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43rd mayor of Miami. Served two terms since 2017 and his tenure is going to end in September because he's term
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limited. Although I hear these days that's flexible. Please welcome Francis Suarez. We're ranked the happiest city
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in America, the healthiest city in America. The formula for success is simple. Keep taxes low. Keep people
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safe. Lean into innovation. How are things going in Miami? Obviously, you know, we talked to you a
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couple years ago when we had our first all-in summit here and uh you had a nonsense approach that you thought was
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going to work with the homeless challenges that we're seeing. I think candidly we discussed a large portion of
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the homeless problem in these major cities is an addiction problem and you know giving a junkie a home doesn't
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exactly get them off the street. It just doesn't work. And you've you were one of
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the first people to say that plainly. How are you dealing with it? Has it gotten worse? Is it an intractable
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problem? Yeah. Take us through it. So, in homeless specifically, we are at an 11-year low. Uh we did our census, we do
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two census a year. We do one in uh January, one in in the summer. And our our January census had us at an 11-year
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low. We had 546 homeless, unsheltered homeless in the entire city of Miami. Um we have a couple thousand sheltered. And
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uh I actually raised money on an annual basis uh as a mayor's ball. I I did my mayor's ball last year and this year
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I'll be doing it in May 31st to end homeless. We want to be the first major American city to have zero homeless and
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we think we can get there. We call it functional zero and and and and frankly the the
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strategy is not that complicated. You know, obviously there's a macroeconomic strategy. We have the lowest
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unemployment in America. We have the highest median wage growth in America. We I lower taxes to the lowest level in
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history. And we've seen 140% growth in 9 years. So, the economy is robust. We were ranked the happiest city in
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America, the healthiest city in America. Frankly, if you're happy, you're healthy
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and you're working, you're probably not homeless. And then, of course, we've done innovative things in the homeless
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space. We've worked with um charitable organizations that uh help people reunify families if they live in other
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parts of the country. And also, we rent homes so that we can get around the building process and give all the same
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wraparound services, but we we sort of hack through that process. Those 500 individuals um who are categorized as
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homeless. Yeah. How many of them are suffering from mental illness andor self-medicating slashaddicted to drugs?
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A very high percentage. Um I would say 80% plus, right? And that's sort of anecdotal. Um but when I and I've been
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out to the streets, I'll I'll I'll be out there before my my homeless ball now on May 31st. I'm actually going to spend
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a night out on the street. Um and when you talk to them, when you engage in them, a vast majority of them are
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unfortunately. Okay, so let me double click on that. this problem wasn't as acute before the super drugs meth like
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the the serious meth um well the really serious ones they're making now and fentinyl right these this combination
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seems to be you know we had people addicted to heroin like Miles Davis and like Philip Seymour Hoffman who produced
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incredible art and were addicts for 30 years and they and they went in and out of it but this drug is pernicious
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different deadly super addicting how much of the problem are those two drugs specifically if you double clicked on
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it. A big part of the problem heroin or opioids. He's asking for a friend by the
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way. Just not I'm asking if you have a hookup. Clearly. No, but I'm I'm being deadly serious because we we had these
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homeless individuals in New York, you know, back in the day in the 70s ' 80s. They were kind of like um hobos and
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vagabons, not seriously addicted, you know, suffering where they're folding over and curled up in a ball from
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fentinel. Well, well, to your point, I mean, meth and and and uh the opioids are incredibly addictive and they're
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very hard to to to beat, right? I mean, even people who are are wealthy and get addicted to these drugs have a very hard
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time um the recidivism rate is very high and so uh you know, you just had Antonio
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on here a minute ago and he was talking about, you know, immigration and the border and one of the big problems with
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the border is the tens of thousands of people that die annually because of fentinel that gets imported through
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China and through our border. And so uh there's a tie-in, right, between federal
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policy and and local policy. But for us, um again, uh in 1980 during the the cocaine era, right, different drug, uh
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we had 220 homicides. So you had drugs hurting people, but you had the business of drugs very much hurting people,
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right? Last So we started recording homicides in 1946 in Miami. 1946, we had 32 homicides. From 1946 to today, the
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lowest number we ever had was 24. Last year we had 27. Wow. Okay. We had 220 in 1980. This year we're trending below the
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24. So we may this may be the safest year in the history recorded history of Miami. Can you connect those dots there?
