this is bbc news. we will have the headlines and all the main news stories for you at the top of the hour as newsday continues straight after hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk, from san francisco. i'm stephen sackur. california was the launchpad for america's tech revolution. the giants of our digital age, the likes of gates, jobs, and musk, built their empires from right here in california.

their work has transformed our lives, but it hasn't always been for the better. well, my guest today is the san francisco tech billionaire, dave friedberg. he says science and technology can and will fix humanity's problems. should we believe him? dave friedberg, in san francisco, welcome to hardtalk. yeah, thanks for... thanks for coming by. it's a real pleasure to be here. you describe yourself as an "extreme optimist" when it comes to we humans, and our ability to overcome

the most fundamental challenges we face. what do you base that optimism on? well, i think history's a good predictor. so historically, humans have... ..found themselves facing existential threat, right, it started when we were roaming the savannah looking for food, and then, we realised we could engineer the earth and make food. and that was the dawn of agriculture. and every time humans have faced some sort of existential threat, and it has been many times in our history — and we always seem to think we are facing an existential threat, perhaps we're hard—wired evolutionarily to think that — our ingenuity always seems to prevail. some new invention or engineering, or discovery has enabled some revolution in abundance for humankind. and so, there are countless examples. well, i would counter that with the notion of the law of unintended consequences. yes, human history shows us so many different ways in which technologies have progressed human capacities. but if we think of the last great technological era

of revolution, that is the, sort of, the steam engine, the combustion engine, the industrial revolution, we now realise in the 21st century that that amazing set of achievements has also a legacy of profound, even planet—threatening problems. yeah, no doubt about it. so, every technology advance that humans have manifested has come with some cost, right? so one example within the industrial revolution, chemical engineering. chemical engineering and the principles that allowed us to create new materials and create new objects, and use the factories that we had built to create many of those objects have given us really extraordinary abundance. every house has plastic chairs, has plates, has tables — all of these products are created because of the revolution in chemical engineering. along the way, a lot of the chemicals that we synthesised, it turns out, are persistent and

carcinogenic, and sit in the environment. now, what was the cost, and what was the benefit? that is a very hard thing to quantify, but the same is true in our industrialisation of food systems. we have an abundance of calories, we have, you know, enough calorie production in the next decade, theoretically, to meet the needs of nine billion humans. but a lot of those systems have their downfalls, have their costs, have their consequences. so, the arc of technology is and has never been linear. it has always had, you know, some cycle to it. i would argue that the recent cycle probably peaked in 1969. that was when man landed on the moon, and it was also the year that we had woodstock. and so, right now, i think from a societal perspective, we're generally techno—pessimists. and we were really techno—optimists leading up to the moon landing and during the industrial revolution. and now, we're seeing the consequences in the last

couple of days that are really overwhelming. yeah, you call it "techno—pessimism" — it may be techno—realism. i mean, there is no doubt that climate change and global warming are real, and they are a real threat to the way we live our lives today, and frankly, for the future of our species on the planet. now, you say this, you say that, "we do not have to make compromises as "we re—engineer life. "the ability to re—engineer our systems of production "doesn't mean that we have to make compromises." in essence, you're saying we can have our cake and eat it, too. and most human beings, in the end, conclude generally, that is not possible. yes, so i think not today, but it will be. so, there are a number of technologies — so if you look at the cost of clean energy, wind and solar has now dropped in the range of, call it $0.07 per kilowatt hour, on an amortise basis, to produce that energy. and that's a carbon—free energy source. nuclear power is less

than $0.05 a kilowatt hour, somewhere between $0.01—5 a kilowatt hour — also a carbon—free energy source. those technologies have really seen an increment of nearly, an order of magnitude, in terms of cost reduction, over the past decade, decade—and—a—half. so, we should and, we do expect to see — and there are a number of other technologies that are on the horizon, like nuclear fusion, plasma fusion — which is a new type of technology that's being proven out in a number of places right now. so, we will have an abundance of clean energy in the next couple of decades. if you assume that all the things we're seeing today, all the technologies, all the progress that we're making actually does come to fruition and scale, as we're seeing it happen right now, that a lot of the carbon production goes away and gets replaced by notjust a better, but also a cheaper alternative. all right. i mean, i understand the excitement and the importance of r&d, and offices like this is where people are

considering financing amazing future—oriented scientific ventures using bioscience, bioengineering — and it is all very fascinating and exciting — but do you not feel the urgency of now? people struggling and suffering today i'm just thinking about food — food and the agri—tech sector, which you've been big in for some time. the world food programme says, "this year, a year of unprecedented hunger, "828 million people go to bed across this planet "hungry every night". do you have technological solutions relevant to those people today? yeah, absolutely. so, most calories on earth come from rice, wheat, corn and soybeans. that's the vast majority. about 80% of calories come from those four crops. those crops, the technology capabilities in producing those crops — digital software that helps farmers make better decisions, precision agriculture equipment that allows them to get more yield

