June 29, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
21:48
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| You realize that this world is becoming more and more tech-focused, and cities have two options. | ||
| They can either embrace that reality, or they can ignore it to their peril and to the peril of their residents. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right, I'm Dave Rubin. | |
| We are On Location in Miami with Miami Mayor Francis Suarez. | ||
| Mr. Mayor, first off, The shirt matches the shoes, matches the socks. | ||
| You are living in the synthwave future that was promised to us in the 80s, huh? | ||
| That's right, that's right. | ||
| This is Miami for you, you know? | ||
| It's Miami style. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Definitely Miami style. | ||
| I mean, I guess the best way to start this off is that this place is just blowing up. | ||
| You gotta be kind of feeling good about life and the world and what you're doing. | ||
| Is that the easiest question ever been asked to you before? | ||
| It's the most common, that's for sure. | ||
| Yeah, no, it really is, I think, a generational opportunity, a generational moment. | ||
| Miami was always a great place. | ||
| I mean, pre this sort of tech boom, we were growing significantly. | ||
| We're not a very, you know, we're not a well-kept secret. | ||
| But I think what is happening now is Order of magnitudes different. | ||
| You're now creating a kind of ecosystem and economy that's really going to propel our city into the future. | ||
| The world is changing. | ||
| It's changing at a pace of disruption that we've never seen before. | ||
| And we're talking about this a little bit off camera. | ||
| Cities just don't get it, oftentimes. | ||
| They don't understand that things are changing, and they're changing permanently, and they have to adapt quickly. | ||
| When did you get it? | ||
| I mean, did you know about this sort of shift before you were elected in 2017, or did this just happen? | ||
| So I was actually elected in 2009 to the council, as a councilman. | ||
| And for about 10 years, we were trying to create this technological ecosystem. | ||
| I'm a young elected official for a major city. | ||
| I'm 43. | ||
| I was 32 at the time. | ||
| And I realized that I was a first generation with a smartphone. | ||
| I was a first generation with laptops, cell phones. | ||
| And you realize that Our world is more and more engulfed by technological tools. | ||
| I now have a seven-year-old and a three-year-old, and my three-year-old just the other night was telling me, Dad, let's take a selfie with her, with her, with her, you know, we call it a tete in Spanish, with her, with her pacifier, you know, she's taking a selfie with me, so three years old. | ||
| So you realize... Cameras and pacifiers, that's on its way. | ||
| It's coming, it's coming. | ||
| But you know, you realize that this world is becoming more and more tech-focused. | ||
| And cities have two options. | ||
| They can either embrace that reality, or they can ignore it to their peril and to the peril of their residents. | ||
| Were you worried at all that the people were going to come from San Francisco and bring all of the bad policies and ideas that basically wrecked Silicon Valley and wrecked San Francisco? | ||
| I hear the worry a lot. | ||
| I actually don't worry, and I'll tell you why. | ||
| My family, unfortunately, was exiled from a communist country in Cuba. | ||
| And I don't see people getting on rafts and trying to go back to Cuba. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's just not... The people that come here to Miami are traumatized. | ||
| They're traumatized by governments that don't work, by policies that don't work. | ||
| And frankly, you know, the decision to leave a particular city is a very difficult decision, particularly when you have a family. | ||
| And to uproot your family and say, I'm going somewhere else, that is not easy. | ||
| And so for me, I find it very hard to believe that anybody's going to make that very difficult decision, basically trauma-based, right, to come to a new city and then create the same policies that created the conditions for them to want to leave in the first place. | ||
| What kind of chaos has it caused in the last year being here? | ||
| I mean, real estate prices are bananas. | ||
| Rents are going crazy. | ||
| These are all good set of problems, but it must be a lot for you to just have to manage. | ||
| You know, it's interesting. | ||
| The real estate prices are bananas in homes that are on the water, like this home. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| But we're, competitively speaking, incredibly affordable. | ||
