Francis Suarez & Graham Stephen | PBD Podcast | Ep. 293
In this episode, Patrick Bet-David is joined by Miami Mayor Francis Suarez & Graham Stephen. They discuss Governor Ron DeSantis, the U.S. Credit downgrade, the chaos in California, and much more.
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Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Why would you pet on Joliet when we got bet dated?
Value payment, giving values contagious.
This world of entrepreneurs, we get no value to hate it.
I'd be running, homie, look what I become.
I'm the one.
What episode is this?
293 episode today with Mayor Suarez and Graham Stefan, which is a weird combination because you ain't running for nothing, right?
Nothing.
You happen to be a guy that's got, you started real estate at 18 years old.
I did.
You sold $130 million of real estate.
You got, I think, two YouTube channels, maybe more.
One of them is like four or five million subscribers.
The other one, the iced coffee hour, which is phenomenal.
We did a podcast together.
So much fun.
Last year at MG.
Matter of fact, it's coming.
You're right.
Because I'm going to be in Vegas Monday for Artists.
It's Graham here, so I just wanted to share my...
And if you can lower that, Rob, thank you.
So exciting to have you on here with us.
And he's a boxer, by the way.
Yeah, hardcore.
We heard about that.
So that's why a couple of the guys I told him, don't mess with him.
Watch his feedback.
He did it.
He did a celebrity boxing, which that's what he's here for.
That was Adam's main animation.
And by the way, what's interesting is he lost because he only trained four times a week.
The other guy did six days.
Six, seven days.
Six to seven, two.
Less than seven days.
Less than somebody.
It's serious stuff.
If you're going to challenge somebody, you got to go six or seven days.
Six or seven days.
And then we have Mayor Suarez, the gentleman who asked the legendary question, how can I help?
Yes, sir.
Right.
Of Elon Musk on Twitter.
Shocking.
Shocking.
Yeah.
Shock the world, man.
Shock the world.
From there, you know, even recently, I think there was a girl that did a tweet.
Rob, if you can pull this up, the tweet from Ashley sends a tweet saying, hey, I lived in Texas my whole life.
I've never really imagined living anywhere else before, but I really feel like Texas doesn't have much here anymore.
Any recommendation must be crypto-friendly, marijuana-friendly, good networking opportunities, plenty to do.
Elon Musk, probably Miami, right?
Yeah.
And this is just three months ago, by the way, less than three months ago when that happened.
So Musk is a big fan of you.
Musk is a big fan of what you guys are doing in Miami.
Did you know that I responded to that tweet?
I didn't see that.
Can you go to Respond or now?
No, it's all right.
Well, I don't know if you can, but I responded, definitely Miami.
Definitely Miami.
I love it.
So American lawyer, politician serving as a 43rd mayor of Miami since 2017, son of former mayor Javier Suarez.
He previously served in the Miami City Commission from 2009 to 2017 and first elected mayor of Miami in 2017, re-elected 2021, and now running for office, trying to do the impossible.
That's right.
Something that's never, ever happened since 1776, going from mayor to president.
There was another gentleman that tried to do it, a guy named Pete.
That's right.
And so now you, and of course, it's going to be interesting to see what happens, but it's great to have you on the podcast.
It's great to be with you.
We call it actually Project Possible instead of doing the impossible.
We call it Project Possible, which is based on a movie, 14 Peaks, where a guy tries to climb 14 mountains that are over a certain altitude of thousands of meters in a certain period of time.
And they told him it was impossible.
14 Peaks.
Yeah, 14.
You got to see that on Netflix.
It's really good.
And he did it.
And so nothing in life is impossible.
You have to start with that premise.
Big ideas, big goals, big dreams are all possible.
And you have to set a course and you have to have a strategy and you have to go there.
And of course, you have to have what I call a theory of the case, right?
Like, how is it going to happen?
Yeah.
I think you do a lot of due diligence.
I mean, I'm sure in real estate, you do a ton of due diligence before you get involved.
You guys do as well.
And then, you know, we were in pre-production here, saw you guys studying and all the work that goes in.
People, there's this great saying in the churches.
They say, they see the glory, but they don't know the real story, right?
They see the sort of the glitz, the glamour, all the great stuff, but they don't know how much work goes into it.
And then, you know, look, it's the beginning of this process.
Like you said, it's a huge mountain to climb.
And we'll see how it goes on.
So question for you.
For, you know, everybody you look at, their campaign is a campaign for something, right?
You know, I'm with her, you know, Hillary Clinton, first female, you know, Trump, make America great again.
And you're, what is, if you were to say my campaign is around two or three points, what are those two or three points you're campaigning behind?
I think the first thing is unifying the country.
The country is incredibly divided.
I was blessed to be elected by 85% and re-elected by 80%.
We live in a world where we're constantly fighting with each other.
And I think the only people that that serves are our enemies.
If you think about, you know, what is China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, all our enemies have in common, or what do they want to see us in terms of a democracy?
They want to see the kryptonite of democracy, which is division.
And we're giving it to them.
And I think no one is really saying that they want to unify the country.
No one really is talking about how they want to do that.
So my one word would probably be unity.
The other one is to believe, to your point.
You know, you got to believe in the impossible.
You have to believe in America that anything can happen.
That if you work hard, that if you are talented enough, that you can articulate a vision, you can captivate people, inspire people, anything can happen.
And it was interesting.
I was on a Fox business interview, I think, two weeks ago, and the moderator put up a graphic which basically showed that at the exact same time that I was doing the interview in 2015, Trump was at 1%, which is sort of where I am, right?
Unknown.
Well, he was known, but he was not, you know, he did not have a high polling.
And so, again, we forget sometimes how many times the country chooses an underdog to be the president.
It's happened so many times in my lifetime.
I want to ask you a follow-up question on that.
So the first time Trump ran, everybody's like, this is a, you know, this is a marketing gimmick.
This is not real.
This is this.
This is that.
And most people don't realize.
I think he ran in 2000.
He ran in 2000 the first time.
Can you check to see when it's the first time he ran?
I think you're right.
I think he ran before.
Yeah, he ran the first time 2000.
And everybody's like, dude, this guy doesn't stand a chance.
There's no way it's going to happen.
There's no way this, no way that.
And in this election, you know, you and I have spent time together.
And I, you know, what I respect a lot about you is I made a video specifically dedicated to you.
Yeah.
Because as a business guy, I love guys that are, you know, getting back to you quick.
Let's go.
Let's roll.
You and I, one day where you, I think you DM me on Instagram, Pat, can we have you on the show, Miami?
And then we start talking, and then I'm driving on the car in the car, calling you, and we're on the phone.
Hey, okay, whatever's on that, call Karina.
Well, if you can have your assistant, call Karina, we'll get a time to do the podcast.
I hang up 30 seconds later, your assistant Rosie calls Karina.
They book a time, they come in.
I'm sitting there in the car saying, that's the kind of stuff.
I don't know if this guy's going to be a president or not, but a guy that moves that quickly, you have to respect that because sometimes the criticism of your competitors may be they move slower.
Yeah.
You know, like Vivek and I, super fast on how he communicates.
RFK, you can get a hold of him, talk to him, no problem.
Even Trump's camp is easier to work with if you want to find out what's going on there.
Some of the camps, you know, it's not the case.
You know, sometimes it's tough to get a hold of DeSantis.
To be fair with them, I've spoken to them multiple times.
Nothing's happened.
It's just always talking and it's challenging.
But some say for you, if I may ask the question, some say, is he running because he's running to be a president?
Is he running because he wants his resume to say former presidential candidate?
Because if he can't do it, you may as well get it out of the way.
Sure.
Or is he running because I'm going to get in the ring?
I'm going to get dirty.
Maybe he wants a position on Trump's cabinet, DeSantis' cabinet.
Or maybe it's just kind of like go get your nose bloody.
Yeah.
You're going to have a bunch of tough situations.
And then maybe you'll run again 28, 32, 36.
Which one of those is it?
So let me just take a step back and talk about something that you just talked about before.
I answer the question, which is you got to look at the candidates' history, right?
And I think that speed of response is directly correlated with the fact that certain candidates are private sector guys, right?
They have that private sector experience.
Even me as a mayor, I'm a working mayor and I'm a working public official for 13 years.
I've always been able to work, right?
So you have that connection to the private sector, that instant response that don't let an opportunity go by.
That how can I help tweet that definitely Miami responds to that tweet?
That's the private sector part of you that says there's an opportunity.
You got to jump on it.
When you talk about someone like the governor, if you look at his history, no private sector experience that I can tell, right?
Nobody's ever really talked about that, right?
The fact that smart guy, you know, Ivy League or Harvard Yale, super smart.
Smart guy, you know, come, you know, jag, you know, serves in the military, wonderful.
Then from there goes to Congress.
I just don't, I don't see the private sector experience.
So I think, you know, when you're just in the public sector all the time, you don't have that same hunger, the same ferocity, that same, right?
No one's talked about that.
No one has actually mentioned that because I think they get so caught up with his public sector bona fides and his educational bona fides.
Nobody actually says, well, wait a second.
This is kind of like a Joe Biden situation where someone has not worked in the private sector ever and doesn't have a connection, doesn't understand how the private sector works.
So I think that's part of it.
And I have that private sector and I also have the public sector.
I think that also distinguishes me from someone like Vivek or even a Trump who they have a lot of dynamic ideas, things that are sort of out there, right?
And so because they've never worked in the public sector, when they get in, they're like, oh, wait a second, this is a different monster than what I thought.
You know, for me, I have a combination of those skills.
And so to answer your question, right, the specific question, first of all, I've done this at a great sacrifice to myself financially.
You know, obviously, as you know, family-wise, you're traveling a lot.
I have two little kids, a nine-year-old and a five-year-old.
I was away yesterday, came back home, you know, and then I'm going to be away twice next week.
So it's a huge sacrifice.
It's part of the reason why it took me so long, right?
It took me a long time to decide to run for president.
It wasn't like something I did.
And at some level, it was a bit of a disadvantage, right?
Because I could have done it two months ago.
I could have done it three months ago when Vivek started, when Tim Scott started, when Nikki Haley started.
They started months before.
And I was struggling because, you know, I'm not as well known, right?
I don't have personal, like massive personal wealth where I can't get in my jet and be like, hey, I'm going to three states today, which some candidates can do.
And then I didn't have a $100 million, $150 million war chest.
And, you know, the best known news channel in America saying, hey, we want you to run.
We're going to back you.
We're going to put all this free press behind you.
So I've been running a very sort of insurgent campaign in that sense, understanding that the only path to victory for me is incremental, right?
It's going in increments, in small bites.
So the next increment is the August 23rd debate.
I have to be on that stage because it's the first opportunity that I have to be on equal footing with my, let's call them competitors.
I don't really think of them as competitors.
They're friends.
They're good guys.
They're good people.
They care about this country.
They want to see this country go forward.
We may not agree on everything, but that's my first opportunity to articulate my vision, to talk about my track record, to inspire people and connect with them, right?
And I think that's one of my strengths.
And so that'll be interesting.
And then, and the beauty of this process, and I actually kind of like it.
Some people don't like it, which is these, all these requirements, right?
40,000 contributions, 1% polling.
I get on the stage to get on the next stage already saying it's 50,000 contributions, 3% polling.
I actually kind of like that because they're benchmarks.
People in business understand benchmarks.
You've got to hit price support levels if you're a stock, right?
You've got to hit these benchmarks so that you can grow.
And if you don't, you're taking away time from somebody else.
This is a mutually exclusive, you know, zero-sum game.
Yeah.
Time here is time that somebody else is not here.
So you're running, you're not running to get on a cabinet.
You're not running to get your feet wet because maybe in the future you're going to run.
You're running because you're convinced you're going to run for president.
Absolutely.
Look, to be a cabinet member will be a huge financial sacrifice for me.
Okay.
I'm not interested in being a legislator, a senator, or congressman or anything like that.
You know, people have talked about vice president.
And, you know, I've said very honestly, candidly, authentically, like if somebody were to ask me to be a vice president, I wouldn't say like, oh, no, that's, I'm too good for that job.
You know what I mean?
Would you do governor?
Would you have interest in being a governor of Florida?
You know, to be honest with you, Pat, I look at opportunities as they come, right?
This was an opportunity that was in front of me, right?
I analyzed it in front of me.
If I do well in this opportunity, let's say it doesn't work out for whatever reason, and that's an opportunity in the future.
Sure, I would look at it.
I would look at it without a doubt because it's a $100 billion government with 20 million people.
It's the third largest state in America.
It's probably one of the largest countries in the world if you consider it a country by GDP.
