The Pomp Podcast - #673 Making Miami the Bitcoin Capital with Mayor Francis Suarez

Episode Date: September 28, 2021

Francis Suarez is the Mayor of the city of Miami.  In this conversation, we discuss Miami, bitcoin, local government in the digital age, MiamiCoin, and whether he is going to run for President.  ======================= Circle is a global financial technology firm that enables businesses of all sizes to harness the power of stablecoins and public blockchains for payments, commerce and financial applications worldwide. Circle is also a principal developer of USD Coin (USDC), the fastest growing, fully reserved and regulated dollar stablecoin in the world. The free Circle Account and suite of platform API services bridge the gap between traditional payments and crypto for trading, DeFi, and NFT marketplaces. Create seamless, user-friendly, mainstream customer experiences with crypto-native infrastructure under the hood with Circle. Learn more at circle.com ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Francis Suarez is the mayor of the city of Miami. In this conversation, we discussed Miami, Bitcoin, local government in the digital age, MiamiCoin, and whether he is going to run for president or not in the future. I really enjoyed this conversation with Mayor Suarez, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Circle. Circle is a global financial technology firm that enables businesses of all sizes to harness the power of stablecoins and public blockchains for payments,

commerce, and financial applications worldwide. Circle is also a principal developer of USDCoin, or USDC, which is the fastest growing regulated fully reserved dollar stablecoin in the world, now standing at more than $30 billion market cap, and is adding nearly $300 million of net new digital dollars in circulation every single week. The free Circle account and suite of platform API services bridges the gap between traditional payments and crypto for trading DeFi and NFT marketplaces. You can learn more by going to Circle.com. Again, Circle.com. I've had the CEO Jeremy Allaire on the podcast a number of times, and I'm really, really interested in how fast that fully regulated reserve dollar stablecoin is growing, USDC. So go check them out at Circle.com.

Next up are my friends over at LMAX Digital. LMAX Digital is the number one institutional crypto exchange. If you've never heard about them, it's probably because you're not an institution. Every institution knows about them. They offer clients the deepest pool of crypto liquidity on the planet. It's underscored by 100% uptime track record through volatility spikes as well. They leverage LMAX Groups, their parent company, relationships, and ultra-low latency technology. LMAX Digital is the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading and custodial services.

They feature a central limit order book, which streams spot Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash. And it's all paired with US dollars, euros, and yen. LMAX Digital. They're secure, they're liquid, and they're trusted. I love them. I think you will too. Go check them out at lmaxdigital.com slash POMP. Again, lmaxdigital.com slash POMP. All right, let's get into this episode with Mayor Suarez. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

Anthony Pompliano runs POMP Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Mayor, how are you? I'm doing great, man. Look at my date. All right. Let's start with kind of just a high level overview of you and the city of Miami. Last year, you started tweeting and basically took all of Twitter, tech, Twitter, et cetera,

by storm. And I think a lot of people at first were like, ah, who is this guy? Is this going to be an effective kind of avenue for a politician? But what we've seen throughout this year is kind of the formation of this idea of like the capital of capital and tons of investment firms and asset managers all coming to the city, myself, my brothers, a bunch of other people moving. So maybe just talk through a little bit as to like what's happened over the last year and how you evaluate where we are today. Well, you know, it's interesting that you say that because at the beginning, you know, people were like, well, you know, is this a COVID thing? Is this something that's going to end during the summer? And then, you know, people were often asking me, you know,

what are the analytics? How do you prove sort of this anecdotal story that you're weaving, you know, through your own podcast, which are my Coffee Still Tech Talks, of which you and your wife were a part of one. And now the numbers are starting to come out and they're starting to weave the narrative in a way that is objective, right? So what do I mean by that? Well, in the last 16 months, we've moved $1.1 trillion of assets under management companies to Miami. Okay. In the last two quarters, we are number one in the nation in tech job growth, number one in the nation. So in the last six months, we were number one in the nation in tech job growth, which I believe is a 29% increase. We have created 8,000 jobs at an average salary of about $120,000, which is just shy of a billion-dollar recurring annual economic impact.

