Let me show you.

Turn the cameras.

You feel that?

It's pretty thick.

In 1991, that would have been a normal window.

Right.

Every single window in Miami is like this.

-Yeah.

-Every single one.

So we are literally a bunker.

[music] I try to do two sets of 50.

50, 50, so it's 100 total.

I started working out when I was 15.

I'm a gym rat.

To me, it's part of my mental health, interestingly, like people think, oh, you know, it's physical, it's a workout, right?

Like, it's physical.

But for me, it's as much mental as it is physical.

Yeah.

You know, obviously, I also do believe that you can't overdo it.

I do believe in overtraining.

You can overtrain, you can, you know, your CNS, what I call a CNS.

Well, not I call it, the central nervous system.

It's meant to sleep a certain amount.

It's meant to be nourished, right, through food, and then also have a certain amount of stress or load, right?

And the load can be physical.

And it can also be obviously mental and emotional.

But I think the physical releases chemicals, endorphins, serotonin, dopamine, stuff that helps you cope with the other stresses of life, right?

Particularly when you're running a city, a business, whatever it is that you're doing, stress management is a huge part of it.

-Mr.

Mayor, -Great.

-thanks for having me.

-No, thanks for being here.

Lovely home you have.

Thanks for participating in part of our daily routine and what allows us to, run what I think is one of the best, if not the best cities in the world.

My wife and I work out generally from 8 to 9.

We schedule it like a regular appointment, just like any other appointment, because, we think it has that level of priority in our lives.

And I'm blessed.

I live, close enough, not on the water, obviously, but close enough that I get a little bit of a breeze from the ocean.

I personally love nature.

I love being outside.

I'm a big spear fisherman.

I love to be on the water.

So working out outside for me, it's almost like a double benefit.

You get to work out.

Plus you get to be outdoors, get some sun, most of the time.

Now, you said you were a confessional last night?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, I confessed to your trainer -that I'm a neophyte.

-Okay.

But I want to do this, the real McCoy, -Let's go.

-the full monty with you.

So you're going to do everything we do.

Everything you do.

Except, you know, maybe a little lighter.

Okay.

Keep going, keep going.

There you go and straight up.

This is without weights?

Correct.

Go go go go go go go.

Lock it out.

Now, there it is!

Good job, man!

How much does this weigh on it's own?

Thank you, mayor!

Nice and slow.

Here you go, tap, and drive, control.

Beautiful.

Let me tell you, you look a lot better on that set than you did on the first one.

Yeah, day and night.

A lot better.

Right, you get acclimated and then it feels good.

You feel like, when we've talked about obesity is a crisis in America, maybe more so than any other developing or developed country.

Yeah, that's right.

Why is that?

Well, I think we use food as medicine.

I think there's going to be a shift in medicine generally, and I think it's going to go from, pharmaceuticals, right?

Like you're sick.

You need to take a pill, to how do we prevent you from getting sick?

Right.

Like how do we focus on, keeping you healthy?

You know, I think we're like a quarter of the industrialized worlds health care costs.

One country out of 200.

So, you know, that's an indication that we're doing something wrong, right?

It's good that we're spending money on our health, right?

We want to spend money in our health.

But the fact that we're spending such an inordinate amount, vis-à-vis, the world shows that I think we're looking at health care as a business.

And it should be really about wellness and health care.

So my wife is phenomenal at keeping us on a very clean diet, as clean as possible.

We try to keep it to natural things, not artificial preservatives, all that stuff.

We don't eat a lot of junk food.

I don't drink sodas.

What I tell most people, particularly in the city, is just stick to the basics.

Try to get eight hours of sleep, eat, you know, three good meals.

Try to, if you can, you know, not necessarily counting calories, but try to maintain a certain percentage of your protein, like one gram of protein per bodyweight.

And then, exercise, 30 minutes to an hour, whatever you feel like you can do.

And by the way, a lot of it, you know, look, I have a lot of machines and weights and all that stuff, most of it you can just do with bodyweight, like you can do air squats, you can do push ups, you can do pull ups.

That's stuff that doesn't require really much equipment, if any.

