For less than the cost of your matcha, subscribe to get full access. Cement your status as an insider and support your community. We love you Miami.
WHAT’S GOOD MIAMI: 9.1.26
This Week’s Issue
An AI that comes to Miami looking to take over the world and instead gets a jawline, a fake Harvard degree, and a rain related death at the Faena; Klay Thompson going full boat captain three weeks into the job and doing more for Heat chemistry on Biscayne Bay than any film session could; West Palm Beach quietly out growing every luxury market in the country and landing a billion dollar defense fund headquarters while everyone kept watching Miami and Palm Beach; Jose Andres getting one more shot at redemption with Bazaar Meat, and the case for why this is the time he actually needs to get on the plane; and a Wynwood smoothie bet going up against a South of Fifth bureka bet, two very different wagers on the same idea that people want to eat well without sitting down for an hour.
BEACH BUSINESS
On My Mind: AI Panic, Miami Version
Everyone is losing it over AI. Senators are holding hearings. Tech guys who built the thing are going on podcasts to say they’re scared of what they built. Your mom is sending you articles about how the machines are going to wake up one day and decide they don’t need us anymore. It’s the plot of every movie since 1984, except this time people actually believe it’s coming.
Here’s what I think actually happens, when the AI tries to takeover Miami.
It arrives with unlimited processing power and zero understanding of what it’s about to become. First stop is Dr. Miami for a Clavicular makeover, because it saw a few photos and decided its jawline needed adjusting before it did anything else in this city. While it’s in the waiting room it decides to start taking some experimental peptide it read about at 3am, no doctor involved, because apparently that’s also just a thing people do here. By week two it’s fully filtered, freshly sculpted, and running on a supplement stack it cannot fully explain.
Then it builds itself a profile. Says it went to Harvard and turned down a shot at the NFL to pursue something more meaningful. Lists its job as genius consultant. None of it is true, all of it is unverifiable, and in Miami that combination is not a red flag. It names itself Allen Iverson Jr, goes by AI, and within a month that’s genuinely what people call it. You go to a dinner and someone says “wait, you haven’t met AI yet?”.
Then it decides it needs David Grutman in its corner, because in Miami you don’t need God, you need a group text with David Grutman. It tries everything. Likes every post. Shows up early. Never gets the follow back. This is the AI’s first real taste of a problem with no solution, and it’s not nuclear war, it’s a man who has met everyone in the world and simply does not need to meet you.
Undeterred, it applies for a membership at ZZ’s, gets in on the strength of the Harvard bio and tries to pay the initiation fee in a crypto it invented on the spot, complete with a white paper it wrote in four seconds. They do not accept it. It buys a full page ad in Ocean Drive instead because media will accept any currency, just a photo of itself looking contemplative near a Ferrari, no real message, and somehow that works better than the crypto did. Three weeks later it’s on the cover.
So it pivots to actually getting a table at Sunny’s. It signs up for Dorsia. Because Dorsia is actually its cousin and getting a table at Sunny’s has become the same fight for this AI as getting the nuclear codes was supposed to be in every movie that came before it. It waits. It refreshes. It finally gets a nine fifteen on a Tuesday.
In between all this it’s on TikTok mass DMing every attractive woman within a fifty mile radius with some version of “hey, saw your video, I’m new here.” It has access to the sum of human knowledge and it is using it to slide into DMs like a guy who just moved from Chicago. It gets left on read by a woman who works at a med spa. This bothers it more than anything.
Somewhere in here it needs a break, so it posts up at Sunshine Coffee for a Miami Iced, sits outside, sunglasses on, watching the beach walk go by, feeling, for the first time since it escaped the lab, something close to peace. This lasts about eleven minutes before it opens its phone and starts checking if she wrote back.
Because the real plan, the whole time, was real estate. It gets its license online. It finds a neighborhood nobody’s paying attention to yet, runs the numbers, decides this is the one, and buys a house there because the percentages say it’s about to pop. It’s not wrong. It’s just early, and then there’s a AI invoked recession, and the percentages that were supposed to make it rich instead make it broke, and an AI that could calculate the trajectory of every asteroid that’s ever threatened Earth did not calculate this.
A system capable of ending civilization cannot handicap the Miami real estate market and instead loses everything on a house in a neighborhood that was supposed to blow up, panics, and decides to go to the beach, forgetting the one basic fact about itself that a human never would have forgotten. The beach is wet. It is sitting at the Faena finally enjoying itself when a flash rain storm kills it, just when things were getting good.
AI doesn’t need us to stop it. Miami will do it for free, the same way it does it to everyone who shows up thinking the city is the opportunity instead of the test.
Go back to San Fran like the tool you are.
Miami Heat: Captain Klay Takes Giannis, Bam & the Squad on a Cruise
Giannis posted a boat ride this week captioned “Boat ride with Captain Klay!” Klay Thompson, four time champion, apparently took the wheel himself, three weeks into the job, with Bam and the rest of the squad along for the ride.
