thousands of Americans denied health insurance visited healthcare.gov excited to finally receive coverage. Instead, they were greeted with error pages and four-hour wait times. The fallout crippled the launch of the president’s most important domestic policy initiative and sparked nationwide attention to the critical nature of technology in achieving policy goals. Three years later, despite the central role of technology in American life and public hunger for new approaches to old problems, the potential for technology to transform government has been completely absent from the presidential campaign.

From smartphones to social media, consider how technology has changed your life in the past eight years. Yet, the changes produced by data, automation, and countless new technologies promise to reshape the economy in ways that make tweets and iPhones seem quaint.

Because technology will thread itself through every policy decision facing the next president, candidates in this election should be expected to demonstrate competence in technological issues. The recent debate over unlocking the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone clearly illustrates that national security policy would benefit from a thorough public debate over privacy and the relationship between government and Silicon Valley. But why stop there? Technology offers the chance to reevaluate every political issue made stale by decades of unchanging arguments repeated thoughtlessly by ideological warriors. What does “soft power” mean in the age of the internet? What do driverless cars mean for infrastructure spending? Can we reform education without addressing access to broadband?

With more than 45 hours spent debating between candidates in both parties, technology issues have received almost no airtime with the exception of questions about Hillary Clinton’s email server (not, mind you, whether the IT system she sought to avoid is too antiquated to be useful in today’s communications environment). The boldest technology proposal so far has in fact come from Donald Trump, whose suggestion that we shut down parts of the Internet to stop ISIS arguably shows the most creativity in using technology to achieve policy goals.

Consider instead a campaign in which candidates use technology to inspire the imaginations of the American public and evolve the way we think about issues. Republicans, who need ideas that don’t alienate every emerging demographic group in the country, could put forward a plan to dramatically modernize government, while reducing its size and inefficiency. Democrats could set out a technology agenda that makes government more effective and responsive, while also increasing efficiency and transparency. Both parties would do well to consider a policy agenda that prepares America for the massive job loss that will come with the automation of jobs across all levels of the workforce over the next quarter century.

Over the last decade, digital technologies have forced America’s largest companies to fundamentally rethink how they operate. The companies that have best adapted are the ones whose executives are themselves personally invested in understanding and harnessing technology. The same is true in government. With confidence in institutions at record lows, the next president has nothing to lose in pushing for a technology revolution that will redefine how our government works. It’s not enough to have campaign managers who understand how to leverage data to help win office. The next president must believe in using technology to reshape America and achieve their policy goals.

As the parties settle on the candidates to lead them into the next election, we’d like to see them address a fundamental question: how will they use technology to transform the relationship between government and its citizens over the next four years? To help the moderators of the upcoming presidential debates facilitate this discussion, here are some questions all candidates should be prepared to answer:

  1. On American leadership: From Amazon and Apple to Facebook and Google, the companies shaping the future were created in the US. What will your administration do to ensure the US remains the best place to create the technologies and industries of the future?
  2. On regulation: Innovation often comes at the expense of established companies and industries. As president, will your priority be regulation that supports innovation or regulation that protects companies from disintermediation?
  3. On artificial intelligence: Stephen Hawking recently expressed caution about pursuing artificial intelligence, while Elon Musk equated it to “unleashing the demon.” Do you think advances in AI pose a potential security threat to this country and if so, what will you do about it?
  4. On IT security: Last June, hackers working for the Chinese government were able to steal the personal information of more than 4 million federal employees. Given that security experts have warned cyber attacks could cripple our economy and jeopardize our security, what will you do to protect America’s IT infrastructure?
  5. On jobs: Recently, economists have speculated over the impact that robotics and machine learning will have on the need for human labor in many of today’s blue collar and white collar professions. What will you do to protect or retrain people whose jobs are displaced by increasingly technology?
  6. On biotech: One of the most exciting fields of technology is biotechnology, which promises everything from allowing us to modify human DNA to extending life spans. What is the role of the United States government when it comes to supporting, regulating, and policing biotechnology?
  7. On privacy: In what circumstances do you believe the government should be able to access the personal electronic information of United States citizens?
  8. On government modernization: What will you do to create a digitally savvy government that is as tech savvy as the rest of the US economy? How will you attract the best and brightest from silicon valley and beyond to work in the US government?
  9. On education: Much of today’s education is focused on preparing kids for the jobs of the 20th century. What will you do to make sure that our education system is teaching the next generation of Americans the skills they will need for the next generation of jobs?
]]> <![CDATA[Two Weeks in Thailand.]]> https://sam-weston.medium.com/two-weeks-in-thailand-777b078a5a1d?source=rss-1d87c6625fde------2 https://medium.com/p/777b078a5a1d Mon, 11 Sep 2017 00:41:45 GMT 2019-01-04T18:08:15.964Z
Water hyacinths compete for space with barges and longtail boats on Bangkok’s Chao Phraya river in this shot from the Peninsula Hotel river ferry