So we're creating high-paying jobs. And in the last five weeks or six weeks, we've closed about $550 million worth of venture capital deals, which annualized is about, you know, it's approximately a $6 billion deal flow, which is basically a 200% increase pre-pandemic. In addition to that, we got the Bitcoin conference from Los Angeles, which was hugely successful, 50,000 people conference, you know, and we've gotten FTX to sponsor the arena. We've gotten XBTO to sponsor, you know, our soccer team, Inter Miami, eToro opened an office in Miami, blockchain.com opened an office in Miami. So we're not only weaving ourselves into a capital of capital narrative, but we're also weaving ourselves into a Bitcoin capital of the world narrative. And that's what I'm very proud of. And so when you think about this idea of like local governments in the digital age, I think that there's been so much focus on national politics and kind of geopolitical topics. People had almost forgotten about the local governments, right?

For most folks, I think they kind of had this dissonance between I think a lot about who the president is. I think a lot about who the elected officials are on the national level. But actually, some of the most important things are what happened to me locally, right? And the rules and regulations and just the general posturing of those local politicians. So maybe talk a little bit about how you see the role of those local governments in this new digital age. Well, the way that I explain in the sort of the way we the Miami story is I talk about three things specifically. You know, I talk about the fact that we have under my watch the second lowest tax level since the 1960s which is a property tax it's the only tax that we impose number two while

other cities in america have decided to defund their police uh and have seen crime uh increase we have increased funding in our police and our new budget uh calls for over 30 new police officers um we're in the process of negotiating with our labor unions and hope to have a new labor deal with them so we're increasing funding for our police department and we've seen historically low levels of crime. Just a couple of years ago, we had the lowest homicide rate since 1954. And then the last thing is we're focusing on quality of life. Because one of the things I've learned, I'm 43 years old in my life is the one commodity, you can't get back, you can't trade, you can't get more of his time. And so, you know, we invest and we do all these things. So we can

have the ability to do what we want with our time. And so if you design a city around that fact, and you focus on, you know, cultural facilities, of which we continue to invest in, if you focus on parks we just did a hundred million dollar linear park called the underlying you focus on sports uh we have uh all the major sports plus formula one that's beginning next year they just did a 10-year deal where the only second city in america has formula one and we're the only city that has all the sports and formula one probably in the world and then you talk about homelessness which is another quality of life issue we have 510 homeless in our city we're at the lowest level since 2013. And we just got passed through our dollars, what I call a functional homeless plan,

which is to hopefully be one of the first big cities in America to reduce homelessness to zero. So that is sort of the importance of local government, how it touches on all of those aspects of your life, your quality of life. And I think that is important for people to realize federal government is obviously your federal tax dollars, your income tax, and how that's spent on national security, uh, social security and welfare, uh, or things of that nature, um, you know, social programs, uh, and, and your state is mostly a state income tax, which is a consumption tax. Um, but the city are the ones that pick up your garbage, they police your streets and, and they keep you safe and protected. When you talk to people who are considering

moving to Miami, what's been the reasons why it seems like, uh, Austin and Miami both have been, the recipients or kind of the beneficiaries of, you know, if we just kind of explicitly say it, a lot of the decisions that were made in California and New York. And so you can see this through a bunch of different data points, but it appears that people have moved from California and New York to Austin and Miami. And we're not talking about tens of millions of people, you know, it's hundreds of thousands in the last year, but definitely a trend that people are paying attention to. Why are people doing that when you talk to them? Well, first of all, as I've kind of articulate some of the statistics on, you know, percentage of job growth in tech.

