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Ladies and gentlemen. Allow me to introduce your besties. The Queen of Quinoa, the Sultan of signs. David freeberg. The Rain Man, David Sacks. The dictator himself. Chamath Polly Hypatia. And everyone's favorite Betsy, the point God, Jacob. Rayman, Davidson. We open sources to the fans and then you just got. Love you, queen. I cannot believe what Jay Collins pulled off here. I mean, I am in shock that this is even real. The I saw, I still don't know where all the money went, but. The amount of money you embezzled. We are witnessing our first Theranos moment starring Jason Calcanis. Guys, I got great news for you. I took all the money. I put it in Luna. Haven't checked it in the last week, but we were up 3X. We're gonna kill this. You'll never find the money. I put it through multiple Bitcoin tumblers. That's great. That's gonna be great. Welcome everybody. By the way, sorry, this is a joke to everybody in the room, but one person sitting over here who is really sweating the accounting of this report is having he had a panic attack last inning. I said if Jake's gonna do this, we're gonna have a grift session. We're gonna all sit down and we're gonna figure out where the grift happened, cause it's gonna happen. The guy who's always calling out the grift. Knows how to grift better than anyone else. We'll figure this out. Like, yeah, half these people have families here. Have you guys met them all? They're great people, but. Are there any Cal Canices who are not on the payroll? Can I tell you we're feeding a lot of calcaneus here? I've been, I've been this guy in your new job. I've been your biggest supporter, defending you from these two ******* jackals. But it finally got into my brain as well. So when I got into the hotel room and I opened the bag, I was like, well, maybe this cup cost $4000, right? Maybe. It's very possible. Possible? It's a heated cup. It's a heated cups. Who are we to know when is the last time you bought a cup? It's it's like it's like the Pentagon or something, you know? I mean two months. Like when George Bush went to the supermarket and didn't know how much a tomato or gallon of milk has a cup. What does a gallon of 799? I've no idea. I'm sorry. I'm not gonna pretend, I asked Sax, when's the last time you flew flew commercial which George Bush was in office? Herbert Walker. Yeah. No, it was. I think Obama was still in office. Yeah, he just won the Democratic nomination. We're so great. Grateful for you all to come here. How many people flew just by a show of hands and a whoop? Whoop? How many people flew over 10 hours to get here? Oh my God. I mean, it's pretty incredible. Dance from around the world. And I I just think, you know, it's very special to us that this podcast means so much to you. Last night we, we, you know, had a little debrief and the thing just said to us, you know, when we, when we when we met you all. And it's very weird to do a podcast like this and have it become super popular item. 2 weeks ago it became the 26th most popular episode in the App Store, which to us was crazy. We did this because we were losing our minds and COVID and as friends we couldn't play. Look, we couldn't see each other, was very lonely, and we did this for ourselves. And the fact that all of you got some value from it, it was just remarkable to us. Like as a concept, but incredibly gracious of you all to come here and then to tell us what it means to you. It just has blown us away that people are even tuning in to it. How has it changed your life, Friedberg? I mean, you were a nobody. I literally didn't have a Twitter account. They were all very familiar in the tech industry, but nobody knew you, so let's just start there. I mean, I mean literally. But we were backstage and they said Queen of quinoa and this audience went crazy. I mean, you're very socially awkward. Tell us what what is it like for you to be famous? You know, I appreciate that, but I'll tell you the. The, The, the weird thing is we go into our office for 90 minutes a week and we talk to each other over zoom, and then we go in the room and people want to take pictures. That's what's so, like, strange. It's like we've never done this and we did it once in person together, right? The, the pod at your. We've always done it over zoom. And it was always like a remote, like, so it always just felt like, hey, I gotta, I got meetings on either side, let's go do the pod for 90 minutes. And then all of a sudden it's like, hey, you know, people actually ******* listen to us talking over zoom a little wacky, I'll tell you. But it was great to meet everyone. It's not. I think it was. It was really cool because I heard a lot of stories last night about some dude sold his company for like, ******* $2 billion worth that guy. That guy. And he's like, he's like 11. What? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He said he sold his company because of the the call we made on the top of the market. And he's like, I I took the deal 21 times revenue. Oh, there he is. Ohh, who's this guy? Sir, how are you? Welcome. Anyways, everybody, it was crazy. What an audience. The Mayor of Miami, Francis Suarez. So I take it. I take it 11. Just close. I have to dress like a human being for about an hour of my day today. Well, it actually doesn't close. 