So it would be a tremendous opportunity to shape the future of a lot of lives in the way that government can do it in a hopefully helpful way or getting out of the way.
What's your relationship with the governor?
You and Governor Ron DeSantis?
Not much.
Have you guys had dinner before?
Have you broke?
Have you had a phone call, private conversation with the two people?
We have.
He called me during COVID when I got COVID.
I was actually the first person in Miami-Dade County to get COVID, or at least to test positive, which is kind of a funny story in and of itself.
I don't know if you heard this story.
It's actually hilarious.
I guess if getting COVID could be hilarious for somebody.
But what happened is the president of Brazil comes to Miami.
He had actually been in Mar-a-Lado with President Trump and Bolsonaro.
Bolsonaro, March 2020.
Correct.
That's right.
So I tested positive March 12th of 2020.
Okay.
The day of COVID, basically.
Exactly.
Like, I think it was the day the NBA canceled the season or something like that, right?
So, so, so he comes Monday and Tuesday with his huge delegation, and he has in the delegation, obviously, you know, his staff or whatever.
They leave.
They all leave on Tuesday.
Thursday, we have a council meeting, and it becomes public that his publicist or his communications guy got test positive for COVID.
So I'm like, wow, 150 guys.
What does that mean for me?
You know what I mean?
So my, my, this is, I don't know if I should tell the whole story, but anyways, my father chief is telling me, you got to quarantine.
And again, this is the private sector.
What do you mean, quarantine?
How do I know I even was around this guy?
I feel great.
You know what I mean?
Why?
Why do I have to quarantine?
Well, you know, you got to quarantine.
You got to be safe.
You know, blah, blah, blah.
And I said, yeah, I don't know about that.
You know, I'm a worker.
You know, this is standing on the sidelines thing for 14 days.
You know, I don't know.
So then I get a call from a friend who's a high-ranking public official.
I'm not going to say who.
And he says, hey, man, you're in a picture with this guy.
Like you're in, like, he's like close to you.
So I was like, oh, God.
So he sent me the picture.
He texted me the picture.
And now with Bolsonaro.
With that guy who was sick.
So it was a different picture.
But yeah, that was the trip when he was here.
I gave him the kid of the city, which the mayor of New York refused to give him.
So he was always a big fan of me.
And anyhow, great story.
So I do then, in fact, say, yeah, I'm going to quarantine.
Obviously, I was in a picture with the guy.
I was obviously close to the guy.
I didn't know who he was, right?
And I said hi to a lot of people.
So the next day, I get up.
I'm at home alone.
And because I couldn't go to a hotel, this was all public already at this point that I had it.
It was like a big mess.
And I wake up and I have a missed call because I had to go test.
The day before it was me, Rick Scott, and the county mayor at the time, who's now a congressman, all had to go test, right?
So I get up, I have a missed call.
And the Herald's reporting that a 42-year-old male, because I guess they wouldn't release the names, tested positive.
I was 42 at the time.
And so I pick up the phone and the doctor answers.
And he goes, I regret to inform you that you are positive.
And I go, are you sure?
He goes, I'm 98% sure.
I go, no, no, no, pops.
You got to be 100% sure here.
I have, this is pre-social distancing, masks, all that stuff.
So I'm like, I've been in contact with thousands of people, thousands of people.
Like, this is going to be a major problem if, you know, if it turns out that I'm positive.
And he goes, I'm 100% sure.
Just like that.
So, yeah, that was that.
And your governor called you then.
So he called me then.
And then we maintained a bit of a relationship.
You know, with him, it's kind of one way, you know, like it's you listen and he talks, you know, kind of a relationship.
And, you know, and then that was it.
He, so that, I mean, we stopped talking right around then.
At some point, he stopped taking my calls.
Maybe I did something he didn't like or something.
I don't know.
What do you think that was?
That he just wasn't.
Who knows?
You know, his group, his people are very fickle and they've attacked me a lot.
I don't know if it's, they don't like the oxygen that I get, the attention that I get.
They don't like the fact that people think that maybe what's happening in Florida is in large part what's happening in Miami, all the great things that are happening in Miami.
There's a little bit of like, you know, you're taking away the oxygen.
And so they kind of try to brand me as I'm not Republican enough or I'm not this or I'm not that.
And so I read, you know, every time something happens, they start hitting me.
You know, you could tell it's the sort of the troll, you know, they're sort of trolls and they're paid bots and all that stuff.
But shouldn't shouldn't the governor of Florida at some sense have a somewhat of a relationship with the mayor of the biggest city in the entire state of Florida, one of the biggest cities in the country?
Who happens to be Republican as well?
Shouldn't there be some sort of relationship?
And I've always been open to it, right?
And look, a relationship, a friendship, and I think this is an issue that's coming up in the campaign, sort of his limitations in terms of building relationships and friendships and loyalty and things like that.
Like to me, those are the bedrocks of friendship, right?
Friendships are created based on loyalty, based on, you know, listening to people, based on, you know, give and take, and based on, you know, hey, you're going to help me, I'll help you.
You know, that's the way I've always viewed it.
So I think what's important for people to look at in this campaign is as an attribute for a presidential candidate.
I think this is important for people to say, can the person build relationships?
Does the person understand friendship?
Why is that important?
Well, our relationships in the Middle East are completely destroyed.
They're completely fractured.
If you go now, we don't have a relationship with Israel.
Not a great relationship with Israel, right?
The president and BB are not, you know, they're not on the Fab Five, right?
The president called the prime minister of Saudi Arabia a pariah, right?
NBS.
NBA asking about that.
And then turned around and said, hey, can you, by the way, increase production so that we can lower gas prices in advance of the midterm so I can do better in the midterm?
And of course, the prime minister said, no, right?
He's got issues in UAE.
He's got issues in Qatar that I've heard from people in, you know, I've been there and I've talked to people that have said, you know, the U.S., for example, had asked us to criticize the Iran deal and then they were backdoor doing the Iran deal, right?
So they're asking us to publicly criticize Iran and they were backdoor doing a deal with Iran.
So those are the kinds of things that don't create relationships and friendships.
And you don't think Ron does that?
You don't think the governor does that to build a relationship with the mayors?
I think, well, he doesn't have a relationship with any of the mayors, maybe with the exception of one or two, very few.
Is that normal, though?
I don't think that's normal.
Okay.
So I would be curious.
But by the way, go a step further.
What about Congressman?
He was a congressman, right?
He lost, I think there's 13 endorsements that are 12 out of the 13 went to Trump.
I think he got one.
In Florida, you're in?
In Florida.
Right?
So that goes to show if you're a Congressman.
You can check that guy, Rap.
You can check it.
That was his congressional block that used to carry him, correct?
Is what you're talking about?
I read about that.
Yeah.
And I mean, Google.
They moved.
When the presidential election came up, his block of support in the greater Daytona area shifted.
There were agriculture leaders in there, the orange growers, I believe.
Yeah?
Yeah.
And then one of them was a guy named Greg Stuby, who I went to law school with, who's a congressman, who had fallen off a ladder and hurt himself.
And he said that Trump called him personally to see how he was doing, and that DeSantis', I think, fundraiser called him to ask him for the endorsement.
So he was just.
Can you go back to that?
Can you go back to this?
So that means DeSantis, also a former congressman, doesn't have the support of the majority of the home state delegation with 12 out of 20 House Republicans from Florida back in.
So eight supported him.
I don't think it's eight.
Can you collect him?
I think it's of the 13, I could be wrong, but I think it's of the 13 that have zoomed in.
There's only one that has actually supported him, who actually worked for him.
The state's two GOP senators, Rubio and Scott.
They have not endorsed in the primary.
Go a little lower?
Go a little lower.
Okay, so that's right there.
If you that's not going to tell you what it is.
But also Rubio and Scott have both been aligned with Trump since 2016.
I mean, in terms of publicly, I don't know about privately.
I got a question for you, Graham.
Did you have a question for the mayor, Tom?
Yeah, I did.
You know, it's very interesting to hear you talk about your relationship with DeSantis.
What happened in the gubernatorial election gave great hope to Republicans all across the United States?
A major U.S. city, Miami-Dade, voted Republican.
That was a big thing.
And I'm not trying to corner you.
I'm asking you an honest political analytic question.
Did you deliver Miami-Dade as this promise of hope to conservatives all across America who are seeing Republicans voted, you know, Republicans carried the day, and the Independents came along, and oh my goodness, Miami-Dade voted Republican, or did he do the work to make that happen?
Because it doesn't sound like that you guys, for the sake of the governorial election and the Republican Party, came together in a huddle and did it.
So I'll give you a very simple answer, very straightforward answer.
So I was elected.
So with the phenomenon you're describing, I'm going to dig into it a little bit more, right?
So the phenomenon you're describing is in 2016, Miami-Dade County went plus 30 for Hillary against Trump, right?
Plus 30.
I was elected in 2017 by 85%.
And I obviously implemented a series of policies reducing taxes, low crime, rapid growth, job growth, right?
And then in 21, I get re-elected by 80%.
And in 22, we move it from a plus 30 for the Dems in 16 to a plus 10 for Republicans in 22.
That is a 40-point swing.
Okay.
Now, how can I make the case that that was me and not the governor?
Okay.
How do I make that case?
Well, look at Jacksonville.
Jacksonville is the governor's congressional district.
He supported a mayoral candidate.
The prior mayor won, which is Lenny Curry, by 25 points, Republican, won by 25 points.
The current governor endorses a Republican in that race against a Democrat.
The Democrat won the mayor's race by four points.
So it's a negative 28-point or 29% point.
What year was that?
This was just a few months ago, right here.
There you go.
Boom.
This was one year after the sweep, right?
After DeSantis victory, you go back four years.
So it's almost the same amount of time.
You go back four years.
Lenny Curry wins by 25 points.
He's the mayor four years ago, right?
You go four years later, and a Democrat wins by four points.
That's a 29-point swing in favor of a Democrat with the governor's support in his home congressional district.
So if I may, it sounds like we're piling on Ron.
That's not what it is.
No, no, no.
That's not what it is.
No, but you asked me a specific question, so I wanted to answer specifically.
That's not referencing that.
That's not what I'm saying.
I thought they were doing that.
I thought that Miami was a great hope to the conservatives, Republicans across the country that a big city can follow a leader with the right policies and get its head around it.
And it is.
And that's part of my platform for president, right?
Which is to say, look, there are at least three discrete groups that if Republicans want to win the 2024 election and beyond, win Congress, win the Senate, and win generationally.
I think there are three mega opportunities, if you will, right?
One is Hispanics.
Okay.
Hispanics are 20% of the population of America, 60 million people.
The last two elections, we can debate who won the election, right?
But the last two elections were decided by 70,000 and 40,000 votes collectively, right?
In all these little pockets, these mini-states, you know, it comes down to like 250, something crazy like that.
Well, those are the key votes that flipped the electoral votes.
Correct.
Got it.
Exactly.
So the key discrepancies that flipped the electoral votes were 70,000, 40,000.
You're talking about a 60 million person population, right, in Hispanics, which according to the last poll I saw, which was not even a week ago, 20% undecided.
20% undecided.
So do the math on that, right, in terms of opportunity.
Then you look at young voters, right?
Voters that are 30 or younger.
This is going to drive, this is going to make the hairs on the back of your next stand-up.
Biden won them by 26 points.
An 80-year-old guy who does not project vigor, strength, youthfulness, right?
All this stuff is winning young voters by 26 points.
That's why, by the way, he's trying to do debt forgiveness and all that stuff, college definitely, trying to win the young vote.
I think that's one that my candidacy can win.
Last question.
This is I just wanted to highlight if I may, Tom.
Look, I'm a Miami guy, born and raised in Miami.
I was at that 2017 announcement in Wynwood when your dad introduced you.
You're literally the first political figure, public figure that I've ever donated to.
Thank you.
I got a lot of love for Miami.
I got a lot of love for what you're doing in Miami.
But at the same time, the whole reason that DeSantis is even in the conversation is because he's actually done a good job in Florida.
Yeah.
Right.
Pat has said publicly that one of the main reasons he moved to Florida was because of Ron's policies.
So ultimately, my question is, what grade would you give DeSantis as governor for the last two terms?
Look, I don't, you know, I'm not like here as a political analyst per se, like to analyze my opponents in the presidential race.
No, as governor.
Look, I think he did well on COVID, without a doubt.
I think, you know, I think where he struggles a little bit is, you know, in terms of he has decided, and I think this goes to the whole private sector issue, right?
Which I think is important, right?
When your only experience is in the public sector, your only ability to implement your ideas is using the public sector.
So let's look at the Disney issue as an example, right?