There's also a percentage of tech migration. We're number one in the nation in that as well. And what you're seeing is that some of the areas that you mentioned are number one in people that are migrating out. And part of it is for a variety of reasons. I think the first is, you know, that there's been an anti-innovation attitude. You know what I mean? You know, Amazon was kicked out of New York. You know, in San Francisco, they said F Elon Musk. uh you know when mark zuckerberg donated 75 million dollars to hospital he got you know criticized for that and so you know in a lot of those cities they are not uh you know appreciating some of the innovators and creators uh in in their cities so that's number one you

know we are we want innovators we want creators we saw what happens when government gets too big in the case of cuba where it becomes everything and all the innovators and creators leave and And Cuba is now, you know, the place where my parents were born is now a time capsule when it was in the 1960s. So we know that that kind of command economy doesn't work. Growing government too large doesn't work. And that's just one of the factors. The other one is obviously increasing taxation.

You know what I mean? When you have to pay an extra 14% to live in a place like New York, when the cost of living differential is already two to one or three to one, you're paying three times the amount of money to live there. Plus you're paying an extra 14%. That just doesn't work. And with remote working, most people have figured out that you can be effective anywhere in the country without ever having to leave your home and you don't really lose out on much. And so you've seen a lot of the big hedge funds, a lot of the big money managers do that.

And that's why that's what explains a trillion dollars of assets under management, moving employees from one area to another. And like you said, it doesn't have to be millions of people that are moving, but they're bringing their assets, they're bringing their capital, which creates a new center of gravity where people can create and innovate. And that's why I keep calling Miami the capital of capital. When you think about kind of the tech industry specifically, I think one of the things that really blew me away when I first came to visit before deciding to move was just how many people I was meeting that were the CEO and founders of Series A, Series B, Series C companies that most people in the industry would consider kind of the hot companies or the companies that were doing really well and seemed to have found product market fit and were starting to scale. and they hadn't moved their entire teams. They basically moved to remote work, but the founders themselves had decided to move here. When you think about those folks coming here, what's like kind of your desired interaction with them, right? Is it something that you're talking to them frequently? Are you trying to give them tools or resources? Do you not talk to them at all? Like,

how do you think about that relationship that you have with some of those tech CEOs that if successful will go on to build, you know, very, very large tech companies? Yeah, it's a high level of interaction. I talk to them almost daily. We have incentive plans that we have created that have been successful. One of them with the Downtown Development Authority, if you move to the downtown area, we give you a package of incentives that include $50,000 a year for three years. It's not anything earth shattering, but it's just, again, it's a counter narrative to what's happening in urban America. Just that program alone has created 1,400 jobs at an average salary of $160,000. So it's been extremely successful. And we try to be concierge with the

services that we provide to people that want to come here and build and create. Because as you said, I'm more interested in what are the companies of tomorrow that are going to scale and are going to redefine the way that we work and the way that we live. And I think we realized about 10 years ago that for a city to be strong and resilient, it has to have a resilient ecosystem and economy. And that means it has to have a large tech ecosystem, tech economy, and also finance, because that's what propels and fuels growth. And so those are the things that we focused on. We obviously got, you know, sort of a great opportunity when on December 4th of last year, you know, Deleon from the Founders Fund tweeted out, you know, hey, what if we move Silicon Valley to Miami? And I tweeted out, you know, innocently, how can I help?

And that just sort of went viral. So that helped for sure. That probably made a 10-year process or 20-year process, condensed it into a, you know, a 12 to 18-month process. Yeah. Yeah. And talk a little bit about that. Like the communication methods that you use would be more akin to somebody like myself or an investor or an entrepreneur on the internet in terms of kind of building in public and openly engaging with people. Most politicians, frankly, seem to be doing the exact opposite. They want as little interaction as possible.

