FARGO — Doug Burgum is about to enter a crowded field of candidates vying for the Republican presidential nomination as an unknown figure on the national political stage.

But one early job on Burgum’s resume could help the dark-horse candidate stand out: chimney sweep.

While attending North Dakota State University, Burgum hired himself out as a chimney sweep. The unusual occupation was featured in the student newspaper, with a photo of Burgum, in top hat and tuxedo on a snowy roof, and was picked up by a wire service.

The admissions office at Stanford University saw the article — and Burgum was admitted to its master’s of business administration program.

There, he met Steve Ballmer, who would go on to become CEO of Microsoft and an influential business adviser for Burgum.

After a stint as a consultant at McKinsey & Co., Burgum mortgaged a quarter section of farmland homesteaded by his grandfather to invest $250,000 in a fledgling business software firm called Great Plains Software in 1983.

Burgum, having bet a good part of his inheritance, was unnerved to learn that the business software industry then in its infancy was crowded with competitors, but was able to distinguish his firm with top-notch customer service, a lesson learned from his family’s grain elevator business in Arthur.

The willingness to take a big risk — moderated by working assiduously to improve his odds of success — would prove to be an attribute that would help define Burgum’s rise in business and his later career as a politician.

“Betting the farm,” as Burgum later would describe his source of startup capital, would prove to be a good wager. When Great Plains broke ground at its south Fargo campus, Burgum harnessed a horse-drawn plow to mark the occasion.

Doug Burgum, center, is pictured in 1992 at Great Plains Software.

Dave Wallis/The Forum

In 2001, less than two decades after Burgum tied his future to Great Plains, with Ballmer at its helm, Microsoft bought Great Plains for $1.1 billion. Burgum stayed on as a Microsoft senior vice president until 2007, then turned his focus to serving as an investor and director on the corporate boards of early-stage software companies.

Freed of the responsibilities of running a company, Burgum also took his business chops in a new direction, real-estate development, which would allow him to indulge his interest in architecture.

He had formed a company, Kilbourne Group, named after his mother’s maiden surname. When Burgum was a boy, his mother took him on walks through downtown Fargo, pointing to notable buildings and telling him their background — a history lesson that helped to inspire what would become a major private downtown renewal project.

Kilbourne Group bought and renovated many distinctive downtown landmarks, including the Black Building, and built the 23-story RDO tower.

It became Fargo’s tallest building, although deliberately shorter than the skyscraping state Capitol, striking a note that was audacious and restrained at the same time.

Doug Burgum talks in 2013 about the restoration process of the Loretta Building overlooking downtown Fargo.

David Samson / The Forum

One of the buildings Kilbourne Group acquired and renovated, the former St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, became the Sanctuary Event Center, where on Wednesday, June 7, Burgum will take the stage to announce his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president.

As a real estate developer, Burgum preached the virtues of dense, downtown development as a way to enliven communities, prevent urban sprawl and save money by avoiding the need to extend expensive public infrastructure and services to the city’s fringe.

Later, as governor, he would promote the same themes through his Main Street initiative, saying that communities must offer attractive amenities to attract workers.

Burgum has made philanthropic contributions, including his family’s support of the Plains Art Museum and his donation of the former Northern School Supply building to his alma mater, NDSU, which became Renaissance Hall, which houses the university’s visual arts department and much of its architecture department.

Although a campaign contributor, Burgum was never visibly active in politics until he entered the 2016 governor’s race after Jack Dalrymple announced that he wouldn’t seek a second term, leaving an open seat.

Fargo entrepreneur and philanthropist Doug Burgum, third from right, meets with the press following his announcement for North Dakota’s gubernatorial race on Jan. 14, 2016, in Fargo.

Michael Vosburg / Forum Photo Editor

But a major obstacle stood in his way: Wayne Stenehjem, who had served more than 20 years as attorney general and was the presumptive Republican nominee.

Burgum entered the race trailing by almost 50 points. He sought the endorsement at the party convention, not expecting to win, he said, and finished third.