1111 doesn't close. So we'll just go there. Sorry, it's 24 hours. It's 24 hours. Not that I've ever been there, but yes. Hey, thanks for hosting us. We were thinking of a place to do it, and you were gracious enough to to encourage you to everybody's poker money everywhere else in the country. So you decided to come here, right? Yeah. We're gonna swing up here. But what an incredible resurgence and courting of the tech industry you've done here. Tell us about a little bit about what's happened in the last two years since you started replying to people on Twitter saying. Hey, if you're running a business, we'd like to help you. Yeah, sort of a United States of America type of approach, right. Fun, fundamentally American, where we wanna create high paying jobs in our city. We want to empower people. We want to give people an opportunity at being prosperous. And for some reason in this country and in certain cities that's been frowned upon or it makes you feel guilty about it. And here in Miami, we're fundamentally shaped by our sort of our, our origin story, right? And many people in Miami were exiled from their country of birth for because in those countries communist regimes took over. And obviously in those countries a government official is saying, hey, give me your property, give me your your business and don't worry, I'll make everybody equal. And they do make everybody equal. They make everybody equally miserable. So, you know, they they've accomplished that. And whenever government wants to grow, you should run in the opposite direction. And so in Miami, we do it by by following some simple rules. We keep taxes as low as humanly possible, and shocker, our budget has doubled in size since we have kept taxes to 1960s lows. We focus on quality of life, so we have the lowest homeless rate since 2013. We're the first major city, I think, in America to actually try to get to 0. Don't have zero homeless and we we we actually invest in safety. You know, we actually, while other cities decrease funding for our police, we've increased funding for our police. We have the most, yeah. We have the most police officers we've ever had in our history. And by the way, they have the hardest job in America right now are our police officers. And I'm going to give you a shocking correlation. Her crime went down. Shocking. So you added police, we added police and the crime went down. Yes, I know it's, it's it's it's bewildering. Our homicide rate went down by 23% last year. This year it's down by 40% from the 23% of last year, so almost 63% two years. So that's basically the combination of economic prosperity and then safety and security. Yep. People are too busy to think about all of the long tail things they could be doing to screw up their own lives or somebody else's life. They're just living a good life. Yeah, we have 1.4% unemployment. We have. We're number one in the nation and wage growth. We're number one in the nation in tech jobs. We're number one in tech job migration. I think we've moved 2 trillion AUM in the last 18 months and our VC pipeline grew by 200% year over year. And to put that number in context. If it was a 0 sum game and our game was, for example, San Francisco's loss, which it may very well be going into the future, in two years we would overtake San Francisco as the VC capital of the world. Yeah, and to be clear, at that rate, you know, this is a very liberal city that is welcoming of all people. This is not like you've become some like insane, crazy right wing, like TL sacks insanity. You still are like fine with people living their lives and you know, yes we're we're we're very much into freedom. We we're we're kind of sort of libertarian here in Miami and and you know we we want people to live their lives as they see fit. We're not here to tell them what to do. We're here to create the conditions for their prosperity to the extent that government even gets involved in that right. We we like to stay out of people's business. We try to be efficient, which I know is almost an oxymoron in government and we try to facilitate. People's growth and success. That's it. That's all we do. Tell us about your support of crypto. So, you know, when we were trying to create this buzz and ecosystem, we knew we had to disrupt the the, the natural order of things. And so our hack, right, our David and Goliath sort of slingshot hack was to go all in on crypto. A part of the reason why is, you know, I understood the fundamentals of it. I like the fundamentals of it. You know, I think one of the things that's missing in our society is trust. And when you see policymakers, whether it's the Fed or or or the federal government, spending significantly more money than what it's taking in, which is creating hyperinflation, we see interest rates going up and it's sort of a a terrible man, man or woman inflicted suffering. And you see a system that is designed to sort of create trust by making it human less. In effect, it was something that was very attractive, obviously the blockchain. Part of the Blockchain Foundation, a part of the blockchain task force for the state of Florida. So I had a sort of education on the technology prior to the moment where I sort of decided to go all in on it. And I thought that it could be a differentiator. Being a young mayor who understood the tech more, understood that I wasn't taking as big a risk as people thought I would be taking, and it's been great for our ecosystem. I mean, whatever the price of Bitcoin is at a given moment is pretty much irrelevant. What's important to me is we have the Bitcoin Conference, we have you guys, we have the Bitcoin Conference, which is a 10s of millions of dollars in economic development. We brought a a tremendous amount of funds and and and exchange exchanges to headquarter here in Miami which has created hundreds of high paying jobs and then we got FTX to name our arena which is a $200 million gift or contribution to our our community. So it's it's been something that's benefited us to the tunes of hundreds of millions of dollars. So regardless of what you think about crypto as a technology, as an economic development tool, it's been game changing for us. Sax, I'm curious how you think about what you've seen in this city. Versus, you know, where we all live and operate in the Bay Area and then across the country. How do you agree