They don't want to kind of take questions from the public, let alone from reporters, etc. So why take this path that others may deem a little counterintuitive for somebody in your position? Well, I'll be honest with you. You know, initially I was sort of the conventional. I mean, I think I did it a little bit differently and a little bit more exciting and a little bit more cutting edge because I'm younger. But I think I was, generally speaking, within the range of what somebody would consider typical, right? We would post, you know, events and things like that. after the, how can I help tweet when I realized that we were onto something and what I realized that there were sub communities in Twitter that were extremely positive, that wanted to build, uh, that wanted, uh, you know, to support people that felt the way that they felt. Uh, I, I, I sort of got, I sort of fell in love with, with the idea of being able to communicate and hyper-communicate with a group of people that were like me, right. That, that were young,

that, that, that were excited about the future of our country that wanted to innovate, that realized that the key to our success was to be the most innovative country and the most innovative city on the planet. And so success begets success. So the more positivity that I encountered, the more I went all in. And I think the same thing happened with Bitcoin. When I started on some of these Bitcoin initiatives, I realized that there was a huge community of Bitcoin followers and enthusiasts that were excited about some of the initiatives that we were doing. And I remember, you know, we had, you know, we announced the resolution that we put out that allowed for our employees to get paid in Bitcoin, allows for fees and taxes to get paid in Bitcoin and talks about us holding it on our balance sheet. I think we put it out at like a Thursday night, you know, random hour wasn't done at a particularly strategic time.

And we got millions and millions of views of that video because people were so excited about, you know, government innovating and mainstreaming a technology that so many people were involved in. And that was kind of probably more under the radar than people thought. When you think about Bitcoin, I had a conversation with you, I think, back in probably either November or December of last year. And then again, in the beginning of this year. And one of the things that really struck me was most folks would hear Bitcoin or some of these technologies and say, oh, that's, you know, that's cute. But instead, one of the questions you said to me was just like, hey, you know, what should we be doing here? And so walk us through kind of your journey with Bitcoin. I believe that you've said publicly that you own some, but just kind of

how have you, you know, kind of educated yourself? And then what are your thoughts today? I was talking to my team earlier today. They call it my laser eye journey, uh you know and so my laser eye journey sort of began a while ago actually probably earlier than people think i was part of uh something called the blockchain foundation and i was also asked by the cfo of florida to be part of the blockchain task force so that was the state's a vehicle looking at this technology before you know uh it became as popular as it is right now i think you know uh for me i uh i love the mathematics of it i loved the way that it that the way that it was created. You know, nobody wanting to necessarily take credit for it, but building something that

was going to be driven by a decentralized network of people, transparent. And it wasn't necessarily somebody coming out and say, I'm the guy that, you know, created this. I also thought that the disconnection or dislocation from fiat was revolutionary and very much appealed to me because I see, you know, governments continually, domestically and foreign, foreign probably worse in terms of the currency manipulation corruption that we see in governments and things of that nature and this solves for that and so there you know bitcoin solves for that and so for me um i i saw the runway and i'll tell you there's so many people that told me you know stop don't do it uh you know bitcoin is x or y or z or whatever whatever you know fill in the

blank criticism. Right. And, and from my perspective, I just saw opportunity. You know what I mean? Like, I think you and I talked about this or you had put out a challenge at one point to see, you know, you know, who could put Satoshi's white paper on their website fastest. Right. And I think maybe Estonia beat us. So we were the first government in North America and in the world, other than Estonia to put Satoshi's white paper. And I just thought, you know, that's, that is a low hanging fruit, you know, putting, putting a white paper of an innovator creating something that's revolutionary what's what's what's the downside but i think in government people are always afraid they're afraid to innovate they're afraid to be criticized

right because everybody's afraid of that and then i said you know and then i you know i have friends that are in the community and they said hey what's your encore like what's next you know so obviously you know the laser eyes thing was a cool moment and and and certainly uh you know this this resolution of of going a step beyond and making it more substantive right and saying like, hey, you know, now I want my employees to be able to get paid. And, you know, there was a very famous NFL player who wanted his contract paid in Bitcoin. And I think by the time, you know, he went from being like a regular average NFL player to being like the third highest offensive lineman, you know, and I thought, you know, it'd be cool to give my employees that