I think we all agree.
all of us, I presume we all agree, that you shouldn't teach sexuality, that school should be teaching sexuality to young kids.
No doubt.
We all agree on that.
We talked about that all the time.
100%.
So you win that argument, put it in the bank, move on, do a deal with Bob Iger where you say, hey, you know what I mean?
Look, we all agree on this issue.
Disney's backing down.
We're going to make this big investment in the state.
You win the ideological issue, and then you win the economic issue.
Instead, he doubles down.
He says, we're going to put a prison next to Disney.
We're going to take away their tax exempt status.
And it becomes, it looks like it's personal, right?
It goes from ideological to personal.
Then Bob says, hey, we're going to pull back a couple billion dollars of investment, thousands of dollars of jobs.
And then you start to think to yourself, wait a second, is ideology more important than creating economic prosperity in your state?
Right now you're starting to create conflicts with things that are good.
And then when you take that to the foreign policy and deal making and building relationships and friendships, that becomes an issue, right?
Are we going to put ideology over what's best economically for Americans?
That's the problem.
So let me add something to that.
And Graham, I really want to get your feedback on something, but I want to add something to that with you.
And I'm not going to pick on him either.
I'm just trying to be straightforward.
No, no.
So here's as a voter, okay?
As a voter, I look at things in a couple different ways.
So one, I look at a candidate and I say, if I had, who would I want to have dinner with?
Okay.
I'd have an incredible time having dinner with you, bro.
I mean, if we have dinner, whenever you talk sports, we'd have a blast, right?
Because, you know, the vibe, like if you and I were in the military back in the days, you know, we would have had a great time reading books.
You know, going to bars and drinking water and doing all that.
We would have had a great time.
That's an important test for politics, bro.
I think you're 1 million percent right, but that is an element of mine that I look at.
Okay.
So, you know, then you look at the other part.
Can the guy get up and give arguments of substance?
Okay.
Can he sell?
Is he willing to make himself relevant on a daily basis on stories?
You know, where is he at with rating?
You know, some guys will say, well, you're not even polling top six right now.
Are you even going to make the stage?
Are you going to get on there?
Right.
And then, well, the argument could come back and say, well, Trump also 2000 didn't get on there.
And he was this and he wasn't Poland looking.
He's now president.
Okay.
Fine.
So that's the other thing that you're going to have to make the argument to three.
I think that's fair.
Three would be how good is he in issues?
Like you remember when, you know, who was the governor of Texas back in the days?
Rick Perry.
Yeah.
You know, the three, you know, the eminent three.
You know, that thinking, okay.
So by the way, you're going to have those moments.
100%.
Yeah.
Not once, not twice.
It's going to happen.
And that's going to force you to go back and do your research.
You had one with Hugh Hewitt, I think, or whatever it was.
That's going to happen.
100%.
It happened to Trump.
It's happened to Biden.
It's happened to me.
That's okay, DeSantis.
So it's happened to DeSantis?
How you recover from that, right?
Then I call 2023 the year of investigations, right?
I said everybody and their mothers is going to get investigated.
Myself included.
Yeah.
So Trump yesterday, I keep saying tweeted it out.
We can't even say tweeted it out, whatever the truth social is.
He says, I think I need one more indictment to have my candidacy locked or something like that, right?
Sealed up, right?
Which is like the indictment that he says.
I don't know, something like that.
Yours comes out.
What a world, man.
Yeah.
So, here's a news nation what I'll just read, and you know, you respond to the way Miami Mayor Suarez defends a $500,000 donation received by the Super PAC supporting the Republican presidential bid despite an FEC.
He regrets, I have no reason to believe that any of the contributions received by the entity are not United States, either citizens or residents.
The Campaign Legal Center finds a complaint claiming that a passion force LLC business allegedly linked to China was used to hide the true contributions to the Super PAC SOS America.
The complaint suggests a potential violation of rules prohibiting foreign contributions.
So, this type of stuff is that already got cleared up in like less than 48 hours.
I totally get it.
But all I'm saying, like, you know, this kind of stuff is going to come at you for sure.
And a million miles away.
And I feel like, as a voter, I'm watching to see if I like you.
Check.
Yep.
I'm watching if you can make it on the stage to 40,000.
You will start 240,000.
You got to bust your ass for that one shit to have.
Can he really go deep in issues?
He's got to have a good research team, people, all that stuff.
And how is he going to attack, you know, respond back when they attacked him with different claims like this?
Yep.
And how's it going to handle us?
So, what do you say to all of those things as well as the story?
I think you've identified the four pillars of how you create a successful candidacy.
So I think you're spot on.
And I love it because I was actually listening to the Rogan podcast before I came up.
And you always go back to what's quintessential in politics, which is how do you sort of market yourself?
How do you check these boxes, if you will?
And by the way, I'm not going to sit here and tell you there's no learning curve.
There has definitely been a learning curve.
And there will continue to be a learning curve for me, right?
And I'll tell you, I mean, we could talk about that for a while, right?
Like the whole learning curve process of this, right?
But again, going back to it, look, getting on the debate stage, we are feverishly working to get there.
Being a debater and being able to articulate, you know, sort of an argument and being able to be inspiring and have a vision and have a track record of success.
We think, I think I check all those boxes.
I'm the only public official that I know that has a podcast, right, that sort of was different in that sense and revolutionary.
We created Venture Miami, which was an arm of our government specifically to help people onboard as companies to Miami.
When you look at, by the way, the comparison between Miami's growth and the state's growth, man, we grew 14% last year.
The state or three.
Okay, that's more than four to one.
The year before that, 12%.
You know what I mean?
Our homicide rate, by the way, governors don't deal with urban crime.
I do, right, as a mayor.
So our homicide rate, and by the way, 85% of Americans live in American cities.
91% of the GDP produced by this country is by people who live in American towns and cities.
91%.
Last year, we had a per capita homicide rate of low of 1964 last year.
Okay.
This year we're 37% below last year's number.
Okay.
Chicago, which has had, I think, 11 years in a row, the murder capital of America, had 700 homicides last year.
And we're different.
We're a smaller city.
Miami's a smaller city in Chicago.
I want to contextualize people.
Oh, no, you know, whatever.
We are, we have 17 year to date.
By the way, remember the Cocaine Cowboy years, the 1980s?
We used to have 300.
So just to give context there.
And if we were to end the year, how we, the pace that we're on right now, we would be the seventh, because you got to compare apples to apples.
We'd be the seventh safest city per capita in America of a population over 400,000.
So, I mean, look, and in terms of like dealing with these things like you were saying, like the passion fruit thing, I mean, that already got cleared up within less than 24 hours.
What happens with the press, and look, we're all victims of it.
Every single candidate's a victim of it, is the press shoots first and they ask questions later because they know that you can't sue them.
You can't sue them for defamation because it's a public official.
There's an almost impossible standard of malice.
You have to prove malice.
They were malicious, right?
No, there's a complaint.
We're just reporting on the complaint.
They don't wait like a reasonable person before, you know, wait.
Like, okay, somebody put out, anybody can put out a complaint.
Anybody can sue anybody in this day and age.
Let's see how this plays out a little bit before we report it.
No, they don't know.
They just put it out.
And then two days later, it turns out it's an American guy whose name is Ivan Soto Wright, who has a company called Moonpei, very well-known company, who just attracted the CEO from Time magazine.
And the guy's, you know, company, you know, they have a similar name as the one that supposedly is Chinese connections or whatever.
He gave half a million dollars to a political committee or PAC or whatever.
So it's a non-story.
But instead of waiting for the facts to come out, they don't.
They shoot first and then they bloody you up.
And then, of course, you have to deal with the content of it.
So that's a, I'm glad you're saying that.
When I think about DeSantis, the one area I think about DeSantis that I think he can do a lapse around everybody, and I firmly believe this, I think DeSantis' strength is incredible with policies.
Incredible with policies.
I think he's been in it for so long, military, Congress, governor, first, second.
Now, here's the thing.
On a golf score, if you're marrying somebody, you can have 20 different things on things you're looking for to marry, right?
You know, you could say, oh my God, you know what I love about her?
What?
She was valedictorian, 4.6 GPA in high school and graduated college with a 4.0 GPA.
Does that make her a great wife?
Not necessarily.
It just means she's brilliant.
Okay.
So in the area of policies, I do believe he can sit with anybody.
When we spent three hours with the guy, all he talked about for three hours was, honestly, it was only policies.
And you're just sitting there, you're like, so the teachers unit doesn't serve somebody.
I'm like, okay, policy, America is not 90% policy.
America is 10% policy.
90% is the rest, right?
Personality.
Yeah.
So I think, you know, Graham, question for you.
So you're a guy, super successful, young guy, 33 years old, April baby.
You just turned 33, three months ago, right?
You've done very well for yourself.
You started real estate at 18 years old.
You sold $130 million of real estate.
You got a beautiful life.
You moved out of California.
You moved to Nevada.
You lived in Nevada.
You've made videos before.
I think you made one a couple of years ago.
April Fools, you know, you're moving back to California, all that stuff.
I saw that video like a year ago or something.
So for you, I got a couple of questions for you because I think your opinion matters a lot.
All of us at this table are above 40, okay?
You're the only one that's 33 years old.
So you're closer to the 20 crowd and you're right in the middle.
You're a very, very important voter, okay?
Because you're also a business guy who's got influence.
People actually listen to what you have to say.
It's not easy to create a business channel with four or five million subscribers.
It's easy to create it if it's spoof, pranks, all that stuff.
Very hard to build a business channel, four or five million subscribers, because that audience, it's not that interesting to everybody.
They want to be laughing.
They want to be doing that stuff.
So you obviously know what you're doing.
What's important to you at this age when you're looking at who you want as a president?
One will say whether they know where you lean politically, left and right.
I don't think you ever talk about where you lean politically.
But I think for a guy that's a street guy guy like me whose job is to read people, I would say you vote right.
You don't have to answer that, but I'm just telling you for a guy like me, if you escape California and you go to Nevada, you're not fully right, but you're right enough.
If you were maybe further right, you would have moved to Texas or Florida.
But you went to Nevada to be kind of Mark Wahlberg-right, which is kind of like, you know what I'm saying?
Perhaps like center-right?
Hollywood.
So what's important to you?
Why did you leave California?
And what are you looking for as a businessman for your next president?
Well, I definitely think, well, first of all, when I made that video leaving California for Las Vegas, someone from the business administration of Las Vegas reached out to me.
And I remember Googling them and thinking, oh, why is this person emailing me?
This is crazy that this person of this stature would reach out to me.
And they sent me an email.
They said, hey, I want to let you know we all in our office saw your video.
We really enjoyed it.
If there's anything we could help you with, please reach out.
We're here to help.
Thank you so much.
But I would never have imagined that they would have been appreciative of me moving into Las Vegas, bringing what I have to offer there.
It would never happen in California.
But for me, California, it just, I didn't feel like it was worth it to stay.
When COVID happened and all of a sudden I was working from home, I thought, why do I need to be here?
Even though I've spent my entire life there and I like it there.
But I just saw it going downhill and just visiting Vegas and seeing how nice it was.
And I thought, this is only four hours away.
And I moved and it was such a great decision.
Everything there is more affordable.
There's not traffic.
It's very clean.
All of our neighbors, by the way, are either from California or New York.
From New York too?
New York.
Yes.
So a huge percentage of people came from California.
And, you know, even walking up and down the street, there are like people from Newport Beach, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego.
But I think for me, I'm really in the middle of a lot of things where I could be swayed either way.
And when it comes to Republican or Democratic, I look at both people and I say, well, I like this about these people, this about this.
For me, I think relatability is something that's really important to me.
And I guess it's being realistic.
And just.
Give me policies.
Like, give me policies for a guy like you.
We need more people like you.
I think when we talk about hero making machine, we need young guys who look up.
If a 17-year-old kid is looking up to you, I'm good because we need more 17-year-olds who want to grow up, be disciplined, work hard, get their license, take care of their family, buy their house, live their dreams, and then sell the dream to others so they can emulate.
So to me, you're an ideal candidate for a hero to 16, 17-year-old that nowadays in high school, people, when they grow up, they want to be what?
They want to be YouTubers, right?
But actually tell me policies.
At 33 years old, you've paid millions of dollars of taxes.
Is that a fair assessment to say?
You paid millions of dollars in taxes.
So when you pay millions of dollars in taxes, when you are in the mix of speaking, you're creating content, you're no longer like low level issues.
It's no longer like, I just want somebody that I can trust.
Bullshit.
I mean, we all, you know, it's not something that we can all say.