Do you have these types of outdoor gyms in the city?

We do, pretty much all of our parks have body weight based, exercise machines.

So we do it at basically every single park.

The other thing we've done is, we've done some CrossFit initiatives for kids because some of these gyms are very expensive, $150 a month, $200 a month.

Yeah.

And so what we want to do is democratize exercise for all the kids in our community.

So we've been doing that initiative for a couple of years now.

We were ranked the happiest city in America and the healthiest city in America.

Something we're really proud of.

Mayor, we're here at your alma mater.

Yeah.

It's exciting.

I mean, I graduated in 1996, I've gone to Catholic school my whole life.

With the exception of college, and law school.

But, yeah, I was Catholic educated, different orders.

Just a great, not just education, but certainly formation as a person, as a human being.

And I think that's important to us as parents too.

Were your teachers telling you that one day there would be an American pope?

No, I don't think anybody really anticipated that.

It's interesting, because I was married by a Cardinal, Sean O'Malley, who's the cardinal of Boston, and we always hoped that he would be the Pope, or he'd be the first American pope.

You know, I think people are very excited about the new pope and, looking forward to what he has in store.

I think the Catholic Church is, an institution that's been around for thousands of years.

And I think, you know, interestingly, it has competitive pressures, right?

And so I think it's learning how to survive and thrive in a modern day world where you have a lot of non-denominational Christian churches that are appealing to young people.

And I think they're trying to figure out how to connect.

And, I think you're seeing a revival.

And the Pope, as the leader of the church is the person most responsible for setting the tone, for the future of a pope, just like a mayor is for a city.

And this is now the computer center.

-Yeah.

-The learning center.

But you told me this was your library.

It was.

There's been sort of an evolution over the last 20 years where libraries, as we knew them growing up, you and I, you know, card catalogs and checking out books, have evolved into essentially digital libraries.

Right?

Digital access centers.

They have computer rooms where we do programs for, the elderly, where we, give people the opportunity to apply for jobs.

A lot of job applications now have to be computerized.

-Yeah.

-So, I mean, imagine if you didn't have a computer at home, if you don't have Wi-Fi access at home, you literally couldn't apply for a job.

We're trying to create that connection for people.

But it is interesting how things are evolving.

You and I talked a little bit off the air about, technology and how that's a part of our society.

And is it something that scares you or something that you embrace?

And, you know, I've chosen to embrace it.

You can pretend it doesn't exist.

You can be afraid of it.

You can put your head in the sand, sort of ostrich effect, or you can lean into it.

And I think when we saw this, when I saw for the last 15 years this evolution from the industrial economy to the digital economy and the knowledge based economy, I think I saw it personally as a leader, as an opportunity for us to take advantage of what I call a tsunami of opportunity.

And we took out our surfboard famously in 2020.

December 4th, I put out a tweet that said, you know, what if we move Silicon Valley to Miami?

How can I help?

Which was a huge difference from what was happening in the rest of America and New York and famously kicked out Amazon, California had kicked out Elon.

And, we were embracing innovators and innovation in our city.

So that put us on a huge path of success.

We now have the lowest unemployment in America, highest median wage growth in America, and we grew 150% in the last ten years.

When Waymo was seeking permission to operate in Miami, they gave you enough certainty about the security of autonomous vehicles?

Yes, I think all the statistics show that level three to level five autonomy, is significantly safer than human drivers.

So I'm actually not that worried about the driverless vehicles.

I'm more worried about the driver vehicles, right?

So yes, I certainly feel very confident and comfortable that Waymo, Tesla, and others are inevitably heading towards a future where we have driverless vehicles and it's safer for us.

We see things like, for example, with Uber.

Things that I think were unintended positive consequences, our DUIs went down over 50%.

So now that you have ubiquitous access to rideshare, you don't have to take a chance to drive a car if you are even slightly inebriated.

Right?

So that's just kind of an unintended positive consequence of a technology that created rideshare at scale.

The consequence that you're still contemplating and that's looming is the consequence of un-hiring, right?

The effect of AI, at a time when housing costs are record high in most cosmopolitan centers, but especially Floridian ones, Miami.

