What I learned in 2024

Hi,

For those less familiar, I try to do an annual post on what I learned each year. (Previously), (Previous-er-ly, because I skipped writing this in 2023 for personal reasons.) Honestly, I write these more for one purpose of this newsletter — hacking the concept of a diary for my extraverted brain, by writing in public — than for your elucidation, so not all of this might resonate for you, dear reader. That’s okay.

So here are some things I learned last year.

So It Turns Out A Man Learned Some More Lessons

1. “We're all capable of the most incredible change. We can evolve, while still staying true to who we are. We can honor who we've been and choose who we want to be next.” — The Doctor

2. Sometimes, you look back at your old rules for yourself, the truly big ones that felt so essential and binding and built into the walls of your life and say, “Wait, what the actual fuck.”

3. I have been exceedingly bad at identifying others’ emotional bids.

4. You’re allowed to ask for things.

5. So am I.

6. For someone who has been very successful in careers where you’re supposed to be agentic, I’m not sure that I have been very agentic until recently in most aspects of my life. Sometimes, I feel like I lived a decade of my life as a pro athlete that got admitted to the greatest game at the peak of his career, and proceeded to stare at the stands instead of play the game. I’m trying to change that, and I feel pretty good about the results over the past year, but still can do a lot more there.

7. All the good excuses I had for not being at Inbox Zero whenever possible were bullshit. You should probably be at Inbox Zero. (Note that Inbox Zero doesn’t mean that you don’t have anything unresponded to. It just means you KNOW what you have to respond to, and have sorted them into the appropriate boxes).

8. I grew up in a house where having people over was extremely rare, like, “fewer times than the number of fingers I have on my hands across my entire childhood” rare. I was never sure if this was because my parents were very private people, or some other reason. And even in adulthood, I didn’t really have the spoons to be agentic about planning events, causing too much of the burden to fall onto others in my life. As a result, learning how to host others often and easily has been a big change for me this year, one that has brought me great joy.

   1. I should host more Shabbat dinners.

   2. You should also host more shabbat dinners.

   3. If you are not Jewish, you might now be wondering: should I host more Shabbat dinners? No. You should attend my Shabbat dinners. Bring a bottle of wine.

   4. Okay, fine, you can host your own Friday night dinners too, just, like… don’t steal the name. Dude.

9. Somewhere along the way, I got slightly more religious, and America got a lot less religious, and now I’m more religious than the average American, but still far less religious than we culturally sort of pretend the average American is. This causes a lot of confusion.

   1. This is doubly true if you work in the field of “trying to convince people not build a silicon Lovecraftian god,” while almost every politician you’re trying to convince is at least officially a theist, and almost everyone you work with is an atheist. (Note that some of these atheists, too, host lovely Shabbat dinners.)

10. Sometimes, you lose a big fight, really hard. And then you have to dust yourself off. It doesn’t mean that you didn’t mourn the loss.

11. “Iomedae is the Lawful Good goddess of triage and tradeoffs.” — lintamande

12. “There are a lot of things I want and can't have. The problem is really that we've been too successful. One gets out of the habit of living with failure." — The Archmage Cotonnet

13. “If you understand one thing about the world, understand that a collection of very smart, extremely well resourced people can be making absolutely terrible decisions, and know that while they are making them, and that state can continue for years on end.” — Patrick McKenzie

14. The AI policy world is incredibly open to new people who show up and try to write something of value, or hell, even just say useful things out loud at late-night conversations in Berkeley. (They don’t realize how special this is.)

15. If you think about cooking more about the food you have and the flavors you want, and less about the recipes you observe, the happier you’ll be:

16. Braising is an underrated next step for kitchen exploration for folks who’ve gotten good at stir frys.

    1. LLMs are now actually good at suggesting recipes based on the ingredients you tell them you want to use.

17. One odd thing about dating apps is that they teach you what kinds of American events we take photos at, and which ones we don’t. Plausibly hundreds of thousands of children are far downstream of the decision by early fishing contest promoters to invite the local newspaper’s photographer.

    1. Pro-natalists should therefore choose to take orders of magnitude more photos for people, and do not. You should be unable to walk past a pro-natalist without them offering you a free staged “candid” photo session for your dating profile.

    2. You can infer many facts about our world and how people are taught to solve problems generally from the fact that they don’t, and it appears never to have occurred to them.

18. Sometimes, G-d gives you a cat.

    

    
    

19. Canonical tier ranking of major bars visited:

    1. Super

       1. Connaught Bar (London) exceptional experience, earns its reputation; stand at one of the few tops adjoining the service bar if you can

       2. Friends and Family (Oakland) retained at Super tier

    2. A grade

       1. Groucho Club (London) private members only, but go if you can get a member to bring you

       2. ABV (San Francisco) downgrade, previously Super tier

       3. The American Bar at the Savoy Hotel (London) for Corpse Reviver #2 only

       4. Silver Lyan (DC) retained at A tier

    3. B grade

       1. Death & Co (DC) I so very want to give this an A, but something’s always just less that the sum of its parts when I go here

       2. Binge Bar (DC) the non-alcoholic cocktail concept is excellent, but the service is hit or miss

       3. Side Hustle at the NoMad (London) excellent high-volume bar

       4. The Mirror (DC) good classics, great vibes, go before it gets too popular

    4. C grade

       1. Palette 22 (DC) perfectly respectable, but nothing special

       2. Pop Fizz (DC) bar good bubbles selection but otherwise unremarkable

    5. D grade

       1. Bermondsey Arts Club (London) wildly overrated, terrible service, unbalanced drinks

       2. Code Red (DC) trash

20. “We had a rough start. But we’ve decided to pick ourselves up, and get back to work.” — For All Mankind

Put it in a playlist?

Dave, all of this seems great, but can you (once again) boil it down into metrics that friends and strangers bet on with fake internet money?

Disclosures:

Views are my own and do not represent those of current or former clients, employers, friends, or Mozzarella the cat.