An underrated WCC matchup goes down Saturday night when Santa Clara travels to face San Francisco.

San Francisco was on the wrong end of a 23-point collapse on Thursday night at the hands of St. Mary’s while Santa Clara won in the final seconds as home underdogs to BYU. Now, they meet as two teams trending in opposite directions.

The Dons look to get back off the mat after a tough, emotional loss, and are laying a big number against Santa Clara, but can they cover?

Let’s answer the question by first looking odds from WynnBET Sportsbook.

Spread:

Money line:

Total: 149 (Over -110/Under -110)

Santa Clara’s high octane offense can cause some issues against San Francisco, as they are capable of going five out and moving the San Francisco bigs out along the perimeter, opening up driving lanes for PJ Pipes.

The Broncos are 27th in the country in effective field goal percentage and can cause issues for USF big man Yauhen Massalski on defense. The Dons are elite at running teams off the three-point line, allowing a bottom 10 three-point percentage to opponents and also are great at defending the rim, top 30 in the country. However, Santa Clara can combat that with their mid-range offense, they are top third nationally in that metric, per Haslemmetrics.

Of course, banking on the mid-range may not sound like an effective strategy on the road, but given the Dons 67% free throw shooting and the possibility of an emotional letdown following a blown lead, I’m siding with Santa Clara staying close .

PICK: Santa Clara +8, play to +7

All of Reed’s college basketball plays can be tracked here, his best bets column for college basketball is 27-36-3 for -11.5 units.

The post Santa Clara vs. San Francisco Prediction and Odds (Wager Broncos to Cowl) appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

SAN JOSE (KPIX 5) – Record-breaking investments and large commercial office businesses are still being made in Silicon Valley, although many of the large office buildings are still vacant during the pandemic.

“We made the largest office rentals of the year in the United States and the largest investment sales of the year in the United States in a week in Silicon Valley,” said Mark Ritchie of Ritchie Commercial in San Jose.

CONTINUE READING: Smash-and-Grab Thieves Hit San Jose Eastridge Mall Jewelry Store; 5 Wanted

In one of its most recent major office deals, a British investment company was paying a record San Jose per square foot price for three office buildings on Coleman Avenue in North San Jose.

“It just shows the incredible global interest in investing in Silicon Valley to buy the office space for the tech companies in anticipation of the return to work after COVID,” said Ritchie.

But in some parts of downtown San Jose, the only sounds you hear are the pounding and machinery of high-rise buildings.

And most of the people on the sidewalks are construction workers.

With most office workers still working from home, once busy streets and sidewalks feel like a ghost town.

CONTINUE READING: Kitten rescued from Highway 101 near Burlingame is now available for adoption

“I think it’s pretty dramatic, we have little foot traffic during the week,” said Randy Musterer, who owns two sushi restaurants, one in downtown San Jose.

“We’re getting some companies, but definitely not what we’re used to,” he said.

It’s still a struggle for the small businesses that are trying to survive.

“It’s an uneven recovery, there are still many shocks with working from home, the bottlenecks in the supply chain. Small businesses are nowhere near complete recovery. While things appear to be going in the right direction, it will be a top priority when considering some of these future investments, ”said Derrick Seaver, President and CEO of the San Jose Chamber of Commerce.

“There is light at the end of the tunnel, but will it be in a year? In two years or in 10 years? ”Asked Musterer.

Nobody knows the answers, but those who can afford to sit out COVID are putting their money here.

MORE NEWS: Santa Cruz man sentenced to 6 years federal prison for malicious hate crimes

“Anyone who thinks the Bay Area is over, moving to San Francisco, San Jose, and Texas doesn’t know what’s going on. This is still the absolute center of the universe for new technology and innovation, ”said Ritchie.

The post As Workplaces Sit Empty, Buyers Wager Massive On Robust Restoration For Downtown San Jose – CBS San Francisco appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

• Pension funds are investing in office properties in large metro areas hurt by the pandemic.
• They’re seeking discounts in markets that money managers think will eventually rebound.
• BlackRock said investors are pursuing office space in smaller markets like Austin and Nashville.

The market for office space in top-tier cities like San Francisco and New York has floundered during the pandemic — but pension funds and other large institutional investors are pouncing on the opportunity to scoop up bargains. 

As companies push back their return-to-office plans and questions swirl over whether workers’ flexible-work arrangements will diminish office demand permanently, the resulting uncertainty has chilled overall investor appetite in the sector. 

Just under $17 billion of commercial real-estate sales took place in New York in the first half of 2021, according to data from CBRE, putting the year on track for even less dollar volume than the $36 billion sold in 2020, when the pandemic inflicted its worst damage on the economy. In 2019, almost $61 billion of commercial real estate was sold in NYC, according to CBRE. 

