The Good And Bad During A Week In San Francisco: How It Impacted My Thinking About The Move To Spain

Again, I want to be very clear that these neighborhoods are not some hell on earth, and anyone from the rest of world would be smitten to have the chance to live in them. As I wrote above, if an average African, Asian, or Latin American asked my advice I would tell them to move there. It would be downright weird of me to tell them otherwise, given ... See more

It made me start to wonder just how much I’d been affected by the bubble of prosaic routine in the US, feeling the only path to success was rigidly linear. This was a gentle reminder that there were no straight lines on the path to success. Success became a universe of possibilities. Their energy imbued my world with new, limitless horizons.

Life c... See more

We accept today that the days of startup cities, at least in the West, are over, but I don't think we should. And the societal changes that a post-COVID world makes possible could restart this cycle. For thousands of years, ambitious young people have had to move to big cities run by the kind of people who run big cities to maximize opportunity in ... See more

“The ultimate question that I have: how can we create cities that are big enough to give people economic opportunity, but small enough to give people love and others in their lives that touch their hearts?”

In Paul Graham’s famous essay Cities and Ambition, there’s this idea that some cities are centers for some type of ambition, and when you come to one of those cities, you can feel the message the city is sending to you. For example, the message that you can feel in New York is “You should be richer,” while Berkeley’s is “You should live better,” Pa... See more