#AIS: Opening chat with Miami Mayor Francis Suarez

[Music] hey everybody hey everybody hey everybody everybody hey everybody hey everybody welcome back besties are back besties have reunited besties are back besties are back for the all-in podcast we'll call this episode one episode two this is our fifth episode episode eight the last time you heard from the besties it was election night and it was a [ __ ] show he's got a megaphone prince of spax the dictator the dictator chamoth paulie hoppa tia hey everybody it's me jason this is cashmere do you like my thin cashmere joulet that i'm wearing let's all take a moment to say what we like about jamaat okay great let's get back to the episode queen of

quinoa queen of kin y the queen of kin waff david freeburg is with us let me tell you guys what you missed out on hey everybody it's me jason califanus welcome welcome chiming in is rain man himself david sacks rain man david sacks hey guys hey besties are here talk about tech economy politics and our lives in silicon valley is it if newsom is recalled i would like to put my name on the ballot we're not going to get any positive change in this state until the politicians are held accountable salesforce in a record transaction for a sas company the ship goes into the suez canal and it had a blackout the chauvin trial guilty all three charges xi jinping and putin got

together and they're apparently besties and then we can talk about the corporatist scumbags and other [ __ ] people over so let's let's do that you know i realized that what i said last week lacked empathy particularly towards others who are dealing with persecution i think what makes this podcast great is the diversity of opinion and respect that we show for each other jake out if if anything i said hurt your feelings i want to say i'm sorry i think you are the most incredibly loyal person love you chamath jake i have something to say to you as well sister breakdown [ __ ] it back at ya

thank you to young spielberg extended edition remix we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it all in statistics where some maniac is breaking down how many minutes we each talk all in stands have a ton of skills who's the guy henry who does all those incredible videos with animations that is fraud that's where elizabeth holmes crossed the line crushing those things are great draymond green in the house what's up you bet 13 okay you don't get 13 back you only get 10 back uh we have biology here brad gershner welcome back to the program ryan armstrong what's up bro ryan peterson from flexport thanks for coming

on the pod and we appreciate it i love you guys i wanted to kiss all of you on the mouth hopefully we'll have a bestie poker soon thank you for helping me get through a very difficult year people just can't believe men say to each other they love each other and they can't believe that saks almost is able to say it we love you sexy poo i love you david sacks and i love you david sacks back at you can we book the miami trip gym off let's let's go out there king of spaxx himself the guru of growth he puts the dick in dictator that time piece what does it do it reminds him of how much more money he has than you sweater is worth six times laura piana

is above his line your super villain with that 1985 sasakaya he be chillin he's dropping annual letters in luxurious sweaters as far as respects go well it can only get better himself back with us again the tsar of arr the savant of sas he puts the ass in asperger's he's the sucker he's a sucker for tucker cesar of arr he perfected the flywheel with his boy peter tl lps don't be nervous because he's only investing in software as a service the world's biggest [ __ ] the rain man himself david sacks he's just waiting the queen of quinoa himself he'll reboot your physique with his munique the thriller from mamilla valley he puts the

eye on anxiety works in dna but in the 90s all he cared about was the mdma the duke of dna the titan of tempeh in high school he had no friends but thanks to the pod undergrads are in his dms all forms of steak he's a persian he's the vanguard of all the virgins the king of quinoa [Music] [Applause] ladies and gentlemen allow me to introduce your besties the queen of quinoa the sultan of signs david freeburg the rain man david sacks the dictator himself chamat pali hapatia and everyone's favorite bestie the point god [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] i cannot believe what jkl has pulled off

here i mean i am in shock that this is even real you know i still don't know where all the money went but the amount of money you embezzled we are witnessing our first theranose moment starring jason calcanis guys i got great news for you i took all the money i put it in luna i haven't checked it in the last week but we were up 3x we're gonna kill this um you'll never find the money i put it through multiple bitcoin tumblers that's great it's gonna be great uh welcome everybody by the way sorry this is a joke to everybody in the

