You are a Seenager. I am a Seenager. We are all Seenagers. Get ready to roar. My friend Debbie Nigro, and her partner, Charlie Ponger, started a new hysterical podcast talking about you and me, and all of our contemporaries.
Radio veterans Debbie Nigro and Charlie Ponger are the ringleaders uniting the 50+ generation on the one thing they all have in common. The desire to have as much fun as possible, while they still can…without hurting themselves.
New York, NY — “Tell me you didn’t crack up seeing Joe Namath having fun rockin’ his signature fur coat during the Super Bowl Draft King commercials?” said Debbie Nigro, Co-creator and Co-host of the trending comedy improve podcast ‘The Official Seenagers’ Can’t Make This Up.
Joe Namath just showed everyone a great example of the kind of fun antics we at ‘The Official Seenagers’ podcast applaud! Having fun making fun of himself. Love him.
What is a “Seenager”? “Senior Teenager’. A person in midlife or beyond who experiences or exhibits a renaissance of freedom, creativity, and social engagement like those usually present in a person’s teenage years. Most ‘Seenagers’ typically appear to be mature adults, parents and grandparents.
Broadway Joe’ Namath is obviously one of us. He’s very fun and very real as you’ll hear in the most recent episode of ‘The Official Seenagers’. He thoughtfully shares why he thinks people are still drawn to him, tells the story of his famous white shoes, gives up his grandpa name, and shares who he watches football games at home with and more. He even tells Debbie something he never told anyone before.
“That Draft Kings Goddess of Fortune has nothing on me when it comes to Joe Namath,” said Debbie. “I’m The Goddess of Truth Serum. LOL“
“Joe Namath’s outlook, spirit, and humor are a perfect example of what we and our show are all about.” said, Charlie Ponger, Co-Creator and Co-Host of The Official Seenagers. We’re all about the upside and often the hilarious reality of the 50+ generation. The younger generations also find us funny and way cool.
“Humor is in critical demand right now, says Debbie. It’s good for your immune system. Luckily the only thing anyone listening to us could possibly catch is a belly laugh”
Looking For An Alternative Life? Want To Run Away From It All? Tired Of Being Shut-In After The Pandemic? Here’s A Solution!
These Eco-Friendly Floating Condos Will Let You Live in Luxury Wherever There’s Water
We Have Two Alternatives For You, The Anthénea Floating Condo, Or The Arkup.
The Anthénea, a French company, plans to debut its dome-shaped apartments early next year.
Arkup, located in Miami, introduced their luxury floating home a few years ago. In fact, it’s located next to Star Island right outside my window. $5.5 million.
The Anthénea, created by French naval architect Jean-Michel Duacancelle, was inspired by the 1977 James Bond flick The Spy Who Loved Me. The Anthénea has a diameter of 31 feet and accommodates two adults or a family of four. It features a lounge, bar and kitchenette. The rooftop features a bar-slash-solarium for 12 guests.
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You and your friends can dock near each other and form your own floating condo colony.
The Anthénea does not disturb the underwater ecosystem. It is fitted with solar panels and powered by 100 percent clean energy. It’s also equipped with an innovative anchoring system and sand screw which does minimal damage to the ocean floor.
Other green tech features a saltwater filtration system and a US Coast Guard-approved waste treatment system. The pod is 100 percent recyclable.
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Anthénea says the pods can be used as exclusive oceanic condos, though the company is also looking to partner with resorts around the world.
Anthénea starts at $365,000. The floating spa model is $730,000.
Our Visit To The Bal Harbour Luxury Shopping Mall Yesterday.
We had lunch at the Bal Harbour Mall yesterday with good friend Neil Plakcy who is an award -winning author of 50 books to date. They’re all on sale at Amazon. You can imagine what our conversations were like considering he writes mysteries. We learn so much. His husband Marc couldn’t make it to lunch, He was greatly missed.
Most women who shop at Bal Harbour are thin and fashionable. I never got the memo.
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY VANITY FAIR, PHOTOS FROM GETTY IMAGES, NETFLIX.
Rachel Williams, the former Vanity Fair staffer who was conned out of $62,000 by Anna Sorokin, known as Anna Delvey, never wanted to discuss her former friend again. She purged her recollections of the traumatic friendship in an essay forVanity Fair and, later, a book, My Friend Anna. But when Netflix reportedly paid Sorokin $320,000 for her life rights—allowing the convicted felon to profit from her crimes after she was forced to use part of the sum to pay restitution and fines—Williams was irked. And when the adaptation of those rights and Jessica Pressler’s New York magazine feature made its way to TV screens on Friday, in Inventing Anna, Williams was shocked to see the degree to which the series sympathized with Sorokin (Julia Garner).
“I think promoting this whole narrative and celebrating a sociopathic, narcissistic, proven criminal is wrong,” Williams told Vanity Fair in her first interview about the series. “Having had a front-row seat to [the Anna circus] for far too long, I’ve studied the way a con works more than anybody needs to. You watch the spectacle, but you’re not paying attention to what’s being marketed.”
The way Williams sees it, Netflix and Shonda Rhimes were conned into believing that Sorokin was a special and even inspiring person—just like Williams was. They didn’t see her as a felon who was convicted on eight charges, including second-degree grand larceny, theft of services, and first-degree attempted grand larceny. (Sorokin was acquitted of attempted grand larceny in the first degree in regard to a $22 million loan she tried to obtain, and of stealing $62,000 from Williams. American Express later protected Williams from the Morocco hotel charges.) Sorokin was released from prison in February 2021. After overstaying her visa, Sorokin is currently in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement where she is fighting deportation and offering the occasional interview to press.
Even more dangerously, Williams contends, the series recklessly blurs fact with fiction—opening each episode with a cheeky title card: “This story is completely true, except for all the parts that aren’t.” To Williams, the show could convince viewers that Sorokin is some trailblazing renegade worthy of further fascination and financial payouts in spite of her crimes. (A Netflix spokesperson would not confirm the figure to The New York Times, but did clarify that “payments were made to an escrow account monitored by New York State’s Office of Victim Services.”)