with the job the mayor has done here and what do you think the lessons are for the rest of the country? I think, you know, Mayor Suarez done an amazing job here and it's something that other cities should be looking to emulate, which is simply to be helpful instead of, you know, being an impediment. I did an event for Mayor Suarez in San Francisco, you know, my, my home, and it was the best attended event I've and I've done a lot of political events. The one we had with you was the best attended event I think we ever held and the reason there is a tremendous amount of curiosity on the part of people in San Francisco. In terms of what's been happening here, and the kind of the thing that you heard over and over again by the people who attended that event, who had asked questions was, you know, why can't we have a mayor like you in San Francisco? Because I don't live there. Actually, I'm, I'm president of the US Conference of Mayors. So I kind of jokingly say, well, I'm kind of, you know, trying to, but every, every city I go to it asked me the same question. And I'm like, well, I really like Miami a lot. Yeah. I mean fundamentally we have not just a mayor, but because the mayor and services goes actually not bad. London breeds not bad. The issue is the Board of Supervisors who really controls the city. I mean they've been engaged in killing the Golden Goose. I mean San Francisco and the Bay Area had a lock on the tech ecosystem and because. The political forces there defined tech as the enemy. They basically have driven it out. And as a result, you now have emergent tech hubs, all of the United States, starting with Miami and Austin and other cities like that. And it's kind of crazy. San Francisco had the monopoly, and it basically chose to give it up. Well, spending, it was a giant grift, right? Aren't they at like 4X budget per capita over New York? It's like, yeah, it's really, it's something insane. Yeah, it is crazy. Mayor, let me ask a question around one of the reasons Silicon Valley exists is because of the relationship with the universities and the Bay Area. Yeah. And obviously that still continues to be a big driver for the tech and more recently biotech economy in the Bay Area. A lot of people get their PhD, they graduate engineering students, they stay in the Bay Area, UCSF, Stanford, Berkeley, etcetera. How do you think about the relationship between universities? What's the kind of kind of reflective solution here and are the relationships you could maybe build or bridge? The California schools to kind of get innovation hub set up that that partner with graduate I would I would love to. You know one of the things interesting about Silicon Valley is 95% of the people that live in Silicon Valley were not born in Silicon Valley. In Miami it's closer to 70% of the people that that live in the city were not born in the city. I'm actually an anomaly being the first Miami born mayor in the history of the city 125 years. So that's that's a pretty cool stat but I absolutely think that we can look we're not. Perfect. I like to think that I get up every morning as a mayor you you sort of look at the imperfections and you, you try as as a long term build right beyond these 24 months, you start thinking about what are the structural things that we can do better. And I think you just hit on one of them, right. I think certainly having a university that's at the caliber of the Stanford, the MIT's, you know, Harvard, even UT and Georgia Tech, a lot of fanfare in Austin and and in the Atlanta area. And so I think we can certainly do better. I I'm not one of these people that likes to be complacent or that thinks that, you know, even if we had a university at at the calibre of some of these universities, I'd be still trying to find a way to do better. I think the world is highly disruptive. I think higher Ed is highly disruptive and I think and it's an archaic sort of institutional just like government, right. They're always behind. So I think that that gives cities like Miami, if we're smart, if we find our crypto for universities, right, we can sort of leapfrog a lot of them and and get to the top very quickly. I I wanna ask you as we as we wrap here a really hard question. We are struggling how does each month in poker? Yeah. It's hard. Impossible. I would say the no. I mean, we have a drug crisis in this country. Yeah. With fentanyl, yeah. It is a super drug. But we have never seen we have this problem in San Francisco with homelessness and drugs. And you're now running the conference of all the mayors in the country and you all come together and it seems like some cities are figuring out how to deal with this. And some are floundering. Is the issue that we're looking at a super drug and an addiction problem that has very low chance of resolving itself through even, you know, when somebody can get a bed and go to recovery? The recovery rates were fentanyl are low single digits. And we're looking at this as if the problem is actually homelessness, that they don't have a home when in fact they are addicted to a super drug. Why can't we look at this for what it is and stop conflating? A super drug addiction problem with people not having a home and an economic issue. It seems like there's some denial going on. Sure. Look, I think fentanyl is the numbers are very scary, right? In terms of recovery. It's infinitesimal in terms of people that can get out of that. That vicious cycle of fentanyl addiction in Miami, what we did about 10-15 years ago was we created a network of of, of, of, of facilities that do drug treatment, alcohol treatment, mental health. And vocational training, all at the same place. It's called the homeless trust we use. I think it's a scent from it's a basically a tourist tax. So people who come in and visit pay a bed tax when they come and visit a a hotel. It