In May 2017 I got married and — like half of the world’s newlyweds — went to Thailand on a Honeymoon. We wanted to combine bourgeoise Bourdainy food tourism and Honeymoony do-nothing-on-a-beachism into two weeks that would wipe away six months of prewedding diet and exercise.

Our itinerary was the product of advice offered by everyone from dentists and chefs to US Trade reps. Friends, friends of friends, and acquaintances of friends all weighed in with helpful advice on where to stay and what to do (thanks again, everyone!) Deciding what to make time for was overwhelming, so I thought others might benefit from our experience.

Here’s how we broke it up.

Flying in Thailand is cheap, fast, and safe (we flew Thai Airways, but there are a lot of options). It’s easy to cover a lot of ground in the country by flying from city to city, so if you’re making a first trip there’s no need to limit yourself to one city or region.

Given this, we decided to split our trip into four parts:

  • Bangkok (2 nights)
  • Chiang Mai (3 nights)
  • Southern Thailand (5 nights)
  • Bangkok (2 more nights)

Two Nights in Bangkok.

Chess had it right: one night in Bangkok and the world’s your oyster. Many people skip Thailand’s capital and head straight for the countryside of Chiang Mai or Phuket’s beaches, but you should spend real time here. It’s a city that offers endless opportunity to create your own adventures. If you’re lucky enough to be visiting with a strong currency in your wallet and you’re willing to live like a local, your money will take you a long way. Throw in bottomless noodle combinations, a window into the Chinese-led future, and a communal entrepreneurialism that makes American cities feel dull by comparison and we left wondering what it would be like to live there.

We landed in Bangkok in the middle of a workweek afternoon and were faced with our first decision of consequence. The MRT train system and taxis take about the same amount of time to get into the city, but the train will set you back about $2 US while a cab costs closer to thirty.

Everyone told us to make room in our budget to stay at The Mandarin Oriental. We didn’t — opting to stay at the Le Meridien Bangkok (terrific) and The Peninsula (okay) instead. We discovered that this was a mistake at the end of the trip when we visited the Oriental for afternoon tea (a must, just go with it), and left determined to stay at some point in the future.

Tuk tuks hired by Bangkok Food Tours will take you on an eating tour of the city.

The first thing we did in Bangkok is probably the real reason I fell in love with the city so quickly. Bangkok Food Tours offers a range of group and private eating tours of the city and we took the Midnight Tour by Tuk Tuk (about $60 a person), which was a great way to insert ourselves into a new time zone and get in front of some fantastic food.

Ann Guay Tiew Kua Gai, Bangkok.

Stops included “Ann” Guay Tiew Kua Gai, where we discovered a bowl of noodles so good we went back a second time, the Flower Market on Tri Phet Road and the nearby night markets, Wat Pho, and a rooftop bar overlooking the river. At Ann Guay, our guide took us behind the restaurant to visit the kitchen before we sat for bowls of roast chicken with egg noodles (ask for the version with the runny egg and make use of the Tupperware containers of chilies and condiments that sit on every table).