| So, for example, in downtown Miami, the urban core, you can get a one-bedroom apartment in an unsubsidized, not affordable housing or anything like that. | ||
| We're building brand new, $1,450. | ||
| In Manhattan, it's $3,700. | ||
| In San Francisco, it's $3,700. | ||
| So you're talking about a three-to-one differential. | ||
| That hasn't changed from one day to the next. | ||
| And then, you know, we're building a ton of affordable housing. | ||
| We have the ability to build supply, which cities like San Francisco, the Bay Area oftentimes, and New York can't do because New York is sort of overbuilt and San Francisco has restricted their ability to build. | ||
| So we have the ability to remain competitive for decades into the future, which I think is a huge competitive advantage for our city. | ||
| So I think when most people think of conservatives, they think of some kind of old white guy sitting in a smoking room and, you know, flipping through the Wall Street Journal or something like that. | ||
| You're a conservative. | ||
| It seems to me that you're sort of what the future of conservatism is. | ||
| What does that actually mean to you? | ||
| Like, what are your kind of guiding principles? | ||
| You know, I grew up, I was born in 1977, so I grew up sort of in the 80s. | ||
| 76, you're a young buck. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| My dad was mayor in 1985 of Miami, and I grew up sort of in the Reagan years. | ||
| So for me, sort of being a Reagan Republican was someone that was strong on national defense. | ||
| You know, for me, I believe in having a balanced budget, even though that's something that our federal government has not been able to do for a long time. | ||
| Are you guys balanced here? | ||
| We are. | ||
| Actually, we have a surplus. | ||
| We have a $150 million surplus in the city of Miami. | ||
| We have the second highest bond rating we've ever had and the highest we've ever had in history under my leadership. | ||
| So, it's a double A plus. | ||
| You know, I believe in fiscal responsibility for governments. | ||
| I think governments should live within their means. | ||
| I think that, you know, governments should be there to facilitate, not obstruct. | ||
| And oftentimes they are obstructionists. | ||
| You know, but as a conservative, I also, and as a young person and someone who sees even young conservatives and young liberals come up concerned about the environment. | ||
| So I think that's something that, you know, we have to have a better conversation on. | ||
| Immigration is another issue that, you know, we're a city of immigrants. | ||
| We're a country of immigrants, you know, and that's another issue. | ||
| I think we need to have a healthier conversation. | ||
| I'm in the one that we're having right now and in the sort of national landscape. | ||
| Yeah, where does the Bitcoin stuff fit in this new future conservative? | ||
| Mecca that we've got going here. | ||
| You just did the big conference. | ||
| Yeah, we just did the biggest, the largest Bitcoin conference in the world. | ||
| We also had FTX, which is a large crypto trading platform out of Hong Kong, named the arena where the Miami Heat played. | ||
| $200 million naming deal. | ||
| We had Blockchain.com headquartered in the city of Miami, 300 jobs. | ||
| And eToro, which is... Don't forget Locals.com moved here. | ||
| And Locals.com as well, and eToro as well. | ||
| So, I mean, we've had a ton of crypto companies moving over here and blockchain and Bitcoin companies moving over here because we believe, we were sort of the David in this David and Goliath story, right? | ||
| But we believe that to have that transformational moment, we had to step outside of the conventional box. | ||
| And I thought that Bitcoin and crypto was our way of doing that. | ||
| You know, we're the first city in the world, sort of the first city in the United States, second city in the world to put Satoshi's white paper on our website. | ||
| You know, we're the first city in the world to begin the process of allowing our employees to get paid in Bitcoin, of allowing... Do you get all of it? | ||
| Or is it just like you have good people around you? | ||
| Because some of the tech stuff, the high-end, high-level tech stuff is a lot. | ||
| No, I get it. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I get it because I have a finance background. | ||
| My dad was an engineer, is an engineer. | ||
| My grandfather was an engineer as well. | ||
| So I get the mathematics behind it. | ||
| I get the principle behind it. | ||
| I was actually part of the Florida Blockchain Foundation when it began. | ||