Prices have fallen as well. Last month, CBS sold its Sixth Avenue headquarters for $760 million, notably less than the $1 billion or more it was seeking for the tower before the pandemic. 

As with other dips in the property sector, however, some investors see opportunity. That’s the case with a handful of large pension funds investing in office space in major cities — either through investments in real-estate funds, investments with real-estate companies and other partners, or outright property acquisitions. 

These investors see the depressed valuations on big-ticket real-estate assets as an efficient way to deploy hundreds of millions of dollars and ride what they believe will be an inevitable rebound of office strongholds like New York.

Big investors, big deals  

While some investors have grown shy of office investing because of the lasting damage the pandemic could inflict on the sector, pensions — which must reap sizable returns to meet their obligations to retirees but have the leeway to do so over the span of decades — can afford to take a longer view.  

Canada’s largest pension fund, the Toronto-based, $411 billion Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, announced in July that it had established a $1 billion co-investment program with Singapore’s sovereign-wealth fund, GIC, and the office-property developer Boston Properties to acquire offices in Boston, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC.  

This summer, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, which was already the partial owner of a skyscraper in midtown Manhattan with Silverstein Properties, bought the remaining 50% stake in the building at 1177 Sixth Ave. from UBS Realty Investors, The Real Deal reported. The 47-story office tower was valued at $860 million, sources told the real-estate news outlet.

More recently, South Korea’s National Pension Service, a $786 billion pension fund, partnered with the real-estate firm Hines to acquire and redevelop Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s office campus in downtown San Francisco, which includes a 600,000-square-foot complex and a million-square-foot, 34-story office tower, an announcement last week said. NPS and Hines acquired PG&E’s office campus for $800 million, a spokesperson at Hines told Insider. 

Across locations, Cushman & Wakefield has seen a “significant acceleration” of pension-fund office acquisitions since the second quarter, David Bitner, global head of capital-markets insights at the real-estate investment giant, said in an interview.

“There were no acquisitions in the first quarter,”  Bitner said, adding that acquisitions “really turned off” in the third quarter of 2020.

In comparison, pensions made office acquisitions totaling $700 million in the second quarter of this year, and $458 million in the third quarter through August, Bitner noted. 

“With crisis comes opportunity,” said Sondra Wenger, head of Americas Commercial Operator Division for CBRE Investment Management. The firm was involved in the CalSTRS deal at 1177 Sixth Ave.

“We see opportunities in the San Francisco and New York sectors,” Wenger added. 

CBRE is particularly focused on locations in cities with “knowledge clusters” that support innovation and highly trained workers — including in technology, which in turn attracts venture capital. 

Both CBRE and Cushman & Wakefield said that Class A office buildings — the newest and highest-quality buildings on the market — are a focus for institutional investors. 

Throughout the past year, other institutions have also invested in office properties through smaller allocations in real-estate funds. 

In July, the University of Michigan endowment approved a commitment of up to $25 million to the Rubicon First Ascent real-estate fund, which invests in office and mixed-use properties in the Bay Area and Pacific Northwest, meeting documents published by the investor show. Earlier this year, the $43 billion Connecticut Retirement Plans and Trust Funds, which consists of six state pension funds and nine state trust funds, committed $50 million to the same fund. The board for the Pennsylvania State Employees’ Retirement System also approved in December up to $50 million in commitments to the First Ascent fund, which is managed by the San Francisco-based real-estate investment company Rubicon Point Partners. 

Institutional investors are searching for office properties at a discount and “realize that these prices are going to adjust on the office side, so this may be a good time to buy,” Ani Vartanian, the cofounder and comanaging partner of Rubicon Point Partners, said in an interview. 

Most of the fund’s investors are endowments, foundations and pension funds, Vartanian said. 

Hunting for bargains

The moves to invest in office space in metro areas like New York and San Francisco could be viewed as a value play, given that return expectations for the asset class in those markets have diminished, according to BlackRock. 

Relative to other office markets, “we actually think San Francisco, Washington, DC, New York City, and Chicago will underperform,” Steven Cornet, head of US research and strategy for BlackRock’s real-assets business, told Insider. Myriad factors — including lower occupancy rates, rents, and sales volume — prompted the firm’s outlook, Cornet said. 

In New York, for instance, more workers are working from home and “finding it tough to commute in,” as they might live further away from their employers, he said. And, to hire tech workers, some San Francisco employers “have to promote the work-from-home environment,” as an option, Cornet said. “Most of the tech firms are a little bit more flexible on that,” he added. 

In May of last year, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told employees they could work from home indefinitely. Earlier this year, Spotify also told its workforce that, starting this past summer, employees could work full-time from home, the office, or a combination of both.