What are actual issues that matter to you at 33 years old, successful entrepreneur issues?
I would say the most relatable to me because I don't have kids.
And so the one thing that affects me the most is probably taxes.
But I would say from that perspective, lowering tax from 39.6 to 37 would be no different than Biden saying, well, we'll get rid of student loan debt because that affects me.
So I think obviously I would be enticed by something like that.
But I also think realistically, would that make that big of a difference?
Probably not.
If they increased capital gains from 20 to 22%, probably not.
It's something for me to consider.
So in terms of policies, I would say fiscally, I would like to see some savings, but that's just me being selfish on that.
And I try to look at the bigger picture and see where's the money going.
And I think that for me is a big thing of just seeing the national debt skyrocket, sea spending, skyrocket.
And I see some of these things and people are able to slip.
Like, here's 500 million in this policy in this huge package of trillions of dollars.
Let's put 200 million over here.
And I think, I'm just adding this stuff up.
Where does the money go?
And so when I see that and I see what I'm paying in tax, I have no idea where the money goes.
And that for me is something that at least I consider.
You talk about what you liked about Nevada and why you moved there.
So you're staying in deposit of what didn't you like about what Newsome did in California that caused you to leave?
Oh, gosh.
I think crime and homeless were two big issues because I grew up and I lived for quite a long time in Santa Monica.
And just seeing what has happened in that city has been awful.
And I don't think there's the proper support system for people who are mentally ill on the street.
And that's what a lot of it is.
At least from my perspective, from what I've seen, these are not people who the landlord raised their rent and now they're on the street.
These are severely mentally ill people who oftentimes have severe drug addiction.
And from what I've seen, there's just not the support system there for those people to take them off the street.
So what they're doing is they're on the street.
Nothing could be done.
Crime is going up.
And especially in Venice, it's just seeing that the police won't even respond.
There's that one video recently where people went into the Gucci store in Century City and they just ransacked the place and left.
And everyone's just there on the phone.
You see the security guard, by the way, just standing there.
And I get it.
You're not supposed to necessarily value a Louis Vuitton bag over someone's life if these people are armed.
Is that really something you want to risk your life over?
Can you play this clip?
Just play the clip if you can with security guard.
This is Century City Mall.
This is Century City Mall, the Outdoor Mall.
So this is right by Beverly Mills.
I know exactly where this is.
Bloomingdale's is in here, so I know where that's at.
So, Graham, can I ask you a question on that right there?
And literally, I couldn't ask Mayor Suarez a better question while you're saying this.
So you got out of Santa Monica, L.A., you went to Nevada.
How much of, and we've heard this multiple times, the homelessness, the crime, the traffic, obviously.
How much of these issues do you put on a Gavin Newsom as the governor, i.e. a DeSantis in Florida, or on the mayor, which I think I believe at the time was Garcetti, and now it's Karen Bass, I believe.
What is that relationship?
Like, how do you personally put this on the politician?
Because you must have been in rooms with buddies, friends.
Dude, I lived here my whole life is a mess.
Are you blaming a Garcetti, the mayor?
Are you blaming a Newsom?
And then, and the Mayor Suarez way in after.
It seems like Newsom takes the heat for everything.
So my initial thought is Newsome.
But I think you also have to put some emphasis on the mayor as well.
But I feel like Newsome gets the clicks, gets the headlines.
So for me, as just a person who's honestly right in the middle of a lot of things, when you see Newsome, Newsome, Newsome, it gets clicks.
And that's where my mind first has.
Like when you see an image of Newsom, not to like put you on the spot, like, is it like, hey, that's my guy?
Oh, disgusting.
Like, is there, how does emotionally do you respond to that guy?
It's tough because I feel like you have to be tougher on crime than that.
I mean, that should not be happening.
It shouldn't be a policy where if someone steals something, you just have to step back.
There's got to be something in between risking your life.
When you see his image, how do you feel about that?
That's great.
Knowing a little bit, obviously left.
He looks like a movie villain there.
Knowing a little bit about LA, because I lived there until moving to Dallas and then moving here, I can tell you that at the time there was a crime base that was being addressed and Mayor Richard Rardin was working on that.
But he was rebuffed with support dollars from Sacramento.
And in Sacramento, they were saying, hey, we're not going to send these support dollars to L.A. County.
And so Gray Davis was able to intervene.
So, the governor can handcuff mayor's efforts if he doesn't like them with state support and what the state dollars that are going to move around.
And by the way, you said Nevada sent you a nice email.
Trust me, if you liquidate a major asset within four years of leaving California, they will also send you a nice email.
They have that law where they will recapture it.
If they think you move to sell a company, they will sell that.
Congratulations on you, bro.
Did you get that email from California?
Anything like that?
No, no, no.
Did you get any love letters from California?
We miss you, Graham.
Come back.
I hired a great accountant, great attorney.
I had everything done exactly as it needed to be because I didn't want to leave any loose ends.
I was like, whatever I need to do to prove and show and do this correctly.
The last thing I want to do, if I make a mistake that's coming back on me, that's why I hired a great team.
And I mean, we made such a clean cut.
And how often do you go back to California and you're like, oh, I miss it here, but then you see a homeless guy kissing in the street.
You're like, I'm glad.
It's rare.
It might be a few days every now and then, every few months, just going and visiting.
When I visit, I mean, there's certainly an aspect to Los Angeles where I like the weather and I like the culture and I like the motivation and the mindset of some of the people there.
It's very forward-thinking in terms of being an entrepreneur, being a business owner, pushing boundaries.
I think there's something to be said about the motivation and the hustle of Los Angeles that you don't get in Las Vegas.
Mayor Soros, how would you clean up this mess that Graham forced him to leave?
What would you do?
Look, it's actually not that difficult, right?
You just cannot implement socialist policies, right?
So what happened, what have we done in Miami that's very different from a lot of these cities, right?
First is we never got into the defund police movement.
Never.
No.
That was never a thing in Miami.
On the contrary, we actually increased funding for police officers.
We have more officers than we've ever had in our history.
So this nonsense of defund police never happened.
Secondly, and you see it manifesting itself in that video, the concept of no cash bail, right?
Where you get arrested and then you're back on the street.
You don't even have to post bail and you're back on the street.
There's no consequence.
There's no consequence to committing crime, right?
We live in a society of laws.
There's supposed to be a consequence when you break the law, right?
You go to jail and then you have to stand for trial, et cetera, et cetera.
When you take away all those things because you want to be sympathetic, what you end up doing is you have a situation where now CVS, well, how many articles have we seen of CVS and Walgreens and people shuddering saying, hey, look, the loss is greater than the gain, right?
So who gets hurt?
So now you're trying to be sympathetic to the person who's committing crime.
And what you're ultimately doing is you're diminishing the quality of life of every single other citizen.
We have this issue a lot with homelessness, right?
You want to be very humane with the homeless.
They're human beings.
Absolutely.
You have to be humane in the treatment of homeless.
But you also have to understand that their actions impact everybody else.
And so there are things that, you know, were previously legal for the homeless to do in the city of Miami that we changed through federal laws and federal case where before they could basically defecate and urinate in public.
They called them life-sustaining activities.
And they weren't even required to go to a bathroom if there was a bathroom within a certain feet distance, right?
Things that you and I couldn't do.
We couldn't just go outside, pull our pants down, and go to the bathroom, right?
We'd get arrested for indecent exposure.
So there was almost like this sort of two-tiered system.
And so for us, we never got into no-cash bail.
We never got into defund police.
We increased funding for our police officers.
We maintained law and order.
When the George Floyd protest happened, things never got out of control in Miami because I said, look, there's a line here, right?
The line is, we're not going to let you harm people's property and we're not going to let you harm people and we're not going to let you harm police officers.
If you try to do any of those things, we're going to arrest you.
We're going to hold you accountable.
And we did.
And so there was no Antifa.
There was none of that came here.
Everybody, to the extent that they might have been here on day one, they were gone.
And so we had very little arrest.
We were able to manage that very intelligently.
And so, and then I think there's two other pieces, right, to crime prevention.
We have the lowest unemployment rate in America.
Full stop.
Okay.
Highest wage growth in America.
Full stop.
So, and these are qualitative rankings, but we're ranked the happiest city in America and the healthiest city in America.
So it turns out if you're happy, you're healthy, you're working, and there's police officers, guess what?
You're not doing committing violent crime or committing crime, right?
So it's not like a super complex formula, right?
It's sort of basic.
And we've gotten away from it because we've let these sort of socialist ideologies, which for me, I think the biggest danger in the world is communism and socialism because my parents got kicked out of their country of birth when a leader there said, give us all your property, give us all your businesses, and don't worry, we'll make everybody equal.
And he did.
He made everybody equally poor and equally miserable.
Thanks, Fidel.
Yeah, yeah.
But by the way, it's the easiest selling politics.
Graham, with all that being said, when are you moving to Miami, buddy?
Let's go, man.
I love Vegas.
I love Vegas.
What a diplomatic.
We need to get you to a beach.
We need to get you to a beach.
So let me ask this question about when we're talking about these cities and what's going on with the crime, Gucci, all this other stuff, you're seeing it all over the place, and the security is kind of just kind of standing around.
How much of this is, you know, sanctuary city laws?
How much of this is the fact that, you know, you don't do anything with them?
You know, the whole concept of the definition of a sanctuary city is where a city defies the federal law to say, no, we're not going to follow your guidelines.
We're going to follow our own guidelines.
You know, we're not going to do what you're doing.
For example, New York City, the largest city we have that's, you know, and they have sanctuary laws since spring of last year.
They've had 93,000 migrants that came to New York City.
Just this weekend, a video was going viral.
Can you play that clip?
New York City, if you type in New York City immigrants, type in New York City immigrants.
They're sleeping on the outside.
If you can find it right there, if you can make that bigger, it's awful.
So, you know, these guys are coming in here thinking, well, this is a sanctuary city.
It's okay if I come here and live here.
200 people are sleeping outside because there's no place to go.
Mayor Adams is going around saying, hey, you know, we need help.
We need to do this.
We're not going to change the laws of being a sanctuary city.
But at the same time, we need funding from the federal government.
So, Tom, are you familiar with the whole sanctuary city deal?
So when you arrest somebody and you fingerprint them, the police department is supposed to report that to the FBI.
The FBI reports it to ICE just purely for documentation.
ICE can come back and say, we want you to hold them for 48 hours.
And a sanctuary city can say, no, we're not going to hold them.
We're going to release them, right?
The whole catch and we're going to release them and they're not going to have to be held here.
But Mayor Adams saying, we don't want to follow federal guidelines on what it is when people arrest them.
But hey, Biden, can you sell us some money?
Because we're really having a hard time with the stuff that's going on.
So how much of the issues that's going on in these cities do you think is caused by sanctuary city laws?
Either one of you?
I have my opinion on it.
As an informed voter looking in, I think Sanctuary City is ridiculous.
I think basically what it was is a hidden, it's basically a hidden word.
It's a word and you have to look at what's behind the word.
And what's behind the word is socialist policies and lax immigration.
And so is it a good thing to check people at the border?
I mean, the Statue of Liberty says, give us retired your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
Come here.
We all come from somewhere.
American is a citizen.
American isn't a race.
It's an idea and a citizen.
We all come from somewhere.
So the immigration that comes here, that's what we're all about.
And you're coming here because somewhere else you don't.
Schultz, I'm doing a podcast.
I'll call you afterwards.
Hey, the presents for Joe were so good.
That's my guy right there.
You've had Schultz up there.
Yeah, no, and he's crazy.
My man, I got somebody who wants to say hello to you.
I don't know if you recognize this guy.
Mayor of Miami, how you doing, man?
How's it going?
Good to see you, brother.
You good?
Hey, man, what are we doing at Cafecito, bro?
Let's go whenever you want, my brother.
Hey, I need you to quit this president stuff, and I need you to open up a club.
Andrew Schultz shows up on the party.
But you got to be a partner.
You got to be a partner with me on that.
If you do that.
You got to be a partner in it.
We're going to get sauced and bring all the underage girls.
No, no, I can't do that.
Schultz.
My wife of 16 years, bro.
My wife of 16 years will not be cool with that.
You guys have editing functions.
That's crazy.
All right.
We'll talk about that by the way.
Love that guy.
That's crazy.
He can end the presidential campaign.
Andrew Schultz falls.
Lord of mercy.
Not happening.
Go ahead, Tom.
My wife of 16 years.
Sorry about that.
So from campaigning to clubbing in six seconds.
So it's C to C. By the way, I took the brunt of that joke.
That was on me, the underage situation.
None of you guys have nothing to do with it.
No, I think the sanctuary city laws is basically a cloak.