During the convention, Burgum played up to his outsider image by lecturing the delegates, many of them state legislators, whom he criticized for allowing state government spending to balloon unsustainably on their watch.

His strategy all along was to win the GOP primary, and he made a point of visiting every community in the state with at least 1,000 people, often talking to very small gatherings, especially at first, and filling notebooks with ideas from his encounters with voters.

North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem, left, and Fargo businessman Doug Burgum shake hands at a gubernatorial debate in 2016.

Rick Abbott / The Forum

Burgum roared back from his drubbing at the convention with a convincing victory over Stenehjem, taking 60% of the vote in the primary — and cruising on to beat his Democratic rival by capturing more than 76% in the general election.

Some of Burgum’s famous friends from his time at Microsoft were among his prominent financial supporters during his first campaign for governor. Microsoft founder Bill Gates contributed $107,000 and Satya Nadella, who succeeded Ballmer as Microsoft CEO and who had worked under Burgum at Microsoft’s Fargo campus for 5½ years, donated $10,000.

During the campaign, Burgum ran as an entrepreneur and businessman, with a pitch that he was the right person to apply his tech savvy to reinvent state government through greater efficiency, and to help diversify the economy, too reliant on energy and farm commodities subject to whipsawing price swings.

Once in office, Burgum sometimes clashed with the Republican-dominated Legislature. Although he pledged party unity after winning the divisive primary contest with Stenehjem, Burgum didn’t shy away from tangling with those in his own party.

Burgum showed himself willing to dip into his personal fortune to fund a political group that worked to defeat fellow Republicans who had resisted his initiatives, most prominently former Rep. Jeff Delzer, R-Underwood, who had been the powerful chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, who was at odds with some of Burgum’s spending priorities.

During the 2022 election cycle, records showed Burgum gave at least $935,000 to the Dakota Leadership PAC, which ran an advertising blitz against Delzer, who lost the GOP primary endorsement. Burgum spent much more in 2020, bankrolling the group’s ad campaign with contributions of more than $3.2 million.

Burgum’s internecine quarrels rankled some of his fellow Republicans, some of whom were legislators who were in a position to make their displeasure known, but Burgum didn’t alter course.

As governor, Burgum has championed energy policy. Unusual for a Republican, he set a goal of using innovation and incentives to achieve carbon neutrality in North Dakota by 2030, exploiting North Dakota’s policy and geological advantages in storing carbon dioxide deep underground.

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum delivers his annual State of the State address on Jan. 3, 2023.

Jeremy Turley / Forum News Service

He boasted that as of 2021 companies had responded by pouring $25 billion of investments into energy initiatives in the state.

In contrast to many of his fellow Republican governors, Burgum’s response to the public health threat posed by the COVID-19 pandemic included support for vaccination and, in the early days of the pandemic, targeted business shutdowns and a mask mandate as measures to prevent hospitals from being overrun with cases.

Chafing at the state interventions, the Republican-dominated Legislature responded in 2021 by passing a law allowing legislators to call a special session, with the power to “terminate, extend, or modify” a state of disaster or emergency declared by a governor.

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum receives a first dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine at the Bismarck Event Center on March 9, 2021.

Jeremy Turley / Forum News Service

Burgum’s drive for efficiencies in state government draws upon his background in technology and business.

He sounds like the McKinsey consultant he once was when he makes the case for better cash management of state funds, and he sounds like a former software executive when he rhapsodizes about the need for information technology upgrades that are more consumer friendly.

Burgum has never emphasized socially conservative positions and has generally refrained from joining the “culture war” debates that animate many in a party dominated by Donald Trump. In 2020, Burgum said the state Republican Party’s position on LGBTQ issues was “divisive and divisional.”

Still, in the recently completed legislative session, Burgum signed a near-total abortion ban bill as well as several laws restricting transgender rights. Earlier, in 2021, he signed a law banning the teaching of critical race theory in North Dakota public schools.

North Dakota leaders shouldn’t forget that the state is in constant competition for capital and for talent — skilled workers — and be seen as welcoming both, he has said.