| And I'm actually part of the Florida Blockchain Task Force named by the CFO of Florida to promulgate state regulations and laws to hopefully to continue to bring crypto to Miami and to Florida. | ||
| Do you have other mayors in either in Florida or in the rest of the country that are kind of pissed they're kind of jealous like this guy's making it happen and we're not either because we're handicapped by our own state governments or whatever it might be? | ||
| You know the ones that probably would be pissed are not calling you know I think I think they feel like they're I can't speak for them. | ||
| They may feel like they're boxing. | ||
| They may believe some of the policies that their cities are promulgating that I think are not good for their cities. | ||
| But I can tell you I've gotten a ton of mayors that call me from across the country and chambers of commerce from across the country that call me and say, hey, how do we replicate what you're doing down there? | ||
| And for us, there are some things that are hard to replicate. | ||
| Miami is kind of hard to replicate. | ||
| But there are other things that I think are very basic. | ||
| For us, basically our formula for success is three things. | ||
| Keep taxes as low as humanly possible. | ||
| While other cities defund police, we're investing in our police and we have the highest number of police officers ever, so public safety is incredibly important to us. | ||
| It's something that we sell, being one of the safest big cities in America. | ||
| And the third thing is we focus on quality of life. | ||
| We know the fundamental truth that nobody can live yesterday again. | ||
| So the most important decision that we all make in our lives is where we are this very moment, where we're going to be tomorrow, where we're going to be the day after. | ||
| And if you create the kind of city that really respects that decision, for example, we have 555 homeless in the city of Miami. | ||
| We want to get to functional zero, which means we want to be one of the first big cities in America not to have any homeless. | ||
| I mean, I've been here for five days. | ||
| I have not seen one homeless person. | ||
| I come from L.A. | ||
| It's very, very different. | ||
| It's very different. | ||
| And I think we've done a variety of things over a number of years to get to that point, and we want to get to zero. | ||
| So, for example, what's one thing you've done on the Homeless Fund that I can bring back with me to California? | ||
| We have something called the Homeless Trust. | ||
| We spend about $50 million a year. | ||
| It's a food and beverage tax. | ||
| It's basically a tourist tax that's not paid for by our residents. | ||
| But it generates money and we use that money to build facilities to treat homeless in a comprehensive way. | ||
| Obviously a lot of them have mental health and drug addiction issues and vocational training so that they can leave a shelter with the ability to make a living and reintegrate into society. | ||
| So they get mental health counseling, they get drug addiction counseling and they also get vocational training. | ||
| When you see the mayors of, say, LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, all the progressive mayors that are just raising taxes, and then you see the reverse of all of the policies that you've got working here. | ||
| Do you ever think maybe I could just call these guys and explain like basic economics to them or something? | ||
| Like, I just never can understand the disconnect between the things that they say and then the results that end up happening. | ||
| Well, I can tell you, a lot of them are my friends. | ||
| And I'm going to be, if I'm re-elected in November, which hopefully will be a non-event, God willing. | ||
| You got elected with 86%. | ||
| And, I mean, what are we going to do in 93? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What do you say? | |
| Listen, you got to go up, man. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| I'll tell you a funny story about that later. | ||
| But I think, You know, if re-elected, I'm going to be the president of the U.S. | ||
| Conference of Mayors. | ||
| So one of the cool things is my colleagues, those mayors, have chosen me to be the president of all the mayors in the United States. | ||
| And I think it's a really wonderful opportunity to take this formula that has been successful in Miami and export it to urban America. | ||
| I think there's some things that we can do on gun violence. | ||
| There's some things you can do on homelessness. | ||
