The Abyss Stared Back in San Francisco
brief notes from 19-26 october 2025
San Francisco disproportionately smells like shit. Literally; I stepped in some at one point.
I’ve lived exclusively in blue cities since COVID, so I’ve grown used to witnessing poverty and desperation on my walks around town. But San Francisco genuinely gives the sense that it’s coming apart at the seams. The Financial District feels dystopian despite the pleasant weather. Walking out of a $700/night hotel for a short run, I passed tents and trash only to glipse someone on a full-rigid commuter bicycle with the name MOOTS on the downtube. A ten-thousand-dollar bike, as a daily commuter, yet so stealthy as to fool a petty bike thief.
In fact, the whole city is—in a bizarre way—stealth-wealth. I look at the aging facades and taped-over car windows and inexplicably janky Clipper Card ticket system (New York and Boston solved this!!), and I think “Four-thousand-a-month one-beds.” I don’t know if that stealth is unintentional—do San Franciscans flush with wundertechnik money intentionally seek the effete shabbiness of true old money elitism, or has it not occurred to many AI researchers that they could spend their money on beautiful things?
The Tenderloin shows the widest contrast between wealth and poverty. It looks like there are some genuinely nice apartments and hotels in the area, but merely walking up Taylor Street is a concerning tableau. The Trans Pride colorations on the crosswalks deepen the irony: the paint is a good deal cheaper than making the streets safer for people half my weight. Apparently this is the improvement, too. I wonder how much of the anti-institutional bent of the SF tech scene—both the AI-pilled and the BTC-pilled—stems from seeing some of the worst municipal and state governance in the country win reëlection, despite (because?) of the immense capital generated by the residents and businesses they’re supposed to serve. If these are the shmucks running the world, why not obsolete them whole-cloth?
The advertisements are peak SF—only in San Francisco would startups pitch B2B AI-enabled products to other startups. I asked myself whether the TAM of San Fran Founders is high enough to justify wrapping a bus, but then I hung out with a guy who had recently been fired from his job. We went to a party on open-source software (neither of us were open-source programmers), and on his nametag, he listed his workplace as “Stealth.” Everyone is a founder here.
The Waymos are the best way to get around in San Francisco. The absence of a driver frees up the social energy I would have spent on even a quiet Uber ride, allowing me to let the “Chill Vibes” station play without prompting, catch up on my notifications, and zone out for twenty minutes. It’s cheaper than Ubers or Lyfts in Boston, and I’m never prompted to tip or rate a driver. The only technical problem is that Waymos struggle with finding elegant places to pull over. The primary social problem is that I learn a lot from talking to Uber and Lyft drivers.
The food here seems to cost 20-50% more than Vermont. The variety is undeniably wider—the only ethnic food of consequence in Vermont is Nepali food—but the basics simply taste better in Vermont. I would take a country store sandwich over most of the fast casual spots in SF, and I failed to find coffee in SF that I preferred to what I can get at home. I brought this up at my local coffee joint, and the owner suggested that rent is the driver. Roasting nice coffee doesn’t pay SF rents unless you let your storefront be a loss leader for an online business.
The Industry
Visiting a city hits different when you have a Rolodex and a corporate bar tab. SF gets a lot more exciting within offices, business lunches, and invite-only parties. As a New Englander and thus a bear, I’m frequently flummoxed by the confidence of people starting businesses with two quarters’ worth of funding and utter faith that AI growth will stay exponential. San Franciscans disproportionately believe in utopia: in Bitcoin replacing the USD as ground-truth monetary value, in artificial intelligence surpassing human output by 2030,1 in the United States outpacing Chinese development, and in all these outcomes being unalloyed goods.
I, meanwhile, put equivalent odds on unabated AI growth through 2030 and on straight-up losing all semiconductor manufacuturing beyond 12nm (REMOTE 1-5%). I can scoff and doubt as much as I like, but they make fuck-off money and I’m a humble wagie. Thiel is right; if I was right and they were wrong, I would have the insane equity portfolio.
This trip reminded me of the manhwa Tower of God. In this world, people who successfully climb the Tower are deemed Rankers. These Rankers are repeatedly shown to be orders of magnitude faster, stronger, and smarter than the Regulars still on the climb. Even the protagonist, with his uncommon strength, fails to rate. I am now a Regular in the San Francisco Technology Nexus. I am of value, at least in a monetary sense. Although I feel deeply out-of-touch, I am clearly smarter (and better-dressed) than many in the SF Tech World. But there are Rankers in this town. They have the smarts to outclass me, the resources to crush me, and the foresight to do so before I realize what’s happening.
