Dear Friends,
Greetings from Guadalajara, a city that packs a lot of A’s into one name, as Wilco’s
observed on his Substack. It was an arduous journey from San Diego to Guadalajara during which I fell into a four-day winter funk. Sadness is a funny thing. We all experience it, and yet it’s impossible to climb into someone else’s head to know 1) what it feels like for them, 2) what prompted it, and 3) how they got over it. Fortunately, I did get over it — just in time for a laughter-filled Christmas celebration with Iris’ family.
This time, the sadness felt kinda good — like a turtle tucking into its shell for a week-long hibernation. Still, I knew I needed to do the work to snap out of it: get some exercise, journal, meditate, talk to friends. And sure enough, the tools, they work. Anyway, perhaps I’ll write more about the sadness in a future newsletter if I can figure out how to make it relatable and useful.
But for now, I’ve returned to my usual, enthusiastic self … so if you’re willing to spend ten minutes with me today, I’ll revisit my predictions from 2023 and share ten things that have me excited about 2024.
Last year, I made 12 sorta-predictions about 2023. I got them mostly right, methinks, so I’ll focus on what I got wrong. For instance, I wrote:
I have no idea where the economy will go from here. I can just as easily imagine the next decade of stagflation or a massive stock market rally fueled by productivity gains from AI & CRISPR. A lot of money will be made and lost depending on which way the economy goes. I’ll hedge my bets.
I wish I hadn’t hedged my bets quite so much. I put $50,000 into a 5% savings account. After taking 3% inflation into account, it made me $1,000. Had I put that money into the stock market instead, which rallied nearly 25% this year, I would have made an inflation-adjusted $11,500 — enough to pay our rent in Oaxaca for at least 6 months.1
Even further off the mark, I wrote, “I would also bet on Bitcoin losing most of its current value.” Yikes. I’m sure glad I didn’t! (If I had put my $50,000 into Bitcoin instead of a savings account, it would today be worth $111,000. 🙈 The cruelest irony of the FTX implosion is that Sam Bankman-Fried is likely to spend at least a decade in jail while his customers, once fearful of losing their money, could end up making money.)
I predicted the decline of Twitter and Facebook, and the rise of TikTok. I got two out of three right. Twitter has indeed lost active users and TikTok continues to grow despite being banned in a growing number of countries, including India, Nepal, Afghanistan, Senegal, and Somalia. Still, Facebook continued its growth by copying TikTok’s features and launching Threads, a Twitter copycat. It’ll be fascinating and frightful to see how social media evolves in 2024, a year in which a record-breaking 40-plus countries, representing more than 40% of the world’s population are due to hold national elections. (Including, of course, Mexico and the US.) 😬
I tried to manifest that “we just may be on the path back toward political sanity,” which seemed right until Hamas launched a gruesome attack on Israel, followed by Israel’s disproportionate retaliation in Gaza, and we once again reverted to our baser instincts and succumbed to the temptation of righteousness: passive-aggressive purity tests, us versus them tribalism, and binary thinking devoid of nuance. Anyway, the 9-month chill-out was lovely while it lasted. 😎
Finally, I wrote:
If the most alarmist predictions about temperature and severe weather come to pass, I assume some rogue actors will release reflective sulfur particles in the sky to cool the planet.
I didn’t expect that 2023 would become the hottest year on record, but I’m not surprised to read that Pakistan scattered flakes of silver iodide in clouds to induce rain to clear the smog using a method known as cloud-seeding. I only recently discovered that there are 42 “cloud-seeding” projects in the US (with plans for another 200). The US government invested $2.4M in cloud-seeding to increase the amount of rain and snow that feeds the Colorado River, and one study estimated that it could increase snowpack by up to 15% in just one year. Geoengineering sounds sci-fi but apparently has been happening for years. It doesn’t seem like such a leap for a hot country like the UAE to test solar engineering in the coming years to bring down its summer temperatures.
I’ve got 10 new predictions about 2024 to deposit into the time capsule, but I’ll save those for next week to give myself some more time to play around on Manifold, a website that allows users to bet fake money (and leave funny comments) about predictions for the future.
With apologies for a bit of navel-gazing, ten things that have me feeling excited for 2024:
Midlife career change! I have been working full-time without pause for 25 years. (Seven years in cafes and restaurants, five years at Global Voices, and 13 years in philanthropy.) I feel insanely blessed that I have all of next year to figure out what comes next in 2025. I’ll be working with career coach Alice Chen to help me test and eventually narrow down the five or so ideas I’ve been dreaming about.
