San Francisco

On ToTheMoon, San Francisco is less a topic than a vantage point: the hosts live nearby, travel there for interviews and meetings, and treat the city as the place where technology shows up before it reaches the reports. It appears in two storylines — as a proving ground for driverless taxis and as a street whose billboards show the state of the AI market; episode 022 added that roughly forty percent of Big Tech engineers are concentrated in the Bay Area.

Driverless cars are the most persistent thread. Back in 2024 the hosts described riding Waymo in San Francisco, where it cost more than Uber, in one of the hardest cities to teach a car to drive (episode 028). In early 2025 Waymo there was described as a working service rather than a futuristic clip (episode 039); by autumn Tesla robotaxis had launched there for a closed test group (episode 086). In episode 090 the city became an example of fragile systems: storms cut power to a third of it, while robotaxis there still ride with a human on board.

The second thread is advertising. In episode 045 the hosts recalled the billboards along Highway 101 on the way into the city, in episode 124 that the whole of San Francisco was hung with AI ads, and in episode 147 they discussed the joke about a billboard where AI stands for Average Intelligence. The city also serves as a test prompt: in episode 134 ChatGPT and Claude were compared on a question about the area where Chinatown and the Italian neighborhood meet, and in episode 138 glossy 3D models of San Francisco were set against the broken websites of the same companies.