Ahead, Williams reacts to the series and its unflattering depiction of her, and shares her own truth.
Vanity Fair:I just reread Jessica Pressler’s original article about Anna forTheCut, on whichInventing Annais partially based. In the story, you’re depicted straightforwardly. Did you have any sense that the show would portray you as an opportunistic hanger-on?
Rachel Williams: I was caught off guard when Netflix announced its description of the character Rachel. [Editor’s note: Netflix described Rachel as “a natural-born follower whose blind worship of Anna almost destroys her job, her credit, and her life. But while her relationship with Anna is her greatest regret, the woman she becomes because of Anna may be Anna’s greatest creation.”]
To say a woman is someone else’s creation is counter to a feminist narrative. I looked at it and I was like, Really? That’s where you’re going to go with this? So I had some unease, but nobody thinks that someone is going to be reckless with facts, especially when the character is given my name. To me, it’s not making a statement but convoluting truth in a way that’s dangerous.
How much of the show have you seen, and what was your viewing experience like?
I haven’t watched the whole thing yet—I’ve been skimming. I started and was like, I’m not sure I have the stomach for this. I’ve seen enough of it to know my objections. Part of the reason I didn’t want to speak up [initially] was because I think people will want to couch my statements within the Rachel-vs.-Anna narrative. And I mean, yes, I am concerned about some very obvious, refutable factual inaccuracies.
But I’m more interested in this kind of true-crime entertainment. Some people online think this is a fact-checked series. Books are fact-checked. This show is playing with a fine line—peddling it as a true story, but also [in the opening disclaimer] saying, “except for all the parts that aren’t.” I think it’s worth exploring at what point a half-truth is more dangerous than a lie. That disclaimer gives the show enough credibility so that people can believe [the fictional elements] more easily. I think that’s really dangerous territory. Plus, it affected real-time criminal-justice proceedings.
Is there any particular story point that you want to go on record to correct?
I don’t want to get lost in the weeds of what is right versus what isn’t right. But I obviously was not laid off at Vanity Fair for this. I was not complicit [in] helping my friend defraud my employer. But the second I sit down to defend myself—especially because there’s now this false narrative about me and about the broader story—then I’m just feeding into this picking-sides-ism, when this isn’t something that is actually two-sided.
One person’s a criminal. The story profits her. This is a narrative designed to create empathy for a character who lacks it. The whole thing is very problematic. If I start saying “fact” or “fiction,” I feel like my voice will be lost and also more of a distraction.
The show dramatizes Jessica Pressler reaching out to you when she was working on herNew Yorkmagazinearticle, and you declining to participate because you wanted to tell your own story. But in terms of the TV show, did Shonda Rhimes or the series reach out to you at any point?
They reached out to get my option, but at that point HBO already had it. [Editor’s note: Williams’s book wasoptionedby Lena Dunham, but it is no longer in development. The story rights were returned to Williams.]
At that point they already had optioned Jessica’s story?
Yes.
Do you have any theory why you’re characterized this way?
Who knows. Julia Garner’s a terrific actress. But I think that whatever elusive charismatic powers Anna has come through less in the way the story is presented, [and more in] the way the whole story was created. Everyone talks about Anna’s star power—they were so clearly taken with this subject that they began to empathize with her. If you think about it, what do con artists do? They tell stories. Stories have so much power when it comes to creating belief. So everybody has bought into this fantastical narrative that has become so devoid of fact but still has the illusion of truth. The facts are boring, I guess, but they’re important.
How did you feel once you started watching the show? Did the Anna debacle harden you to the point where you aren’t surprised by anything anymore related to her?
I think there is a false narrative with regard to me not having been a strong person before this entire thing. I have learned a lot, of course.
In a lot of ways, though, reality has gotten stranger than I ever imagined. So yes, the next gross bag of tricks probably shocks me less than it would other people. But I think my resolve is strengthened. Certainly not because of Anna. But you learn at some point that kindness is not mutually exclusive from strength. I think I was trying too hard to emphasize kindness for too long with Anna, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t strong.
Sometimes we hesitate to draw a firm line with someone who tests our limits because we think that leniency is kind. But at a certain point, it’s actually the opposite for both people.
I just would like to raise questions that I hope other people would see the value in exploring.
Like the fact that Netflix paid Anna over $300,000 for her life rights.
Yes, and to say she doesn’t profit because there isn’t much money left over after she pays lawyers…it’s like, at what point does $75,000 worth of attorney fees factor into not being her profit? The fact that she financed a private criminal defense attorney, and chose to spend the money that way, doesn’t mean it wasn’t money.
In your character’s scene on the witness stand, Anna’s lawyer accuses you, too, of profiting off of Anna because you sold a book—even though you sold a book, in part, to help recoup your losses from Anna. But there were other immeasurable negative effects of your relationship with Anna, I imagine.
I don’t want to dwell too much on the impact because it’s been however many years, but it certainly took a huge toll on me. As I’ve said one too many times, this is the hardest thing I’ve gone through—the betrayal as much as the money. Having been betrayed by someone I trusted—and to have been betrayed in a huge way. Her entire identity had been a complete sham. That really sends you into a ricochet of memories, looking back trying to look for all the signs you missed. That’s why I wrote a book—I was drowning in rumination and trying to process what had happened.
So it was like this giant purge of all these cached memories that I strung together so I could step back, look at them, and figure out what had happened, what to make of it, and hopefully leave it behind me.
Katie Lowes portrays Williams in Netflix’s Inventing Anna. BY NICOLE RIVELLI/NETFLIX.
Katie Lowes, who plays you on the show, said she wanted to use the real you as a jumping-off point, and actuallybasedthe character on someone else she knew. Did she ever reach out to you?
No, I never heard from her. From what I’ve seen of the series so far: Lowes’s concern for accuracy, when it comes to portraying me as I am, seems limited to the spelling of my full name. This sort of half-truth is more insidious than a total lie because it causes uninformed viewers to mistake fiction for fact based on mere fragments of reality—like my place of work, for instance, and even a photo of the real me within the end credits.