-Yeah, for sure.

-It seems like the AI effect may only exacerbate that disconnect, right?

Like how are you grappling with the effect of AI to displace workers?

Yeah.

Well, I would say a couple things.

One is, housing costs are driven by demand.

And I think cities that are successful have an increasing amount of demand.

And so that is something that we have to contend with.

How do we meet the supply with the demand increases that we have?

Cities that lack demand have potentially more affordable housing because they don't have as much people trying to obtain housing in those particular cities.

So they've got to manage that piece of it.

So and I have mayors, I was president of the US Conference of Mayors, that are on that side of the ledger and are struggling to get people excited about their cities.

So that's something that we've got to just manage because it's our set of problems, right?

In terms of displacement or dislocation on AI, you know, I think it's hard to predict what AI will do.

Technology sometimes we think it's going to, disrupt in a negative way or create a loss of jobs and something that actually does quite the opposite.

So I definitely see AI as a force multiplier for people.

I think people are using it more and more.

Do I think certain jobs are vulnerable?

Absolutely.

There's no doubt about it.

Because of the ease with which you can do it.

I can give you an interesting example, and I feel bad for the speechwriters of America here.

But, I was, opening a Moroccan consulate in Miami, and sometimes I get talking points that I don't use, and sometimes I get 1 or 2 bullet points.

In this particular case, I got two bullet points.

One of them was direct flights from Casablanca, and the other one was, it's a second consulate in Miami that Morocco opens.

It wasn't enough for me to build the speech on.

So literally as a person was introducing me, I told the AI, pretend you're the mayor of Miami and you're about to open the Moroccan consulate.

You know these two facts about Miami and Morocco.

You know, what would you do?

And before the person was finished introducing me, it had written a speech.

I read the speech.

People were crying.

They were laughing.

They were clapping throughout the speech.

So this technology in 15 seconds built an entire speech that connected with an audience with two facts.

And I think that is something that is just reality.

-Yeah.

-It's there.

I think there should be a, like a speech writers workout group, right?

To feel the chemistry that we did this morning.

Yeah.

Because you can't replicate that in a 3D printer, right?

No doubt.

There's something about the humanity.

And I do want to talk to you about the humanity because you represent an authenticity -personifying the city.

-Thank you.

It's, vibrant immigrant legacy, but not immigrant as alien to America, as America.

Part of America.

Right.

Is your sense that the kind of indiscriminate, un-discriminating raids that we've seen in the second Trump administration is that creating a climate of fear?

Well, I think the climate of fear is based on people's uncertainty as to what their status is in this country, right?

And I think it begs for a solution at some point.

And I think both administrations, whether it's a Republican or a Democrat, I don't think, it is a partizan issue in the sense that I don't think either party can claim that they've solved the problem.

For example, I think we should be talking about right sizing legal immigration.

I think anyone who's in this country wants to be here legally, you know, I mean, my parents came to this country they came here legally.

Everybody wants to be here legally.

I think if you gave a path for people to be here legally, they would take that path, right?

So that's not really being talked about.

First of all, you have to understand that a lot of immigration pressure comes from people in their home countries who are unhappy.

And they're unhappy oftentimes for political reasons or economic reasons.

In terms of economics, for example, one of the things we can do is we have a half a trillion dollar trade deficit with China.

And I think one of the things we're trying to do is near shore a lot of our productive capacity.

We saw during Covid how vulnerable we were to Chinese production and how much wealth we're transferring to China, who is stealing our IP and doing a variety of things that are nefarious or hostile to the United States.

And we can bring some of that productive capacity to our hemisphere.

I think we can create better outcomes for people in their home country, and potentially put them in a place where they're more prosperous and our supply chain is more secure.

So that's one thing I do think, we've seen border security as an issue that both parties have ultimately, agreed on.

Why?

Because you're trafficking human beings across the border.

You're trafficking fentanyl and other drugs across the border that are killing tens of thousands of Americans.

And then I think the third piece of it is a rational legal immigration policy.

If you have legal immigration that is significantly greater and tied to benchmarks that are a good nexus between legal immigration.

I think a lot of people would choose that pathway, right?