room but one person sitting over here who is really sweating the accounting of this freebird is happening he had a panic attack at the beginning i said if jacob's gonna do this we're gonna have a grip session we're gonna all sit down and we're gonna figure out where the grift happened because it's gonna happen the guy who's always calling out the griff knows how to griff better than anyone else we'll figure this out like half these people's families here have you guys met them all they're great people are there any calcaneuses who are not on the payroll can i tell you we're feeding a lot of

calcaneuses here i've been i've been this guy bob it's a good job i've been your biggest supporter defending you from these two [ __ ] jackals but it finally got into my brain as well so when i got into the hotel room and i opened the bag i was like well maybe this cup cost four thousand dollars right maybe it's very possible it's awesome it's a heated cup it's a heated cost who are we to know when's the last time you bought a cup it's like it's like the pentagon or something you know i mean tomas like when george bush went to the supermarket he didn't know how much a tomato or a gallon of milk i have no idea i'm sorry

i'm not going to pretend i asked sax when's the last time you flew commercial which george bush was in office [Music] herbert walker yeah no it was uh i think obama was still in office yeah yeah he just won the democratic nomination uh we're so great uh grateful for you all to come here how many people flew just by a show of hands and a whoop whoop how many people flew over 10 hours to get here oh my god i mean it's pretty incredible um fans from around the world uh and i i just think uh you know it's very special to us um that this podcast means so much to you last night we we you know had a little

debrief and the thing just said to us you know when we when we when we met you all and it's very weird to do a podcast like this and have it become super popular item two weeks ago it became the 26th most popular episode in the app store which to us was crazy we did this because we were losing our minds and coveted as friends we couldn't play poker we couldn't see each other it was very lonely and we did this for ourselves and the fact that all of you got some value from it uh it was just remarkable to us like as a concept uh but incredibly um gracious of you all to come here and then to tell us what it means to you uh

i i it just has blown us away that people are even tuning in to it how has it changed your life freedberg i mean you were a nobody i mean i literally didn't have a twitter account we were all very famous in the tech industry but nobody knew i mean i mean literally we were backstage and they said queen of quinoa and this audience went crazy [Applause] i mean you're very socially awkward tell us what what is it like for you to be famous you know i appreciate that but i'll tell you the um the aw the weird thing is we go into our office for 90 minutes a week and we talk

to each other over zoom and then we go in the room and people want to take pictures that's what's so like strange is like we've never done this and we did it once in person together right the the pod at your so we've always done it over zoom and it was always like a remote like so it always just felt like hey i gotta meet i got meetings on either side let's go do the pod for for 90 minutes and then all of a sudden it's like hey you know people actually [ __ ] listen to us talking over zoom yeah it's a little wacky i'll tell you um but it was great to meet everyone last night i think it was um it was really cool because i heard a lot of stories last

night about some dude sold his company for like [ __ ] two billion dollars where's that guy that guy and he's like he's like well yeah yeah yeah he said he sold his company because of the um the call we made on the top of the market and he's like i took the deal 21 times revenue oh there he is oh oh who's this guy sir welcome anyways everybody it was crazy what an audience the mayor of miami francis juarez [Applause] so i take it i take it eleven just closed i got to dress like a human being for about an hour well it actually doesn't close eleven

eleven so we'll just go there sorry it's 24 hours it's 24 hours not that i've ever been there but yes um hey thanks for hosting us we were thinking of a place to do it and uh you were gracious enough to to encourage you took everybody's poker money everywhere else in the country so you decided to come here right yes we're going to swedenborg up here um but uh what an incredible um resurgence and cording of the tech industry you've done here tell us about a little bit about what's happened in the last two years since you started replying to people on twitter saying

hey um if you're running a business we'd like to help you yeah sort of a united states of america type of approach right for fun fundamentally american where we want to create high-paying jobs in our city we want to empower people we want to give people an opportunity at being prosperous and uh for some reason in this country in certain cities that's been frowned upon or it makes you feel guilty about it and here in miami we're fundamentally shaped by our sort of our origin story right and many people in miami were exiled from their country of birth uh for because in those countries uh communist