Have you heard from Anna or Kacy, played by Laverne Cox onInventing Anna, since the trial?
No. I mean, it speaks to my objections about the way truth is [dealt with on the series], but there’s this constructed world within the show—which I guess is the necessity of television—where it creates this illusion that I was close friends with Neff (Alexis Floyd) and Kacy. I like them. I’m not going to speak negatively about them. But they were not my close friends.
In one of the final episodes, Kacy criticizes your character for participating in the sting operation that led to Anna’s arrest, and seems to point a finger at you for being a bad friend, despite everything Anna did to lead you to that point. Do you want to respond to that?
I don’t want to litigate every [plot point]. But are we forgetting the fact that this person is a convicted felon and chronic hustler? How come every other character [in Anna’s circle] is completely enamored with Anna, and yet my character’s liking of Anna is the only one that people think must have been for reasons that are objectionable? Could it not have been that I, too, thought she was interesting and smart and funny?
What bothers you most about the series?
The show’s trying to straddle the divide between fact and fiction. I think that’s a particularly dangerous space, more than the true-crime medium, because people sometimes believe what they see in entertainment more readily than what they see on the news. It’s the emotional connections to a narrative that form our beliefs. Also hunger for this type of entertainment urges media companies to create more of it, incentivizing people like Anna and making [crime] seem like a viable career path. [Editor’s note: Inan interviewwith the BBC last year, Sorokin was asked if crime paid. She responded, “In a way, it did.”]
In the show, the character based on Jessica Pressler defends Anna as a product of our culture, and that’s seemingly how she rationalizes her sympathy for her. Do you have anything to say about that?
I think it’s the same with Netflix. It’s the same with Shonda. It’s a really convenient narrative people are projecting. But when you do that, you have to recognize you’re not looking for truth. You’re looking for your own version of the truth, and that’s not necessarily related to the reality of the people and the events [involved]. This is Shonda Rhimes’s first foray into a nonfiction story…And I think that they came into it thinking they were going to make a statement about what it’s like being a young woman in a man’s world, or the materialism of the fashion and art world. Obviously, there are a lot of things about those subjects that we all would agree with.
I just think that there is a risk when you try to project a fictional narrative onto a real [crime story]. You may have shaped [a show] in a way that’s convenient for your story, but it’s a disservice to the people whose stories you’re telling.
I’m curious what will happen to Anna because of the show and the attention on her. For some people, attention is a more powerful commodity than money.
I agree. Attention is a form of currency, and if history is any indication, it’s what Anna will continue to seek. It’s what she needs in order to convince people to keep buying into her stories.
Joan Didion was right—we tell ourselves stories in order to live. For a fake heiress like Anna, the statement rings especially true.
Julie Miller is a senior feature writer at Vanity Fair
One of our favorite actresses, Julie Gardner, plays Anna Sorokin, aka Anna Delvey, in Inventing Anna, a woman who tricked Manhattan’s high society. Listen to how she perfected her accents.
Still scoring major editorial hits after all these years. Client Dr. Arthur Bregman, former Chief of Psychiatry of Nicklaus Children’s Hospital for several decades, and now head of the private psychiatric practice of the Bregman Medical Group in Coral Gables, Florida, talks to CBS TV about how family and friends have to get more involved in trying to prevent the growing number of suicides that we are reading about every day.
Depression and Suicide: A Hidden Pandemic?
Food celebrity Anthony Bourdain. Linkin Park singer Chester Bennington. Indian actress Pratyusha Banerjee. Korean comedian Park Ji-Sun.
Yes, all of these are the names of celebrities lauded for their talent and high-quality output. They were also human beings who suffered from depression and ultimately took their own life.
It can seem like another pandemic, losing high visibility personalities to their inner struggles. Most recently we experienced the loss of former Miss USA Cheslie Kryst. What is happening here? It can’t just be due to the Covid-19 pandemic – some of these names were lost before coronavirus was even a short article in the back of a newspaper. In fact, this problem has been hiding in plain sight for quite some time now.
People often erroneously attribute these suicides to the “tortured artist” or “troubled celebrity” trope. But that does the disservice of isolating them from the tens of thousands of suicides reported each year in the United States alone. Research shows that approximately 2% of people treated for depression will eventually die by suicide. When we realize 16 million Americans suffer from depression each year, that 2% looks pretty big.
Two out of three people who die by suicide suffer from depression. The correlation is there, and we actually understand why to a certain extent: depression takes hold of our brain’s chemistry, causing life to become gray and melancholy. Things that used to please us become stale, and negativity pervades the life of a depression sufferer.
If the depression and hopelessness are severe enough they may lead a person to suicidal tendencies or an outright attempt. In the celebrity instances, it essentially acts as an amplified tragedy playing out in the public eye. It’s sad but perhaps we can learn from it.
This is because depression is treatable, and addressed early enough the worst outcomes can be avoided in many cases.
First, be on the lookout for warning signs. These may include talking about self-harm, troubling personality change, substance abuse, and reckless or dangerous behaviors.
Second, and quite importantly, comes treatment. There are two sides of depression treatment: self-care, and professional treatment. First we’ll talk about some self-care approaches.
Reach out, be social – Talk to friends, family, and trusted loved ones about the problems you’ve been having and spend time together. Take a walk together, go out for a tasty meal, share some laughs. By getting a different perspective and enjoying the people in our lives, we can feel less alone and find new ways to deal with negative emotions.
Getting off social media – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter – all of these can be a lot of fun but they can also reinforce negative views and reactions. Take a break from social media and do some productive activities that you enjoy. This can give your brain a break from the constant bad news and social comparisons, and help you construct a healthy happy inner life.
Go outside – There’s something about heading outside to nature and doing some physical activity that gets the endorphins and feel-good chemicals running through your body. Sometimes a bit of sunshine and fresh air does more than refresh us physically, it can help clear our minds as well.
Take care of yourself – Eat a nutritious diet, keep up with exercise as mentioned previously, and also get good sleep. When your body is healthy, the mind follows. Being in a good physical state helps our energy levels and productivity stay elevated, and keeps us busy doing what we find meaningful as opposed to being stuck in the quagmire of depression.