But underperformance in the New York and San Francisco office markets will be “a near-term phenomenon, as we have conviction in the long-term attractiveness of these markets,” BlackRock’s Cornet said. 

Return expectations in those markets will bounce back over the next one to two years, he added — leaving a window of opportunity for some investors. 

“We believe these markets are a bit out of favor, which lessens competition for assets that may perform strongly over the medium to long term, depending on the specific asset and location,” Cornet said.

The real-estate investment consultant Townsend Group, which advises large institutional investors like pension and sovereign-wealth funds, endowments, and foundations, also expects the San Francisco and New York office markets to be challenged this year. The consultant looked at market revenue per available foot, which it described as a combination of two key metrics — effective market rents and occupancy — that gauge the health of a market.

The firm expects revenue per available foot to decline by 21.6% for the San Francisco office market in 2021 and 17.1% for New York’s office market, according to a June presentation to a pension client, the Los Angeles City Employees’ Retirement System. Townsend declined to comment for this story.

The hybrid office 

Still, some institutional investors remain undaunted, joining CPPIB in search of commercial real-estate opportunities in big office markets like San Francisco. 

Vartanian and Raz Boladian, the founders and comanaging partners of Rubicon, said that in total, the Rubicon fund has raised nearly $250 million in total commitments, with 80% of that fundraising happening since March 2020 —  when many offices throughout the country effectively shut down during the first wave of COVID-19 infections. 

Boladian said that while people tend to have “a very binary viewpoint of whether the office is dead or alive,” Rubicon thinks that “offices are changing to a hybrid environment,” where employees come in a few days a week and employers opt for bigger, more creative, and more collaborative spaces.

The CPPIB and GIC venture with Boston Properties will seek opportunities in a number of large markets, including New York and San Francisco, where investment returns could be tempered by the pandemic in the near term, especially if workers choose to stay home or employers continue to extend remote-work plans. 

CPPIB and Boston Properties will each allocate $250 million, and GIC will allocate $500 million through the coinvestment program, which will invest in acquisition opportunities over the next two years, according to the announcement. CPPIB declined to comment for this story through a spokesperson. GIC did not respond for comment.

The investment partners will also look to acquire properties in Boston and Seattle, where BlackRock expects returns to be more solid in the near term.

Google and Apple join the fray

As institutional investors seek opportunities in the office market, recent deals by Apple and Google could indicate that the tide has already begun to turn in San Francisco and New York.

In the Bay Area, Apple signed a deal in May to lease six buildings in Sunnyvale, adding 700,000 square feet of office space, the Silicon Valley Business Journal reported at the time. And last week, Google announced it will expand its office presence in New York with the purchase of the St. John’s Terminal building in Manhattan for $2.1 billion, which will anchor its new Hudson Square campus.

The deal represents the most expensive single US office building sale since the pandemic began, The Wall Street Journal reported. Notably, the beneficiaries of that $2.1 billion deal were pension funds: Oxford Properties Group, the real-estate investment arm of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, and CPPIB, which sold the St. John’s Terminal site to Google. 

The ownership interest in the property was split 52.5% for Oxford and 47.5% for CPPIB, a person familiar with the matter told Insider, adding that Google had been leasing the property since 2018. 

“There was a time-sensitive option for them to be able to purchase the building,” the person said of the 2018 agreement. 

Google expects to open the 550 Washington St. office by mid-2023, Ruth Porat, the CFO of Google and parent company Alphabet, wrote in a blog post. The news follows Google’s announcement that it extended its voluntary return-to-office policy through January 10. 

The office markets with momentum

Investors who are less willing to take the leap into depressed markets can still find opportunities in other areas, BlackRock’s Cornet said.

Townsend’s report highlighted a handful of cities that are expected to see growth in market revenue per available foot for 2021: Austin, Texas (0.7%); Charlotte, North Carolina (0.7%);  Atlanta (1%); and Nashville, Tennessee (1%). 

Cornet said BlackRock also sees opportunities in cities like Denver, Austin, and Atlanta alongside larger markets like Boston, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Those cities, particularly Austin, are seeing job growth, he said, citing major companies’ announcements throughout the pandemic.

Last summer, Tesla revealed its fourth car factory would be in Austin, where it plans to hire up to 5,000 employees and make its Cybertruck, Insider reported. Additionally, Oracle said in December it was moving its headquarters from Redwood City, California, to Austin, where as many as 10,000 employees could eventually be based, according to a Bloomberg report at the time.

“A lot of companies have continued to announce moving to Austin,” Cornet said. “Tesla and Oracle are moving a lot of people there.”

Daniel Geiger contributed to this reporting. 

The post Pension Traders Guess on New York and San Francisco Workplace House appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

SANTA CLARA – The 49ers were in a bind this off-season. With the salary cap unchanged and big contracts already being given out to elite players, they needed a way to turn a little money into a big return.