per acre by doing smarter things in the field, new genetics of the seed, new biological alternatives to traditional synthetic chemicals — these are all products that are available and are making great headway in terms of their improvements in the market today. and to give you a sense — the best corn farmer in the united states gets about 500 bushels per acre. the average corn farmer in the united states gets about 174 bushels per acre. the average corn farmer in china, 110. nigeria, 70 bushels per acre. all those regions have similar soil, similar climate — but the application of technology is different. and there are several companies that you work with that are ensuring that those yields will go higher. but i'm just wondering about your motivation here, because in the end, you're a very wealthy man, and you're wealthy because you spot a profit and you know how to make one. you want intellectual property rights over the brilliant ideas that you and your teams are developing. you want to say to the world,

"i have a means of," for example, "fixing the world food crisis, "but you're going to have to pay me to share my ideas." i think the only form of sustainability is a sustainable business model where the market incentives are aligned, meaning the customer wants something and it benefits them, and they're willing to pay for it. but with the greatest respect, many of the customers we're talking about are the most deprived and desperate people on earth. oh, no, completely, completely agree with you. the purpose is to bring the cost of food down. and if you can bring the cost of food down by increasing the abundance of food, the farmer will pay a price for a service or technology that allows them to do that. and ultimately, the consumer that is in need of calories will thus be able to afford it. and the cycle of abundance will continue. the actual inflation—adjusted cost of food has declined by nearly 50% in the last 30—a0 years. so, we are seeing those technologies already play out. the number you quoted from the un world food programme, on over 800 million people facing less than 1,200 calories

a day on average of access to food, was over 1.1 billion, 30 years ago. that number actually dropped below 600 million pre—covid. and the dysfunction associated with covid in supply chains has caused a dramatic rise in that number since then. i...everything you're saying, i understand, but i come back to motivation. you launched a very successful company some years back, the climate corporation, which used digital technologies to help farmers understand weather patterns, and how they could respond to weather patterns to improve their crop yields and avoid crop damage when the weather was going to be extreme and negative. it was hugely successful. you sold it out for over $1 billion to one of the biggest agri—tech corporates in the entire world, monsanto. and i think it's right to say even your own father accused you of selling out to an evil corporate. so, what really is your motivation?

so, the benefit of that product has been that farmers get more with less. so, they put seed in the ground, they make the right decisions about what applications to apply to their field, and they get more yield per acre out of the field. that product is still largely free. when we sold that product to monsanto, we sold it for when we had about ten million acres of usage. within a year, that product was installed on over 100 million acres, and today, it's used on over 180 million acres globally. so, each one of those farmers is getting more yield per acre — which means less carbon, less water, less cost, and more yield per acre, which means the price of food comes down. and that's the benefit of technology in agriculture. it ends up, if you can actually get technology — and the general definition of technology since the dawn of humanity is to improve the productivity of the human species, where humans can have more leverage, they can get more for less.

and so, we could say, "let's give all the money we have to all the ngos". and what they'll be doing is using yesteryear�*s technology and last year's cost to buy food and feed the world's people — and by the way, that is a very noble goal. we're spending about $20 billion this year through the un world food programme to feed undernourished people around the world. that's a great bridge, but it doesn't solve the problem. in order to solve the problem, we need to make more food, and we need to make the price of food go down. and technology is the way we do that. and technology will only find its way into the market if someone's willing to pay for it because it has a benefit to them. and that means that ultimately, the cost for them to return to them is good, the company that provides the technology is good, and for the consumer, it is good because the price comes down. so, when it comes to technological innovation, particularly these sorts of innovations which can offer so much public good, you don't believe in the, sort of, fundamental principle of open sourcing. so, let's use a general technology example, because one could say the same about pharmaceuticals and therapeutics, and so on, and assume that the typical cycle, the investment

cycle for a therapeutic orfor an agricultural programme, ora piece of software is $1 billion. it cost $1 billion to invent a technology, to bring it to market that's going to have some benefit. who funds the billion dollars? and is the billion dollars ultimately going to yield the best benefit for the market, for the customer, and ultimately for the end user, for the consumer, for the people in need, for the 95% of the world that are desperate to move themselves up the ladder in the world? or will the motivation of the market, the market that says, "if this works, i will get paid for it" — will that source the billion? and by the way, it's not... if i may interrupt, i mean, that sounds like, frankly, a billionaire mounting an extremely, er, persuasive defence of capitalism. but we live on a planet which is dominated by capitalism. and what we see is inequity of every different sort, across this planet, we see billions of people living with virtually nothing. we see a tiny, tiny few in the elite —

like you, dave friedberg — living with unimaginable wealth. capitalism doesn't work. capitalism has its downside. have you read any of steven pinker�*s books? yeah, in fact, we've had him on the show. so, i think he does a greatjob of framing the arc of progress. and the arc of progress, i think, is one where if you look at the relative condition of people as a whole, of the bottom 20%, of the bottom 50%, of the bottom 90%, everyone continues to make progress. the rate of progress, however, is not symmetric across all people — and that is the downside of capitalism, and we're certainly going through a cycle now where that downside is getting the focus of the democracies of the west. but i would argue that without the market, without the market—based system, there wouldn't be as much technological innovation. and you can look at all the socialist and communist histories around the world, and technology has not been born from those markets. technology has been born from the free markets.