Sometimes self-care is not enough. In these cases, a trained mental health professional can help you find your way back to happiness. When reaching out to a psychiatrist or psychologist one may expect a good deal of talk therapy, usually using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy where thought patterns are analyzed and then new ways of relating to negativity are explored. In the case of psychiatrists, medication management may be an additional aspect of treatment.
If you suffer from depression and are thinking of suicide, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline:
Don’t be afraid to reach out. Bregman Medical Group has decades of experience treating depression and various other disorders. We offer online therapy to your device! Simply schedule an appointment at www.bregmanmd.com or call 786-321-4909.
The last time Miami was relevant, it wasn’t important. In the 1980s, Miami provided nothing more than drugs, clubs, pastel blazers, jai alai gambling and, most notably, a hit TV show about all four.
But now Miami is the most important city in America. Not because Miami stopped being a frivolous, regulation-free, climate-doomed tax haven dominated by hot microcelebrities. It became the most important city in America because the country became a frivolous, regulation-free, climate-doomed tax haven dominated by hot microcelebrities.
Every few months, Miami throws the Overton window open wider on to its ocean view. Last March, the city was mocked when the American Airlines Arena, home of the NBA’s Miami Heat, was renamed the FTX Arena after a two-year-old cryptocurrency exchange platform. But by December, the Los Angeles Lakers’ Staples Center had been renamed the Crypto.com Arena. When Miami responded to its massive climate change issues by appointing a “chief heat officer,” it seemed like a dystopic joke. Then Phoenix, Los Angeles and Athens, Greece, hired chief heat officers too.
It may have seemed ridiculous when Miami minted its own cryptocurrency, MiamiCoin, but then New York City and Austin announced their own. After Miami mayor Francis Suarez declared he was taking his salary in bitcoin, incoming New York mayor Eric Adams tweeted, “I’m going to take my first THREE paychecks in Bitcoin.”
The Miami Movement — which is what Suarez wants me to call it, afraid I’ll diminish it to “Miami Moment” — had been building for a while, but it took off when Covid hit. People were working from home, and home was cold. And cramped. And the restaurants were all closed. Miami seemed like a good place to visit. And extend your visit. And never leave.
South Beach, where New York’s Major Food Group has opened a Carbone restaurant
In the past, if you shook the map of the US all the loose bits settled into the Floridian peninsula: the divorced, the bankrupt, the unemployed, the con artists, the ex-convicts and the future convicts. But during Covid, everyone became a loose bit, disconnected from their offices, family, friends, communities. In the 12 months from July 1 2020, far more Americans moved to Florida than any other state — 220,890 of them.
A migration of people can change a place, like California after the Dust Bowl or the Midwest after the Great African American Migration. But what’s happening in Miami is more than a migration of people. It’s also a migration of money. Billionaire Carl Icahn moved his hedge fund office from New York. In 2020, the Jills Zeder Group sold more than $1.2bn in homes, more than any other large residential real-estate team in the country. In 2021, the Jills closed more than $2bn.
“People are coming to have careers, which is unheard of,” says author Dave Barry, who moved here in 1983. “This feels like the first time people are coming here not for purely corrupt and self-serving reasons, but to build something.” Barry and I are eating the best croquetas I’ve ever had at Glass and Vine, a restaurant nestled in Peacock Park in Coconut Grove, a tony, boutique-filled neighbourhood.
The last time Barry ate here, he saw a new group among the normal tables of tourists, bankers and lawyers. “I don’t know if all the tech bros are aware of what they’re going to do when the first big hurricane hits and they have to get in line at Home Depot and buy plywood and then figure out what to do with that plywood,” he says.
I’ve come to Miami to see the future of America. The American id has moved over the past 100 years from New York to Los Angeles to Las Vegas and settled here, and I wanted to see what that id wants now. Especially because this is a country that doesn’t have much of an ego or superego left. How much weirder, I wanted to know, are things going to get? Is this a party sinking into the ocean or a decentralised wonderland of freedom?
On a Thursday morning in December, I take a ferry to Fisher Island to meet real estate agent Jill Eber, one of the two Jills of the Jills Zeder Group. She picks me up in her turquoise golf cart, the preferred method of transportation on this 216-acre island of golf courses, restaurants, apartment buildings, a gym and a school, a community indistinguishable from an all-inclusive resort. According to Bloomberg, it was the wealthiest zip code in America last year, with an average income of $2.2mn.
[What are] all the tech bros . . . going to do when the first big hurricane hits and they have to get in line at Home Depot and buy plywood and then figure out what to do with that plywood?
Eber is a tiny woman, who looks more like a Miami real estate agent than I thought possible, wearing an Alexander McQueen top, Tom Ford sunglasses, a huge-brimmed hat and impossibly high heels. A longtime resident of the island, she schmoozes the polo-shirted and sundressed at the private club restaurant as she power-walks me through apartments selling for $5mn or $7mn or $12mn. In the past, these would be winter homes, many owned by Latin Americans or Russians. “There’s more buyers than we’ve ever seen from California,” she says later, as we drive by the site of a new condo going up by the ferry terminal. “We’re seeing a lot more from tech. They’re calling it the Wall Street of the south.”
I head back to the mainland to meet the other Jill for our long-scheduled appointment at a house for sale on the Venetian Islands, a group of six tiny, man-made islands off the long causeway that connects Miami and Miami Beach. There are painters and construction workers finishing up a renovation of this 5,180-square-foot house on a suburban-looking block facing the Biscayne Bay.
To compensate for the rising tides due to climate change, the house was lifted 16.5 feet above sea level, the space underneath turned into an outdoor living room, kitchen and dining room abutting the water. The roof has been affixed with hurricane straps to keep it on. In the city of freedom, you can watch tidal flooding through floor-to-ceiling windows in a Mia Cucina-designed kitchen with Statuario marble countertops.