So the Niners went to Las Vegas.

And – you see – things actually worked out.

The 49ers’ defensive line is the heartbeat of their team. In 2019, when San Francisco went to the Super Bowl, the Niners’ fast and furious line went eight, nine players down, and wreaked havoc on their opponents.

The Niners feel that the team’s defensive line is back to 2019 levels. Much of that confidence comes from the return of Nick Bosa and the advent of Javon Kinlaw, but part of it is getting this team serious with two – maybe now three – former Raiders players who have been cheaply signed this off-season Has depth.

“You know, we didn’t expect Arden Key and Hurst to become available, but the Raiders made a decision and we pounced on it,” said 49ers General John Lynch at the start of the training camp. “We think they are good football players who can help us. And the more depth of quality we can add at this point is, in our opinion, a good thing for us. And they know that they come here and get coached. They know we have a philosophy that enables these guys to shine and they know that they will be surrounded by quality players. ”

Lynch’s comments look prophetic as preseason game # 1 shows up on Saturday.

For those who haven’t spent much time in Napa or Alameda, Hurst was the surprise of the Niners defense at this training camp. Hurst isn’t the best all-around defensive tackle – he’s a bit smaller and his hands aren’t heavy – but he has one skill that is seriously polished and exceptionally valuable: he shoots the gap.

I’ve seen 11v11 drills too often at training camp to count – Hurst is breaking the line of scrimmage so quickly you turn to the umpires right away. No, he wasn’t offside, but now he’s behind the offensive and in the backcourt. The game is over for the offense.

Hurst may not be an all-down tackle – he won’t push back doubles or knock an anchored guard into the ground – but it’s easy to imagine he’s on the field when passing downs or if it’s a guard and center combination that the Niners want to take advantage of. He’s proven to be a great fit for the 49ers ‘all-gas, no-breaks’ front and is a significant upgrade over Solomon Thomas who has been one such player for the 49ers in recent years.

The Raiders signed Thomas last off-season and effectively voted him over Hurst. The Niners have been enthusiastic about this de facto deal so far. Meanwhile, reports from Nevada suggest Thomas may be on the chopping block.

The Raiders also ran Key – an LSU product that was considered a potential first-round pick ahead of a worrying 2017 season on the Bayou – this off-season. The Raiders picked him in the third round of the 2018 draft and threw him in the fire when they traded Khalil Mack for the bears.

To say that Key struggled with the Raiders would be an understatement for Raiders fans. It seemed that he could never translate his superior athleticism into effective rushes, only registering three sacks in 27 games.

But the film tells a different story – Key has heavy, lineman-agile hands and impressive movements, and leans over the edge. He’s a solid pass rusher when in the right position.

That wasn’t the case in Oakland or Las Vegas. Key said this weekend that he was playing a “tight-five” technique with the Raiders, which means standing face to face or just off the shoulder of the offensive tackle.

With the Niners, he’s Bosa’s backup on “Wide-Nine,” which means he’s outside the tight end.

“I wanted out of there,” Key said of the Raiders. “It was just all bad for me. Bad system. It just wasn’t right for me. I had to get out. ”

Playing Key at the 5 technique seems so ridiculous, given his speed and one-on-one ability, that I thought he exaggerated at this press conference. But I attended a couple of Raiders games for 2020 over the weekend and in fact it was Key who lined up for Snap across from the tackle snap.

However, that is the raiders’ system. We can discuss the merits of different defense fronts on another day.

For now, I’ll say that Key is in a better position for his skills and he looked like a solid plunge for the Niners in 2021.

The Niners are so excited about the Raiders’ committees that they signed another one this week – Shilique Calhoun, the third round of the Raiders in 2016. He’s facing a serious climb to reach the roster, but he could be a practice man for its San Francisco this year. But why not roll the dice again?

The Niners ‘strategy of signing the former Raiders’ defensive linemen is reminiscent of something the Warriors did in their first season at the Chase Center. It was never officially declared in a press conference or post-game huddle, but in the post-Kevin Durant era the Warriors tried to exploit the worst teams in basketball at the time – the Suns and the Timberwolves.

The Dubs signed Marquese Chriss because they were sure that his original team, the Suns, had no idea how to develop him at the age of 19. Chris has had two solid seasons for the dubs.

The Warriors later traded for Andrew Wiggins in what turned out to be number 7 in the NBA draft last month because they bet the Timberwolves weren’t competent enough to maximize Wiggins talent or avoid a bad season. You were right on both counts.

The Niners are doing the same thing to the Raiders here. You rely on talent.

They’re also betting on something I’m sure most Raiders fans will echo: the Raiders defensive coaches didn’t know what they were doing with this talent.