| And frankly, you know, I'm willing to talk to anybody, any mayor, and give them advice, you know, but sometimes I think it's hard because it's either what they believe, which is sort of antithetical to what I think is a growth policy, or what the residents believe, which oftentimes make it hard because they're sort of boxed in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Where does DeSantis fit into all this? | ||
| It seems like, again, from me, 3,000 miles away, that's the best governor in the country right now. | ||
| Yeah, so he's, you know, I think he did some things that were very sort of counter-narrative, right? | ||
| And opened the state up a lot earlier than a lot of people thought would have been a good idea. | ||
| And it turned out to be great for the city and certainly great for the state. | ||
| And he's gotten a ton of kudos on that. | ||
| And I think, you know, I'm pretty sure that if he's re-elected in 2022, which I think is also, you know, he's got a very good shot of that. | ||
| 2024, I wouldn't be surprised if he puts his name in the race. | ||
| I saw a little glimmer in the eye. | ||
| I think you might know something there. | ||
| Where does that put you then? | ||
| You know, look, again, I have to get re-elected and obviously I have a year and a half as hopefully President of the U.S. | ||
| Conference of Mayors, but I've talked about this in the past. | ||
| There's only a few things that I'd be interested in doing beyond being mayor, which has been an amazing thing. | ||
| Being governor of the state of Florida in 2026. | ||
| That's something that I would certainly consider. | ||
| Does it ever seem odd to you that you're governor of all things, like somebody who gets it, like you get business and all of those things? | ||
| I know there's a lot of good people, usually kind of right-leaning, who just don't want to go into government because they don't believe that government is everything. | ||
| So then they just don't do it, and then we get worse and worse politicians. | ||
| Well, that's part of the problem. | ||
| That isn't everything and shouldn't be everything. | ||
| And I think part of the issue we have in our society is people think that government needs to solve all our problems. | ||
| It's not the way it works. | ||
| Government was supposed to be created for a limited amount of reasons. | ||
| The things that we're good at are core competencies. | ||
| And then, you know, when you have good leaders that lead in government, they can work with the private sector, with the philanthropic sectors to deal with big problems like homelessness and others. | ||
| But I think, you know, there's this misperception that you just keep growing the size of government and that it can somehow solve a bunch of problems that government has been historically unable to do. | ||
| Put band-aids on problems, it's created, right? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's pretty much it. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Or make the problems worse. | ||
| Or make them worse. | ||
| What's been sort of unexpected as this all has blown up here on, I guess either on good or bad, like just generally like so much at once? | ||
| Yeah, you know, for me, if you would have told me on December 3rd, right, that the next day I was going to put out a tweet that was going to be, they call it the tweet heard around the world. | ||
| How can I help tweet in terms of making Miami Silicon Valley? | ||
| And that I was going to get 2.7 million impressions. | ||
| Honestly, I don't think I knew of you until then. | ||
| And that day, suddenly everyone I knew in the tech world was like, that's the guy, that's the city, let's go. | ||
| And then it's just been... | ||
| It's been crazy, and ever since then, I mean, I found what I call in Twitter a portal of positivity, you know what I mean? | ||
| And I tweeted 800 more times in the month of December, which got 27 million views. | ||
| Generally, that's not a good thing, but in your case, it's okay. | ||
| For politics, it's usually not a good thing. | ||
| And it's going to sound really hokey pokey what I'm going to tell you, but in many ways I found my voice. | ||
| It kind of sounds book club-ish, but I really did. | ||
| I was able to really express myself, be myself, without the... | ||
| The usual concerns and worries of, hey, am I going to make a mistake? | ||
| Am I going to say something wrong? | ||
| You know, usually if you look at elected officials in social media, it's very antiseptic. | ||
| It's like they went and they cut a ribbon or they went and they did this, you know. | ||
| They don't have a personality. | ||
| They can't really express themselves because they're afraid. | ||
| They're afraid of making a mistake or saying the wrong thing. | ||
| And at some point I just said, you know what? | ||
| I'm going to go all in. | ||
| Let's see how this goes. | ||
| And it's been great. | ||