A 2018 report from the Union of Concerned Scientists estimated that 94 per cent of Miami Beach would be underwater by 2100. Already, because Miami sits on porous limestone, the ocean regularly seeps up on to the streets. While sea-level outdoor kitchens might be effective, less bespoke solutions are being suggested at the Miami Climate Alliance’s annual meeting at Naomi’s Garden Restaurant and Lounge, a Haitian restaurant where chickens run around the tables outside. Members wear name tags that indicate how many feet above sea level they live. The meeting opens with a call to “open our hearts to the moment”, some poetry and a moment of silence to honour the indigenous people who once lived here.
It was incredibly refreshing to live in an area where the goal is to emulate people who are successful. It felt like moving to Mars
Jane Gilbert sits on a folded chair in sandals and linen pants. She has flowing ash hair. Miami-Dade’s chief heat officer since June, she’s hopeful about the city’s other adjustments: the pumps being put on streets, the backflow valves, the movement toward density and away from septic tanks. She believes these changes can handle the “rain bombs”, as Miamians call the intense downpours that have become more common in recent years. The impact-resistant glass that’s been required since 1992’s Hurricane Andrew largely protects buildings from extreme winds. The city is so focused on finding ways to adapt to climate change that the Aspen Ideas Festival chose to hold its new conference, Aspen Ideas: Climate, in Miami Beach in May.
Gilbert is confident that, if the city spends enough, it can survive a two-and-a-half-foot sea rise. Miami, she says, has prepared more than New Orleans, Charleston or Norfolk. When I ask her if Miami will still be around in 30 years, she tells me the answer always depends on her mood. Today, she’s feeling optimistic. She puts the odds at 50/50.
Asking someone to make a $25mn investment in something that has a 50 per cent chance of disappearing in 30 years sounds like a tough sell. Apparently, it isn’t. Jill Hertzberg, wearing a Carolina Herrera dress, comes downstairs from the almost-renovated Venetian Islands house and tells me it has just sold for $25mn. To a guy from California. “It was his friend who came. The buyer saw it on FaceTime. He never physically saw it,” she says.
Jack Abraham is patient zero of the Miami Migration. In June of 2020, the then-34-year-old Silicon Valley venture capitalist and entrepreneur was holed up in San Francisco. His New York buddies invited him for a weeklong vacation in Miami, where the weather was good and restaurants were open. He turned them down, afraid of getting Covid. They kept hounding him and, bored and lonely, he gave in. Within days of arriving in Miami, he caught the virus.
His buddies felt guilty and stayed with him while he failed Covid test after Covid test. Unable to fly back until he tested negative, he hopped between whatever Airbnb rental houses he could book, seeing more sections of the city than he’d known existed. When he was finally about to return home after a month and a half, Abraham decided not to.
“If you had asked me in the beginning of 2020, ‘What’s the probability of you moving to Florida?’, I would’ve given you a zero,” says Abraham, sporting Don Johnson scruff in his office in Wynwood, the arts section of Miami where walls are spray-painted in ever-changing street art, making it one the most Instagrammable spots in the country. The area took off after Switzerland’s Art Basel started an outpost in Miami Beach in 2002. This year’s event was widely called Tech Basel, because it had morphed into a series of tech panels in the same way that Austin’s South by Southwest’s music festival has.
Nearly 20 of Abraham’s powerful friends have visited his house in the Venetian Islands. “If you think of Miami like a product, the conversion rate is extremely high,” he says, guessing up to 70 per cent of his guests extended their stay and then moved. And each of them brought friends. And they brought friends. Abraham didn’t move here because of money or safety. He doesn’t cite the lack of a state income tax compared with California’s top rate of 13.3 per cent. He says it wasn’t the low crime rate or the lack of homelessness. It was the optimism.
“Most of America aspires for their children to be in technology. Silicon Valley is the only place where people are critical of technology,” says venture capitalist Keith Rabois, a friend and business partner of Abraham in the start-up OpenStore. “It was incredibly refreshing to live in an area where the goal is to emulate people who are successful. It felt like moving to Mars.”
I’ve known Rabois since I was 14. He was two years older and ran the Model UN at our New Jersey public high school. I was friends with his sister and we were the only two students in our class to follow him to Stanford. He’s always been kind to me, socially awkward and eager to piss people off. He made an enormous amount of money as part of the PayPal mafia and — partly because he’s a conservative and partly because he likes controversy — became a target for anti-Big Tech sentiment.
Rabois has been searching his whole life for a place where his Nietzschean version of freedom would be embraced. He was an outsider in college, where he was an editor at the conservative Stanford Review. He was run out of Stanford Law School in 1992 for yelling “Hope you die of Aids” outside a lecturer’s home, transferring to Harvard Law School. An adviser to Dan Quayle’s presidential campaign, he didn’t fit in socially with many of his Silicon Valley colleagues. Miami, he now believes, is Silicon Valley in 1999.
Sitting in San Francisco at the beginning of Covid, Rabois and his husband did a “reference call” about Miami with Abraham, who talked them into moving. Rabois, a partner at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, moved to a $29mn house on the Venetian Islands, right near the two adjacent houses Thiel bought for $18mn.
The Founders Fund had zero per cent of its investments in Miami-based start-ups until its 2020 fund, which included about nine per cent. If they raise another fund, Rabois says he’d be disappointed if 15 per cent isn’t invested in Miami. That’s because, he says, the global economy is becoming more Miami-ish.
Rabois co-invests with the Palm Tree Crew, which is run by Kygo, the Norwegian DJ, and his Miami-based manager. “I co-invest with TikTok influencers all the time. I’m in the business of finding what’s going to be popular in five or 10 years and they’re pretty good at that,” Rabois says. “The GDP of the United States is going to be driven by design and culture. If half of American children want to be TikTokers, culture is going to be influenced by that. South Korea has been exporting their culture. This is the American version of South Korea.”