And what the voters don't understand is that they're being used, they're being manipulated.
And what it is, is you're bringing unchecked immigration in under the guise of you're going to be inspecting it.
And then you have mayors of cities that are basically trying to look good.
And you draw a clear line to ID free voting.
Go ahead.
No, I was going to go to you.
Yeah.
So I just say, so to me, this is, there's two issues here, right?
One issue is lawlessness, right?
Like what you're seeing in that Gucci video is lawlessness, right?
It's pervaded Los Angeles, San Francisco, like the sense that the law just doesn't apply.
You can just go into a supermarket and you see people like scooping stuff into a garbage can, right?
That's why it's all locked up, by the way.
Right.
And now it's exactly.
Everything is locked up.
So it's either locked up or they closed the place.
So then nobody gets it.
So that's number one.
Number two, the border is a disaster.
It's a disaster.
And it is a human trafficking disaster and it is a fentanyl disaster.
Okay.
So let me give you some insight into that.
I was talking to one of the executive producers of Sound of Freedom.
And he was telling me that human trafficking is becoming bigger business for the cartels than drugs and guns.
Yep.
That's crazy.
Okay.
That is crazy.
And that's all happening at the southern border, right?
And then fentanyl is killing 80 to 90,000 Americans, right?
Which is the equivalent of a 747 crashing every day.
So think about this, right?
We had this national tragedy when these five people were in the submersible and we're trying to figure out, right?
So imagine if every day a plane is crashing.
Every day, you would stop everything you're doing.
You would declare a national emergency and you would dedicate whatever resources you need to solve that problem.
And we're not doing it.
And now you have, as Pat said, you have a mayor, a Democrat mayor saying, hey, man, I'm overwhelmed.
I need help.
Right.
And don't be a sanctuary city.
Well, if you're overwhelmed, you want the federal government to help you.
Don't be a sanctuary city.
That's definitely part of it.
That's definitely part of it.
But I think the second part is we've got to be realistic about the border, which is a mess.
And it has to be solved.
And look, in Miami-Dade County, just to give you a sense, we had, I think last year, 14,000 undocumented illegal immigrants in our county that were children for this public school system.
That's the equivalent of 7,2,000 children school.
That's a huge strain on the system.
So what happens in a city or in a community or in a county is this causes a massive strain on resources.
And so that's another issue that mayors got to deal with.
We got 500 sanctuary cities in America, 500.
We got 11 sanctuary states in America, states.
We got D.C. is a sanctuary city, right?
And number one in crime.
You can keep going on and on with all these stats of what's going on in these different in D.C., do you know in D.C., when you pull somebody over, if you ask them for their ID, it's considered racial profiling.
If you pull somebody over and you ask them for ID, they can say that's racial profiling.
So there's a part of D.C., Chicago's got similar laws like that as well, where I can't ask somebody for, say, what should in Florida, if somebody did what they did to that Gucci store, what's going to happen to those guys that did what they did at the Gucci store?
Well, look, there was a video, and I don't want to make light of this because unfortunately the guy died.
Are you talking about the Victoria Secret?
Yes.
Yeah.
This was three blocks.
A week ago?
Less than a year ago.
A guy walks into a Victoria Secret in one of these malls, similar mall.
Lincoln Road.
Lincoln Road.
Most famous mall in Miami Beach.
Puts a knife to the, to, to, you know, get a money.
A mother and a daughter.
A mother and a daughter.
And it's up there.
And he was shot and killed.
Yeah, right here.
He was shot and killed by Miami PD.
I mean, sorry, Miami Beach PD.
Yeah, I should correct that.
Miami Beach PD.
So it's just a different, I mean, look at the different response.
You've got, you know, people running out of the other store, right, with a bunch of goods.
In this case, you've got, you know, three police officers that are here.
He backs out now because he sees that the lady has a knife.
Boom.
So he backs away, you know, to give the guy space to make sure that he doesn't do something crazy.
And ultimately, it ends in the police involved shooting where the guy's killed.
So, I mean.
And here's the question.
I don't know if he's black, white, Asian, Puerto Rican.
It doesn't matter.
You're holding a knife, holding a woman hostage.
If you're going to kill a woman, it's not racist for the cops to shoot you.
This is something else, which is important.
Very important.
It's important, P, I want you to hear this.
It's important to be pro-police.
Okay, why?
First of all, it never used to be controversial in America to be pro-law enforcement.
It never used to be a controversial political Republican Democrat.
Not according to NWA, though, but that's a side issue.
Yeah, true, true.
Fair point.
Fair rebuttal.
But I think, you know, law enforcement, I mean, these people now are making very little money.
It's hard to recruit them across America.
And I can tell you, being president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, president of all the cities in America, I hear it from city to city.
And they have the highest scrutiny and the highest risk.
So they're risking their life, but they're also risking that if that guy we're slow, you know, we're reviewing what he did, you know, sort of the way we review NFL players to see if they stepped out of bounds, right?
Like instant replay.
And yet the difference is you don't get to go to the next play, right?
If you make a mistake, you go to jail, right?
So now you're risking your life on the one hand.
You're risking your freedom on the other hand.
And you're not getting paid.
It's not like you're getting paid like an NFL player, right, to take that kind of risk.
So we're really asking of our officers a lot.
And I think part of what you see there culturally is a community that's pro-law enforcement versus a community that may not be so pro-law enforcement and officers who say, hey, man, I'm not going to take certain risks because I don't want to be put out on Front Street by public officials that are not going to back me.
And I've been, you know, very pro-law enforcement.
You know, I was a victim of a home invasion robbery when I was a kid.
I had officers respond.
My dad was a mayor at the time.
They made a human chain.
They didn't know if the perpetrators were in the house.
I mean, they risked their lives.
And I feel incredibly indebted to them and grateful for the men and women who serve our cities as well.
As a citizen, what do you think should happen to those guys?
I guess you don't know.
I mean, obviously, there's got to be some action taken.
I don't have a good solution to that.
I mean, I think maybe the security should be stepping it up a little bit to prevent, but I also think it's got to be more of a deterrent because I think a lot of these crimes and petty crimes, I think the crime is different between holding a knife to someone's neck and grabbing a bag and running out of the store.
But I think there needs to be more of a deterrent.
From my assumption, it seems like the reason a lot of this crime happens is because there's not enough of a deterrent to say I shouldn't do this because the consequences are so high.
I think Pat's question is actually super important.
I think your response is super important because not to even be political.
I think it's very important how you answer this because if you ask me and my buddies with Adrian, whatever, and like, hey, what do you guys think?
Not political, just like, yeah, you take that guy out.
Walk me through the mindset of buddies, friends of yours in LA because there must be a groundswell of people to be like, no, they can't, they can't hold these guys accountable.
Walk me through your dinner with friends in LA what they're thinking.
Are they no, it's racism?
Walk me through that mindset.
I think generally it has to be a deterrent.
From my perspective, I just think, okay, if the consequence of that is, let's just say, a hundred years in prison, people would think twice about that.
So, where do you find the balance between this is an appropriate punishment for that to deter that from happening?
So, for me, look, here's how this works: the part that's confusing is they'll come out and they'll say, That is such bad behavior.
Look what they did, they should have never killed this person.
All they were doing is doing this.
What's wrong with that?
Do you know how bad it is to be poor?
And you know how this is the economical problem that we're having, and that's like, dude, the guy was robbing somebody, right?
So, if we cannot identify what's a bad guy, if we don't know how to identify what's a bad guy, I want you to watch this clip.
This is Kroger's.
I don't know if you guys seen this or not.
A grandma, 87-year-old lady, is walking out at Kroger's.
Watch what happens.
A man tries to take her purse, then watch what takes place.
Go on and play this clip.
Okay, if you can fast forward a little bit, that's good.
Go right there.
Hearing her voice screaming and her being scared.
I just defense a lot.
It was John Presley.
87-year-old who this guy snatched.
So, I want you to see this here.
This is the point of this thing.
They end up giving that guy an award.
A black man protects a white 87-year-old woman from being robbed from another white man.
Okay.
So, what's the moral of this story?
To me, this is a hero-making machine.
Okay, you're protecting my grandma.
I like it.
Yesterday, a video went viral of these two Indians at a store.
I don't know if you saw this one here.
Yeah.
Can you go to the other one?
This video at the store where this guy goes in there and he's just press play, and it will fast forward this as well.
Plus, we're not going to watch a whole thing.
Or you can't say that.
These guys are seeing it.
You can play the audio up, Rob, if you can.
Completely different story.
In the other situation, the black guy is protecting an older white lady here.
This has got nothing to do with color.
So he's taking all this stuff in.
Look at this.
And then fast forward a little bit.
He tries to show he's got a knot.
Look right there.
Watch that.
And then all of a sudden, look, like he's trying to say, if you do anything, I'll take it.
Fast forward, fast forward, fast forward.
Little more, little more, little more, a little more, little more.
Keep going.
A little bit more.
It's about to happen.
And then I'll write there.
Leave it right there.
Don't do that.
Watch what happens right there.
Boom.
Shit, it came with a bump.
Boom.
That's a broom, by the way.
Okay?
And they just, you know, now beating his ass.
Okay, so posit.
Now, we don't need to sit here and get high off of this guy getting his ass beat.
The moral of the story here is the deterrent story you're talking about.
I have to know there's a punishment if I go out there and do that.
If I don't think there is, what's going to stop me from stealing?
I'm going to keep doing it because nothing's going to happen to me.
And there's an additional component, which is you start to see sort of what you kind of look at, like kind of like vigilante justice, right?
People taking the matters into their own hands, which subjects them to danger, right?
Because if they don't feel like something's going to be done, if there's just this, it just becomes more lawlessness, right?
Like this is anarchy, right?
People trying to steal from you, you defending yourself.
I mean, it's literally anarchy, right?
And one of the, let me just say two quick points.
One of the biggest fallacies in this sort of defund police movement, right?
Look, obviously when horrific things happen, you know, it creates a lot of emotion.
But when you go into inner cities in a city like mine or in any city, I guarantee you it's the same in Chicago, New York, LA, Washington.
They're all the same.
If you go to an inner city, they're not going to tell you we want to see less police officers.
They're going to tell you the opposite.
They're going to tell you we don't see as many police officers as some of the wealthy areas.
So it is the exact opposite phenomenon.
And then I'll tell you another thing, another stat that blew my mind.
As a mayor, whenever there's officer-involved misconduct, we're the first ones that get the call, right?
From the press, reaction, blah, blah, blah.
I hadn't gotten a call on that and I knock on wood.
I'm not sure if this is wood, but I knock on wood, right?
Hoping that I don't get the call for a while.
And so I reached out to my chief and I said, hey, chief, let me ask you a question.
How many officer involved complaints did we have last year?
Officer involved?
Complaints, right?
Complaints, total.
Take a guess.
We have 1,400 officers.
How many officers involved?
Complaints.
We had 237.
Okay.
So I said, the next logical question is, what do you compare that number to, right?
How many calls for service?
How many times do our citizens call our officers needing their service where they interact, right?
Like customer, because you're into marketing and customer service, right?
So how many times do our 911 calls get made where our officers are being asked to get involved in a situation?
330,000.
So out of 330,000 citizen interactions, calls for service, 237 complaints, not sustained complaints.
Not like, hey, 237 times that they made a mistake, right?
It's 237 overall complaints of which maybe half of them are sustained, maybe less.
I don't know.
I don't know what the actual rate was.
And I got to look into that.
So that's 0.1%?
Yeah.
I mean, it's nothing.
So that story isn't getting told.
The story of this phenomenal customer service.
If you had a call center, if you had a call center and your call center had 330,000 interactions and only 230 people complained about those 300, you would be like, this is incredible service.
99.9%?
99.9%.
How do you beat that?
Right?
And so that story isn't getting told.
And I've asked for those statistics in other cities and it's equivalent to ours.
Let me ask a question about Miami.
So because the good comes with the bad, right?
So when you're winning, it's great.
You got to brag about it.
When you got a hit, you got to talk about it as well.
Article comes out from WSJ.
Yeah.
So Wall Street Journal comes out with an article talks about how Miami sees its first population drop in decades.
Miami's facing its first population losses over a multi-year period since at least 1970 with Miami Day losing 79,535 people through net migration to other parts of Florida, other states between 2020 and 2022, as per Brookings Institution analysis, surging home prices up 53% June 2020, and a chronic shortage of affordable rental housing has contributed to the population drop.
Miami Day's unemployment rate is below the national average, but the labor market lags behind the rest of Florida with the total number of employed people slightly below 2019 levels.
