America Is More
Happy 250 America and Reflections on AI Engineer World's Fair
It’s July 4th, 2026. America’s 250th birthday. After a week at the AI Engineer World’s Fair, this feels like a good moment to try to put into words what I think the American spirit actually is.
It’s not that it’s a melting pot.
It’s not about guns.
I’d hazard to say it’s not even freedom of speech.
America is more.
More ambition. More scale. More delusion. More beauty. More decay. More stupidity. More genius. More success. More failure. More immigration. More guns. More freedom of speech. More of everything, all at once.
I came to San Francisco for AI Engineer World’s Fair, and by the end of the trip I felt like I had accidentally walked into the purest expression of that idea possible.
The first thing that hit me was the physical scale of the place.
Flying into San Francisco, looking out at the landscape, the mountains, the hills, the way the city seems to be built in defiance of the terrain itself, it felt absurd. Beautiful, but absurd. The roads in the city tilt at angles that make driving a car feel like a roller coaster. The landscape surrounding the city looks like it was designed by a set director who took “good enough” as a personal insult.
Then I got to the venue, Moscone West.
Massive. Grand. Oversized in a way that felt almost theatrical. It had that very American quality of not being content to merely function. It needed to impress you too, to be better than any conference hall you’d been in before.
After a few hours at the “New Engineer Orientation” meetup for first time attendees to AIE, I made my way outside and decided to head to my hotel. I looked at google maps to see how close it was, saw it was only 15 minutes and figured I could just walk.
Within minutes I passed a man so hunched over and visibly broken that it almost didn’t register as real at first. Not because homelessness was some abstract concept to me before, but because the intensity of it felt unnatural. And then I saw another. And another. And another. I checked my phone, saw where I was, and immediately went wide-eyed as I recognized the name “Tenderloin”.
Even in my rural part of the midwest, I had heard of this place, and had a strong hunch that this was a bad idea. If you haven’t had the privilege, look up “tenderloin sf” or “fent bent'“. Apparently being hopelessly addicted to fentanyl is so common there that it has its own colloquial term.
So instead of walking back, I ordered my first Waymo, ten feet from one of these slumped over zombies.
Inside the car: leather seats, silence, sensors, software, cameras, a machine doing something that would have sounded like science fiction not that long ago.
Outside the car: piss on the sidewalk, people wandering around as vagrants or laying on the side of the sidewalk, not even begging for money.
The dichotomy between the two did not stop there. As I was autonomously driven to my hotel I could not stop staring out the window at all the drug-addled homeless people. The intensity I initially saw didn’t stop for the entire ride either.
As my Waymo pulls up to my 4-star hotel, I am greeted by grand neo-classical doors that automatically open for me as I approach. I walk inside and see granite steps and a lobby that just feels pristine.
This country is not moderate. It never has been. The people who crossed an ocean to get here were not moderate. The separatists were not moderate when they signed the Declaration of Independence. The pioneers who crossed a continent in search of getting filthy rich off of the gold rush were not moderate. The country that scaled the industrial revolution, has the highest incarceration rates in the world, build cross-continental railroad tracks, has been one of the fattest countries on earth for the last several decades, pioneered commercial deployment of self-driving cars, spends more on the military than the next 6 countries combined, has the majority of the frontier AI labs, has not one but two reusable rocket companies (and the only ones in the world to do it), and not to mention HAS GONE TO THE FUCKING MOON, is not at all reasonable or moderate.
That’s America.
A land of extremes.
America is not subtle.
America was built by people willing to leave. People who looked at the old world, rejected it, crossed an ocean, and built a new life for themselves in the new world. The gold rush filtered for that a second time, because it wasn’t enough to come to America. Some people got here, looked west, and said, “I want more.”
So they crossed a continent too.
Places carry the values of the people who built them, and California feels like it was built by people with an abnormally high tolerance for risk, reinvention, and delusion. I mean that (mostly) as a compliment. You do not get places like this without a lot of people betting on things that should not have worked had you only looked at the numbers.
And when you stack enough of those people on top of each other, reality starts to bend a little.
That is what San Francisco feels like.
A reality distortion field at city scale.
Most places in America feel linear. You put in some effort, you get some result. Maybe not proportional, maybe not fair, but roughly inline with what you’d expect.
San Francisco operates on a power law.