opportunity, you know, and then and so we started working on stuff like that. And that's how how my integration into Bitcoin, you know, has continued. Obviously, I see what's happening in China. And I think it's an enormous geopolitical strategic opportunity for the United States. I've been involved with a variety of Bitcoin miners, particularly in the United States. I've talked to power companies in the United States. There was an article today in the Washington Post. I'm sorry, in the Wall Street Journal, my apologies, sorry, Wall Street Journal, talking about my interactions with the power company here, which is a nuclear power company, and miners to try to get clean energy mining, which I think the ESG issue has been completely manipulated and has

been completely unfairly characterized, the Bitcoin community, as one that doesn't care about ESG. And I find that to be exactly the opposite. I think all the Bitcoin miners that I've met, and I've seen facilities that are incredible, will blow your mind. They're doing with it completely carbon neutral um there is no uh you know no dirty emissions so i think you know part of the reason why there was that reputation was because a lot of the money was happening in china i think the fact that china decided to shut it down and continues to be antagonistic to bitcoin is a massive opportunity for this country i think it's a massive opportunity not just for urban america but for middle america uh and i think what we have to be careful with is to make

make sure that none of our laws antagonize this burgeoning innovation. And what I've done at the state level, I helped introduce a state legislative law that was frankly copying Wyoming. We want it to be the most crypto-friendly state in the nation. We've obviously passed some of these laws at the city, and we're now going on RFP in October to select the vendor to hopefully be able to, you know, effectuate some of these ideas that we had. So we're continuing to move the ball forward, and it's just very exciting. When you think about a couple of areas, I just want to throw out ideas to you and you kind of tell me where you guys are, how you think about it. So let's start with the one you just mentioned, which is this idea of the city and the state both have

access to power. There's obviously companies within the city and state that generate power as well. Tell us a little bit more about this idea of nuclear power generation for Bitcoin mining. We obviously saw the president in El Salvador talk about kind of volcano energy mining that got everyone all excited. But is there a path here in Miami or in Southern Florida to go ahead and start mining Bitcoin using nuclear power? There's absolutely a path. And it's not just nuclear power, by the way, it's clean power, right? And clean power can constitute a variety of things. Nuclear being one of the, you know, one of the sources that is clean, and that is obviously inexpensive in the sense that it's expensive from the capital side. But once you

have the capital in place, it's actually on a per unit basis, quite inexpensive, you know, So electricity here in Miami is one of the lowest places in terms of rates in the country. But you also have solar. You also have hydroelectric and natural gas as opportunities. And what you want to do is you want to tap into underproducing assets in the energy field or maybe untapped energy assets that are clean and create a way to maximize those assets. So I know companies in Florida right now that I've been conversing with that are doing just that. in a variety of cities across Florida. They're analyzing energy assets. They're looking at the portfolio of cleanliness. And they're also looking at the portfolio of underperformingness and saying, hey, we'll take up this pent up demand, if you will, and we can put it to good use.

And so I think that's just really smart. And one of the things that people don't understand about Bitcoin mining is that it takes up such a small fraction of percentage of the energy that we consume. In fact, in the United States, we waste significantly more energy, significantly more energy than Bitcoin mining consumes. And so when you think about another topic that people are really interested in, putting Bitcoin on the city's balance sheet, how do you evaluate, you know, is that possible? Where are you in that process? You know, it may require some state law changes. So we're working with the state on creating a crypto friendly environment for our state, which requires how we classify Bitcoin, regulation, banking, and of course, things like

holding it on our balance sheet. And so I think it's important for us to continue along that process. And every day that Bitcoin becomes more and more mainstream, I think is a good day for the city to hold it as an asset, particularly given some of the levels of inflation that we're seen in the CPI, you know, over the last few months. And then one of the other things that recently happened, which I've been fascinated with, is this idea of building things on top of Bitcoin. One of the things that got built was MiamiCoin. And for those that don't know, it is built on top of Bitcoin using smart contracts from Stacks. And my understanding of MiamiCoin is people can go in, they can buy this, there's a mining functionality,