So whether that means they have to self deport and then come back under the legal framework, the bottom line is people want to be here legally.

But you've gotten to know hardworking, Oh yeah.

decent, patriotic people who are here without papers.

Amen.

100%.

And you interact with people like that every day.

Yeah.

In our city, obviously, and across America.

One of the things that I've learned being here with you, mayor, is that for first generation students, if they are seeking, college enrollment, they have the opportunity to do so with matching funds?

So we created two programs that I think are first of its kind and maybe only of its kind in the country, and I would highly encourage other mayors and other cities to do this anywhere in the world, but certainly in the United States, because there's an easy formula.

So if you're a Pell Grant recipient, meaning you're someone of low means, right, because you are eligible for Pell Grants, and that's a need based, subsidy.

And you are either first in your family to go to college or you want to get a STEM degree, right?

And we're obviously trying to push technology and this sort of digital transformation, etc.. So if you fall into those two categories, we pay the difference.

I think it's, something that our government should fund.

I think it's a way for us to promote, you know, people who are trying to get educated and succeed and give back to their families and support their families.

And I think it's also something that is, putting an emphasis on the kind of economy that we want to create as a city.

All economies are based on talent.

And just to go back one second on something you were saying on AI, because I think you made a good point and we didn't really explore it.

We kind of glossed over it, which is AI I think is going to replace a lot of what I call the IQ parts.

Right?

Like, you know, you don't have to really debate facts anymore because you can just look them up.

I call it the Oracle, right?

So you could just ask the Oracle, right?

Like, you know, was LaSalle, was Miami created in 1896 or 1897?

The Oracle will tell you, right?

What the Oracle will never replace is what we have here.

Like you said, we spent the morning together, we worked out, you were working with the trainer.

You were trying to figure, we know we're trying to... Trying to figure it out.

Yeah, we're creating a relationship, -Yeah.

-a bond, -Right.

-and that bond creates trust.

That trust creates the ability to do things together.

-Yeah.

-Right?

Whether it's immigration reform or whether it's just work on a project that, you know, economically.

And so that will not be replaced by AI.

Right, those bonds, those human bonds, the relationship, the emotion.

So I actually think the world we're going into is a world where EQ becomes a very, very important component.

So I think we have to develop that as well.

Right?

I think in schools you're never taking a class on adversity.

You know, you're not taking a class on emotional intelligence or emotional maturation.

What are we doing for kids in school on mental health and how they can deal with, some of the difficulties that they have in life?

Are those part of the Miami curriculum?

Yes, of course.

This is one of those authentic, generational, small business, family owned, seafood restaurants.

Where they go out there and they catch their own fish and they harvest it.

And it's just a really great story.

They're from Cuba.

So, buen provecho (enjoy)!

-There we go, thank you.

-This is fried shrimp.

And how does this kind of Cuban food compare to what you grew up eating?

This is seafood as opposed to like, rice and beans and, what they call palomilla, which is palomilla, is, like, very different from the steak you normally eat in restaurants which are fillet mignon and New York strip and all that, which are thick steaks, palomillas are very thin.

Sometimes they're breaded.

And that's kind of a traditional, let's call it meat and potatoes for Cubans, it's really steak and rice and beans.

Your friend was telling me, owner of this establishment, he's kind of between a rock and a hard place, because he wants to serve fresh ingredients.

-Right.

-But he's being squeezed.

-Right.

-By the costs.

Yeah.

And that's not an unusual notion.

Right.

But he made the point that, -the next tier above fast food, -Right.

is where you're not getting, you know, used to be you get a Big Mac for $5, now it's $10.

Now a sandwich here, is now $20.

What do you do about that?

Covid is a great example.

You know, Covid was a really tough time for the country.

And obviously our economy basically ground to a halt.

But when government spends at the level that it did, it created inflation that drove up the prices of everyday goods.

And so I think from a government policy perspective, we need to stop excess government spending.

We need to stop these absurd budget deficits that we've had, this incredible debt that we have that's putting a stranglehold on our country.

And it's a greater and greater percentage of our federal spending.

We spent more money in those years, in terms of driving up our deficits, than we had done in the whole history of the country.