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Like I think I think when people think about social policy, everybody confuses the correlation and causation. Yeah. But
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you've been in the seat now for a long time. Yeah. So you've seen what hasn't worked, what has worked, what maybe has
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been correlated, but if you had to sort of like lay out the road map for other cities, but frankly for other states,
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the rest of the country, what's the road map? The Francis Suarez road map. The formula for success is simple. Keep
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taxes low, keep people safe, lean into innovation, right? Can we just double click into
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those? Of course. I can double click on each one of them. Let's take the other side of these things just to help the
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conversation because I believe in them but let's try to steal man the other side. Sure. Keep taxes low. What people
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say if you look at California and if you look at New York what they would say is
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we have a duty to invest in the social services and the infrastructure to support everybody that isn't necessarily
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as well or didn't get the right side of luck and we need to raise taxes in order
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to generate the revenues to fund that. My my counterargument would be government is not a good purveyor of
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those services. It's not an efficient purveyor of those services. So, so ju just to double click, right? I lowered
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taxes to the lowest level in history and I and I took the city in 2009 as a councilman in out of bankruptcy. So, I
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got it in bankruptcy. We decided this is sort of the Doge before Doge. We decided
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not to raise taxes. We cut cost. We we cut, you know, we didn't we didn't let anyone go, but we had tiered salary
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cuts, pension reform, and we balanced our budget, and we had 10 years of prosperity. And that prosperity led to a
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tripling of the size of our government. So we went from a $500 million government to a billion half dollar
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government while lowering taxes. So we we grew 200%. Right? So the the the resources that we had to dedicate to
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these actually went up even though taxes went down. And then uh you know uh when
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you have a place where there's prosperity and where people are investing and where people are employed,
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they're obviously not there's not as many social problems. So they're not out there killing people. um they're not out
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out there hurting people. So the 1980s we had you know we were one of the mur murder capitals of America and we're now
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one of the safest big cities in America. And then I think you know the the how can I help moment that you guys are all
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familiar with was this juxtiposition with what American cities were doing right famously New York competes for and
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wins the Amazon HQ2 prize right and then rejects it. Rejects it. Yeah. And and and also famously in California, you had
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a I guess it was a legislator that said, "F Elon Musk." Yeah. Elena Gonzalez. Exactly. And she and he replied,
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"Message received." And he left. And then she went to run a union, right? Is that where she ended up? Yeah. I think
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she went to work for a union. She's the CEO of one of the big unions now. But the issue is what I tell people is look,
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it's it's bad enough to kick out a trillion dollar company from your city or the richest person arguably in the
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world from your city. But think about the the signal. The signal to me is much much greater, right? The signal is if
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you want to bring another headquarters or if you want to be another company, we just got FC Barcelona two days ago. We
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announced that FC Barcelona moved their headquarters from New York to Miami, right? Every single day um we announced,
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you know, 900 million dollars of loans in two projects in the last two days in two buildings, you know, our stadium,
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our Inter Miami stadium. We have the FIFA World Cup headquarters for 2026 in the in the world, right? So, I mean,
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this formula for success, it seems simple, other cities are getting it wrong completely backwards, right? their
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taxes are high, it's not safe, and they're not leaning into they're rejecting innovation. Are there are
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there downsides to growing this fast? Like are there things that have to keep up that are harder to change like
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building code, housing density, you know, those sort of cost of living things like have those have you guys
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been able to drive reform there or is that is that not where you wanted to be? So Ken Griffin recently was interviewed
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in a fireside chat like this and said, "I'd rather have the problems of success than the problems of failure." And so
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there's no doubt that there are problems that stem from success, right? And housing prices, you had a tremendous
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amount of inflation in the last administration and you you you sort of couple that with hyper demand here in
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Miami and you get hyperinflation, right? So housing costs have certainly gone up
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significantly. And we do everything we can to leverage public dollars and public assets like land to try to build
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projects at a 15 to1 or 20 to1 leverage rate. So for $100 million invested, we'll get $2 billion worth of projects.