The Niners feel confirmed in their bets at this early point in the season. Both Hurst and Key signed one-year contracts for $ 1,045,000 – starvation wages for solid depth on the teams’ key positions.

The only question now is how much return the Niners can get on these investments and whether that win can bring them a trip to Los Angeles in February.

The post San Francisco guess in opposition to the Raiders — it is already paying off appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

‘Maybe we’re having a bust right now, but it’ll boom again’

Mat Honan

OneZero is partnering with the Big Technology Podcast from Alex Kantrowitz to bring readers exclusive access to interview transcripts — edited for length and clarity — with notable figures in and around the tech industry.

To subscribe to the podcast and hear the interview for yourself, you can check it out on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

BuzzFeed News Executive Editor Mat Honan has long covered the way society interacts with technology. He joins Big Technology Podcast this week to discuss the “Zoom Class,” the rise of NFTs, and how San Francisco may change after the pandemic.

Alex Kantrowitz: Hi Mat, Let’s talk about the “Zoom Class,” or the group of people who’ve been able to keep their jobs and work from home during the pandemic. Some have even moved to “Zoom towns” a few hours away from the cities they once lived in. What do you think the implications are of having a group of people who can do that, and a group who can’t?

Mat Honan: There’s a couple of really interesting things there. If you think about what this pandemic would have looked like 20 years ago, when it would not have been possible to have a Zoom class, or a work-from-home class, or a Zoom school, all that kind of stuff. Technology really, in a lot of ways, helped this from becoming a lot worse than it could have been. It clearly helped reduce community spread.

But it’s deeply unfair certainly that some people are basically able to ride it out at home, often all being paid very well to do that. I think it’s almost a cliché at this point — I wish I could remember who said it first because it’s a brilliant truth — about the pandemic being the black light that exposed all the problems in society.

In some ways, it was just a lot of right stuff and right time in terms of the fact that it did work. You worked on a story, when this was all starting, about video capabilities when the pandemic was getting going. So many people had gone to Amazon Web services, there was so much bandwidth, people had fiber to the house, and there’s all this stuff. But it’s just deeply unfair that so many people got to ride it out at home, and it’s deeply unfair that the kids whose families had the money to have a better computer and better internet connection got a better education, or got an education. In some families, their kids just sat alone at home all day while both their parents are essential workers.

It’s really exposed the divides in society and just what kind of inequalities we have to work on as a society; I think that’s more than anything else. “Zoom Towns,” is the most obnoxious phrase I’ve heard in a long time, it’s going to have a long-term transformative effect in society, but I hope we can make a positive one.

Let’s talk about the effect. What’s that going to look like?

Frankly, I don’t want to predict the future. Like I don’t know. I don’t know what it looks like, but I certainly hope that all these conversations that we’ve had about race and class in the past year aren’t for naught, and that all the things that we’ve learned about who has the privilege to do these things, that we don’t unlearn those.

I worry that this will just add another layer of division inside an already really divided country.

I do, too. I do hope that there is some good to come out of it and we can have some sort of realignment. I saw something recently about the massive number of people who are registered as Independents now versus four years ago, eight years ago, 12 years ago.

It’s been an increase?

Yes, I think that’s a positive thing. One of the worst things that we’ve done in American society is to divide everybody up into teams. It’s been incredibly harmful. I hope there’s a chance that we can learn from it, and people become more civic-minded, and people can get more involved.

Personally, all of a sudden I care a lot more about schools, and not just my kids’ schools, but other kids’ schools. Molly Hensley-Clancy wrote a story on schools in the spring, and about all these kids who have just been completely wrecked by the pandemic and left behind. I’m certainly not the only person talking about seeing that, but I think people are really thinking about that now, and I hope that we continue to think about that.

I hope that we can do things like make sure that all families have a fast internet at home. Why is that something that only wealthy families can pay for? Why can’t we have a more equitable distribution of broadband? Why can’t there be broadband in rural areas? Why can’t we do more to have the government create infrastructure where there’s not affordable internet that people can get?

Tech development already seemed like it was happening in a bubble, and now it seems to be further ensconced in a bubble?

Some things maybe became less bubbled, like for example grocery delivery. My mother, who’s in her seventies and lives in a rural area, and is on a fixed income and doesn’t have a whole lot of resources, had never been able to get groceries delivered. Now, she can get groceries delivered, order online, and curbside pickup, and that kind of stuff, and she’s been doing it for a year. It just wasn’t available in her area, and the grocery stores that were there then scrambled to implement it. You’ll see some things like that, where places that weren’t traditionally tech, like a rural grocery store, become happy about technology that makes them more useful to people’s lives.

But what happens if the builders of technology are less exposed to folks who don’t work in the tech industry?