And we saw historic inflation rates.

I mean, the base inflation rate was almost double digits.

So if you, you know, you keep compounding that inflation rate, the $10 sandwich becomes $20.

It's that simple.

So good.

Was there a mayor of the world ever that you were like, wow, that person is pretty revolutionary in a good sense?

Like, they know what they're doing?

I've met some mayors in the US that I really look up to.

On the Republican side, David Holt, who's the current president of the US Conference of Mayors, is my successor from Oklahoma City.

On the Democratic side, Justin Bibbs, who's the mayor of Cleveland, great guy, super dynamic, really smart.

You know, you have guys like Mitch Landrieu, who was, working with the last administration, or Steve Benjamin, who was a mayor of Columbia, South Carolina, and a great guy, also president of US Conference of Mayors.

Bryan Barnett, also one of my predecessors, Rochester Hills, a suburb just outside of Detroit.

You guys are all grappling with, affordability crisis the way capitalism being practiced today.

-You're a fervent capitalist.

-Sure.

But in the same breath, when you're paying several hundred thousand dollars for a house, even in a neighborhood that doesn't have the type of safety or educational resources that you wish.

But Miami, I think, has the most expensive housing or apartments anywhere in America.

If capitalism rocked this, does it have to be tamed somehow?

Yeah.

Now, look, I think governments and leaders have a responsibility, a moral responsibility to try to help, particularly using capital and using our assets in a way that creates opportunities for people who don't have the same means as everyone else.

One of the things we've done in the city, is we did something called Miami Forever, it's a bond, and 100 million of it goes to build affordable housing.

And the beauty of the affordable housing that we build is we get a leverage rate of about 15 to 1, or 20 to 1, depending on the project, which means for every dollar that we invest, 20 more dollars or 15 more dollars are invested in the capital stock.

So you get 15 times the money that you invest in a project.

So we built the most number of affordable housing during my tenure as mayor.

And we do the very best that we can to meet the ever present need of affordable housing in our community.

It's just, you know, it's tough.

But the government, as a solver of all problems, model also doesn't work.

So when you see, like, for example, rent control in New York.

New York has has one of, significantly more expensive, property, real estate market than Miami does.

And then the problem that it has is let's say you take a building and you put price control on the building.

So the people that live there, that's great for them.

But the problem is that over time the building decays and since you can't reflect the market.

You're never going to be able to renovate the building.

And then what happens is after 40 years, the building has to become vacant.

So you're seeing buildings in New York that are completely empty, and they can't be renovated because of the price controls that don't allow the landlords to charge market rent.

What about the snowbirds?

Are they part of the problem?

No, I think look, the thing about snowbirds or people that even from our hemisphere, that will buy condos here and either not live in them or rent them out is, we get the tax revenue and they don't require the services.

So it actually ends up being a net positive for us.

But how about the fact that they might be vacant?

Let's say an apartment in Brickell's vacant.

We're collecting taxes every year on that apartment and they're requiring no services.

So for the city, that's the best case scenario.

It's like, you know, someone paying you a gym membership and then not going to the gym.

But, what about the fact that regular folks can't live there because they're priced out effectively?

Well, like I said, prices are a function of supply and demand.

So one of the things we have to do probably better, is try to reduce the regulations that allow people to develop so that we can have a better supply demand balance, that hopefully will keep prices low.

And we can do that because we can grow 10x larger than what we are.

Cities like New York are pretty much built out, and cities like San Francisco are built out, two markets that have significantly higher prices than we do.

Your advisor said he thinks your legacy is what you've done for resilience to safeguard, your coast.

Well, I mean, I was blessed to be on the, Global Commission on Adaptation that was started by the former UN Secretary, Ban Ki-moon.

I'm the only mayor in the US that's on that commission, one of two mayors in the world.

Anne Hidalgo, was a mayor of Paris was also on that commission.

And what we learned by studying this issue deeply, and we presented our findings to the UN, was that for every dollar that you spent on resiliency, you save $7 to $8 on post-disaster expense.

So we went all in as a community, and we did another bond, which was a resiliency bond essentially, called Miami Forever.