Amplify love (in Colombia!) — Our dear friends
and Tony are getting married in Cartagena next month and I can’t wait. Iris and I love to let loose on the wedding dance floor, and it will be my first time returning to Medellín — where I lived for several months in 2007-08 — since 2010.Exploring Oaxaca — I want to try out all of Cass Gilbert’s Oaxacan bikepacking routes. I’d like to learn some basic, conversational Zapoteco. I’m looking forward to reading Alan Dillingham’s Oaxaca Resurgent. And I have dozens of adventures bookmarked from the ever-inspirational Instagram content at Vive Oaxaca, Mario Come Oaxaca, Oax Travel, Oaxaca Explorer, and Coyote Aventuras.
Le Tour de Frankie — On April 27th, I will start Mexico’s most difficult bicycle race from Mexico City to Puerto Escondido. Unassisted, self-sufficient, 500 miles, 35,000 feet of climbing, nearly all of it on gravel. I can’t wait for the special kind of solidarity that comes from shared suffering.
Fixing up a VW Bus — I don’t know how anything works anymore.2 I feel a strong urge to learn the purpose of every part of a machine and how to repair it. So I plan to spend $3,000 or so on an old VW Bus in Oaxaca and learn from local mechanics how to fix it up.3 I barely know what car parts are called in English much less Spanish, so it’ll be a good vocabulary lesson.
Bicycle maintenance class in Oregon — In the same spirit of maintenance and repair, I’m signed up for a week-long bicycle mechanic class in Ashland, Oregon. It’s time for me to move past the basics to learn how to bleed disk brakes, true wheels, and replace bearings.
Start designing a dream cabin — Part of the fun of exploring Oaxaca will be looking for the ideal plot of land to build either our dream home or at least a dream cabin. We were close to buying some land last year, and I kinda wish we had before Mexico’s peso became one of the top three performing currencies of 2023. Still, it’s insanely cheap to build in Oaxaca compared to California, and I share Tyler Cowen’s optimism that Mexico’s economy will continue to grow over the next decade.
Cycling reunion in Spain — I already miss my San Francisco cycling crew, so I’m excited that we’re going to get together in June to cross the Pyrenees in Spain and Andorra, including many of the same climbs in next year’s Tour de France.
New Substack friends — Getting off social media and onto Substack has been so good for me. Elon Musk talks about “unregretted user minutes,” but nearly all of my time on social media is one big regret.4 On the other hand, I love reading newsletters on Substack. I enjoy writing my own. And I especially value the emails and conversations they have prompted. So far, I’ve mostly been reading the newsletters of old friends like
, , , , and … or established pundits like , , , , , and . Over the next couple of months, I want to spend some time seeking out strangers who inspire me … and who knows, may they even become friends. Just recently I stumbled across the Substack of . From his views on philanthropy, friendship, artificial intelligence, writing, and memory … I feel like I’m in conversation with a friend — what Proust described as "that fruitful miracle of communication in the midst of solitude.”Collective growth — I was going to conclude with some gratitude to have an entire year to focus on personal growth. Except that it’s not personal growth. All change is in relation to other people: our family, friends, loved ones, neighbors, artists, writers. I’m ready for the second half of life to keep learning, loving, and exploring with my peoples.
And if you’re one of my peoples who made it this far, thank you for exploring with me. I learn so much from others on Substack and I appreciate you spending some time with me. I hope you’re having a restful holiday week,
David
Even worse, after debating a friend who claimed AI was just a short hype bubble, I planned on investing $10,000 in NVIDIA stock but then got distracted. Had I not gotten distracted, those $10,000 would today be worth nearly $30,000. Enough money to easily pay for more than a year of rent in Oaxaca! 🤷♂️
There was a time when I knew every PHP function in WordPress; now I can’t even make the smallest change without breaking all the code. New cars are essentially computers on wheels, but a VW Bus, they say, is as simple as it gets.
Jill Lepore’s New Yorker essay about the history of the VW Bus doubled my enthusiasm for this project.
Except for the inspiring adventures in Oaxaca 😋
David, cheers. I haven't plugged into the 'community' around Substack much yet but perhaps this can act as an inspiration to do so. Looking forward to future exchanges of ideas. The Proust quote resonates!
I find it hard to believe that after looking at one of my social media posts, that you regret it. Thicc Tony and I flexing shirtless with a huge ass unicorn behind us created by AI. C’mon. And please share the days you were in a slump because I think that you almost never have slumps while I have more than my fair share.