I think what you’re saying is because of people’s ability to ride it out at Zooms, are they going to have even less empathy than they already did have for people who they’ve not been having any contact with. It’s definitely concerning. Did you see the “giraffe money” story?

Was it about having enough money you could buy a giraffe as a test for wealth?

Right. “Are you going to get giraffe money from this IPO?” or just fancy dog money. I don’t know. And you want to have giraffe money. Even that those discussions are taking place is messed up. The U.S. is pretty messed up. I think a lot of that is due to long-term tax policy, long-term policies around race, long-term policies around who got to get a loan to buy a home, and that type of thing. I would hope that the people who are listening to this podcast, who are the builders, are thinking about the unglamorous middle class and working class and working poor who are not living in those bubbles and are not able to be on the Zoom all day.

There’s a company that has an ad where one of their drivers says, “I’m my own CEO,” and it struck me as tone-deaf. Because yeah, you’re your own CEO, you don’t have health benefits, you don’t have unemployment benefits, you don’t have any of the safety nets that come with full employment, and actually, you’re not even your own CEO because you don’t really even set your hours.

You’re managed by an algorithm.

Yeah. But that that mindset could come out now is shocking to me and appalling. We talk about these people as essential workers, yet we treat them as if they’re completely inessential, and it’s discouraging to me that you could have so little empathy that you might not see that as a problem.

When meanwhile there’s a thing going on in San Francisco right now. There’s a driver, I believe it’s an Uber driver, maybe a Lyft driver, who was assaulted by some people because he had asked them to wear a mask in the car. People are out there scrambling and working hard and putting themselves at risk so that other people are able to be at home and sit there on Zoom and Google Docs, and get your work done and check your workflow in Asana, all that kind of stuff. You know? It happens because other people have ventured out and took risks. And I just hope we think about them.

Okay, what do you think about this whole non-fungible token craze and the fact that bitcoin is going to the moon? I think you have a mountain full of bitcoin sitting in some Wired server from your Wired days.

They burned that, actually.

We should tell the story of the Wired bitcoin server, if you’re able.

This wasn’t me, but it was while I was there and it’s pretty amazing. I believe it was Bob McMillan, who’s now at the Wall Street Journal, who had a Butterfly Labs bitcoin mine, and it was in the gadget closet, and it’s just in there churning away mining bitcoin.

What year was this?

2012, maybe 2013. And at first, it’s just in there churning out stuff at whatever bitcoin was at the time. Even when it was $100 a coin, nobody really thought about this being a big problem. Then, all of a sudden bitcoin shot up, I think it was a thousand bucks or something, and I’m not going to get these numbers right, but it became a problem, and people were like, “Wait a second. It’s a thousand bucks today. It could be 50,000 bucks tomorrow,” which I don’t think anyone believed.

Here we are.

Yeah. Here we are. And there was a big debate internally over what we should do with it. I remember Adam Rogers, who’s a longtime writer and editor there, who’s on the science desk there, making the case that we should give that money to charity, “There are people sleeping on the street. We can’t keep this and sit on this bitcoin stash because it could in some ways compromise our integrity.” At this point, I want to say it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 bitcoin. They had mined several, but not a lot. They didn’t have like a thousand bitcoin or whatever; it wasn’t that early. Anyway, at some point after a lot of arguing over it, they made the decision basically to get rid of the key, and so they burned the key; and once they did that, I mean there’s no getting it back.

How much is this worth?

Like when they trashed it. Let’s say it was 10 bitcoin. I don’t know, it would be worth what, half a million bucks now? It’s a substantial amount of money now the way that it wasn’t when they got it.

Do you kick yourself for not buying bitcoin when you knew it was happening back in the day?

You can’t just think about what could have been. You’ve got to go back to that moment in time to really think about it. But there was a point in time when, I want to say it was John Herman, maybe someone else who was there, bought some bitcoin for a story when it was still trading for pennies a coin, and they had to send a money order to somebody who literally went by the name Morpheus. Who could have seen that it became that?

I actually did buy some bitcoin, which I wish I still was holding, for a story one time, and I got beat by Kash Hill who wrote another story about living on bitcoins, which is what I wanted to do. When you think about the million-dollar pizzas or whatever, or whatever Kash spent, she spent some fortune on a bitcoin sushi dinner, I mean it wasn’t worth anything back then, and it became worth stuff because people bought pizza and sushi dinners. That’s why it’s worth something now.

Do you think it’s going to crash?

I think it’s less likely to be valueless now than it was because there’s so many institutional people in it. I have no idea where the money is going or what’s happening with it.

Can I talk about NFTs?

Let’s define NFTs first because I’m still wrapping my head around how someone could sell a JPEG for $70 million.