Wearing shorts to the local Panther Coffee, Rabois says he makes friends stay for at least a week, preferably a month, when they visit, so they can see what the city is like when they’re not on a short vacation. Nine of his 12 closest friends have moved here. Recently, a Coinbase employee walked up to him at the Barry’s fitness class he teaches once a month and told him he moved to Miami because of his tweets. And there are a lot of tweets. Rabois’s 288,000 Twitter followers are subject to more daily stats about the greatness of Miami than followers of the Miami Chamber of Commerce. In late 2021, Barry’s, of course, moved its headquarters from LA to Miami.
A Republican, Rabois says the city is more in line with America’s lunge towards increased individual freedom than other US cities. “You have to look to find a mask here. I only have two face masks in the house, in case I need to mask for an Uber,” he says. Other than three border towns in Texas, Miami was the city with the biggest swing towards Trump in his second presidential run over his first, giving him 11.2 per cent more of its vote.
Even liberals horrified by Trumpian Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s anti-mask laws were lured to Miami. “My partner and I were screwed by Covid,” says Eric Demby, the co-creator of Smorgasburg, the food halls for hipsters. His four New York City outdoor venues were shut down for a year. Their Los Angeles location was also closed. Some of his vendors moved their businesses to Miami. One would Zoom him from a busy café or an event with corporate sponsors.
“I didn’t want to be stupid,” Demby says about his fear of Covid. “But at the same time, as a businessperson, your ethics were at a level of desperation. It made me think of Midnight Cowboy. The dream of Ratso and Jon Voight’s character was to make it to Florida. We’re sitting in squalor in New York and dreaming of oranges and sunshine.” He’s opening a Smorgasburg in Wynwood this spring.
In his huge, swanky offices in Coconut Grove, Alex Rodriguez runs A-Rod Corp, an investment firm split between real estate and private equity (which includes co-ownership of the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves). Everyone here is dressed sleek and cool, and the former New York Yankee All-Star sits in an enormous office flanked by dictator-sized photos of his two daughters. While he’s investing in the company that Rabois and Abraham have started together, he wishes he had invested earlier in real estate in his home city.
“This place has exploded. If you’re starting now, you have to be real disciplined,” he says. Friends call him all the time to get his advice on moving here. “They usually want three things: a school for their kids, a country club for the weekends and a synagogue. And I usually say, ‘I’m good for two of the three.’” Not long ago, he hosted a dinner party with Rabois and Abraham for their out-of-town friends as a recruiting ploy. These new Miamians, used to networking and donating, are contributing to the arts and philanthropy of the city already. And while many are coming from California, most are New Yorkers.
In his 1976 song “Miami 2017”, Billy Joel imagined that New York City, ravaged by crime and a fiscal crisis, would be destroyed in 41 years:
I’ve seen the lights go out on Broadway
I saw the ruins at my feet
You know we almost didn’t notice it
We’d seen it all the time on Forty-second Street
You know those lights were bright on Broadway
That was so many years ago
Before we all lived here in Florida
Before the Mafia took over Mexico
He was only three years off.
In a huge growth year for restaurants (Miami is getting its first Michelin Guide this year; bartender Julio Cabrera’s Café La Trova was ranked 28 on the World’s 50 Best Bars list), the most successful Miami restaurateur was New York’s Major Food Group. Its Carbone restaurants in New York and Las Vegas were successful, but the Miami post is the hardest to get into. LeBron James celebrated the opening in January 2021 on Instagram.
Major Food Group partner Jeff Zalaznick was with his family during spring break of 2020, when Covid hit. They extended their vacation. “In May, I decided that I was going to stay down here for a year and we were going to take over Miami. I announced that I had a job for anybody who wanted to move down here on our staff,” he says. Though he wasn’t paying for relocation, more than 100 of his staff of about 1,000 moved to Miami. “Every single one of those people is so happy here, up to the busboy who thanks me every day.”
Zalaznick, who had lived in New York City his entire life, never went back. He bought retired baseball player Mike Piazza’s house for $15mn. He was represented by the Jills Zeder Group. So was Piazza.
Carbone took over a South Beach space that was already a high-end Italian restaurant. “We turned it from a restaurant doing $7mn a year to a restaurant doing more than three times that without changing its size or shape,” he says. The waiters wear Zac Posen tuxedos, the veal parmesan is $69, the speakers blast Frank Sinatra, and many of the diners weren’t alive when Ol’ Blue Eyes was.
Major Food opened six restaurants in the Miami area in 2021, one of which is a members-only club with a lounge that sold out in four months. They’re also partnering with New York developer Michael Stern to build a condo that will be the tallest building in the city. “The pro-business environment was palpable,” says Zalaznick. “The mayor literally called me and said how can I help? As a New Yorker, you never imagine something like that.”
That’s actually the mayor’s thing, calling people and spouting his catchphrase, “How can I help?” He latched on to it on December 4, 2020, when Delian Asparouhov, who works at the Founders Fund with Thiel and Rabois, tweeted, “Ok guys hear me out, what if we move Silicon Valley to Miami?” Minutes later, Mayor Suarez responded, “How can I help?”
The tweet, which has more than 4,000 likes, was everything the mayor was hoping for. “For 10 years it was like being in the womb for nine months. And the ‘How can I help moment’ was like being born,” he tells me. He’s sold $70,000 worth of “How can I help?” T-shirts with a retro-Miami Vice look, designed by a Twitter follower. He took out a billboard in San Francisco that was a screenshot of another of his tweets: “Thinking of moving to Miami? DM me.”
The fit, tanned, 44-year-old son of a former Miami mayor, Suarez is a mass of bro energy. I spend a long day in his City Hall office, even though he does not. The mayorship is a part-time job so he spends some of his day as a trial lawyer at the LA-based firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan. Still, he manages to fist bump me an awful lot. “How my looking?” he asks me, adjusting his tie. Before I can answer, he does it for me. “Too blessed to be stressed,” he says, leaving the staff office, which is littered with uneaten local desserts sent as gifts. He pops back in a bit later, points to the TV showing Fox Business and observes that the channel now scrolls the price of bitcoin and ethereum in the corner of the screen along with other commodities. This requires more fist bumping.