And about 30 percent of the mining rewards has been diverted and is kind of set aside for a city of which the city then has a choice as to whether to kind of claim it or receive that amount. You guys had a vote a couple of weeks ago and ultimately chose to go ahead and claim that reward, which at the time, I think, was kind of, you know, four, four and a half million dollars. Now, I believe it may be as high as six or seven million dollars. And so talk a little bit just about that initiative. Why go ahead and accept it? And then how you kind of see the relationship with that moving forward? Yeah, well, I think the first thing, and there's things to say that what it is and what it isn't, right?

So I think the first thing to say is it's not, the city didn't create it, right? So it's not a city created initiative, right? It's something that was created by an organization called City Coins, which is sort of a network of people that created it. And as you said, the protocol for mining, you know, creates a benefit that puts a percentage of what is stacked into a wallet, essentially, for the city. Now, as you said, also, it is a cryptocurrency that is created and based on Bitcoin. And so I think that's something that maybe people haven't fully digested. And why is that? Because the Bitcoin blockchain, which is

the most secure blockchain on the planet, is for Bitcoin. And so Stacks, which is a blockchain that allows for smart contract functionality on the Bitcoin blockchain, which is, again, the best, most diverse, most secure blockchain on the planet, creates more functionality for the Bitcoin blockchain and allows for interaction of Bitcoin rewards in this process. So, again, the Miami coin is something that is an offshoot of stocks and Bitcoin. And so, like you said, it has it has generated for the city somewhere in the vicinity of $7 million. I'm just handing it to me. Over $7 million from when it started. And this was about 45 days ago. So look, we're doing our due diligence. We're not out here telling people to buy it or anything like that. On the contrary,

we're doing our due diligence on it. But we have accepted it. We have a resolution unanimously approved to accept it because it's $7 million in 45 days, essentially. And we're also not going to spend it right away, especially because like I said, this is sort of, this is new and we want to see how it plays out. We want to make sure that this is done properly, that it doesn't negatively, you know, affect people. Obviously people buy and sell these assets and they make those decisions. We're not involved in that, right? We're not involved in how it's listed or who lists it or anything like that, or how it's priced or anything like that. And we don't hold any of it. We're not holding any of it. We didn't, we're not, we were not part of some sort

pre-mining or anything like that. So it's an interesting concept because if the market cap continues to grow, it is possible that it could fund a significant part of our budget. And I think that would be transformational because it creates a broader utility for crypto, right? Something that has a social benefit. When you think about if that was to occur, is there a world where, and somewhat of a hypothetical, but it got big enough to replace the city budget. Is there a world where, you know, if the mechanisms work, you could actually reduce or completely remove city taxes or, you know, have some sort of like pass through benefit from a taxation perspective to the citizens themselves? Absolutely. It could take into its logical extension. It is actually

possible that we could be in a world where you fund the government through a non-involuntary taxable source. So imagine we have a billion, $300 million budget we just passed. Imagine a world where that entire budget is funded through a non-taxable revenue source. And that would redefine everything about who we are and how we work. And it's all based on Bitcoin. It wouldn't to be possible without Bitcoin. So I think that's where I think sometimes, you know, are my friends who I consider friends, you know, who are maximalists and I consider myself to be one, right? I want them to see the relationship between these technologies because, you know, at the end of the day, we're pro-innovation and pro-technology. We want to make sure that we're

doing the very best that we can to create a world that has the most exciting things offered for our residents' benefit. I've got two of my brothers here with me. What questions do you guys have the mayor. Mayor, thanks for doing this. Really appreciate you jumping on. I, as myself, as a new resident of Miami, have really enjoyed your leadership over the past few months. So appreciate you. They both moved from New York. So it's been it's been refreshing. I love it. Yeah, exactly. So my question would be, you touched on it briefly earlier, but a few months ago, you had mentioned publicly that you were looking into the possibility of paying government and municipal workers in Bitcoin and giving people the ability to pay their taxes or certain taxes in Bitcoin.