The right conversation here does not add a little bit to your life trajectory. It can multiply it. The right dinner, the right coffee, the right random introduction, the right person overhearing the right sentence at the right moment — all of that matters here in a way that is very hard to understand if you’ve never experienced it.
I got to be around people from companies I’ve respected for years. I talked to people from OpenAI. I talked to the creators of Zed. I talked to people building models, infra, tools, robotics, all of it. I saw some Unitree G1’s in person for the first time dancing for the crowd (they’re much smaller than I imagined). I talked to people connected to products I’ve actually used and creators I actually watch. I ran into people that, normally, would have felt weirdly distant online in the way that only a parasocial relationship can be.
And then in person it was just… normal. Sure there was some awkwardness on my end initially as I tried to break the ice and have a real conversation with them, but after a minute or two you internalize that they’re just a person and it starts to feel normal. You’re not having a conversation with a famous person who happens to be talking to you; you’re having a conversation with a person who happens to be famous.
The internet flattens access to information, but it does not flatten access to serendipity.
Online, you can follow the smartest people in the world. You can even interact with them to some degree, but you are competing in the attention economy with the rest of the internet.
Here, you can bump into them on accident.
It changes what feels possible.
It changes what feels normal.
It changes your standards.
And maybe most importantly, it changes your excuses.
You can’t really tell yourself “that kind of thing only happens to other people” when you’re standing three feet away from a bunch of people making it happen.
There’s another part of this trip that surprised me too.
I liked the social side of it. It didn’t feel forced once I broke out of my shell.
I talked to a lot of people. Constantly. Founders, engineers, researchers, random attendees, people from other countries, people from startups, people from big companies. It was a little draining, sure. But it was the good kind of draining. The kind where you can feel some dormant part of yourself waking up and the flywheel beginning to turn.
I felt more like who I think of myself as, the idyllic self-image that I fall short of in day to day life.
There are many places in the world where intensity gets treated like a social defect. Places where ambition is something you’re supposed to apologize for. Places where wanting to be great is interpreted as arrogance, where trying too hard is somehow embarrassing, where the highest virtue is being chill and reasonable and not making anyone uncomfortable with the scale of your goals.
San Francisco does not feel like that. Or at least not the version of it I found. This place feels receptive to intensity. It feels like a city built for people who want more out of life than comfort and predictability.
And that word — more — keeps coming back.
America is more.
San Francisco is more than that.
It is America compressed.
It is a city where you can take a driverless car past human wreckage on your way to a conference full of people trying to build the future. It is a city where the hills are too steep, the rent is too high, the problems are too visible, the talent density is too real, and the upside feels too big to ignore.
It is ridiculous.
It is inspiring.
It is ugly.
It is beautiful.
And I think that’s why I loved it.
Perfection isn’t the point, aliveness is.
And San Francisco feels alive in a way that is very hard to describe to someone who hasn’t spent time here. Not “alive” in the sanitized tourism-brochure sense. Alive in the sense that things are actually happening. Careers are being created. Companies are being born. People are colliding. Ideas are mutating in real time that will go on to improve the lives of billions of people. It is social and economic evolution at a hypercompetitive pace where if you are able to keep up with it there are tremendous upsides.
Rent is expensive in SF, but the square footage is not really what you’re paying for.
You’re paying for collisions.
You’re paying for serendipity.
You’re paying to be in the room where your ambition stops sounding weird or looked down upon.
By the end of the week, I had this uncomfortable realization that life back home suddenly felt very far away. Not because I don’t care about home. I do. I want to see my wife. I want to see my dog. I want to sleep in my own bed and recover from the busy week.
But I don’t want to go back to smallness.
I don’t want to go back to distance.
I don’t want to go back to a version of life where the future mostly happens through a screen.
America is more. More beauty and more ugliness. More freedom and more disorder. More genius and more stupidity. More ambition and more ruin. Most places spread those extremes out enough that power laws fail to emerge. In San Francisco, they stack on top of each other and start compounding.
That is what makes this city feel so different from the rest of the country. America already runs hotter than anywhere else. San Francisco is what happens when that same engine starts operating under power laws. The talent is denser. The ambition is denser. The serendipity is denser. The wealth is denser. The dysfunction is denser. The upside is denser. Everything gets amplified.
It is America with the gain turned all the way up.
And once you feel that in person, it is very hard to want anything smaller.