Ann Guay Tiew Kua Gai, Bangkok.
The Flower Market on Tri Phet Road, Bangkok
Street vendors sell everything from fruits and vegetables to dumplings and insects

We started the next day on the river. Co Van Kessel offers long and short tours of the city by longtail boat and by bike. The two hour tour of the river and canals leaves from the River City Shopping Center and provides a great perspective on the city at around $40pp.

Monitor lizards (R) make regular appearances in and alongside Bangkok’s canals.
Inside Wat Paknam Bhasicharoen

In addition to weaving our way through the canals that serve as backstreets to much of Bangkok, our guide took us to two temples. Thailand’s temples are beautiful and worth making time for. The three we visited as part of these two tours (Wat Pho, Wat Khun Chan, and Wat Paknam Bhasicharoen) did the trick for us.

Not visited this trip, but recommended by everyone: The Jim Thompson House. We also chose not to visit any of the floating markets as most require a full day (and an early start) but the trip to Amphawa Floating Market by train on the Mae Klong line was the most tempting.

That evening we ventured into Chinatown to hunt down Tang Jai Yoo, where the goal was to recreate the meal featured in Anthony Bourdain’s first No Reservations trip to Thailand.

The suckling pig is the star here (and while gluttonous overkill for two people: zero regrets), but everything we ate was the best version of itself I’ve ever had. We ordered the stir fried vegetables with garlic, the Tom Yam Kung (Tom Yum) soup, and, unnecessarily, rice. The pig is eaten in two steps: first they bring it out with the skin scored into strips of crackling to be rolled into a crepe with hoisin sauce, green onion, and cucumber; when you’re done they cut the carcass into pieces and fry it with garlic.

The following morning we grabbed breakfast at On Lok Yun (recommended in Where Chefs Eat), a two story Thai cafe serving a ‘traditional’ Thai breakfast (sausages, eggs, toast soaked in butter and sugar, and Milo). On Lok Yun is situated at the intersection of Charoen Krung Road and Burapha Road, where the overwhelming number of firearms displayed in storefront windows create a kind of Bangkok gun alley.

With breakfast out of the way we cabbed our way to the airport and headed for Chiang Mai.

Chowing down in Chiang Mai.

I’ll admit that this was the leg of the tour I was most excited about solely because Pok Pok founder Andy Ricker credits the city with so much influence on his cooking. Thankfully our marriage was strong enough to sustain the weight of two distinct goals for Northern Thailand: eat at as many of Andy’s favorite restaurants as possible and get as close to as many baby elephants as possible. To accomplish both these things we stayed at the De Naga Chiang Mai, which was affordable and centrally located but not amazing.

Ricker’s interviews with the NY Times and Afar.com formed the backbone of our eating assignments, especially SP Chicken (get here early in the day as they often sell out of chicken by mid afternoon) and Krua Phech Doi Ngam, which was our favorite restaurant we visited in the area (we ordered the yam samun phrai salad, jin hoom soup, sausage, and roast chicken). We ate noodles at Yok Far, drank too much at The Writer’s Club and sought out Khao Soi Lam Duan Fah Ham which was closed when we arrived at 8pm. Also unvisited but on the list for next time: boat noodles at Kuaytiaw Tii Noi and Kuay Tiew Reur Rang Sit Go-Heng

SP Chicken, Chiang Mai
Krua Phech Doi Ngam, Chiang Mai
Yok Far, Chiang Mai

Being in Chiang Mai during the school week we twice found ourselves swarmed by children as school let out and kids rushed to their favorite street vendors and climbed onto the handlebars of their parents’ scooters. The city has a vibrancy that comes from the combination of young families and international backpackers uninterested in growing up.

Elephant Nature Park was universally commended to us as “the place for Elephants in Chiang Mai.” ENP is a reserve for retired and rescued elephants from throughout the region. The park features a strict no riding policy and a somewhat intense orientation program in elephant suffering which creates an at first begrudging and eventually wholehearted appreciation for said no riding policy. We enlisted in the half day tour, which was more than enough time to see, walk alongside, and gingerly approach elephants of a wide variety of ages and infirmities.