I'm curious, kind of, what was your thought process behind that originally? And if you guys have been any progress towards that? So I'll take the second question first. My thought process behind it was you have to walk the walk. It's nice to talk the talk, to put the white paper on the website, to do the laser eyes. I mean, that's all great. But if you're not ultimately doing something substantive, what are you really doing? Right. And I think I think for me, it was time to take the next step and to get the government involved. Right. And I think a way to to mainstream Bitcoin is for governments not to be hostile to it, but instead embrace the benefit of the technology. So like with everything in government, it's a process.

And we are now about to issue in October what's called the request for proposal. So that's the way that we have to select vendors. And we will have a vendor that will allow us to pay our employees in Bitcoin and allow us to accept Bitcoin for fees. We also have a county commissioner who did a parallel resolution at the county to explore allowing us to pay taxes. So fees are if you come in and pay by, you know, take a permit out. If you come in and do, you know, pay some sort of fee like an alarm permit fee that you can pay in Bitcoin. the taxes part which is flows through the county uh once the county hopefully approves it then your property taxes you could pay for it in bitcoin and so at least the the fee part uh and

the paying employee part should hopefully be finalized god willing assuming the commission supports it in october uh and then uh and that will be done uh so that that that's that would be i think first of its kind uh anywhere in the in the u.s or in the world um and certainly we want to do with Bitcoin because it's what we know and what we trust and what we think is the most verifiable, most trustworthy network out there. Amazing. John, what questions you got? Yeah. Thanks for doing this, Francis. Really appreciate it. Love how you are focusing on taxes and homelessness that those two issues have really crippled other cities in the past. So I love how you are taking the initiative on that. I'm curious what, so I have two questions for you.

What has been some of the best blockchain and Bitcoin use cases that you've seen in innovation? And then a bunch of people are asking in the chat about your ambitions politically for the president. Well, I'm definitely taking the first question first. Look, I think use cases are, they're plenty, right? I mean, in terms of smart contracts, you know, if then functionality is something that I think could create some major streamlining, uh, major transparency. Um, and, and a lot of, believe it or not, a lot of transactions that are done are being done, um, in a much more antiquated way than we thought. And I'll give you one example, the one use case that I liked the most, and it hasn't totally gotten acceptance,

but it's in the process. And I know that it is because I'm familiar with some products that are doing it is tokenization of, uh, of, of financial assets, right? So like, let's say somebody buys a building. Prior to this moment, if you wanted to buy a building, it was bought in two components, debt and equity, right? So, the debt part was you go to a bank and, you know, unless you're a shareholder of a bank, you're not really going to benefit because people who are holding, who have a checking account are not getting any interest. So, they're not benefiting from having their money in a bank account. You know, the people who are benefiting are the shareholders of the bank. So, unless you're a shareholder of a bank, you're not benefiting from a debt

transaction like that. And equity, they're not going out there and crowdfunding, you know, a billion dollar construction, you know, with a 30, you know, $300 million equity stroke. They're not crowdfunding that at $100, right? Increments. What's beautiful about what's happening is you now can tokenize the debt and the equity, you can finance it, and then you can put it out to market. People who, you know, who make very little bit of, you know, have relatively be small savings in comparison, can buy those products and can get a 5%, 10%, 15% return on investment when right now their money is actually losing value in a bank account because of inflation. So I think that is the world that we're looking at, which is extremely exciting for me.