Burgum has twice been endorsed by Trump, and has endorsed the former president he now is challenging for the nomination. He has said he would vote for Trump if he is the Republican nominee in 2024, a choice he regards as preferable to President Joe Biden, the likely Democratic nominee.

Gov. Doug Burgum talks about his vision for North Dakota on April 19, 2018, while meeting with The Forum’s Editorial Board.

David Samson / The Forum

In seeking the nomination, Burgum is betting that what he has called a “silent majority” of voters who shun the ideological fringes would welcome a pragmatist over a divisive ideologue. He knows that he will have to overcome his underdog status as a governor of a small, rural state who is unknown in national politics.

“There’s a value to being underestimated all the time,” Burgum said, recalling that he had no endorsements in his first race. “That’s a competitive advantage.”

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Pedro Portal/El Nuevo Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

Andy Roddick is the most recent American man to win a Grand Slam, having secured a U.S. Open title in 2003 with a win over Spain’s Juan Carlos Ferrero in straight sets. Twenty years later, the former world No. 1 is serving up 146-mph digs at a trio of other homegrown tennis titans, as he kickstarts the hype machine for the inaugural Pickleball Slam.

“I remember watching Michael Chang win the French Open in 1989,” Roddick says in a video shared by Horizon Sports & Experiences co-CEO David Levy, who’s engineered the upcoming event. “I was there cheering Andre Agassi on when he won his first Slam in 1992 against Goran Ivanišević. I don’t quite remember … I think John McEnroe started winning slams before, uh, I was born.”

While Roddick’s testimonial has all the production values of a proof-of-life hostage video—seated in a paneled room and bathed in a sort of beige-ish light, all that’s missing from the former pro’s bulletin is a newspaper of recent vintage—it’s clear he understands how the secret to a successful troll job is to ridicule one’s elders. (This is always the move, even if you have to physically travel to a rest home to find sufficiently aged targets.)

“The point of these stories is two-fold,” Roddick continues. “One, it’s always a great occasion when I have an excuse to spend time with my idols, and two, I am sooooo much younger than the rest of ’em. So my idol Andre Agassi and I are going to kick Chang and McEnroe’s butt at the Pickleball Slam and I cannot wait! Book it.”

While speaking to Levy earlier this week, a quick glance at the Internet suddenly takes much of the fun out of Roddick’s age-baiting. If the crowd-sourced online encyclopedia is anything to go by, McEnroe, who now looks more or less exactly like the Cold Miser from The Year Without a Santa Claus, is only 10 years older than me. Yipes. Then again, Levy graduated from Syracuse in 1980, so I win that round.

Levy and I have known each other since before Roddick lifted the Tiffany jug out in Queens, so there’s always a certain amount of “remember-when” in play whenever we connect. As it happens, that sort of thing is one of the dynamos that powers the Pickleball Slam concept, which couples the fastest-growing sport in the U.S. with the timeless allure of nostalgia. Watching the pro athletes you followed when you yourself were a lot younger quite often delivers a sustained blast of serotonin, especially if the old jocks are trying their hand at a new sport. Part of the appeal of seeing guys like McEnroe and Agassi play pickleball lies in the affirmation that they can still punt all sorts of rump on a tennis court, while the sepia-toned element of reminiscence provides a nice respite from the travails of the here and now. (Unless you were a Victorian-era chimney sweep, odds are you had it a lot better as a spry youth.)

The predecessor to Levy’s brainchild is the Match, the golf exhibition/pay-per-view event he launched at Turner Sports back in 2018. This time around, he’s working as a free agent of sorts—Levy and Momentum Worldwide chairman Chris Weil launched the HS&E agency last fall—but it didn’t take long for a TV partner to swoop in on the pickleball package. ESPN’s Jimmy Pitaro and Burke Magnus opted to carry the event shortly after Levy first pitched the concept; the special will air on the flagship network April 2 at 12 p.m. ET, leading directly into the NCAA DI women’s hoops final.