While most hotels provide transportation for their guests, it was in Chiang Mai — where you’re less likely to stumble into a tuk tuk at every corner — that we discovered Grab, Southeast Asia’s excellent and possibly even superior version of Uber. This service came in handy throughout our trip and was safe and easy to use even given an interface in Thai and my innate inflexibility with new languages.

Mae Hia Fresh Market, Chiang Mai

The cornerstone of our last day in Chiang Mai was a cooking class put on by Pantawan Cooking, one of dozens offered in the area. Pantawan is run out of a family home by a brother and sister team who lead alternating classes through the local Mae Hia market, collecting and learning about the ingredients for a different menu every day of the week. The class was fun and well taught but eating sausage off the grill at the market and learning about the unique qualities of various Thai vegetables was my favorite part of the experience.

Mae Hia Fresh Market, Chiang Mai

We ended our stay in Chiang Mai with a trip to the night market and bazaar and noodles from one the dozens of vendors tucked into the alleys off of Chang Klan Road. There are no shortage of markets to choose from in Chiang Mai; we visited the largest to the east of the “old city,” which was bustling with tourists, locals, and musicians performing late into a Friday. If you can make the trip west of the city, Ricker’s recommendation is the night market closest to Chiang Mai University.

Chiang Mai’s Night Market and Bazaar

Kicking back in Ko Yao Yai & Kamala.

After a week exploring Bangkok and Chiang Mai the mandate for the second half of our trip was relaxation. Our plan was to fly into Phuket and charter a boat, making our way to Phang Nga Bay, the Phi Phi Islands and Ko Phi Phi, and then Ko Lanta. When a friend told us someone she knew once witnessed a monkey riding a goat down the street at the Santhiya resort on Ko Yao Yai we jettisoned our sailing plans for quality time in an infinity pool.

Santhiya Resort, Ko Yao Yai

Any doubt over that decision vanished on the approach to the resort. Twenty or so minutes by speedboat from Ao Po Grand Marina Pier, Santhiya Ko Yao Yai rises out of the sea like something out of a Bond film, carved into the face of a hillside jungle. We spent the better park of the week there before ferrying our way back to the mainland and a splurge night at Keemala.

Santhiya Resort, Ko Yao Yai
Keemala Resort, Kamala
Keemala Resort, Kamala

Located just inland from Kamala Beach, Keemala is a special resort offering treehouse accommodation in a variety of sizes at nightly rates that would sustain many Thai families for months. We stayed here thanks to an offseason deal on an incredible two room apartment that opened to an infinity pool and spilled out into the treetops and a clear sightline to the sea.

Thailand’s mostly Buddhist population becomes increasingly Muslim as you head south toward Malaysia. This was apparent not just in the noticeable presence of mosques and headscarves but also in the calls to prayer that reverberate through the valley and left me with an appreciation for the power of a ritual that adds structure and meaning to the day for millions of people around the world.

Keemala Resort, Kamala

It’s worth noting at some point in this essay that while Thailand is fun, safe, and welcoming, it’s also a dictatorship hostile to dissent and engaged in a multi-decade arm wrestle between juntas and revolutionaries; yellow shirts and red shirts; the elite and the poor. Further south, Southern Thailand is also the subject of a long guerrilla war between separatists and Thailand’s military and police. While we knew about this conflict before our trip, I’m embarrassed to admit it took several days of airport authoritarianism, ever present monarchal deification, and uniform public politeness to bubble up into an urge to properly explore Thailand’s politics. Taking this perspective into your own trip will make you a more aware traveler and more sensitive guest.

Back to Bangkok.

Making time for two final nights in Bangkok allowed us to check off a few things we wanted to do before heading back to the US, specifically a night of kickboxing, afternoon tea at the Mandarin Oriental, a tattoo, and dinner at Bo.Lan.

Our stay at the Peninsula gave us an amazing view of the city and easy access to and across the river.

