White House science advisor David Friedberg on US economic decline, AI, and the future of work
Steven Bartlett interviews David Friedberg — entrepreneur, life sciences investor, and member of President Trump's Council of Advisers in Science and Technology — on the US economy, artificial intelligence, aging science, and the political future of America.
Summary
David Friedberg, co-host of the All-In podcast and a member of President Trump's PCAST advisory council, joins Steven Bartlett for a wide-ranging conversation on the structural forces shaping the United States. Friedberg argues that government intervention in education, housing, and healthcare has driven up costs rather than reducing them, and that the compounding of these failures makes a wave of socialism in America not just likely but inevitable. He contends that the core American promise — enabling individuals to transition from labor to capital — is being eroded by policy failures, wealth inequality, and a political incentive structure that rewards short-term spending over long-term reform. On AI, Friedberg pushes back against the dominant narrative of mass job displacement, arguing that every prior technological revolution has expanded employment rather than destroyed it, and that open-source AI in particular will distribute economic gains far more broadly than critics assume. He also outlines the science of epigenetic reprogramming as a credible near-term path to reversing aging, and predicts that AOC will win the 2028 presidential election.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and David Friedberg's background
Steven Bartlett: David Friedberg, you're someone that graces lots of different subjects. If you were to self-define who you are and what you do — and this is difficult because you've got to put yourself in a label — what would that label be? How would you self-categorise yourself?
David Friedberg: I would say I'm deeply curious about the world and the universe, and how it works and why it works the way it does. I'm a big believer in human agency to affect the universe around us. That's my core driving motivation. A lot of the other stuff, ancillary, is about how do you enable that? And I think that's probably where I also spend some time — in the enablement of those things.
Steven Bartlett: And as it relates to how that manifested into a professional journey, what's your professional journey been for anyone that might not know?
David Friedberg: I started in college majoring in math and physics, and then I changed my major to astrophysics. It was during the time I was in college that the dot-com boom happened, in the heart of Silicon Valley. There was a kid in my dorm room who started a website selling DVDs online and he sold it for a million dollars in our junior year of college. That was an unbelievable, unfathomable amount of money. And so there was this change happening in the world, and I got enamoured with this idea of businesses and how do you use businesses to change the world — not just use scientific discovery as a method to change the world.
So I decided to go work in Silicon Valley. I interviewed for jobs. I didn't get a lot of offers, but I played a lot of poker during my college days. That's how I was able to make money. I read all the strategy books on playing poker. I actually spent a year working in a pool hall, and the manager of the pool hall and the bookie invited me to their home poker game and took all my money — money I was making at four dollars and twenty-five cents an hour. So I was like, I'm going to learn poker. I learned it. That's how I made money. And I put that on my résumé when I applied for jobs after college.
I got interviews with investment banks, and the investment banks were like, we want to talk to a kid that knows how to play poker — because this was before internet poker, before ESPN poker. So it was an interesting thing. I ended up getting a job working in investment banking, then worked on tech companies. I got to learn business finance, accounting, mergers and acquisitions, all this sort of stuff. Then I ended up working at Google when it was just under a thousand employees, and I left a couple of years later and started a business called the Climate Corporation. So I've been in Silicon Valley my whole career.
Steven Bartlett: And that company you end up starting does pretty well.
David Friedberg: The Climate Corporation — we sold it in 2013 for a little over a billion dollars, which was a great outcome for investors and shareholders. Today it's software for farmers. It's now owned by Bayer, which is the big pharma and ag company. It's used across 200 million acres every year. That's a pretty sizable amount of farmland that uses that software still. So yeah, it's done fairly well.
Steven Bartlett: I'm 33 now. You were 33 when you sold that?
David Friedberg: I was 33.
Steven Bartlett: A lot of money. 1.1 billion. And you've done lots of other things since then, which we can go into. But you've also — I think from March this year — you were appointed as an adviser to Donald Trump.
David Friedberg: Yeah, I was appointed to President Trump's Council of Advisers in Science and Technology.
Steven Bartlett: And what does that mean in reality?
David Friedberg: So if you look back at the last couple of administrations, there have been different themes over time on who is appointed to PCAST. In historical context, Bill Clinton had a PCAST that was set up just for the internet.
Steven Bartlett: PCAST —
David Friedberg: President's Council of Advisers in Science and Technology. And so he set one up focused on the internet. This current PCAST under this administration is heavy in AI. So it's Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen, Sergey Brin — that's kind of the cohort that's on this advisory council. But it's always included folks involved in things like biotechnology and sciences, to help guide science policy for the administration. So it involves having conversations with people in the administration on things that are happening in industry, things that are happening on the frontiers of science and technology, to help guide some of the policy decisions that the administration is trying to create or enforce.
The US economic backdrop — affordability, inequality, and the cycle of empires
Steven Bartlett: What is the most important subject of our time?
David Friedberg: AI. But I think it's important to get a backdrop of the economic state and the social state of the nation, because all of these things feed into the big questions on AI and they inform everyone's biases on this subject. If you're at a different socioeconomic position or feeling a different thing, your perspective on AI is going to be radically different. So if we focus on the United States — which in some respects is a proxy for the rest of the Western world — where is the United States at this moment in time? Is it on the rise? What are the pertinent factors that help us understand the backdrop of this nation?