And this is the other piece, part of it was, housing.

The other part was resilience and climatic resiliency.

So we're trying to leverage those dollars as well, so that for every dollar we spend, we can get matching dollars from the state, from the federal government, so that we can create the most water resilient city on the planet.

And so we have three kinds of phenomenon, hurricanes, we have what we call rain bombs, in a day where it rains just significantly greater than what is normal.

And then we have something called dry day flooding, which is actually twice a year during the tides and the moon shift, we get water that actually percolates from the ground up.

-Right.

-Right.

And we have a porous subsoil that's called, limestone.

So the water literally, it's like a sponge.

It literally comes upward and will flood the streets without any water, without rain.

So we're designing and engineering around those things.

So, urban reservoirs, increasing our seawalls, pumps that pump water back into the ocean, cleanly.

Those are the kinds of solutions, among others, that we're implementing to make sure that Miami is here for my grandkids, grandkids.

Were you here for Andrew?

I was, I was 15 years old.

My dad was the mayor, actually.

I ended up evacuating to, a relative's house, and it was incredibly scary.

I remember the door buckling on the house that we were in, and I remember the next day it looked like a bomb had gone off in our city.

There was no power for weeks.

We had something similar during Irma.

We lost power for eight days, and it becomes very, apocalyptic, very fast.

I think we sometimes take for granted these comforts that we have.

We flip the switch and the light goes on, turn on the dial, and the AC goes on.

We forget about mothers who have baby milk in the refrigerator, who, you know, when the electricity goes off, all that milk spoils.

And I vividly remember getting a phone call from a mother who had her baby milk spoil and saying, you know, you got to do something to get the power on.

Even though we don't control the power company, it's a semi-autonomous city.

And I remember calling the power company, telling them the story, and they put the power on.

And she called me back and she was super grateful.

So I think for me, the sort of, how can I help mentality, has really what's exemplified my time in public service.

I try to help every single person I encounter, no matter what their station in life is.

I try to solve the problem, right?

Which is why sometimes, and I say this respectfully, I don't fit that neat box or that framework that sometimes everyone wants to have the conversation around.

-That's why I came to see you.

-Well thank you.

If you could be the mayor of any other city, Okay.

for a day, week, year, or in the case of you and your dad, lifetime?

For a day, it'd probably be in New York, for a day.

Just to feel what it's like to be the mayor of a city like that.

And I think I could help solve a lot of problems in one day that New York has.

For a longer period of time.

I think you'd be surprised at the answer to this, Riyadh.

That would be an interesting place to be the mayor of.

It's a big city in a country that I have spent a lot of time and energy on understanding.

And if I could be mayor for a lifetime, it probably be somewhere in the Bahamas.

Suffice to say, mayor, how many more times prepared is Miami today than it was in Andrew, thanks to the investment in resiliency, is there a way to quantify?

Very easy.

Let me show you.

Turn the cameras.

[knocks on window] Through this.

This is the answer to your question.

-Yeah.

-You feel that?

It's pretty thick.

In 1991, that would have been a normal window.

Right.

Every single window in Miami is like this.

-Yeah.

-Every single one.

So we are literally a bunker in terms of wind resilience.

That's part of our code.

So, they could not have built this any other way.

You either have to put storm shutters or impact windows.

So every single window in Miami's impact.

And then on the water resiliency side, it's really a challenge obviously because water has such volume, right.

Let's say, for example, you do a storm surge of 4 to 6ft in Brickell.

Right now, with the current system we have, it'll overwhelm the system, but only for 24 hours.

In other words, the pumping systems that we have, plus the porous subsoil, will only allow water to pool for about 24 hours.

So it's not a massive, you know, infrastructure disruption.

So many, many times more as a result of... Many, many, many times.

Mayor, thank you so much for your hospitality.

Thanks so much for taking the time coming to our lovely city and spending the day with me.

[music] Continuing production of The Open Mind has been made possible by grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Angelson Family Foundation, Robert and Kate Niehaus, Robert S. Kaplan Foundation, Grateful American Foundation, Draper Foundation, and Lawrence B. Benenson.