I think we can define it as not a JPEG that sold, but as a unique digital object; that’s the way to think about it. I think if you define it that way, that it’s a digital object that is one of a kind, you can understand why that’s exciting.

Digital stuff is replicable on pixels anywhere. If I buy a painting, at least that painting hangs in my house. If I buy a digital object, anyone can see it on the web. I can’t display it. I guess I could buy a screen and put it up there, but anyone could buy a screen and put it up there, so what’s going on here?

I can put a replica of the Mona Lisa in my house tomorrow, right? You can replicate anything, you can already do that.

Is this Beeple’s First 5000 Days thing that sold worth $69 million? I have no idea, man. Who knows? I don’t know.

Why do you think this is cool?

I think it’s cool when you start thinking about it not just in terms of art. I think it’s cool when you start thinking about the ability to have a unique digital item that is yours and yours alone that you have ownership of. I think art is an easy place to start. But I think just in the same way that you weren’t able to really use bitcoin for anything except drugs, you will at some point be able to buy and sell other things, and there’s some weird stuff.

There’s that tweet that Jack Dorsey offered up as an NFT, and so the tweet is always just going to exist on Twitter anyway. It’s the person that’s setting up my Twitter tweet, but someone else is going to own the NFT of the tweet, I think is how it works.

What prevents Jack from selling an NFT of the same tweet to someone different?

Right. But could you fork the tweet? I don’t know. Maybe.

Because it’s all made up.

Yeah. It’s all made up. But I think it’s an interesting way to transfer ownership. This is going to sound crazy, but what if all ownership became some of those transferred NFTs, not just art, but like anything that you own that you don’t necessarily have in your possession, like the title to your car? I don’t know. I possess my car, but the title lives on a blockchain somewhere? It’s just an interesting way to think about ownership. I think there’s obviously all these huge problems with the energy usage that people are talking about —

Because mining bitcoin takes the carbon of an absurd amount of computing power.

The energy involved in mining and transferring bitcoin, and transferring NFTs, is apparently quite significant. But I think being able to prove unique digital ownership is a pretty cool concept.

Do you think you’ll buy any NFTs?

Not $69 million.

But if we put this podcast up and sold the rights as an NFT, would it be valuable at all?

I don’t know, Alex. Why don’t you try it? There’s a service that you can use to sell your tweets, which is I think what Dorsey used.

Oh, yeah. I put something up on there; it didn’t sell.

One of the things I’m going to think about doing is selling. I had someone hack my Twitter a long time ago, they posted to my Twitter account, and it’s always been so interesting to me that when you look at Twitter’s — I own my account, right? Twitter owns my account, but I technically own the content and their terms of service because I created it, the content is mine. Well, I didn’t create that. I didn’t create it. I didn’t display it. Someone else did all that. I’ve been wanting to sell that tweet just to see how you transfer that, how it works to transfer ownership to something that I clearly don’t own and didn’t make.

Could people tell your Twitter was hacked? Because there was one time where you were tweeting one night like, “Oh, God,” and “No, not this,” and…

I was watching Game of Thrones and I was just reacting, I think it was a season finale or something, and I tweeted like, “Oh, shit!” something like, “Oh, my God. This looks terrible.” It’s that total context collapse thing, and then I went to bed. The show was over. And I guess Marc Andreessen saw the tweets and flagged them to Ben Smith, who flagged them to our security, who was trying to call me in the middle of the night. I had my phone turned off. I woke up the next day and there’s all these messages from Ben and our security team like, “Are you okay?” And I said, “Yeah. Why wouldn’t I?”

Was this the moment when Marc Andreessen turned against journalists?

I don’t think so. This was before he went on the blocking spree. This is when he actually followed lots of reporters and was saying those things about how Twitter was his way to inject his thoughts directly into a newsroom.

You wrote a piece on Substack saying that you’re pretty optimistic about San Francisco coming back. What do you think is going to happen here and why are you optimistic?

I guess I see people doing interesting things in the city, especially around media. There are a bunch of small interesting media startups in the city now that I think are cool, but I also see people becoming more engaged, you know?

I do think that we’ve got so many problems to solve in San Francisco. It’s clearly got a horrible, absolutely just incredible, fentanyl crisis, not just an opioid crisis. It’s a fentanyl crisis. It’s got horrible issues with people’s authority to actually live there. Like if you want to rent an apartment, if you want to buy a house: good luck; it costs just a shit-ton of money to try and do that. I think they’re starting to do a little bit of building in San Francisco. Like even people are still fighting it, but you’re starting, for I think at least the first time since the 20 years that I’ve lived there, to see a lot more support for new construction and for affordable construction. And I’m seeing a lot more people involved in knowing what the Board of Supervisors is doing.