Right now, I’m beneath the notice of the Rankers. It won’t stay that way for long.
The Other San Francisco
As it turns out, the negative vibes of San Francisco dissipate with altitude. Even the decay and chaos of the Tenderloin vanishes north of Bush Street, as if the climb to Nob Hill were in fact a seawall against the rising tide of human dysfunction. As I ventured north and west, towards Alamo Hill, Haight-Asbury, and Golden Gate Park, the city felt more amenable: trees, dogs, children, well-dressed people, and the implication of parties that have better gender splits than Tinder. I could see myself riding my bike through Golden Gate Park on quiet early mornings, going to the John Fluevog branch to repair my now-battered shoes, falling in love, and maybe even raising a family.
My primary reason for loving Vermont is that it allowed me to unify my identities as a civil servant, an outdoor athlete, and an artist. Sure, my neighbors are fundamentally unambitious people who look upon the future with fear and disgust, but I have found my place among the autumn leaves and country stores, with enough money to fund my road bikes and boutique espresso. And I could replicate that unity in San Francisco: stake out an apartment west of Van Ness, test my legs on Presidio back roads, make friends among the Haight-Ashbury bohemians, and plunge to sea level to advance the future of the human species.
But at what cost? The rent is in fact the easiest hurdle to jump—not only is my compensation on track to spike, I may soon access the equity and connections that constitute real money. But what of my social circle? After eighteen months in Vermont, I’ve become a regular. I’m known and welcomed and invited to parties. In a way I haven’t been since early college days, I am asked-for at scale. And this is the second time I’ve built a social circle after an uprooting move; am I ready to ditch my bike club and art world connections and loose-tie friendships, to try a third time? I’ve gotten good at making friends, and now I have contacts in multiple major cities. But contacts are not friends, and I have no reason to believe that the larger dating pools of San Francisco (or New York or DC) will return me better outcomes. I didn’t get much traction in Boston, so I doubt scale is my issue.
I Don’t Want to Be Like These People
My greatest social skill is shaping myself to fit into a crowd. I can have equally exuberant conversations in art galleries, dive bars, and dissident group chats, and I know enough about enough things to fit in like an insider, wherever I go. But that shapeshifting is not totally plastic: I can be a lot of things to a lot of people, but the inner architecture of my soul still changes to reflect the people I spend my time with.
Sometimes, that’s a good thing. I am made more virtuous by the influence of my dearest friends, and I have grown bolder in the presence of the Substacker cohort I have joined. But will San Francisco make me a better person? Do I want to be in the presence of people who say “NPC” without irony? Do I want to be friends with vice-signalers, with people skimming margin off the burning of Rome? I, for one, have deep sympathy for the permanent underclass. And I fear that if I took Waymos everywhere, and Doordashed Cava all the time, and only hung out with the AGI-pilled, I would lose my capacity to empathize with airline pilots and nurses, truck drivers and air hostesses.
I can recognize my phone as demonic presence, and to that end I try to keep it out of my bedroom.2 But I felt a similar malevolence in much of San Francisco. A spiritual corruption has taken hold in the city, and it has instilled a delusional sense of personal agency and moral entitlement in many. And my soul is poisoned enough to be vulnerable. I could turn monstrous quite quickly.
Remember, my loyalty is to the mission of electric service. AI is simply the driver. For this reason, I am happy to visit San Francisco and advise the people motivating capital expenditure into the institutional goals I care about.
But I don’t want to be friends with SF tech people.
I don’t want to become one of them.
And I fear the transformation has already occurred.
But I don’t have to decide today. I have until January to renew my lease, and in the world of AI, that may as well be a year. I put roughly equivalent odds on:
Lapsing my lease in Vermont and moving to San Francisco by June 2026
Lapsing my lease, crashing out, and re-starting my life from my parents’ basement in that same timeframe.
(HIGHLY IMPROBABLE 5-20%)
This writing reflects my views alone, and does not reflect the views of SemiAnalysis. This is not investment advice. For analysis on semiconductors, AI, energy systems, industrial inputs, or utilities, visit https://semianalysis.com
In some sense, that has already happened relative to a lot of people. Consider how the Turing Test has quietly shifted from something that a computer passes to something a human fails.
Often, I fail.