Jonathan Stern

Notes from San Francisco: the renaissance is underway

I recently spent 36 hours in San Francisco.

Unfortunately, all of the bad stuff you hear about the city is true. Drugs, homelessness, trash, foul odors, people zombie-ing around visibly high and intoxicated. “Felt like a scene straight out of the walking dead,” one guy on Twitter recently said. Yes - it certainly did.

But let’s be very clear: San Francisco is still very much San Francisco. And it’s apparent a renaissance is underway.

Once you get away from the sketchy parts, the city is the same gorgeous SF it’s always been. The Mission is lively, Pacific Heights elegant and charming, the Presidio one of the most glorious strips of land I’ve ever seen. And beyond the raw beauty, SF is still the closest thing in the modern world to Renaissance Florence. A city buzzing with techies and artists and philosophers, with easily the highest per capita concentration of weird and ambitious people on earth. It’s a city of not even a million, and yet in the last fifty years it’s done more to transform the world than any other, and it’s on the cusp of doing it again as it ushers in yet another tech revolution.

If you’re in tech, or you simply love the world of ideas, there is still no better place than SF.

Some say the city isn’t what it used to be. True, probably. But you’d have to be a fool to bet against this place. The political climate is moderating. People are returning. Claude advertisements are at bus stops and on highway billboards. Dolores is overflowing with people. You can just feel the energy everywhere. This is a place where big things are brewing.

I went to a house party the night I was there and the people—every last one of them—were friendly, unpretentious, earnest, talented, and weird. Good weird. At one point in the evening, I got to talking with a girl who had recently gone through a break up. In most parts of the world, when two people break up, it’s not uncommon for one ex to stalk the other on Instagram or Spotify. For this girl, the platform of choice was Manifold Markets, the prediction market platform. She was keeping tabs on her ex-boyfriend’s forecasts!

The bottom line is that in SF everyone’s a nerd and everyone knows it. The result is an absolute lollapalooza.

I hope to be back again soon.