View from the Peninsula Hotel, Bangkok

After checking in and revisiting the menu at Ann Guay, we headed northwest by tuk tuk to Rajadamnern Stadium, the MGM Grand for muay thai in Bangkok. We booked ringside tickets in advance ($60 pp), putting us among a small group of tourists who did the same, but regular tickets can be purchased onsite or online for between $30-$45, and the action in the crowd is as exciting as the stuff in the ring.

Rajadamnern Stadium, Bangkok

On our night — a Thursday that could have been any night — sixteen fighters fought eight fights over the course of around four hours. The country music that greeted us as spectators was quietened by the official silence due Thailand’s new, young king (represented in the crowd by a stadium shrine). Then, after a minute, respect gave way to the twisting whine of sarama music as the fighters prepared for their bouts and the rhythmic chang, chang, chang of cymbals clanged through each round. Sinewy fighters representing gyms from around the country circled each other, spraying sweat and icewater across the crowd with each clash. Small groups gathered around grizzly power betters who took up positions in the stadium that gave the coaches and crews in each boxer’s camp full view of their pleasure or displeasure. The whole evening sizzled with spectacle, tradition, and an energy that made it one of the highlights of the entire trip.

Rajadamnern Stadium, Bangkok

We stayed until the last fight was over and then snagged dumplings from one of the vendors that surround the stadium and cabbed our way back home.

Rajadamnern Stadium, Bangkok
Meatballs hang streetside at one of the many vendors along Charoen Krung Road, Bangkok

Our last full day in Bangkok was possibly our fullest full day in Bangkok. We set out in the morning to find Jok Prince, a restaurant on Charoen Krung Road that might be described as a hole in the wall if it had a front door. Jok Prince is famous for its congee — a soupy rice dish served with pork meatballs that wait raw until they are dropped into vats of porridge and served to locals to help them start the day.

With half our party not entirely appetized by the prospect of congee, we ducked down the street and into Prachak Roasted Duck, a generations old restaurant serving up wonton noodle soups and pretty much any duck, pork, or noodle combination you could hope for.

Congee at Jok Prince (L) and Wonton Noodles at Prachak Roasted Duck (R), Bangkok

After crossing the river earlier in the day we came across Common Ground Tattoo, a tattoo studio nestled in one of the many alleys that branch off of Charoen Krung Road. We found an artist to work on a permanent reminder of the city, but the studio itself is beautiful and full of art and prints collected by the artists who visit to tattoo at the studio from across southeast asia.

Common Ground Tattoo, Bangkok

We killed the time spent waiting for the needle with a trip to the Mandarin Oriental for afternoon tea. The Oriental oozes a nostalgia for British colonialism that somehow feels less problematic given the scale of the Chinese tourism empire in which it now rests. We made the mistake of ordering two afternoon teas instead of a single afternoon tea for two people, but as with everything in Thailand — it was an experience worth much more than it cost.

Afternoon tea at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Bangkok

Colonial era revisited, gifts purchased, and ink permanently etched into skin, we Grabbed our way east to our final meal in Bangkok: an omakase style feast at the husband and wife operated Bo.Lan.

Bo.Lan is routinely rated as the best ‘Thai’ restaurant in Bangkok and one of the best in the world. They did not disappoint. The restaurant serves food for the entire table from four seasonally adjusted multi course meals ranging in scope and focus depending on your appetite. If you’re looking for a splurge meal in Thailand, put Bo.Lan at the top of your list and book ahead of time. Not to be missed from the drinks list: the passionfruit caipirinha, which I’ve spent several hours since returning from Thailand trying to recreate.

Dinner and dessert at Bo.Lan, Bangkok

Two weeks in Thailand provided a great reminder of how big the world is, and how much creativity and possibility exists outside of the cities, companies, and circles that dictate our day to day lives. Before visiting Thailand I was curious as to why so many people I know make return visits and now I know. The exchange rate, the food, and the energy everywhere we went left both of us eager to go back and to share our experience with everyone else.

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