In May, the city attracts new businesses with 127,000 businesses and applications made in 2022.
But many firms open small or satellite offices employing few people while others focus on cryptocurrencies, which have experienced a market downturn.
What's your response to this WSA article?
Wow, there's a lot to unpack there.
It's funny how you hear the phrase, there's liars, there's liars, and then there's statisticians.
So there's so much to unpack on that.
Like it's funny how there was a part where you were reading about the unemployment.
They were comparing it to 2019.
It's like it was like one, it's like 1.8% now and it was 1.6% then.
So it's like, it's crazy to say, yeah, it's slightly up, but it's up to like ridiculously historically low levels.
So there's two things.
One is hard for people to understand, which is that I'm the mayor of the city of Miami, which is different from Miami-Dade County.
So that's a statistic about Miami-Dade County versus the city of Miami.
So just to give you a sense on our numbers, right?
We grew 14% last year.
So what does that number constitute?
That is the value of all the properties.
That's what we call our tax base.
So that is property value appreciation plus new construction combined, right?
That's the total value.
The way you calculate total values, what have you built new?
And what is the appreciation of what's old, right?
That's basically the total.
So it's hard for me to believe that in a city where you grew 14% through a combination of value appreciation and new construction, the population for that city has gone down.
So there's a bit of an incongruity there.
But the second piece is that, look, you have a situation where growth or not growth is really a function of supply and demand, right?
So why do people leave places like California?
Why, you know, Illinois, New York, California.
Why?
Well, first, first phenomenon is a salt deduction going away.
So when the salt deduction went away, you're talking about having to pay an additional 13%.
He knows that to the decimal point.
Every little point.
13.3% more in federal income taxes than you did before.
And that's fair because why should the federal government, and this was thanks to John Trump and Paul Ryan and the tax law that they passed, why should the federal government subsidize a state like New York that has less people than Florida, but twice the budget?
Why?
It shouldn't.
And so now it's fair.
Unfortunately, that phases out, by the way, but now it's fair.
But what happened is you had a flood of people, a flood of people from those cities coming to Miami.
Now, we have one thing that we have that New York doesn't have or San Francisco doesn't have is we have the ability to grow.
We have the ability to grow 10X.
So the delta between what's built right now and what can be built.
We have a form-based code, which is like sort of invisible boxes on top of buildings.
The delta between what's built and what can be built is a 10 to 1 multiple.
But it takes time, right?
I mean, it's not, I wish I could say 30,000 units, go, right?
Done.
It takes time.
For supply to meet demand takes time.
It's a three-year horizon, right?
When you consider you got to get, you know, draw plans, you got to go to permitting, you got to build a thing.
It's a year and a half to two years, right?
That takes time.
So the phenomenon happened quick, and we're building a significant amount of units.
I think we have 35,000 units in our residential pipeline.
That's like a 20% increase in our housing stock that will get built in the next two to three years.
We did $50 million in affordable housing that we got a 20-to-one leverage rate.
So for every dollar we put in, the private sector put in another 20.
There was actually $1.1 billion for $50 million of investment, 3,500 units at all the different income levels.
So I challenge any city in America or any government or any institution to get a 20 to 1 leverage rate on their dollar.
So we're efficient in terms of how we spend our money and what we get for that expenditure.
That'll probably come down with higher interest rates, right?
The rates are higher, so you're not going to get as much leverage.
And that's fine.
But we've got another 57 million that we're going to spend and we're doing everything we can.
But I don't believe that government is the one that solves these problems.
I think government oftentimes makes the problem worse.
So for example, you look at areas that have rent controls, right?
So you think, oh, just put in rent controls.
That solves everything.
No, it doesn't.
Because what it does is maybe it helps the people who are currently in stock, right?
But you create two problems, and they're long-term problems.
Problem number one is, as you know, you can't recapitalize a building and a bank will lend you the money if they don't think they're going to get an ROI, right?
So what happens is you end up creating slums over time because you cannot recap those buildings.
And that's what's happening in New York.
You have ghost buildings.
You have buildings where there's nobody in the building because the building has decayed beyond its useful life and you can't recap the building because you can't increase rents.
It's a very important point you're making, Tom.
Both of you guys can comment on this.
You're in real estate, Tom.
You hear what he's saying about this.
What are your thoughts on his comments?
Well, first of all, I agree part of it.
And I think a distinction needs to be made, especially in Florida, where Mayor Suarez and Cava have to be in partnership, right?
Because she's the mayor of Greater Miami-Bay County.
And that has to be a partnership, number one.
But number two, rent controls, you know, you were about to continue, and I'm sure you're about to say key money, where the landlords artificially inflate rent, you know, by implementing key money.
So here's your rent and everything like this, but I need $3,000 up front key money.
And what that is, is $500 a month prepaid in there to artificially make it.
But I do think, to be fair, there's, you know, part of the election is building up donor bases.
Sure.
And developers are a large part of the donor bases.
So I think that mayors can, because you've got influence over the donors, because the donors want to have influence on who's elected mayor.
Is that fair?
That's fair.
And so I think there can be more of a partnership on affordable housing, which also gets tied to transit systems because you're not going to put affordable housing down in South Beach, right?
But there are people.
But there are jobs and opportunities down there where we would need labor force.
You actually don't wish.
No, I know.
Good job.
I live in South Beach.
So I think you have to have, you know, look, you know, this is all part of urban planning and partnerships.
It goes, hey, we're going to have the affordable housing.
We're going to enable this.
And we're going to have the transit system so these people can easily get back and forth to where the jobs are.
But this is a, and look, this is a lot easier than people make it out to be.
This is not that complex, right?
These are pretty simple formulas and mathematics, right?
In terms of the fact that, for example, to your point, there's a building that's going up right now on the river in Miami.
I think it's the Austin Martin building, right?
It's an acre.
It sold the dirt sold for $125 million.
So you cannot spec out an affordable housing building on $125 million an acre piece of land.
It just doesn't spec out.
You had the Genting property that's a 15-acre property.
I think The deal fell through, but it was a billion to raw land, right?
And that was a discount, right?
That was a little less than $100 million an acre.
It's a discount, even though it's on, right?
So you cannot build affordable housing on that.
You've got to leverage county and city assets.
This is where the partnership you were describing is important.
You have to leverage those assets and then you have to subsidize, right?
And at some level.
And then what I like what we do is we hand it over to the private sector and they manage it within certain income restrictions, right, at their risk because they're much better at managing it than we are.
It's not our competency.
So in New York, you saw those tenement housings, houses, you know, housing projects over years.
And basically, people were living in basically in slums, right?
So you get much better product.
It's built in a way that people can live with pride.
They have amenities in these buildings.
And that's part of the reason why I believe, like in Overtown, we did $60 million of affordable housing in Overtown.
And that's why I believe the crime has gone down significantly because people are indoors.
They're not hanging out outside.
They have a TV center.
They have a gym.
They have a plaza where they can hang out.
They can do everything indoors and they live in pride.
Can I ask you a question on that homeless issue and down to the line?
Graham, go ahead.
Oh, yeah.
In terms of rent control, the one flaw that you did bring up is that it's not based on income.
It really benefits the people who get in early and then don't move at all, which oftentimes ties up housing.
And I've seen so many tenants make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year who just happened to get in early, rent the same place from 1995.
Their rent is maybe $1,000 a month.
They'll make $300,000 and they don't want to leave because why would I give this up?
It's like a pension.
Exactly.
But I had an instance in Santa Monica where a condo owner rented out to what was called a protected tenant.
She had been there for 40-something years.
And I think over the age of 65, you can't kick her out for any reason.
This lady was making a few hundred thousand dollars a year and her rent was capped at like $500 a month for a condo in Santa Monica.
The owner inherited it and tried to get her out because they wanted to sell it.
Could not sell it.
No one wanted to touch it because the HOA and property taxes were worth three times what the tenant was paying in rent.
Right.
And she was a very healthy, 60-something-year-old yoga on the beach every day.
And she's happy there.
They gave her hundreds of thousands to move out.
Doesn't want to do it.
Yeah.
So that kind of validates the point.
But it benefits people who get in early stay.
And it's not really based up, but it ties up units.
Yeah.
So let me let me ask this question.
When it comes down to crypto, Tom, what was the number you said about percentage of Republicans how they feel about crypto?
Yeah, there is in all the polling, now you have issues polling.
It's starting to starting to rain down on us as we get closer and closer to the debate stage.
And 46% of core Republicans, and they were looking at broad-based, so not city-based, but it was broad-based.
Sure.
You know, were skeptical of crypto.
And only when they give them a five-point scale of whether you feel positively about something, very positive, positive, neutral, negative, negative.
So it's standard Likert five-point scale.
Only 6% of them said they felt positive about crypto and they had skepticism about it and saw risk in it.
So that's so that's that's an issue for you because in the name of entrepreneurship, you are also bringing that sector.
I regard crypto as sort of a sector of a larger entrepreneurial ecosystem that comes with it.
Every sector's got its risk and this happens to be tied to financial services.
But you have a lot of voters in there that are like, I'm not sure about this, which also can kind of attach to you a little bit.
Yeah, look, I think that's a fair point.
For me, the way I look at it is it's an ecosystem play, as you sort of stated it, right?
Which is we are number one in the nation in wage growth, right?
We've created a ton of high-paying jobs.
And part of that is because we've leaned into generational technologies, right?
We haven't been afraid of those generational technologies.
Like you said, there are risks involved.
I often cite the example of Netscape and Napster.
Everybody remembers Netscape and Napster.
They're no longer with us.
Their companies did not succeed, but what they created changed the world.
You obviously have Spotify, Apple Music, et cetera, and then you have Google, et cetera.
So the initial technologies don't often, or the initial companies don't often succeed, but the technology changes the world.
I think with crypto, part of the problem is our elected officials don't understand it, many of them, A. B, they haven't, and this is, I think, a failure of the Biden administration, they have not created rules to allow people to play on an equal footing and to be domestic companies as opposed to offshore companies, right?
And so we've seen what's happened, the sort of disaster there, not having any rules related to custodying assets, which is what banking rules are, right?
Sort of basic rules.
It doesn't matter whether it's a cryptocurrency or otherwise.
It's an asset.
You've got to have rules on how you custody that asset or what you can do with those customer assets.
No rules as to whether some things are regulated by the commodities exchange or whether they're regulated by the SEC, right?
I mean, so you have a lot of vagueness in terms of the products that you create.
Yeah, what class does this live in?
Exactly.
And so you have not created an inviting environment.
You're now starting to see Republican Congressmen, Emmer, which is the majority whip and others, be very pro-crypto.
And even Democrats are becoming more pro-crypto now because I think they realize how many people have crypto accounts.
So I don't know how old that particular poll is that you're talking about.
It's coming right now.
You were saying it's going to come out now.
No, it's coming in the last three days as these issues.
Can I ask you a question?
Can I put you on the debate stage?
Yeah, of course.
Mayor Suarez, of course you want to be on the debate.
Mayor Suarez, you're paid in crypto.
So obviously you have some affinity and you've tried to attract it to your city.
What would you say to the American voter that is still skeptical about it?
I would say that things like artificial intelligence, things like cryptocurrencies, things like quantum computing are going to redefine the future.
If I can find a way to prevent my child from being a lot of time on this thing, then maybe we can have a different conversation.
But the truth is that we can stick our head in the sand and pretend like it doesn't exist.
It's not going to benefit our children.
And I'm running for president because I want to create prosperity for the maximum number of Americans.
And the only way to do that is not to be afraid of the future, but to lean into the future.
Here's what, by the way, great answer.
Here's what I would say to you.
I think the crypto community is a political party.
I don't know how big it is, but it is a political party.
And whoever wins it, sometimes.
You know, Mayor Giuliani ran for president 2004.
What was the year when he ran?
04 or 2000?
One of those years when he ran.
And he was way ahead of his time.
That some of the stuff that he said, if he would have ran 10 years later, 16 years later, he would have won.
Or, you know, a lot of people talked about that.
But some of the stuff he talked about wasn't yet bought.
Was there one prior to this, by the way?
Can you check if there was a campaign prior to this?
So for me, crypto, you're seeing what happened with NFTs.
There's a lot of people that are just not fans of NFTs.
Crypto Bitcoin ain't going away.
The convention is here every year in Miami.
It's craziness.
You go there all the time.
I do want to transition into another topic here with what happened with triple ratings, with our ratings that came out.
And Tom, I want to go to all of you guys.
I want to kind of get all your feedback as well.
U.S. stripped of AAA rating by Fitch as budget deficits swell.
This is a Bloomberg story.