and the free markets have allowed the industrial revolution, the internet, and the current age of bioengineering to really transform the human species, to transform medicine, to transform food, to transform industry, because the free markets operate. what you frame this as, dave, is constantly, you frame it as a set of technological challenges which you believe we humans, backed by your money and people like you's money, we can overcome. but maybe, actually, what we need to be addressing isn't constant advance in science and technology. we need to be thinking about human prioritisation, about politics, because there are many people who say, "frankly, we could feed the people of the world "perfectly well today. "the problem isn't a lack of technology. "the problem is the way we run the planet." it's a political, not a technological problem. both are true. both are true, and they don't need to be dependent. it's not that

you have to choose. we can continue to have really important social gain through political action, and we can also continue to move all of society forward and humanity forward by investing in and building new technologies that are only going to be enabled by market—based systems. here we sit in san francisco, one of the hubs of america's big tech economy. i mean, this city has received so much money, has become so prosperous — and, of course, still has massive economic problems to go alongside that — but it has come to symbolise, and particularly california as a whole, has come to symbolise the success of american big tech. but do you appreciate that right now, there is a growing public scepticism about big tech, and about the impacts it is having on society here in america, but around the world? yeah, and i will tell you, for the first time

in my career, i am seeing the scepticism and the concern about the aggregation and the monopoly effects that are being realised in the technology markets being heralded notjust by the majority, but also by the minority in the tech world. and we're seeing it from everywhere. you're saying — because you're very wired into the tech sector, you have a big network here — you're saying that even within the network, there is a concern about, for example, elon musk, who's bought san francisco's very own twitter. he has gone in there, he has slashed jobs. he said that he wants to completely change the way that the site is moderated, the way verification works. i mean, this in a way, has become a symbol of the way power vested in one extraordinarily wealthy individual can have impacts around the world. does it worry you?

elon doesn't worry me. i think the... why not? well, i think elon�*s going to get himself in more problems than he is going to benefit. no, but twitter is actually, isn't it, a very important social media platform for millions and millions of people around the world. and what we've seen is that one man with an extraordinary amount of money and power can go in, and, in many people's view, undermine the values of that company. 0r he's recasting the values. and i think that's his prerogative. and if the customer, the user of that platform doesn't like his new values, what i'm seeing happen, and what i expect will continue to happen, is people will leave that platform, and they will go elsewhere. and we have seen this happen. there is no social network that has continued to dominate on this... we all thought social networks were going to become monopolies. turns out, maybe they weren't. friendster, myspace, facebook, instagram, and now, the current one is tiktok. and twitter�*s, kind of,

a question mark on what's going to happen, where each one of these, the quality of the content, the quality of the audience, the quality over time reaches some peak, and then, declines. and then, that network, kind of, degrades or erodes, and the next network takes its place. so, what will happen with twitter? i don't know. isn't this...? maybe this is much bigger thanjust twitter, or the fate of meta/facebook. maybe this is a moment when we realise that the hopes and dreams we had for the internet 25 years ago, when we thought it was going to be this extraordinary positive force which would empower the individual, give us all, with our smartphones, access to all of the world's information and break down hierarchies, give us more individual power — maybe we've come to realise, maybe even you realise that it could be, rather than benign, it could be malign. again, i'll zoom out.

the bigger perspective is that there are incredible benefits. people that have no access to education can go on youtube and watch educational videos. that is affecting hundreds of millions of people around the world in an extraordinarily positive way. there are social networks that kids are on where they're being influenced with negative content that's causing adverse behaviour in the real world. both are true. i will say... ..in the last couple of years since covid, shopify saw the number of stores increase by something like from a million to three—and—a—half million stores. these are small businesses that otherwise didn't have the ability to earn a living. individuals operating primarily in the united states, but really, now around the world that can now create a commerce, that can create a business that they couldn't otherwise have afforded to do. we're seeing people find new—found careers by being content creators on the internet. there's a whole long list of benefits that are accruing to the individual that are enabling both new content

and access to information, but also enabling them to earn a livelihood that they wouldn't have otherwise been able to earn... well, we... yeah, at the same time, the aggregation of content, by the way, just to say something about this point, has always been a problem in media, and there have always been significant holders, whether it's news corp or — i know bbc is a public service, which is tremendous, the quality of that — but many of the public services have not reached the same quality of the bbc, and the winners in the market have always aggregated into monopoly powers. before we end, i want to get a little bit personal, because again, we're sitting down in this place where there are a very few unimaginably wealthy people, and you're one of them. do you think with that tech wealth comes a clear responsibility to do things for the public good? there are two personalities within that cohort. and i know the personalities, and i know the cohort. the first personality is, "i am going to be the best