The inaugural event will be held at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Fla., with the hospitality chain having signed on for a total of five individual tournaments. Roddick, et al., will compete in both singles and doubles competition, with a $1 million purse on the line. This marks the most lucrative payout in the history of the sport, which is growing faster than the nerve-tonic-addled animated version of Ken Griffey Jr. during his 1992 appearance on The Simpsons. Per USA Pickleball, some 5 million Americans play the sport, which has expanded to more than 10,000 facilities nationwide.

While the Slam was only announced this week, Levy has a good deal of news to add ahead of the official rollout. For one thing, he’s going to sweeten the purse a little by offering each player $25,000 to bet throughout the competition. (Levy was hoping that the original Tiger vs. Phil best-hole match would inaugurate a new era of televised sports wagering, but the PGA Tour effectively nixed that idea.) The side bets and resulting escalation in trash talk should make the competition even more engaging, and as a bonus, the money wagered will be funneled to a charity.

Levy also says he’s “open for business” for further partnerships to complement the Hard Rock deal. “We are now looking for a title sponsor and three presenting sponsors in addition to the Hard Rock, who came in right at the beginning,” Levy said. “The early feedback has been strong, even though we’ve only been out on the street with this a few days.”

In owning the IP outright and devising an all-new live sports format, Levy is leveraging a handful of Big Picture-type entrepreneurial gambits that have been transforming media in the age of rapidly shrinking TV usage. If all goes well in April, the next iteration of the Slam could very well include a clutch of less antediluvian participants, such as Roger Federer or the Williams sisters. Serena and Venus obviously would be a great fit if ESPN chooses to continue with the Slam during the 2024 women’s hoops championship. (Bristol has an option to pick up additional events.)

For Levy, one of the big takeaways from the Slam is that HS&E have put themselves in a position where long-time pickleball enthusiasts and curiosity seekers of all stripes will see the best of the best in action. “This isn’t Dancing with the Stars,” he cracks, in a veiled nod to CBS’s recent primetime special Pickled, a benefit which featured decidedly non-athletic funny people such as Stephen Colbert, Luis Guzmán, Paul Scheer and Tig Notaro. The Nov. 17 broadcast was one of the most-watched in its time slot, averaging 2.24 million viewers.

“It’s the wild, wild west. We’ve got some of the biggest names competing in the hottest new sport, and we’re just getting started,” Levy said. “This is nothing short of a cultural phenomenon, and I’m telling you right now, this is the next generation of destination programming.”

I may not have learned much in my [mumblemumble] years, but I know enough not to bet against David Levy—even if he is fronting the 25K buy-in.

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An underrated WCC match takes place on Saturday night when Santa Clara travels to San Francisco.

San Francisco was on the wrong end of a 23-point slump by St. Mary’s Thursday night while Santa Clara beat BYU as a home underdog in the closing seconds. Now they meet as two teams that tend in opposite directions.

Trying to get off the mat after a tough, emotional loss, the Dons put on a big number against Santa Clara, but can they cover?

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

Spread:

money line:

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

Santa Clara’s high-octane offense can cause some problems against San Francisco, as they are able to go in fives and move the San Francisco Bigs along the perimeter, opening lanes for PJ Pipes.

The Broncos are 27th in the country in effective field goal percentage and may cause problems for USF big man Yauhen Massalski on defense. The Dons are elite at leading teams from the three-point line, allowing opponents a three-point percentage in the bottom 10, and they’re also great at defending the rim, the country’s top 30. However, Santa Clara can combat that with their midrange offense, they are the top third on that metric nationally according to Haslemmetrics.

Of course, going through the middle might not sound like an effective strategy on the go, but given the Dons’ 67 percent free-throw rate and the possibility of emotional disappointment after a missed lead, I’m sticking with Santa Clara.

CHOOSE: Santa Clara +8, play to +7

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

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‘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 Flawed to Wager In opposition to San Francisco: A Dialog With BuzzFeed Information Exec. Editor Mat Honan appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.