| It's been a lot of fun. | ||
| It's part of what allowed me to get into the crypto space as well, at the level that I did, because I was really getting great feedback. | ||
| And I said, you know what? | ||
| I got to do more. | ||
| Were you kind of shocked? | ||
| So you put that tweet out, and then it was basically everyone that I know in the tech world was just like, that's it. | ||
| Were you just shocked that they immediately were like, what can I do? | ||
| And then you basically just set up meetings with people, right? | ||
| I was shocked. | ||
| But it was also a tremendous learning experience, right? | ||
| In the sense that I realized what this world is all about now. | ||
| This world is highly, highly disruptive. | ||
| I mean, I gotta say this. | ||
| I don't even know what camera to look into. | ||
| This world is highly... Somewhere over there. | ||
| This world is highly, highly disruptive. | ||
| To the point where the paradigm can shift on you in a second. | ||
| And I think that's what some of these cities are not completely understanding. | ||
| You know, and I think that as you see what I call this confluence of capital coming from New York, Silicon Valley, and Miami's geoposition, right, close to South America and Central America, close to the Middle East, Israel, and Europe, we're sort of in the middle of all that. | ||
| We're the place that can really be that global mega city that can be what I call the capital of capital, the place where if you want to build a business or start a business, you've got to be living in Miami. | ||
| Low taxes. | ||
| Does it all sort of boil down to that at the beginning? | ||
| That's a part of the equation, but it's not all of the equation. | ||
| I think for us it was low taxes, it's incredible weather, it's incredible amenities from a city perspective, now the restaurants, everything is sort of coming together. | ||
| And it's going to sound, again, sort of crazy, but it's being welcoming. | ||
| I can't tell you the number of people that have told me, look, I would stay living in one of these cities. | ||
| I'm still paying a lot of taxes. | ||
| I'm not getting the services. | ||
| I'm not getting a return on my investment. | ||
| I'm not getting any of that stuff. | ||
| You're just talking right to me now. | ||
| But on top of everything else, I'm made to feel like I'm not a good person, right? | ||
| Like the government officials, the F. Elon Musk, the let's criticize Mark Zuckerberg for giving $75 million to a hospital for them wanting to name it after him. | ||
| Let's push Amazon out of our city. | ||
| I mean, that just doesn't make any sense. | ||
| And what we've been doing is the opposite. | ||
| We're like, okay. | ||
| You know, keep coming. | ||
| And we're creating thousands of high-paying jobs in our community that are going to have a tri-generational impact. | ||
| Tri-generational impact. | ||
| It impacts the person who has a job and their spouse. | ||
| It impacts their children and their educational opportunities. | ||
| And it's going to impact their children's children. | ||
| How do you make sure that the people that are the natives here in the midst of this, as some prices rise and things like that, don't get pushed out of communities that they're in and that sort of thing? | ||
| Yeah, you know, it's a hard challenge, you know, because, and I was actually doing an interview recently with one of our local papers, and I said, look, it's hard because, you know, the first thing is people sort of complain that there's a lot of income inequality in cities, which is true, you know, it's a problem in urban America. | ||
| And then you start bringing high-paying jobs, and they say, well, you're gonna push out. | ||
| So it's like, well, what do you want? | ||
| Do you want high-paying jobs, or do you want, so how do we deal with income inequality | ||
| if we don't bring high-paying jobs? | ||
| And I think that what ties those two things is you gotta create an educational framework | ||
| from young children to university students to young adults who are left out of the tech ecosystem | ||
| to even the elderly to create a framework where they can be integrated into this economy. | ||
| And so we do it with child savings accounts to teach financial literacy. | ||
| Every single child in kindergarten in the city of Miami gets a child savings account that we fund. | ||
| We do it through a coding program we just raised through the How Can I Help campaign, $70,000. | ||
| $70,000 for a coding program in the inner city for robotics and coding. | ||
| We're helping facilitate a tremendous amount of philanthropy to universities and even working with some major universities, marquee universities, to try to get partnerships, you know, maybe bridge that reputational gap that we may have. | ||