Fitch ratings downgraded U.S. debt from AAA to AA plus due to consumers overswelling budget deficits with the federal deficit reaching $1.39 trillion for the first nine months of the current fiscal year, up 170% from previous year.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called the downgrade arbitrary and outdated, but Fitch justified the move, citing potential deterioration in the country's finances over the next three years due to tax cuts.
Now, spending initiatives, economic shocks, and political gridlock, despite the downgrade, the bond market remained relatively stable, but risk-sensitive assets took a hit with Europe's stock 600 index tumbling the most in a month.
The downgrade underscores the worsening U.S. fiscal outlook, with Fitch forecasting the debt to GDP ratio to rise to 118% by 2025, more than 20 times higher than AAA median of 39.3%.
Grant, when you see this, you're in the real estate space.
Some guys are saying it's not a big deal.
You're overreacting.
Stop.
This isn't anything.
It's just this.
It's just that.
You know, and then there's some that say this is pretty bad.
I mean, you know, Kevin O'Leary came out and said, this is not anything that's regular.
This is very bad on what's going on here.
Where do you stand with this?
I think a default should never even be in the conversation.
The fact that we even have headlines that say, oh, the U.S. risks a default should never even be a consideration.
The fact that it is and it's being used as a leverage point, I think is awful.
Totally.
It shouldn't be used as that.
There should be no question whatsoever that the U.S. is going to pay its debts on time, as agreed, always.
So the fact that this is being used as a possible scenario in the past for negotiation, I think is awful.
But I mean, they're not exactly wrong with what they say.
So I think in the long term, is this going to matter?
Probably not.
But I do think all the concerns that they bring up are, I don't see any issue with them.
I mean, they're not wrong.
Yeah, I totally agree with you.
And I think this is serious.
And I actually disagree that this is not serious.
And you didn't, you know, the second part of the, you would say in Spanish La Noticia of the information is the same week that the federal government was negotiating the debt ceiling increase, same week, Miami got a credit rating increased to its highest level ever, SP.
So you can Google that, Miami SP rating, same exact week.
So running for president, because we, you know, I'm, you know, I'm here to talk about Miami and what I did in Miami, but I also want to translate into how it makes me a good presidential candidate.
I'm the only candidate, period, that has cut a public sector budget.
Full stop, 20%.
The delta between our income and our expenses as a federal budget is a 20% gap right now.
It's going to be ugly.
Very ugly.
I've done it.
It's going to be very ugly.
Number two, I inherited a bankrupt city.
When I got, you know, people look at Miami and oh, 14% growth.
This is great.
You know, whatever, blah, blah, blah.
I inherited a bankrupt city.
My city, on day one, 2009, when I got elected, I was the only public official that didn't get elected with union support because I wouldn't lie to my employees.
I told them we're going to have to cut costs and it's going to come out of you.
We're not going to raise taxes.
And that's exactly what we did.
Okay.
We had to balance a $600 million budget to $450 approximately.
$115 million we had to cut from our budget.
$115, one year, by the way.
We didn't get a four-year phase in, a five-year phase-in, nothing.
We now have the highest reserves ever, highest.
We're going to have a super high individual year surplus and the highest bond rating ever.
We were fiscally sound.
We tightened our belt.
We did things that government doesn't do, which is be disciplined and do what every American does, though.
Every American bounces their checkbook, hopefully, right?
And this is what we should be promoting in our country, right?
Savings, like you said.
And so I think this is a big issue.
To your point, they've postponed it till after the presidential election, which I thought was, you know, I don't think that's a good, you know, I don't think that's a good idea.
I think it's wrong.
So the next president's going to have to walk right into that.
By the way, when I first got elected mayor, so I confronted this deficit in 09 as commissioner and then had to reconfront it as mayor because we got sued by our labor partners, 13 lawsuits.
We won 12 out of the 13.
The 13th we lost at the Florida Supreme Court.
Okay, it was a $700 million liability in our budget.
And I said to the guys, I said, look, I didn't lie to you in 2009 when I told you we were not going to be able to raise taxes and we're not going to be able to increase your compensation.
We have to cut your compensation.
We did tiered salary cuts, pension cuts, et cetera.
Never done before in the history of Miami.
I'm not going to lie to you now.
If you bankrupt the city of Miami, when we just grew 10.5%, everything is gone.
All your cookies, all the stuff, it's all gone.
And they believe me and they listen to me.
And so I negotiated that debt down for, I think it was 18 cents on the dollar from $700 million to $50 million.
We didn't even pay it all up front.
We paid $20 million up front and $10 million over three years.
And so, look, you have to, that's where the private sector, public sector experience is important.
Let me ask.
Any word on Fitch, and then I'm going to come to you and then go ahead.
You know, first of all, it's not what happens to our bonds because Jamie Dimon and Janet Yellen, you're saying two slightly different things, but they can both be right.
Jamie Dimon says it doesn't really affect the U.S. government debt because the price is determined by the market and people are still going to be buying billions and billions of dollars of government debt of the countries like Japan and China that speculate and hold U.S. government debt.
So it's not going to change much.
What does change is the waterfall effect in the capital markets across the globe because you saw what happened the European bond market dropped.
So there was real loss of value on one day in the European bond market because Fitch drops on the U.S.
And although we've had headlines about defaults, have we ever defaulted?
You know, the debt ceiling is just the next version of a Marvel movie, and it's kind of pathetic.
You know, the world's going to get saved.
You just look at your watch and say it's going to be at about two hours and 15 minutes into the movie.
And I think it's pathetic to the people.
I got to disagree a little bit with you on that.
It kicks the can down the road.
Every time we raise the debt ceiling.
I can hear you.
I have to disagree a little bit with you on that because I think what happens, and you see this in the history of conflict, right?
To your point, this debt ceiling debate or whatever you want to call it, right?
It's a standoff, right?
A Mexican standoff or, you know, and what's going to happen is, which is what happens when there's nuclear war, right?
Is sometimes neither side flinches, right?
Both sides dig in for whatever reason, whatever their reasons are.
And I think, to your point, not solving a problem, continuing to kick the can down six months, a year, a year and a half, there will be a moment where both sides will dig in, thinking that the consequences will not be as bad as what they will be.
It will happen.
And I think I believe personally, and of course, this is, it's like saying, what is Putin going to do next?
I mean, who knows, right?
Who can get into his mind?
I believe that the consequences will be dramatic and dire.
That's what I believe.
Maybe it will never happen because of that reason, right?
Maybe, hopefully, or maybe a president like me gets elected and decides we got to balance our budget.
Like this has to be the number one priority because by the way, we haven't even talked about inflation and interest rates where what I call by dynamics, the poor get poor, right?
In PyDonomics, right?
Through increased, through increased inflation and interest rates.
Most people have their money in bank accounts.
So they lose purchasing power.
They want to buy a house.
They got to pay more in interest.
So they get squeezed on both ends.
But if that doesn't happen, if we don't, by the way, we're living on fictitious money, fictitious money.
I agree.
20%, right?
It's a huge, huge delta.
I mean, this is a huge, huge delta.
So to bring that back into line, it's going to take discipline.
It's going to take pain and it's going to take a good tax policy that will grow us out of it at some level.
But it's going to take reducing expenses, which we hopefully are prepared to do.
Mayor Soros, I have a sort of a policy and personality question for you, right?
So you talked about the project possible.
So maybe there's people that's listening that are like, hey, I like this guy.
Yeah.
Super likable guy, but he's in Miami.
It's Miami.
I'm in Iowa.
I'm in New Hampshire.
I'm in South Carolina.
What is he going to do for me?
Right.
So number one, how can you take the Miami model and extrapolate that for nationally?
And then, you know, like we highlighted before, politics is so divisive right now.
But I mean, I don't know if the camera can consensus.
You're a super likable, aspirational, positive, optimistic guy.
That's sort of your message for America.
You know, from a policy perspective, debt, GDP, like Graham was talking about, inflation, but also just getting along, being a synergist, coming to Washington.
How can you take what you've done to Miami, the Miami model, economically, but also personality-wise?
What could you bring to D.C.?
Well, I think I hope I can convey the personality that I have the right personality, that I'm a consensus builder, that I'm a unifier, and that's based on my record as getting elected by 85% or re-elected by 80%, and changing a county that was plus 30 for Democrats into one that's plus 10 for Republicans based on our policies.
But in addition to that, the biggest problems that we confront as a nation have to be confronted by someone who has experience confronting them, right?
And so I would say the first problem is our deficit and rapid inflation and rising interest rates.
We've got to get control of that.
I'm the only candidate.
You can look it up.
You can do the research that has actually cut a public sector budget by the same percentage that we have to cut our federal budget.
The only one that has that experience, right?
So I have the personality, the skill set, and the experience to deal with that problem.
Problem number two, immigration.
I don't think that there is a better person capable of dealing with immigration, which is a multifaceted, complex problem, than a Hispanic Republican president.
Why?
Because you've got to control the border.
You've got to, I think depowering China is a big part of dealing with immigration.
And we can get into that if you want, but it's a complex sort of analysis.
You've got to deal with, you've got to write-size legal immigration.
And I think that has not been pegged to objective metrics like growth, like the need for skilled and unskilled labor, the declining birth rate, et cetera.
Immigration in terms of legal immigration should be pegged to those factors and should float with those factors, right?
So that we may need 2x, 3x the number of legal immigrants.
I don't know what that right number is, but there has to be a formula to solve it for America's benefit, right?
And I think then you've got to deal with the undocumented.
And I think a Hispanic Republican can help demystify that problem.
As you were saying, Pat, you did this a lot in Rogans, and you've done some of it today.
At some level, as partisan politicians, we're always counting votes, right?
Is this going to benefit me as a party?
Is it going to hurt me as a party?
I'm not likely to support a policy that may hurt me as a party as I am likely to support a policy that may benefit me as a party.
And I think being a Hispanic Republican president, you are, in effect, telling the Republican Party, hey, having immigrants is a positive thing for this country.
And if they're Hispanic, this could benefit the Republican Party as opposed to be a detriment.
You talked about some of the polling numbers, right?
We can shift that and change that dynamic, which changes the argument in many ways.
I think if you wanted mainstream media to get behind you and promote the hell out of you to start getting the polling to increase, if you made the bold and brave decision of being part of the LGBTQ community, you would blow up.
I think there's a big play there as a mayor.
Are you trying to compliment my eyebrows?
No, I'm just trying to say, man, there's another guy that's a mayor that did that, and he was on every magazine, book, story, everything.
That's definitely one way to get on there.
I don't think you're going to do it.
You've been happily married for 16 years.
I'm blessed.
Let's talk about something that's going on that's kind of weird to me.
I take it in a weird way, and I'm really curious to know how you guys process this.
Okay.
All of a sudden, story comes out that Ron DeSantis agrees to debate Gavin Newsom on Fox News.
Okay.
So, okay.
I mean, you know, because Newsom called him out, et cetera, et cetera.
And then all of a sudden they decide to come in and say, yeah, you know, I'm not going to do it.
I'm not going to do it.
I'm going to do it.
And now finally he says, yeah, I'm going to do it.
So Governor Newsom agrees.
Governor DeSantis and Newsome have tentatively agreed to debate on Fox News.
A Republican is vying for the Republican presidential nomination while Newsom, a Democrat, is supporting President Joe Biden.
DeSantis agreed to the debate, saying, absolutely, I'm game.
Just tell me when and where.
Newsome office had sent a formal request to Fox News with proposed debate dates, and both governors seemed ready for the challenge.
A debate, if it happens, would be a significant event in modern presidential politics, defend his progressive policies and Biden's record.
Newsome's office proposed three potential dates, debate sites: Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina.
I don't know if you've gotten the invite yet, but they're thinking about doing it in Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina.
So, Tom, for you, how do you process this?
So, the way I see it is one guy is not even a candidate, Newsom, okay?
Although he is, we talked about this on the Rogan podcast.
He is, I saw an ad the other day for him raising money.
I'm like, what is he raising money for?
This was like four days ago, three days ago.
You know, so he's saying, no, I'm behind Biden, all this other stuff.
DeSantis, who's not in the lead, Trump's in the lead, and Viveka is about to pass up DeSantis, and you got a bunch of different things going on.
This has never happened before.
It's not like this is something that happens every single time.
We've never, apparently, this has never happened before.
How do you process a governor from a state that's not running during election session with Biden being the president and DeSantis, who is second place behind Trump, saying, let's do a debate, the two of us?
You know, the first thing I looked at was what Gavin Newsom was asking.
And I tried to look up real quick the polling in North Carolina because I know there are battleground areas in North Carolina, but it's a predominantly Republican state, although shifting kind of lavender.