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Um, there's a 5 million h, you know, 5 million housing shortage across the country and Miami has its fair share
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just like any any other major city. Traffic, I know none of you guys have experienced any bad traffic this last
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few days, right? I was in the car two two hours and 40 minutes going over to that. I'm not going to I'm not going to
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tell you how far along we are with the Boring Company on trying to find underground boring systems or with some
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of the EV toe companies that we're working with. But I do think that transportation generally has to sort of
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turn the page from, you know, last generation's archaic um solutions to next. How did you get that train that
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what do you call it? The sunshine line or something. Bright line. Yeah. The Bright Line. Yeah. How did you get that
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done so quick? And everybody says it's the greatest thing ever. That's a private sector project uh that was done
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by company. Um we had a piece of it which was we did a piece from with Tri Rail to bring it into the station. And
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when we did that piece, we made it free for inner city residents to be able to use. So it was something that I was very
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proud of was part of my legacy. So a private company built it, correct? You gave them the right of way. They bought
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the right of way. So it was totally private. So look, we have microobility options that are private like scooters.
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So all you did was just not get in the way. Exactly. Shocking. By the way, what an idea. Let me Yeah. Let me let me ask
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you h how how can It's like the hypocratic oath. Do no harm. Do no harm. How can
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mayors address they they come into office with a reform motivation and they're elected on, hey, we've got to we
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don't have what what Miami has. We got to fix this. We got to get get the city working again. We got to attract
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business. We got to track growth. And they inherit this regulatory morass, this massive infrastructure. Like San
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Francisco recently, I I I got all caught up in the fact that you can't put these
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phone booths in your office. You know, a lot of startups, I don't know if any of
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you guys have these, these these phone booths, you got to have someone go in and make a call. You put the phone booth
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in. And all my startups, all the companies I've been involved in, you can't put one in San Francisco. So, you
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you put these phone booths in and then you can go in and make calls. So, when everyone's in an open desk
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configuration, but you got to do a private call, you hop them in. Everyone loads up their offices with these phone
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booths. In San Francisco, they're illegal. Turns out that you need to run you and there's a piece of paper, which
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I was actually going to tweet because it's insane. It's like three pages long. All the things you need to know about
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the phone booths that you want to put in your office. You got to get an architect
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review, an engineering review, a design review. You got to get sign off from the
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engineer. You got to submit the permitting fees. It gets reviewed by the city inspector's office. You got to
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design fire sprinklers that have to go into the phone booth. That's nuts. In case there's a fire in the phone booth,
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someone needs to put out the fire in the That's hilarious. So, I was talking I was talking to some folks about like
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what are you going to do about this? But the mayor's kind of like, I don't know if there's enough action that I can take
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because it's it's it's in law that there's all this kind of regulatory stuff. How do you advise mayors that are
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stuck with this sort of an environment? And this is not just San Francisco. There's a lot of big cities in this
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country that have books and books of this stuff. And we can talk about philosophically why this has happened,
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sociologically why this has happened. Books and books of this stuff where the city can't get out of the way. What do
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the mayors do? when you guys get together like is there any advice or are we stuck like what's the what's the
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solution? We're not stuck. I I I think it it's cultural right at some level you have to inculcate a culture where you
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empower your employees to innovate and and to to uh you know deconlict. I think uh when people come to me with a problem
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I say look first first issue is if there's something that's blocking it that doesn't make any sense why don't we
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just change it? We're legislators. That's what we do. We legislate so we can fix it. uh maybe it happened maybe
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it made sense 20 years ago maybe it made sense 50 years ago doesn't make sense today let's just change it I think
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regulation is the is the other side of the coin from innovation right so regulation is telling you what you often
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times what you can't do or or how to do something innovation is to protect loss it's sort of a first principles thinking
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we're going to we want to do this right we we want to make this work and I think
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uh I always not always but I regularly fall on the side of innovation and I think you you you as a public official
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frankly who's elected by the people really are the one that has to push the bureaucrats, the bureaucrat class,
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right? The bureaucrat class, they get very accustomed to saying no. They're riskaverse. Um, you know, they're not
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incentivized often times, right? There's no incentive structure that says, "Hey,
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if you innovate, you're going to get X or Y or Z." And then I think the third piece of it is artificial intelligence.