| We're doing a tremendous amount of stuff on upscaling, either through vocational training or through companies like WinCode that was bought by BrainStation. | ||
| And then for the elderly, we're working with apps like Papa to make sure that it's relevant to them, this tech boom. | ||
| Yeah, you mentioned the elderly. | ||
| I was going to ask you, I think a lot of people think of Florida, but Miami specifically. | ||
| I tweeted a Golden Girls clip at you yesterday. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're not going to do the Golden Girls theme song. | |
| That's not going to be the official theme song of Miami. | ||
| I'll keep working on that one. | ||
| But that people think of Florida is like, oh, that's where old people go to retire. | ||
| That was our reputation. | ||
| Our reputation was we're a son-in-fund place or a retirement place. | ||
| And I think, you know, what I tried to do with the How Can I Help tweet and beyond was, you know, I don't know if you've ever seen the cruise ships turn. | ||
| Like literally? | ||
| Literally when it turns. | ||
| When a cruise ship comes into port, it comes in this way and they actually got to turn it. | ||
| To go outward. | ||
| It actually takes forever, right? | ||
| Because it's a huge, massive thing. | ||
| It's like a city that you're turning. | ||
| I literally got every single tugboat in Miami and turned what was the reputation of Miami, which was like a cruise ship, turning it as fast as possible. | ||
| So we could create two new industries in technology and finance that are high paying and they're going to propel us into the future and make us a city of the future. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Two more things for you. | ||
| And then I'm going to join you in just a moment. | ||
| We're going to flip the script here. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| So first off, I'm moving my company locals down here. | ||
| We're hiring right now. | ||
| We're hiring right now. | ||
| What can we do to get word out there? | ||
| I mean, what kind of resources are there as companies move down here? | ||
| Well, first of all, what we're doing right now is the number one thing we can do, which is, you know, you have to, I've learned after 12 years, this is why these podcasts are so, have gotten so much, you know, play, right? | ||
| Is because we're in the storytelling business, right? | ||
| I'm in the storytelling business. | ||
| I realized this after 12 years of being in politics, like I am now a storyteller. | ||
| And the story is the narrative of what Miami is and what Miami is going to be. | ||
| And so just this podcast and the one that we're going to do on the Cafecito Tech Talk, continue to tell that story to a point where People may have doubted it at the beginning, you know, this is just going to be a COVID thing or this is just going to be a, you know, in the summer, everybody will leave, you know, but when you keep telling the story over and over again, you pile on success after success, after success, the perception becomes a reality. | ||
| You marry perception with reality. | ||
| So that's, that's really important. | ||
| I think one of the things that we want them to know is we're setting up funds. | ||
| We have a fund already through the Downtown Development Authority that gives, as opposed | ||
| to kicking out a company, we give companies $50,000 a year for three years that locate | ||
| in downtown Miami. | ||
| We're hopefully creating a fund called Venture Miami, which will be hopefully an early stage | ||
| seed fund, which we're going to have somewhere between $2 and $5 million a year over the | ||
| next two years to help early stage companies grow. | ||
| which oftentimes, you know, they're the ones that have the hardest time, you know, with the mom and pop. | ||
| So we're trying to do everything we can to accelerate this ecosystem growth. | ||
| Then my final question for you is, if I make the move, if I just can't take Callie anymore, I make the move myself, | ||
| can you hook me up with a house like this? | ||
| When you make the move, we will do everything that we can. | ||
| We like to have that red carpet service. | ||
| We call it concierge service. | ||
| That's pretty much the limit of what a mayor can say. | ||
| Well, I can't give you the house, but I can put you in touch with people who may want to sell you a house like this. | ||
| Mayor Suarez, thank you so much. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about tech instead of nonstop yelling, check out our tech playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're right over here. |
Export Selection