And I know why he left.
Lavender.
That one's good.
Yeah.
Well, you know what?
Purple.
I got it.
Purple.
I got it.
That was very nice.
Lavender.
I'm trying to keep it.
I got a visual.
Well, I was trying to defer to your recent announcement.
Thank you.
Excuse me.
So kind of you.
Just God.
Okay.
I got it.
I got it, too.
Sorry about that.
So what I was doing, I know why he would want Nevada.
I know why he would want Georgia.
I didn't know why he would want North Carolina.
I was trying to look up the polling.
There is a lesson, and you're an expert on this, and you've probably seen this in California too.
Never agree to a debate, mano a mano, with anybody significantly below you in the polls.
The only thing can happen is you raise them up.
Happily be on stage with them because you can talk around them or ignore them.
That's why nobody wants to debate me.
In a group, right?
But this is true.
This is political strategy, right?
That's why Trump is arguably not going to go to the debate, the first debate.
He said he's going to wait to see who he takes as a whole different theory, but keep going.
I think this is bowled by Newsom.
And if I'm DeSantis, I wouldn't have taken this.
You're enabling him at a time where he's trying to raise even more stature, visibility, and support.
I wouldn't have done it.
Okay.
So what do you think?
I think it's a sign of DeSantis' desperation, to be honest.
I think it's a no-brainer for him.
What have been the big criticisms of him, right?
That he won't take on rough interviews, that he's sort of coddled, that he's like not willing to expose himself.
And I think his advisors have told him, that's over.
You're not going in the right direction.
You're going in the wrong direction.
And the only way to shake things up is to take risks, right?
Like, that's just the only way to change the dynamic.
And I think for him, you know, this gives him volume, right?
We're all seeking volume at some level, right?
To make our case, right?
We have to make our case with volume, right?
It's not the same, you know, being in a and everything is an ROT.
I call it ROT, return on time, right?
Like, where are you investing your time in terms of how much volume you're getting to try to get your message to connect?
I'm not surprised at all.
Now he puts pressure on himself.
He's got to compete.
He's got to do well.
And if he does poorly, I think it's very, very fatal.
And by the way, who knows if he's in the race in November?
It's another issue.
What do you think about it, Adam?
No, no, I'm asking you, what do you think about it?
Oh, gotcha.
This?
Yeah.
I love the return on time thing.
Well, it comes down to risk and reward.
Yeah.
Okay.
What's more of a risk and what's more of a reward?
I don't know why Ron DeSantis isn't going on every big podcast out there.
Okay.
Respect to you for sitting down and answering tough questions and being a part of this.
Sure.
You know, we all know that political candidates, you know, you can do great on a five-minute Fox News CNN segment.
Great.
You're polished.
You have all your words, your scripts.
But when a curveball throws your way, you're like, oh, shit.
So DeSantis has, whatever reason, not come on certain big, big, big, big podcasts.
Risk reward.
I don't know.
Let's say you lose a debate to Governor Newsom.
You saw what Newsom did to Sean Hannity.
Hannity invited him on.
Like, you're on Fox News.
You're in my world.
I'm about to whip you around.
Dude, Hannity ended up bloodied.
It wasn't good.
I mean, you did better in your fight than Hannah did.
No doubt.
But I'm curious.
I'm curious to know, like, what do you think about this?
I saw that.
Newsome's a great speaker.
He's a great debater.
I think for DeSantis, it makes sense that he might want to do that because he could get his face in front of everyone who wants to watch Newsome.
What I've noticed with Newsom is that it seems like people who dislike him and like him both want to watch from a different perspective.
The people who like him.
What a point.
The people who like him want to see more of him.
The people who dislike him want to see them.
Still want to see more of them.
That's a very good point.
So let me give my thoughts on this, on what I think.
So for me, I think it's an insult, if you ask me.
I think it's an insult on how it's being done.
Because if I'm a guy that's anti-establishment, the way I process this is here's two guys that are saying, yeah, look, we don't think Biden, you're going to be there.
And DeSantis Trump, we don't think you're going to be there.
You're being indicted three times.
We don't think you're going to make it.
We're convinced the two of us are going to end up at the end of the day debating.
And we think a year from now, it's going to really be DeSantis against Newsom.
So there's an element of arrogance to it.
There's an element of...
Makes sense.
There's an element of undermining two people.
Newsome undermining Biden and DeSantis undermining Trump.
So if you do that, if you're part of Trump's campaign, there's a lot of different things you can do.
You can come out and can say, well, you know, look at this guy.
He's desperate.
You know, he desperately needs to do this because he just fired a third of his camp and they're running out of the fundraiser.
So they need to be doing this.
They have to re-strategize their marketing.
This is one of their ways to get in front of.
Okay, great.
Fantastic.
So that can be one argument.
Now, let's go to the actual debate.
Rob, put a poll.
I'm curious if we can run a poll.
Who do you think will win the debate?
The actual debate, Newsom or DeSantis.
I'm actually curious what our audience will say on who will win the debate, Newsom DeSantis.
Not policies, but on TV, who will win the debate between you two.
Policies is one of the areas, but who win the debate?
For you guys here, for all of us that are here, who do you think?
Maybe I'm not going to come to you because I think you're in it.
Tom, Graham, Adam, who do you think is going to win the debate between the two?
I was writing something down because that way I made a prediction before I saw the poll.
But I think 65-35, Newsome DeSantis.
Yeah, I think Graham, where you at?
I think Newsom.
But Newsome's also had a lot more experience.
He's a great speaker.
So my vote's probably Newsome.
I think with the exception of GDP in California, because you could always be like, what is it?
Fourth in the world?
Okay, great.
I mean, that could always be the gold standard.
You're not even close, Florida.
But if you want to compare resumes of the last couple of years of who's done better as far as people coming into your state, people leaving your state, policies, COVID lockdown, DeSantis has more to run on is what I think.
That's a good quant, but lay it out for who do you think wins the debate, the way debates are evaluated by consumers and voters and things like that.
I think they're, with all due respect, neither are our stellar human communicators like that.
I mean, I think Gavin Newsom is as fake of a politician as it gets.
We sat with DeSantis.
Policy wonk, respect.
He knows his policy thing.
I'd like to see how he does.
It's a lot of personality.
We're looking for numbers.
Personality.
Put it out.
Here's what I would say.
All DeSantis has to do is talk about a few different points.
First time since 1851, you've lost people.
California.
Number two, you need the borders to be open to show that your population increased.
So the only way California can show that its population increased is by getting the borders to be open because the people that are coming up the borders, they're going to be voting Democrats.
Most 64, 65% of Hispanics vote Democrat.
And it's even higher when it's lower level income people that are coming to a state like California.
So that's going to be probably 70, 75%.
So, you know, Newsom's going to say, we've had the net positive growth this year.
And that data can be misleading.
And DeSantis got to show the only way you have a net positive is because you left the borders open.
Okay.
So that's going to get the crowd responding.
During COVID, no one handled it better than DeSantis did.
What's Newsom going to say about DeSantis?
The issue with Disney, how he's dealing with Disney, the woke ideology stuff, the books.
He's going to say DeSantis is banning books, CRT, blacks, the stuff that Kamala Harris is doing.
DeSantis has to defend the slavery stuff, saying there was some good that happened with black slaves.
Newsome's going to go after him hardcore on that.
If there's anything they have to roll plays, what that answer is going to be on it, because you can't just say, well, it did do so.
You can't do that kind of stuff.
It's going to hurt you.
Then they're going to say Newsome is going to come out and he's going to say, well, listen, if you think Trump is right, DeSantis is further right than Trump is.
So you definitely don't want somebody like DeSantis because look what position he took with Roe v. Wade.
Look what position he took with this.
So it's going to be a mess.
You know, DeSantis is going to go out there and say, look, in my entire year, I've been living in Florida for 45, 45 years.
I've never seen so many license plates that are saying state of California on it, right?
He's going to say that.
So debate skills, Newsom's got it.
Marketability and getting eyeballs, Newsom's got it.
Resume, it ain't even close who's got it.
DeSantis got the resume.
But we're learning at this election that resume matters.
You need slightly more than resume.
You need more than one.
Give you the final thoughts on that before we finish it up, and as well as yourself, if the audience is listening to you right now, saying, Look, Suarez, you know, I know where you're at, I know what you're doing.
Yeah, you're doing a great job as a mayor.
Maybe it's good you run next as a governor, but president, I'm not sure I'm ready for you yet.
So, if you got thoughts on this and this newsome, give that, and then final thoughts we'll go to before we finish up.
Yeah, I'll just say that on that issue, I would just say that you like you said, it's more than policy.
You have to be able to be inspiring, you have to be able to connect with people, you have to have the right personality.
And you know, you could, you know, I don't think people thought of Trump as a policy wonk.
I wouldn't say that's the way he's characterized.
Uh, so you know, I think you know, politics is the art of the possible.
And I think for me, um, I would say, look, look at our record, look at the success we've had, look at the qualities that I have as a person in terms of being able to bring people together, in terms of being able to solve big problems.
We live in a Washingtonized partisan world where everybody wants to just blame the other person, and that's that's their solution, right?
Call a press conference, blame the other side.
Um, and and and I, you know, I don't have the luxury of doing that.
Uh, Republic, you know, hurricanes are not Republican or Democrat.
You got to deal with them.
Uh, picking up the garbage is not Republican or Democrat, you got to do it, right?
And so, uh, I think I'm a doer, and uh, as president, it's time for us to have someone who's different, who looks and sounds different, a Hispanic, be the first time ever, um, also a mayor, be the first time ever, someone who's a problem solver.
Um, and I think that with my record, I've shown that I can bring people together and get things done.
Fantastic, Graham.
Yeah, um, what's next for you, man?
You're 33, you're a millionaire, you're doing great.
Uh, we're gonna put the link to all the channels so people can find you.
Uh, Rob, if we can do that below.
Uh, uh, uh, what's next for you?
What should we say before?
Oh, we talked about this a year ago.
I'm still clearly, but I'm traveling now.
So, we're doing the podcast.
We've done so much traveling over the last few months, and so I'm actually getting out there going to the UK pretty soon.
So, I'm just seeing what else is out there.
Fantastic.
Excited for you, man.
Thank you.
Graham, you had a question for Pat that you wanted to ask him at the beginning.
I am over time.
I am over time.
So, we'll do this.
We'll save it for you.
You can ask me on your podcast.
We're doing that tomorrow, right?
Oh, okay.
We're doing that tomorrow.
Okay, fantastic.
This was great.
Gang, tonight we're doing the live podcast with Vivek Town Hall at the other studio that we have, the club.
For those of you guys that are Florida-based, I think it's already sold out.
But if you want to stay updated for the next live, we'll be announcing for another one that's going to be coming up outside of this one.
Text Award podcast to 310-340-1132.
Again, Text Award podcast to 310-340-1132.
Take care, everybody.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Truck Bed David here from Valute Mining and PBD Podcast.
Look, once a year, we host a conference called the Vault Conference.
It's our Super Bowl where 3,000 entrepreneurs, CEOs, executives, salespeople from around the world come together to spend three and a half days together from August 30th to September 2nd at the Diplomat Resort in Miami to learn how to scale their business, how to identify their next 5, 10, 15 moves, who to recruit next, who to go raise their money from, how to raise capital, how to properly scale, culture, retention, hire, fire, all of those things, and much more.
And we do that over a span of three and a half days.
And the reason why it's a very important season to attend a conference like this, the following reason.
Today, there's three different types of people.
There's scared, they're those that are content, and the obsessed.
The scared, they don't want to do anything because they're worried about what's going to happen in the economy.
They're going to take a big hit.
The content, they're walking around saying, Life is pretty okay.
I don't need to do anything else.
And then there's the obsessed because they see a massive opportunity today.
So imagine spending three and a half days with 3,000 obsessed people that want to grow in a season like this.
Imagine how much you can learn from just those relationships and networks.
So, on top of the people that are going to be attending at this event, there's probably the best lineup we'll ever have at a Vault conference.
Tom Brady, seven-time champion.
I'll be interviewing him.
He'll be at the Vault Conference.
Mike Tyson, Will Guidera, the gentleman who ran the restaurant 11 Madison, New York, that went from a regular restaurant to a one Michelin star, two Michelin star, three Michelin star, and eventually the number one restaurant in the world.
He's going to talk about how they treat their customers.
So, look, if you've not registered yet, this is my recommendation to you.
I never went to conferences when I was coming out by myself.
I always went with a spouse, with a business partner, or running mate because I only have a lens on what I see.
Every night afterwards, we would sit there and say, What was your biggest takeaway?