"at reinvesting these dollars in building the next enabling "technology set that is going to benefit the world. "and that is more important than donating money "to non—profits." the second cohort is, "after a certain amount of money, "i don't need any more, let me give it all to non—profits, "and let's benefit the world today". and there are very smart and rational people in both camps. which one are you in? i'm not in either camp, because i'm not in that stratosphere. yeah, you are. it's a serious question, because you have an influence and the power that comes with money, and i wonder whether you think carries with it a responsibility. so, my area of focus on a nonprofit basis is animal rights. so, i donate a lot of money to animal rights causes. that's my — i don't donate any money to political campaigns or political causes, or anything like that. so, i'm much more of a "who can't be helped by technology "and how can we help them"? and then, the other aspect for me is, where can i invest my capital in building

technology that can benefit people and make costs go down, and improve access to things in the world? and so, i guess one could argue maybe i straddle both camps, but i'm certainly not as influential as those who are very die—hard and much bigger in one or the other. what do you think of those individuals? and i guess i'm talking about musk and bezos, who are spending tens of billions of dollars, if not more, on space, on their preoccupation with expanding mankind's horizons to mars, and maybe even beyond — when even in this city, san francisco, which has benefited so much from the tech boom, there are thousands of homeless people, when, as we've established, across the world, there are hundreds of millions going short of food. what do you think of that? the same comments you were making were being made in the 14th and 15th century in spain, and there was a more dramatic disparity of wealth, disparity of income, and disparity—of—life

condition than there is even today, believe it or not. and during that time, the attempts to cross the atlantic and discover the new world ultimately yielded benefits that were unimaginable at the time. and one could argue, yes, there was travesty and loss of life, and all these terrible things that happened because of it — but ultimately, it did enable a lot of progress for all of people that i think arose from discovering and realising the opportunities in the new world. so, i'm not going to rush to judgment to say that someone choosing to invest their wealth in discovering new frontiers — whether that's microscopic biological frontiers, or whether that's space frontiers — is doing right or wrong. i think time will tell what the benefits will be that will accrue ultimately to all people, if those discoveries do pan out, and they do yield benefit for us. dave friedberg, we have to end there, but thanks very much forjoining me on hardtalk. thanks for having me.

hello there. it's been cold enough alreadyjust recently, but i'm afraid to say it's going to get colder still over the coming few days. with some clear skies overnight, we're looking at widespread, quite sharp frosts. there is the threat of some icy conditions as well, particularly where we see some wintry showers. now, this colder air is coming our way because the wind is a northerly and that northerly wind sweeping down across the whole of the country now because it's a northerly northern scotland's really in the firing line. this is where we're going to see most of snow could be ten centimetres over the hills in the next few days. there is a risk of ice and snow elsewhere. but for many inland parts of england in particular, it's a very low chance of snow. it's going to be cold everywhere with a widespread frost, maybe not quite so cold early on wednesday in

east anglia in the south east, because we've got a bit more cloud here that'll take a while to break up. 0therwise many places will be dry and see some sunshine. it's areas exposed to that northerly wind that will see some wintry showers. parts of northern ireland down, some of these irish sea coast down the north sea coast and more especially northern scotland. seeing that snow, those are the temperatures in the afternoon, 3 to five degrees, a little bit colder than it was on tuesday, windy in northern scotland and down those north sea coast. so it's these areas in particular that will feel quite a lot colder in that wind. and the snow continues as we head overnight and could get a bit heavier across northern scotland. we may see some mixture of rain, sleet and snow coming in to northern ireland as well. and that's coming into cold air, of course, another widespread frost with clear skies across many parts of the country. and we've got this cold air, this northerly air right the way across the country. now, the winds are not particularly strong. so where you have those clearer skies, that's why we're seeing such low temperatures at night. it could be icy for a while across northern ireland may

turn a bit icy across western parts of wales with some wetter weather beginning to move in here. still some showers grazing those north sea coasts, more snow to come across northern scotland, although the snow may ease off later in the day. if anything, it may well be a bit colder on thursday. typical temperatures only around two or three degrees. it doesn't get an awful lot better than that on friday either. another widespread, quite sharp frost. you can see we've got a few wintry showers, mainly around coastal areas. so in many, actually, the winds will be light. there'll be some sunshine around, but temperatures may be no better than around two to only five celsius. goodbye.

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