A former employee, who likes him, described his energy as the same as being around a person with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Nearly everyone I meet in Miami shows me a tweet, Discord conversation, text or WhatsApp message that the mayor sent to them late at night. Each one exudes a positivity and confidence that would motivate Tony Robbins.
Suarez was the first major American politician to get Covid, which he caught from one of Jair Bolsonaro’s aides during a visit the Brazilian president made to Miami. He started posting about his illness on Instagram. “I saw that the analytics on the diary entries were through the roof. And I realised, we live in a content-based world,” Suarez says from his office, filled with professional lighting and cameras pointed at his huge desk that sits in front of enormous windows overlooking the ocean.
The new president of the United States Conference of Mayors, Suarez, who was re-elected mayor of Miami last year with 79 per cent of the vote, is a Republican. But he’s a Republican who is anti-Trump and disliked by Governor DeSantis, a man who lacks any of Suarez’s smoothness. The whiteboard in the mayor’s offices lists priorities including “upfund the police” and “anti-woke/freedom”.
The freedom Suarez is promoting is shiny and happy, but it’s radical. In June, he lured the bitcoin 2021 conference from its planned gathering in LA. One of the conference organisers introduced him to an indoor crowd as “the most irresponsible politician in America, the mayor of the mecca of freedom.”
Part of freedom is paying other Miamians with money so free it is beholden to no government. One of the few policy books anywhere in the entire office is Vijay Boyapati’s The Bullish Case for Bitcoin. The MiamiCoin Suarez had minted through a company called CityCoins has netted his office $25mn, which he intends to distribute to Miamians the way Alaska does oil revenue. It feels like balancing a city on top of a bubble. But then I look at that TV in the office and see the commercial that’s on nearly every NFL game, in which Matt Damon shills for Crypto.com. Maybe the brew of success always percolates as bubbles.
Compared with other cities, Miami’s mayorship doesn’t come with much power. The mayor of Miami-Dade has more control of the area, and Miami Beach has its own mayor. The mayor doesn’t get a vote on the city council, and Suarez’s 2018 ballot initiative to secure more mayoral power failed. When I arrived at City Hall, I feared I had the wrong address. It’s a small, two-storey building on the marina, away from downtown, and the mayor’s staff of 15 use only the second floor.
We’re a young city. We’re a teenager with a moustache. What the mature version of Miami is, is on the table
But Suarez has got himself named number 20 on Fortune’s World’s 50 Greatest Leaders list by using the office to create his own power. He’s devoted half of his limited office space to a project he calls “Venture Miami” that he’s secured $9mn in private financing for, allowing him to hire a “VC in residence”. In the half of the mayor’s office devoted to Venture Miami, he hosts a weekly YouTube talk show, Cafecito Talk, in which he serves guests one of the excellent café Cubanos the staff makes with the office espresso machine. Usually guests are tech entrepreneurs, but he’s not the kind of guy who is going to turn down David Beckham, Magic Johnson, Marc Anthony or conservative pundit Ben Shapiro.
Earlier, the Cafecito Talk room was used for a rap session for six start-up founders, who ran questions by two venture capitalists. At 8am, they sat in a circle, sipping those sweet café Cubanos, sharing woes about real estate prices and public transport. They were reassured that their employees would soon be zipped to work through a tunnel Elon Musk is building, where five-seater Teslas will fling people into the city. There’s also a programme for flying cars. Everyone nods their heads at this solution. Of course, yes, flying cars.
Cary Gahm and his business partner, who started a temp service for dental hygienists, worry that the local coding talent is weak and immigration rules prevent them from hiring the Eastern Europeans they want. Another founder tells them about a local guy who can buy them visas for $14,000 a pop. “We love Miami. Everyone is like, ‘We got a guy!’ Gahm says. Then, half-joking, he adds to the guy who knows the visa whisperer, “We should get a boat together.”
The start-up founders tell me I must go to the Miami Tech Happy Hour, an every-other-week event that is happening that night at a restaurant called Freehold. When I arrive, I make my way to the outdoor bar where I find co-founder Chris Adamo, who serves as the Mr Roarke of the Miami tech world. He’s wearing a Jams World Hawaiian shirt, his daily uniform for five years, even to weddings, setting the tone for the anti-New York utopia he’s helping to build. Nearly 100 people have turned up.
Adamo, who has lived in Miami since 2012, says the tech world has changed since he first got here. “Some of it was weird and interesting, and some of it was weird and illegal. And now we’ve hit the sweet spot,” he explains. The meetup’s co-founder, Natalia Martinez-Kalinina, who also runs a book club and throws kitesurfing outings for newcomers, says these nights show her what the future of Miami might be. “How do we become more of what people come here for? We’re a young city. We’re a teenager with a moustache. What the mature version of Miami is, is on the table,” she says.
Demian Bellumio, the co-founder of a telehealth company, walks up to Adamo and shows me the Telegram channel he started to organise biking, yoga and kayaking trips for about 1,000 local entrepreneurs. As he’s showing me a chat chain, I see that Mayor Suarez has chirped in.
Being a tech publicist isn’t precisely the job of the mayor of Miami, but Suarez’s work has impressed Barry, the author. “It’s a big change from what the mayor used to do, which was engage in feuds. He doesn’t seem to be too feudy,” he says. Suarez’s two-term mayor father, nicknamed Mayor Loco, threatened Barry’s friend, writer Carl Hiaasen, with a libel suit and responded to one citizen’s critical letter by showing up at the retired 68-year-old’s house at 10.30pm to deliver his retort.
For a city split between Cuban Americans petrified of socialism and college-educated liberals petrified of autocracy, partisan fury here is weak. Democrats and Republicans socialise and work together. Anti-immigrant anger burnt itself out in the 1980s. In 2019, the Republicans controlling the Florida legislature admitted that they’d lost a decade by ignoring climate change and directed more than $200mn to fund solutions.