regimes took over and obviously in those countries uh a government official is saying hey give me your property give me your uh your business and don't worry i'll make everybody equal and they do make everybody equal they make everybody equally miserable so uh you know they've accomplished that and whenever government wants to grow uh you should run in the opposite direction and so in miami we do it uh by following some simple rules we keep taxes as low as humanly possible and shocker our budget has doubled in size uh since we uh have kept taxes to 1960s lows uh we focus on quality of life so we

have the lowest homeless rate since 2013. we're the first major city i think in america to actually try to get to zero we want to have zero homeless um and we we we actually invest in safety you know we actually while other cities decrease funding for our police we've increased funding for our police we have the most [Applause] we have the most police officers we've ever had in our history by the way they have the hardest job in america right now are our police officers and i'm going to give you a shocking correlation our crime went down shocking so you added police we added police and the crime went down yes you know it's

it's it's bewildering our homicide rate went down by 23 last year this year it's down by 40 from the 23 of last year so almost 63 percent two years so that's basically the combination of economic prosperity and then safety and security people are too busy to think about all of the long tail things they could be doing to screw up their own lives or somebody else's life they're just living a good life yeah we have 1.4 unemployment um we're number one in the nation in wage growth we're number one in the nation in tech jobs we're number one in tech job migration i think we've moved 2 trillion aum in the last 18

months and our vc pipeline grew by 200 year-over-year and to put that number in context if it was a zero-sum game and our gain was for example san francisco's loss which it may very well be going into the future um in two years we would overtake san francisco as a vc capital of the world yeah and to be clear at that rate you know this is a very liberal city that is welcoming of all people it's just not like you've become some like insane crazy right-wing like teal sacks you still are like fine with people living their lives and you know yes we're we're very much into freedom uh we we're we're kind of sort of libertarian

here uh in miami uh and and you know we we want people to live their lives as they see fit uh we're not here to tell them what to do we're here to create the conditions for their prosperity to the extent that government even gets involved in that right we we like to stay out of people's business we try to be efficient uh which i know is almost an oxymoron in government and we try to facilitate people's growth and success that's it that's all we do tell us about your uh support of crypto so you know when we were trying to create this uh buzz and ecosystem uh we knew we had to uh disrupt the the natural order of things and so our hack right our

david and goliath sort of slingshot hack was to go all in on crypto part of the reason why is uh you know i understood the fundamentals of it i like the fundamentals of it um you know i think one of the things that's missing in our society is trust and when you see policy makers whether at the fed or or or the federal government when spending significantly more money than what it's taking in uh which is creating hyperinflation we see interest rates going up i mean sort of a terrible man man or woman inflicted uh suffering and you see a system that is uh designed to sort of create trust by making it um humanless in effect it was something that was very

attractive obviously the blockchain i was part of the blockchain foundation part of the blockchain task force for the state of florida so i had a sort of education on the technology prior to the moment where i sort of decided to go all in on and i thought that it could be a differentiator being a young mayor who understood the tech who understood that i wasn't taking as big a risk as people thought i would be taking and it's been great for our ecosystem i mean whatever the price of bitcoin is at a given moment is pretty much irrelevant what's important to me is we have the bitcoin conference we have you guys uh

we have the bitcoin conference which is a tens of millions of dollars in economic development we brought a tremendous amount of funds and and uh and exchange exchanges to headquarter here in miami which has created hundreds of high-paying jobs uh and then we got uh ftx to name our arena which is a 200 million dollar uh gift or contribution to our our community so it's it's been something that's benefited us to the tunes of hundreds of millions of dollars so regardless of what you think about crypto as a technology as an economic development tool it's been game changing for us saks i'm curious how you think about what

you've seen in this city versus you know where we all live and operate in the bay area and then across the country how do you grade the job the mayor has done here and what do you think the lessons are for the rest of the country i think you know mayor suarez done amazing job here and it's something that other cities should be looking to emulate which is simply to be helpful instead of you know being an impediment i did an event for mayor suarez in san francisco you know my my home and it was the best attended event i've and i've done a lot of uh political events the one we had with you was the best attended event i think we ever