I think that, in some ways, having school board meetings, and board supervisors meetings, and all these other government meetings happening on the internet where people can tune in and see them, and not have to go to a building and be there in person, it encourages participation, and so that’s encouraging to me. I think it’s only encouraging though if people are willing to dive in and start doing things and trying to make a difference, and I certainly hope they are. But also part of the point of that piece was that San Francisco has always been a weird fucked-up place, right?

From the very beginning, and it’s been this kind of place that’s always attracted weirdos doing weird things, whether they’re looking for gold, or coming for the summer of love, or whatever. Certainly, there are the origin stories that are connected to Stanford and Xerox PARC, and Fairchild Semiconductor, and all that kind of stuff. But one of the reasons that there are a lot of tech people in San Francisco is that it was a place where people were trying interesting and different new things. There’s a great book called What the Dormouse Said about this, but there’s a direct line between people that experiment with drugs and experiment with technology.

And I think that San Francisco has been a town that’s had a lot of booms and busts, and maybe we’re having a bust right now, but it’ll boom again. It’s a beautiful place that’s on the ocean, you can ride your bike across the bridge and be in a national park. It’s got a lovely climate, even if we do have fire season now.

And people are going to want to live there. This myth that everybody’s vacating San Francisco for Miami — also a great city, but one that’s sinking underground and brutally hot in the summertime — it’s ridiculous. People are always talking about problems. But before 1990, San Francisco was pretty grim, and yet the tech boom happened after its grimness.

They tried to draft you to run for mayor at one point. Are you going to do that?

No. I tried to draft myself, honestly. But no, I’m not. Of course not. I could never do that. What a terrible job that’s got to be, right? Man, that’s a shitty job.

Maybe to be governor, but it’s also super interesting to me that San Francisco politics have become so dominant, in the sense that the politicians have become so dominant: Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris. All those people come out of San Francisco local politics, and it’s amazing.

If you think about the dot-com bust which happened in 2000, but it took a couple years to shake out, lots of interesting stuff happened in San Francisco in 2003-’04, ’05, ’06. Before, it was totally on its feet. If there are people who are there just for a job and they want to leave, they should be able to go.

Going back to one of your earlier questions, I do think that we’re never going to go fully back to the office, and there are going to be people who are working on Zoom, we’re going to be working from all over the place; and if they don’t want to be in San Francisco, they shouldn’t necessarily have to be. I think things will shake out, and things will change, and we’ll fix some problems, and we’ll get new ones.

I think you need to have a certain level of affordable rent to have the weird people that make a city enjoyable, so maybe this will be one of the silver linings, that San Francisco will be a place where weird can flourish again.

I hope so. And I hope it’s also a place where people who have grown up there can stay there. My wife, as you know, is a nurse, and she works with people who commute in from hours away because they can’t, especially if they’re younger, afford rent. I hope it’s a place where artists and nurses and teachers and musicians and people who are the soul of the city can live, and I think that all comes down to housing. I think when you think about the homelessness crisis, the people experiencing the homelessness crisis, that’s driven by housing. So much of what people complain about with San Francisco can be solved by starting housing, and it’s encouraging me that we’re starting to see a little bit more get built.

And it’s encouraging to see that some of the focus that’s been happening out of city hall, including today, is on livability. I think when you really start thinking about what makes a city livable, it’s people’s ability to fucking live there, right?

That sounds so stupid. But if you can’t actually live in the city because you can’t afford to, I mean it’s not going to be a lovely city. Like who cares how many slow streets you have. You’ve got to have a house.

You’ve written eloquently about the fire season here that’s become a fact of life. Are we going to have a fire season on the West Coast every year? This year was particularly brutal.

It was awful. I don’t remember how long it was. I just remember it was just absolutely awful. Especially combined on top of the pandemic, I mean it’s terrible. It destroyed some people’s homes and their lives. Peter Aldhous has written a lot about it, and everything that I’ve read that he’s written has made me discouraged that it’s going to get better anytime soon.

Yes. I mean the trend is certainly that they’re getting worse. I don’t know what the snowpack is like right now, but it was low, which is not encouraging for fire season. I think it’s a fact of life in the West. It was happening in Colorado, happening in Montana, in ways that it didn’t used to. To me, that’s the thing that’s really alarming about living in San Francisco and California and the West and the world is like, “Oh, shit. What have we done to the planet? And are we going to be able to do anything to fix it?”

My wife’s cousin was emailing us and they’re like, “Well, we wanted to come out in August, but we’re worried that it’s going to be very smoky,” and my response is, “Yeah. I don’t think you should come in August.” I wouldn’t plan a vacation in California in August right now.

The post Why Everybody’s Incorrect to Guess Towards San Francisco: A Dialog With BuzzFeed Information Exec. Editor Mat Honan appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.