#21 - David Friedberg

Balaji Srinivasan (0:00)

All right, well, David, welcome to the Network State Podcast. I think now we're at two or four, maybe three or four, because I was actually on All-In a while back.

David Friedberg (0:08)

That's right.

Balaji Srinivasan (0:08)

And Sax and I have been friends for a while, and Sax sometimes quotes me, and I sometimes quote Sax. But is your first visit out to Singapore?

David Friedberg (0:15)

No. It was my first visit to Singapore.

Balaji Srinivasan (0:17)

What are your reactions?

David Friedberg (0:18)

What do you think? I mean, someone told me a statistic that 4,000 family offices have been opened in the last 10 years or so in Singapore.

Balaji Srinivasan (0:28)

Underestimate, probably. Yes.

David Friedberg (0:30)

Incredible. And so I've met with a number of folks from that community. And then obviously, there's a lot of business in the region that operates from here. Capital in the region that moved through here. Beautiful city, wonderful people, amazing place.

Balaji Srinivasan (0:45)

And it's very well run. It's near everything. And if you saw my tweet on this, maybe you have some thoughts on this. So London has already given up the crown to Dubai. And I think Tokyo and Hong Kong, the capital of capital in APAC, is now Singapore. And now maybe NYC is succeeded by Miami. There's like a little Miami boomlet, like a few years ago. And now it's like, that was like the GPT-1. Yeah.

David Friedberg (1:08)

Aspirational Miami is Palm Beach. I think everyone would aspire for Palm Beach. They might settle for Miami.

Balaji Srinivasan (1:14)

Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, you know the specific geography of it.

David Friedberg (1:16)

I think Palm Beach is a lot like Connecticut. It's like where the hedge funds actually set up versus New York.

Balaji Srinivasan (1:23)

There's another reason for me, which is that Latin America with now Malay is showing more energy than we thought. Rather, Malay showed staying power. You say you won in Argentina, right? So with Malay and Buckeli, you have essentially, potentially a Latin American capitalist renaissance. And a non-obvious thing that I didn't know, you know Antonio Garcia Martinez, right? So he made a post years ago that Miami is actually the land America or the Singapore of Latin America. Because if you're doing a deal between like a Mexican guy and someone from Paraguay or something like that, they will tend to do that deal in Miami because there's people there who speak Spanish, it was like a neutral third party location. And because Miami is full of Cuban immigrants, it can't go too far communist.

David Friedberg (2:10)

Right.

Balaji Srinivasan (2:10)

But because full of Cuban immigrants, it also can't go too overboard on the other side as well, right? So there's an interesting sort of centrist, muscular centrist, good esthetics kind of thing about Miami, where if one was in the US, I think that's one of the two or three best places to be. The other place might be Starbase, Texas. I don't know what are your thoughts.

David Friedberg (2:27)

I think Miami maybe has a little less of the aspirational element that you might find in other college communities. It's got a lifestyle element that probably dominates the aspirational element, has been my experience. So people are just so happy to be there.

Balaji Srinivasan (2:41)

Yes.

David Friedberg (2:41)

And they're just so happy to live life. That's the vibe. It's a little bit of a European vibe, but positive European vibe. But yes, I understand. And Starbase obviously is the pioneering West, which I think is what's deeply lacking in the United States right now. It's more of those moments where, you and I talked about this earlier, but the vision of Westworld, you get to go live in the West. You get to go live that pioneering life where it is an open landscape, everything is a potential, and your actions control your outcomes. You have absolute agency, but also absolute accountability and responsibility. That fundamentally has probably been driven out of the United States to a large part at this point. There's a strong push to try and bring it back and to regrow it. And there's some great pockets of it, thanks to Elon and others that have forced it to happen. There's some decent governors that are trying to re-enable it. But for the large part, I think, you know, that moment of the Renaissance is over. So I do think there's a big question of where is it next? That's one of the big takeaways I take from visiting your network school here today is kind of re-imagining that west, that we've all, I think, had these dreams and fantasies about. Wouldn't it be amazing to go to those empty towns?