Will Silicon Valley ruin Miami?
Life and Art from FT Weekend
Forhecz Topher
4.6 • 601 Ratings
🗓️ 12 February 2022
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Miami is hot right now. In the pandemic, more people moved to Florida than to any other state by a long shot. Chief among them were the tech elite, who have made Miami—one of America’s most diverse cities—their next big conquest. But what happens when Silicon Valley falls in love with a place with such a singular culture? Will a new tech migration help Miami, or hurt it? We go to Miami with writer Joel Stein to meet the people investing in 'Miami 2.0', from A-Rod to Mayor Francis Suarez to its newest residents. We also hear from Miamians who have lived there for decades.
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Links and mentions from the episode:
–Joel Stein on how Miami became the most important city in America: https://on.ft.com/3LsiMfy
–Alec Russell’s Lunch with Lea Ypi (ahead of next week’s episode): https://on.ft.com/3GHmi1J
–Joel Stein is on Twitter at @thejoelstein
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Original music by Metaphor Music. Mixing and sound design is by Breen Turner.
"Miami" by Will Smith. Copyright Sony Music Entertainment
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Last March, there was big news out of Miami, Florida. |
| 0:07.3 | It's sports arena, home to the basketball team, the Miami Heat, was officially going to be renamed the FTX Arena. |
| 0:14.9 | What is FDX? It's a crypto exchange platform. |
| 0:18.7 | And it became kind of a joke. |
| 0:20.5 | Like, really? |
| 0:21.6 | Now stadiums are being named after the blockchain? |
| 0:24.8 | It also felt back then pretty out of character. |
| 0:28.1 | The old name American Airlines Stadium isn't oozing with local charm either. |
| 0:32.5 | But crypto in Miami? |
| 0:34.8 | One of the people laughing was journalist Joel Stein. Well, it seems idiotic, right? |
| 0:40.4 | There's a stadium named after some crypto company no one's ever heard of. But this was actually a big |
| 0:46.3 | moment because Miami was first. They were first to do a tech thing. Soon after, Coinbase became the |
| 0:53.1 | crypto partner of the NBA, the Staples Center, |
| 0:55.9 | home of the L.A.Lakers, became the Crypto.com arena. And there was one man in Miami patting himself |
| 1:01.7 | proudly on the back, Francis Suarez, the mayor of the city. Here he is a few months later, |
| 1:07.8 | talking with local news channel, WSFL TV. We've had such big wins. I mean, FTX coming in as a crypto exchange is spending, $200 million. We also brought the Bitcoin conference. I mean, that was a big deal. We took it from Los Angeles and brought it to Miami. It's the largest Bitcoin conference in the world. So we've done it on sports. We've done it on finance. |
| 1:28.6 | We've done it on technology. |
| 1:29.8 | We're creating the greatest city on the planet. |
| 1:33.3 | Suarez has been on Twitter and across news stations through the pandemic, |
| 1:37.2 | preaching this gospel that Miami is America's new tech center. |
| 1:41.1 | And he just became very much like a publicist for tech and crypto, particularly. |
| 1:46.5 | He's on Fox all the time talking about crypto. He minted their own coin called Miami coin. |
... |
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