held and the reason there's a tremendous amount of curiosity on the part of people in san francisco in terms of what's been happening here and the kind of the thing that you heard over and over again by the people who attended that event who had asked questions was you know why can't we have a mayor like you in san francisco because i don't live there actually i'm president of the us conference of mayor so i kind of jokingly say well i'm kind of you know trying to but every every city i go to they ask me the same question and i'm like well i really like miami a lot yeah i mean fundamentally we have not just a mayor

but because the mayor in san francisco is actually not bad london breed's not bad the issue is the board of supervisors who really controls the city i mean they've been engaged in killing the golden goose i mean san francisco and the bay area had a lock on the tech ecosystem and because the political forces there defined tech as the enemy they basically have driven it out and as a result you now have emergent tech hubs all over the united states starting with miami and austin um and other cities like that and it's kind of crazy san francisco had the monopoly and it basically chose to give it up well spending it was a giant grift

right aren't they at like 4x budget per capita over new york it's like yeah it's reacted something insane yeah it is great mayor let me ask a question around um one of the reasons silicon valley exists is because of the relationship with the universities in the bay area and obviously that still continues to be a big driver for the tech and more recently biotech economy in the bay area a lot of people get their phds they graduate engineering students they stay in the bay area ucsf stanford berkeley et cetera how do you think about the relationship between universities what's the kind of um kind of reflective solution here and are there

relationships you could maybe build or bridge with california schools to kind of get innovation hubs set up that that partner would graduate i would love to um you know one of the things that's interesting about silicon valley is 95 of the people that live in silicon valley were not born in silicon valley um in miami it's closer to 70 percent of the people that um that live in the city were not born in the city i'm actually an anomaly being the first miami-born mayor in the history of the city 125 years so that's that's a pretty cool stat but i absolutely think that we can look we're not perfect i like to think that i get up every morning

as a mayor you sort of look at the imperfections and you try as a long-term build right beyond these 24 months you start thinking about what are the structural things that we can do better and i think you just hit on one of them right i think certainly having a university that's at the caliber of the stanfords the mits you know harvard even ut and georgia tech get a lot of fanfare um in austin and in the atlanta area um and so i think we can certainly do better um i'm not one of these people that likes to be complacent or that thinks that you know even if we had a university at the caliber of some of these universities i'd be still trying

to find a way to do better i think the world is highly disruptive i think higher ed is highly disruptive and i think uh and it's an archaic sort of institutional just like government right they're always behind so i think that that gives cities like miami if we're smart if we find our crypto for universities right we can sort of leapfrog a lot of them and and get to the top very quickly i think i want to ask you as we as we wrap here a really hard question um we are struggling how to beat your mouth in poker yeah it's hard to be possible i would say no i mean we have um a drug crisis in this country yeah with fentanyl yeah it is a

superdrug we have never seen we have this problem in san francisco with homelessness and drugs and you are now uh running the uh conference of all the mayors in the country and you all come together and it seems like some cities are figuring out how to deal with this and some are floundering is the issue that we're looking at a super drug and an addiction problem that has very low chance of uh resolving itself through even you know when you when somebody can get a bed and go to recovery the recovery rates for fentanyl are slow single digits and we're looking at this as if the problem is actually homelessness that they don't have a home

when in fact they are addicted to a super drug why can't we look at this for what it is and stop conflating a super drug addiction problem with people not having a home and an economic issue it seems like there's some denial going on sure look i think fentanyl is uh the numbers are very scary right in terms of recovery it's infinitesimal uh in terms of people that can get out of that that vicious cycle of fentanyl addiction in miami what we did about 10 15 years ago was we created a network of of of facilities that do drug treatment alcohol treatment mental health and vocational training all at the same place it's called the homeless trust