generates about $50 million a year, which you can bond out. And we've created a decentralized set of facilities all across the MSA. We reduce homelessness by about 90% with that network. We're now down to the chronic few that the last 10%. It's about 1000 in the county, in Miami, in the city. Which is one of 34 cities in the county. We have 510 homeless right now in the city and that's incredibly, you know, down to the person. Yeah, down to the person we do, we do a, a, a continuous audit and continuous census. And so we know down to the person. And I think the key for us to go to 0, right, aside from trying to fund the networks wish list, which we did with some ARPA funding that we got, is to really know them at an intimate level, know their stories, right. You know you when we first met you. The things you said was you don't know someone until you know their story, right. How do you drill down and how do you get inside and know what is, what's the reason why they're there, whether it's an addiction, whether it's some people just have been homeless for 20 years and they're just used to it, right? They wanna lifestyle, they want to live on the streets and those are the hardest ones because you really can't unfortunately legally tell them you can't live on the street, right? So it's it's it's it's about convincing them that there's a better path, there's a better life that that that there are things out there that can. Create more happiness for them, yeah, but you have to hold the line as well you do on a policing level like you if you as we've seen in San Francisco, if you incentivize it by not doing any basic policing, you get more of it. Well, here's the issue. I think what people often forget is obviously people who are homeless are human beings and they need to be treated with dignity. At the same time, there are human beings like we are if any one of us is recording over there, if any one of us just got up. And started urinating on the stage right now. They would be arrested, they would be arrested. So, so we're we, we, we're held to a certain level of account as human beings where our actions affect others, right? So it's not just about the human person and how we take care of that human being, but it's also how does that human being interact with and affect everybody else. And I think that's the part that gets lost sometimes in the debate. Mayor before, sorry, I want to ask one question. You focus on local issues, the city that you operate. What do you think? Wants to be United States the federal government over the next 30 years. You have any points of view on where we're headed as a oh wow, it's that's a long that's a loaded question, but I think, well, you'll be running for mayor so far for president. What's your that 3rd 2032? When are you planning to know? Who knows? Thank you. Whenever Chamath also authorizes it, look, it has been authorized. Just you know you are looking at an 8 to 12 years from now he will be the President of the United States. But anyways, go ahead and I'm always trying to hack and accelerate the process anyway. So. So so it it sounds good by the way. I I think a few things. I think first of all those three those three bullet points if you will those three sort of keys to success keeping taxes low, investing in quality of life which is sort of homelessness and safety and then you know creating high paying jobs was leaning into an innovation economy. We're we're transitioning that's that's a that's a recipe for success for the country. Can we change the country though? What can we change? Can we move the trend right. We got a giant look look what we did in Miami in two years. Absolutely we can I think we have to transition there's there's two inflection points which are. Massively disruptive. The first is from a an industrial to a digital economy and the 2nd is from the boomer generation to our generation. Yeah, right, right. So those two inflection points are happening at the same time, if we and what, what that does, I call it a tsunami of opportunity, right. And if we get ahead of the tsunami and we surf that wave as opposed to letting the wave run us over, I think we can create a generation of prosperity. But look, you have you have China and and Russia banning Bitcoin. Do we want to agree with China and Russia on anything? Right now, I don't know. You know, I don't think so. So, you know, I, I think there are tremendous opportunities for us to lean into this innovation economy and create prosperity. You have the largest microchip factory in the world being built in Columbus, OH. I think that's something that we need to sort of reclaim our ability to, to produce things. In the technological industrial revolution, we're seeing, you know, Bitcoin mining facilities that are done at carbon, you know, carbon neutral. So I think there's a lot of opportunities in this new economy. For us to really jump ahead where skilled labor is going to be a premium over unskilled labor that's gonna be done with computers or, you know, you know, printers or whatever. Well, Mr Mayor, we we appreciate that you are putting your life to service of the citizens of this great city and we really appreciate that because you have other opportunities you could have pursued and you're pursuing really changing what is some major dysfunctions in the political system. And we're all rooting for you and. Results are undeniable and we really do appreciate you, ladies and gentlemen. You guys, I love you. Thank you. Let your winners ride. Man David. We open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Thank you. White. White. Besties are gone. My dog's driveway. Ohh man. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge order because they're always useless. It's like this, like sexual tension that they just need to release them out. Your feet. Where did you get mercies?