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I really feel that there's a breakthrough that's going to come and it's not just in transportation. We're
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talking about EV tools and and underground boring and all that, but I think in in zoning codes and and all that, it's
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it's going to be computer to computer, right? So the codes are all straightforward, right? We have the same
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code for 15 years, right? Probably 97 or 8% of all known decisions have already been made under this code, right? So all
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they have to do is be replicated going forward, right? Unless the code changes and then you just change the coding and
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you make the decisions all over again. So it's not that complicated. You should be able to submit something. The
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computer should be able to spit it out immediately. If it needs changes, it should tell you what the changes are. A
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computer could look at that, make the changes, and spit it back in. Right? And if you were to do that, you know, it
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takes to get a permit on a on a home in most places in America or on a building in most places in America, you know, 6
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months, 9 months, a year, a year and a half. I mean, it's insane. It should be done instantly. And it could literally
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be done instantly with a technology that we already have available to us today. Hundred billion dollar business, by the
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way, in case anybody's a great idea. It's a killer idea. I think some startups have worked on it too. Um I
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know multiple that are working. Yeah, they work on the other side of it. Building on Freeberg's point, the two
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best proposals I heard about regulations and I'm curious if you could steal me on
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them or you know just how practical you think they are. Putting um a time limit on regulations. So if you fought for
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some regulations around these phone boots back when foam boots, you know, Superman changed his costume in them
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from the 60s and 70s, like back from that era, maybe it lasts for 20 years and then it expires or you want to add
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two regulations to office space regulations. You got to take one off the books, you know, and and those were the
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two proposals I've heard. Some way of timing these out or um if you want to add, you got to take you got to find
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something to take off. Are either of those practical? I kind of like the first one better than the second one
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because the second one I mean this sort of one for one I mean there's got to be a reason to do one or the other. Right.
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Okay. I I like the first one better. Um actually what we normally do in government is the opposite. What we do
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is we do what we call pilots, right? So you'll do something that goes away very quickly, right? In other words, you
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imple implement a piece of legislation say, "Oh, we're going to do it for a year. Let's test it out." Right? And
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it's a pilot and then it goes away. Um, I I like what you're saying in terms of,
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you know, a big part of regulatory culture can probably be phased out over a 15 20 year period as being
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anacronistic, right? It just doesn't a year get reviewed and you you're the government's responsible for reviewing
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5% a year for 20 years and they reertify it or right and and then you have the ability to reimplement it if you think
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it makes sense. But I think what happens is you go back down to zero. you were asking Antonio and I was I was listening
00:16:13
to the conversation because we did we did it like I said we had to cut our budget by 20% in one year and uh and
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part of the problem is budgeting is like layering right it all layers on top of each other same as regulation it layers
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on top of each other so if you were to be able to strip it down in a mechanical way right in an instantaneous way as
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opposed to having to fight the the the structures in our case we were very lucky there was a state statutory
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vehicle that allowed us to implement the cuts otherwise we'd have to bargain for
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them in a in a union process and obviously no one would ever bargain to cut their salaries. There would no never
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bargain to cut. It would nothing would have happened. We would have come we would have been bankrupt and then a
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court would have taken us over. We would have looked like a joke and instead we we cut costs and we and we survived and
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we thrived right going forward. And by the way, my employees now love me. They were not happy the first couple years
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when we did it. But now they they they um I mean I don't even have to go to a union interview when I when I run for
00:17:05
office. They just support me right away. Do you want to be governor? I don't think it's quite that simple. I want to
00:17:10
dunk. I want to dunk. Yeah, I want to be able to dunk, too. Uh, look, I think that I'm a Republican for those of you
00:17:17
who don't know, and uh, you know, the president's already weighed in the Republican primary. I respect the
00:17:21
president's uh, perspective. I have a good relationship with Congressman Donald's. So, I I think politics is very
00:17:28
circumstantial. Um, we've talked about that a lot in the past. So, you know, things sometimes conspire in your in
00:17:33
your favor. Sometimes sometimes things don't, right? And I do think it is circumstantial. So, I think you have to
00:17:40
weigh the circumstances. You know, I ran for president because I had a had a thesis. The thesis was urban voters,
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Hispanics, and young voters, if they went Republican, would favor the Republican candidate or Republican
00:17:52
candidate win. And it they did. It just wasn't me, right? It was a different candidate. But, you know, the president
00:17:57
did a great job on podcasts, right? Going on all these podcasts that, you know, the vice president didn't do. Um,
00:18:03
and he got young voters and he got urban voters. Uh, look, a Republican's never going to win Philadelphia, right? Trump
00:18:09
lost Philadelphia to Biden by 85%. But he lost Philadelphia to Kamla by 75%. And and that delta, the 75, 85, that 10%
00:18:19
delta gave him Pennsylvania. Yeah, that's the election, which was such a crucial state, right? Like arguably the
00:18:25
the winning state. So you you know, Republicans are never going to necessarily win urban votes or the urban
00:18:31
population centers throughout America. But you're also seeing and and I think it's important to note you're seeing
00:18:37
Democratic mayors lose across America. London Breed lost in San Francisco. Yeah. Tashara Jones lost in St. Louis.