we use i think it's a cent from it's a basically a tourist tax so people who come in and visit pay a bed tax uh when they come and visit a hotel it generates about 50 million dollars a year which you can bond out and we've created a decentralized set of facilities all across the msa we reduce homelessness by about 90 with that network we're now down to the chronic uh few that the last 10 percent it's about a thousand in the county in miami in the city which is one of 34 cities in the county we have 510 homeless right now in the city and that's incredible you know down to the person yeah down to the person we do we do a a um

a continuous audit and continuous uh uh census and so we know down to the person and i think the key for us to go to zero right aside from trying to fund the network's uh wish list which we did uh with some arpa funding that we got is to really know them at an intimate level know their stories right you know you when we first met one of the things you said was you don't know someone until you know their story like how do you drill down and how do you get inside and know uh what is what's the reason why they're there whether it's an addiction whether it's

uh some people just have been homeless for 20 years and they're just used to it right they want a lifestyle they want to live on the streets and those are the hardest ones because you really can't unfortunately legally tell them you can't live on the street right so it's it's it's about convincing them that there's a better path there's a better life that there are things out there that can uh create more happiness for them yeah but you have to hold the line as well you do on a policing level like absolutely if you uh as we've seen in san francisco if you incentivize it by not doing

any basic policing you get more of it well here's the issue i think what people often forget is obviously people who are homeless are human beings and they need to be treated with dignity at the same time they're human beings like we are if any one of us is recording over there if any one of us just got up and started urinating on the stage right now they would be arrested they would be arrested so so we we're held to a certain level of account as human beings where our actions affect others right so it's not just about the human person and how we take care of that human being but it's also how does a human being interact with and affect

everybody else and i think that's the part that gets lost sometimes in the debate mayor before sorry i want to ask one question you focus on local issues the city that you operate what do you think happens to the united states the federal government over the next 30 years do you have any points of view on where we're headed as a wow it's that's a long uh that's a bloated question but i think well you'll be running for mayor uh for president 2032 when are you planning who knows who knows thank you whenever tamatha also authorizes it um look it has been authorized just you

know you are looking at it eight to twelve years from now he will be the president of the united states but anyways go ahead and i'm always trying to hack and accelerate the process anyhow um so uh yeah so so it's it sounds good by the way uh i i think a few things i think first of all those three uh those three bullet points if you will those three uh uh sort of keys to success keeping taxes low investing in quality of life which is sort of homeless assistant safety and then uh you know creating high-paying jobs was leaning into an innovation economy we're transitioning that's that's that's a recipe for success for

the country can we change the country though what can we change can we move the trend right look what we did in miami in two years absolutely we can i think we have to transition there's two inflection points which are massively disruptive the first is from a an industrial to a digital economy and the second is from the boomer generation to our generation that's right right so those two inflection points are happening at the same time if we and what i i what that does i call it a tsunami of opportunity right and if we get ahead of the tsunami and we surf that wave as opposed to letting the wave run us over um i think we can create a

generation of prosperity but look you have you have china and and russia banning bitcoin do we want to agree with china and russia on anything right now i don't know you know i don't think so so you know i i think there are tremendous opportunities for us to lean into this innovation economy and create prosperity you have the largest microchip factory in the world being built in columbus ohio um i think that's something that uh we need to sort of reclaim our ability to to produce things in the technological industrial revolution we're seeing you know uh bitcoin mining facilities that are done at carbon you know carbon neutral uh so i think

there's a lot of opportunities in this new economy for us to really jump ahead where skilled labor is going to be a premium over unskilled labor that's going to be done with computers or you know uh you know printers or whatever well mr mayor we we appreciate that uh you are putting uh your life to service thank you for the citizens of this great city uh and we really appreciate that because you have other opportunities you could have pursued and you're pursuing really changing uh what is you know some some major dysfunctions in the political system and we're all rooting for you and the results are undeniable and we really do appreciate you ladies and gentlemen

thank you guys let your winners ride rain man david and they've just gone crazy with them [Music] we should all just get a room and just have one big [Music] we need to get back [Music]