A City Where $380,000 a Year Isn't Enough

This episode looks at a couple in San Francisco earning $380,000 a year who feel they may no longer be able to afford to stay — and what that actually says about the city AI is building around them.

The detail that lingers is a line from the article: "Because I don't work for an AI company, I sometimes feel like I've lost the right to live in this city." It's a quiet sentence, but it points to something larger than rent prices.

There's also a parallel drawn to electric motors — how textile factories in the 1890s replaced steam engines without changing the layout of the factory floor, and how that story and San Francisco's current moment feel structurally similar. Technology changed, but the patterns around it took longer to shift.

The episode doesn't frame AI as simply a problem. It notes that without it, some of these jobs wouldn't exist, and the wealth created drew investment and shaped new industries. But it also sits with the discomfort of change that moves faster than anyone has time to think.

A quiet reflection on a particular kind of displacement — not the fear that work will disappear, but the feeling that the place where you used to belong is changing around you, without anyone quite deciding that it should.