00:18:43
The mayor of of Chicago, Lori Lightoot lost. On that point, you were the or still are the head of No, I was I was a
00:18:49
president US Conference of Yeah. for a year and a half. Okay. If if if we had to ask you, you can't live in Miami.
00:18:55
Yeah. You met all those mayors. Who where are two places that you think are actually well-run that aspire, you know,
00:19:02
to do something great and have their [ __ ] together? Cities. Take your time. I don't jump to
00:19:08
an answer. I I'll say this. I I'll tell you a mayor that I like. How about that?
00:19:11
Okay. Justin Bib. Justin Bib is a mayor of Cleveland. We got a couple Cleveland people here apparently. There we go.
00:19:19
Justin is a good friend. Uh I have a lot of friends that are mayors. I'm a mayor.
00:19:23
You know, I love all my mayors because I was a president of that institution. But
00:19:26
I think Justin is a young, dynamic guy who's smart, not super partisan, cares tremendously about his city, and and we
00:19:35
talk a lot about it because obviously Miami and Cleveland are a little different, right? On the margins, that's
00:19:40
fair. Uh and and we joke about it. He says, you know, I wish I had the kind of problems you have. To go back to sort of
00:19:44
the Ken Griffin quote, you know, they they don't struggle with affordable housing. They got plenty of affordable
00:19:49
housing cuz people don't necessarily want to live there. Um uh sorry Jay sorry Jay I love you bro.
00:19:56
Uh but but it's true right? It's kind of true. So so he's dealing with economic uh development. He's dealing with he
00:20:04
wants to he wants to be the Miami of Ohio in terms of getting investment getting the tech community there getting
00:20:10
people special people to move into his community and believe in his vision. And uh I think look company building is hard
00:20:18
as you guys know you guys have built some incredible companies. Ecosystem building is even harder, right? It's
00:20:23
it's it's a thousandx harder than building a big company. I mean, companies take years into decades and
00:20:29
ecosystems take decades into centuries. Yeah. It's too different. Yeah. Is there
00:20:33
something that inside of the next gubernatorial campaign, let's say you don't run for
00:20:39
governor, that's a high impact job at the state level? Not really. I get to practice and I have a private sector
00:20:45
life. Uh I have a 11-year-old and a seven-year-old. So, I mean, if the president called me and said, you know,
00:20:50
I want you to be the US ambassador to, you know, a country that I have a passion to help, you know, in terms of
00:20:56
the United States, in terms of their relationship and world peace and things of that nature. Um, which I think
00:21:02
are high ROIs for for the time investment and the financial sacrifice that you have to make. I would strongly
00:21:09
consider it. But other than that, I mean, I'm I live a very blessed life, you know. I I I'm the mayor of the best
00:21:14
city on the planet, you know. Yeah. And I have incredible, incredible, incredible bosses. These are my bosses.
00:21:22
I have the best bosses in the world. Yeah. And they're constantly encouraging me. They're constantly cheering me on.
00:21:27
And and and I live and breathe for them. I wake up early in the morning. I go to
00:21:30
bed late. And I carry their problems, their hopes, and their dreams in my soul. All right. Give it up for Francis
00:21:36
Suarez, your mayor. Thank you to our friend Francis Suarez, the mayor of Miami, for joining us on
00:21:45
stage at our F1 event. And thanks to you, the audience for tuning in. Give us a like, a thumbs up, a subscribe, write
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all your stable coin needs. And special thanks to my friends, including Shane over at Poly Market, Google Cloud,
00:22:57
Salana, and BVNK. We couldn't have done it without y'all. Thank you so much. Let your winners ride.
00:23:07
[Music] We open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Queen
00:23:19
[Music] of besties are gone. That is my dog taking it on a share driveway. Oh man, my habitasher will meet up at We
00:23:34
should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy cuz they're all just It's like this like sexual tension that
00:23:40
we just need to release somehow. [Music] We need to get mercy. [Music] I'm going all in.