“When you have to send out a notice about a King Tide, you’re pretty much past debating whether climate change is a real thing or not. When you see sunny day flooding with your own eyes, you don’t debate whether or not there’s a sea level rise,” says Miami Beach mayor Dan Gelber from his office, which is in a much more impressive looking building than Suarez’s. And while he’s a Democrat, the number of people who wear a mask in this office are the same as Suarez’s: zero. Both mayors, and Democratic Miami-Dade mayor Daniella Levine Cava, work closely with each other, as which has jurisdiction over what is unclear to most outside businesses and governments, as well as Miami residents.
All three mayors believe that the groundwork Miami was building all these years — the improvement in local colleges, the law firms, the banks — allowed this moment to happen. Which they all insist is a movement. “I spent 10 years as a federal prosecutor, and we definitely attracted the ne’er do wells and the thinly capitalised or, worse, the entities that came here to exploit,” says Gelber. But now “there’s real capital moving here. NFTs, crypto and all that is a pretty new industry, but I don’t think it’s a fake industry,” he says.
“Crypto is the new cocaine,” counters Billy Corben, the film-maker and liberal activist who directed the 2006 documentary Cocaine Cowboys about the 1970s and ’80s drug trade in Miami. “The MiamiCoin is generating revenue through mining, and the city gets a portion of each sale because the mayor got involved in this pump and dump. Somehow, we found a way to make cryptocurrency more shady.”
He refers to the tech immigrants as arroz con manbros. (In Cuba, arroz con mango is slang for “clusterfuck”.) “Don’t come here and tell me how competent and excellent the government is and how easy it is to commute and how great the customer service is,” he says. “Three of the deadliest structural collapses in the last 10 years occurred in one county. That’s not even including the other structural failures that were not deadly. One county, dude. This is a third-world government and a fourth-world infrastructure, at the risk of insulting the fourth world.” Last June, the Champlain Towers South, a luxury beachside apartment just north of Miami Beach, collapsed, killing 98 people.
He notes that the school board banned an elementary school book about culture for not being harsh enough about Cuba’s government. “It’s not freedom, here. It’s economic freedom.” Corben believes Miami’s importance will fade with the virus. “A disposable city suddenly feels essential. It’s a mistress. People lived in places that mattered, and they came into contact with the fragile nature of life and needed a moment. If Miami were to disappear off the map tomorrow it would be of no consequence. No industry would disappear. It’s not a movement,” he says. “A Miami Movement is what happens after I eat at Sergio’s.”
Don’t come here and tell me how competent and excellent the government is . . . Three of the deadliest structural collapses in the last 10 years occurred in one county
I meet Debbie Mucarsel-Powell for breakfast at Nordstrom’s Ebar at The Shops in Merrick Park, an outdoor mall in Coral Gables, an affluent section with classic Spanish architecture and an awful lot of fountains. A Democrat, Mucarsel-Powell, who represented the southern part of the city in Congress from 2018 to 2020 before losing to a Republican, now works for Gabby Giffords’ gun control organisation. She also believes the Miami Movement is hype. “We have really serious issues that make it hard to attract large businesses,” she says, citing that the state is next-to-last in the US in income equality and 47th in healthcare access and affordability.
Maybe everything I saw is a swampland swindle. The Jills, back in 2015, were caught having their listings in the MLS real estate database hidden by the addition of spaces between the letters and numbers in addresses so their competition couldn’t find them. They kept their licences after the guy who reported them got caught on tape trying to extort them for $800,000. Art Acevedo, the Houston Police Commissioner that Suarez lured to Miami in March, saying it was “like getting the Tom Brady or the Michael Jordan of police chief”, was fired in October. Acevedo says he was dismissed for investigating corruption in the city council and is suing in federal court.
After a week in Miami, I board my flight back to Los Angeles, exhausted by freedom, worried I caught Covid and ready to nap. But the young woman in a sequinned Bratz-branded tracksuit in the seat next to mine wants to tell me about her trip.
Natalia Rose, 19, had come on another weeklong trip to Miami to work at a Bellas Cabaret because the money was so much better than she could make stripping in LA. She had avoided Miami at the beginning of the pandemic, even though friends were making good money there, because clubs had no seating capacities and did not enforce mask mandates. Then she says she caught coronavirus in LA while working at the ice cream store Cold Stone Creamery.
For the past three months, she’s been considering moving to Miami. “LA’s economy is just ass right now, not to sound like an oldhead,” she says. She figures she can pursue her music career from anywhere now that everything is produced online. An ex-boyfriend (“No, he’s my ex-situationship”) and a dancer friend have already made the move. “I would move to Miami for more exposure to the crypto scene,” Rose continues. “Not forex, because I know it’s bullshit. I see a lot on Discord.”
I get home and go to sleep early. I am an oldhead unable to process the new world that Miami is the capital of. Like many of the changes in America over the past five years, I’m not sure I want to be part of it. Or have the energy to do so. But if it turns out I do have to join the new Miami Movement, I’m going to need some of its old cocaine.
1-The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.
2-In life, all good things come hard, but wisdom is the hardest to come by.
3-One of the things I learned the hard way was that it doesn’t pay to get discouraged. Keeping busy and making optimism a way of life can restore your faith in yourself.
4-I think knowing what you cannot do is more important than knowing what you can.
5- Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.
6-I don’t know how to tell a joke. I never tell jokes. I can tell stories that happened to me… anecdotes. But never a joke.
7-It’s a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy.
8-I cured myself of shyness when it finally occurred to me that people didn’t think about me half as much as I gave them credit for. The truth was, nobody gave a damn… When I stopped being prisoner to what I worried was others’ opinions of me, I became more confident and free.
9-A man who correctly guesses a woman’s age may be smart, but he’s not very bright.
10-Luck? I don’t know anything about luck. I’ve never banked on it and I’m afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else: hard work — and realizing what is an opportunity and what isn’t.
11-I’d rather regret the things I have done than the things that I haven’t.
12-Use a makeup table with everything close at hand and don’t rush; otherwise you’ll look like a patchwork quilt.
13-Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead.
14-Things said in embarrassment and anger are seldom the truth.
15-You won’t be happy, whatever you do, unless you’re comfortable with your own conscience.
16-Children internalize their parents’ unhappiness. Fortunately, they absorb our contentment just as readily.
DigiDame 