It democratizes the opportunity for people to make money and to have life-changing wealth. And I think that's what we should all be sort of striving for. If as a generation, we're serious about dealing with some of these issues of income inequality and things of that nature, the rich get richer because the rich are the ones that are being able to invest in some of these products. And so the second question, I'll tell you this, I take my day, my life one day at a time, this beautiful city that I live in. And, you know, I have a reelection in about 45 days for mayor. So far, so good. It looks good. I was elected by a large margin. I hope to be reelected by a large margin. And then in January, become president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors,

which is all of the mayors in the United States. And I want to create an urban agenda of innovation and hope that mayors can adopt sort of this urban innovation platform that I've created here in Miami. And then at the end of that, it's about a year and a half. That puts me in the middle of 2023. We'll see what happens. Mayor, an early congratulations. I feel like I know you well enough where I can ask a couple of additional questions around this. So the next election is in 2024, which 2023 seems to be pretty good timing. Talk to me a little bit about what your thought process is in terms of the ability to take what I think most people would consider a pretty successful plan and kind of strategy in Miami. Being able to, one, create innovation, create jobs, create economic impact, recruit other people to want to move to your city, recruit companies and kind of those innovators, entrepreneurs.

How do you see the similarities or the challenges with taking what's worked on a city level and bringing it to the national level? I think it's extremely similar. I think this agenda for urban America and frankly, Bitcoin mining, which I think people don't really understand is a recipe for success for rural America, right? For all of the towns and cities in rural America that have abandoned plants, those could all be easily converted to crypto mining facilities, and are in many cases. So we're bringing jobs back to urban America. China's mistake, people, I don't think people fully understand what a huge mistake China has made. They have given us a gift, which is, you know, before they took away all our manufacturing, because they essentially had

slave labor, right? Now they have given us back technology manufacturing, which is high, you know, high skill, not so much. It's high paid, skilled work that, you know, people in urban and rural America can do and are doing. And so they have given us a gift and we just have to take advantage of that gift. But I think I think this agenda for urban and rural America is what the next person who runs for president should be using as their agenda. I think we need a next generation person, frankly. I think we need someone who can cut through the partisan bickering, which which basically creates, you know, uselessness and stalemate, you know, you know, things that don't get done. And then I think you have to have a very clear agenda and vision for how our cities are

going to look and how our towns are going to look in America, which constitutes like 90% of the population of our country. So before I let you go, last question I have for you is there's a bunch of people who are watching this who don't live in Miami, and they want to know why they should consider moving here. So what's your pitch to individuals, whether they own companies, they work at companies, they're freelance, independent creators, whatever role they have, what's your pitch to individuals as to why they should move to Miami? Yeah, my pitch for them is we have something for everyone, right? We're creating a Miami that is the most exciting, the most diverse city in the planet. We've called it the capital of

capital because we're moving trillions of dollars of capital that are going to fuel the next generation of companies. We're getting mass migrations of engineers coming here and software engineers. We have the most number of new tech jobs in America. You know, we have a huge VC pipeline, which allows us to not just create finance jobs, but also tech jobs. We haven't even seen the confluence of those two worlds completely merged together, which is going to create, I think, a new way of investing going forward. And I think we're focusing on, as you said, these series A, B, and C companies, which are going to be the giants of tomorrow. And those are going to be the ones that are going to propel the employment. This formula we have for creating

high paying jobs is working by keeping taxes low, focusing on quality of life and focusing on safety. So, you know, we're just spending all our time and energy creating the kind of city that I personally would want to live in. And then my children, you know, I know you have to, you know, my children would want to live in and have, you know, their future and their unborn grandchildren. And I'm thinking, you know, generations into the future. And I do think this is a generational opportunity. And I think those who are moving are seeing it that way as well. Absolutely. I think there's no better way to to end it. So thank you for everything you've done for Miami. Obviously, you've you've definitely transformed a lot of things, got a lot of people to move here. Uh, and I tend to think that, uh, the strategy is working, so keep going. And then, uh, if, uh, if you so decide to run for, uh, for governor, for president, for, uh, for the local, uh, bake shop,

whatever you're going to do next, uh, we'll be cheering you on. So, uh, so best of luck and we'll definitely have to do this again in the future. For sure. Thanks. All right. See you later.