The biggest drivers for this nation at the moment, in terms of what public policy and private markets will do, is number one the unaffordability crisis.
Steven Bartlett: What does that mean?
David Friedberg: 63% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. They don't have enough savings to pay for a fiscal emergency in their household. And the cost of things is rising faster than wages are increasing. So things feel less affordable to most Americans. And then there's this wealth inequality concern, which I would say is both a perception issue and a real policy issue — there are definitely policies that have allowed it to happen.
But I think America is in this crisis of classism, this crisis of us versus them. And it manifests in a lot of different ways. You had Ray Dalio on, and if you think about Ray Dalio's cycle of empires — this idea that there have been six empires in the last 500 years and the United States is on the decline and China is on the rise — it can be measured across a number of different dimensions. One of which is this crisis of internal struggle, which manifests often with external struggle. Why can't we stop having external wars? Well, a nation that's happy with itself generally doesn't go to war. A nation that's not happy generally does. And so a lot of this stuff gets tied up in the economic distress that the United States is feeling.
My contention — which may not be very popular — is that the more government has tried to create services for people and help bring them up the ladder, the more expensive those things get.
Steven Bartlett: I.e. socialism.
David Friedberg: Policy in the United States — and this is one of the great lies, and I think there's a series of great lies in US policy over the last half century — one of the great lies is that the government will save you. The government will help you by giving you these essential services that you want more of: education, healthcare, housing. And as the government has entered into those markets — because remember, there are people making those things, offering those services, and there's someone paying for it — as the government enables more money to flow into those markets, the cost of those things has just gone up.
You can see how this plays out in education. If you want to go to college in the United States — I'll just give you a statistic. Thirty years ago, administrative staff were like 10% of colleges. Today they're like 60%. In just thirty years, give me a rational reason why we should have six times the administrative staffing at colleges and universities. There isn't a good reason. The real reason is that the federal student loan program doesn't discriminate against a university on how well they do with their graduating students or the degree or the individual taking out the loan. The federal student loan program has just allowed more money to flow into universities.
Now, if you're a university administrator, there's no constraint on how much you can charge for tuition. So hey, we'll raise tuition 5% this year, 8%, 10%. We'll hire more people. If you hire more people, you get a higher salary. If you think about the individual — I don't get to make more salary until I'm a manager, now I want to be a director, now a senior director, and the organisation grows. That's very natural for any organisation, whether it's a nonprofit, a university, or a private company. You want to grow and people want to make more money year after year. Because they can collect more money, they can charge more for tuition. There isn't a natural market force that says your tuition is too high, because the government has provided unlimited funding to higher education through the federal student loan program.
As a result, education has gotten so vastly expensive that everyone now looks at it and says, we've got to do something about this. And both parties seem to say, well, here's what the government's going to do to do more. And it's like putting fuel on the fire.
So the challenge right now is people are feeling left behind. There's massive wealth inequality. Things are extremely unaffordable. And the solution being embraced is for the government to do more, which de facto leads to socialism.
The transition from labor to capital — the real American dream
Steven Bartlett: What is wrong with socialism?
David Friedberg: I would argue that the key measure of a country's success is how many people are transitioning from labor to capital each year.
Steven Bartlett: What does that mean?
David Friedberg: That means every year I'm working paycheck to paycheck. I graduated college with $19,000 in debt. I went and worked. I got paid. I saved up. I paid down my debt. I was able to get out of it. Then I worked at Google. We had an IPO. Suddenly I had assets. I had stuff. I had money in the bank account. And it was like an incredible moment for me. I said, I could live off that money. I don't need to live off a paycheck every month. I now have savings. I have assets. That is capital.
Everyone talks about capital versus labor. But the real advantage of America is enabling people to go from labor to capital. Every individual that works, saves, invests, does whatever they need to do to accumulate enough capital, ends up in the capital bucket. And then you're no longer stuck needing to go paycheck to paycheck to pay your bills. That's the dream. That's the real American dream. It's not just about owning a house. If you own a house and you have a bunch of debt and you've got insurance payments to make and you still have to work every month to make those payments, you're not necessarily living the American dream yet. The American dream is being freed of that burden.
Steven Bartlett: Because you can live off the interest of your assets.
David Friedberg: That's right. Let's say you have $100,000 saved and you can make 10% a year on that. That's $10,000. If you get to a million dollars saved, you can make $100,000 a year and live on that. That's economic security. That's financial security. That's what we should give to every American — the ability to own assets that give them freedom to choose what they want to do in their life, rather than be stuck in work.
And the problem with socialism is it takes away that transition moment. It eliminates it, because it says everyone has to be labor all the time for the rest of their lives. And then no one has freedom. That's what America was founded on — this ability to find, through freedom of choice, through agency, the ability to transition from labor to capital. Our goal as a country should be to get 2% of Americans across that line every year. But if everything is about giving people more stuff and having the government do it, we're just going to keep raising the debt, making things more expensive, inflating the cost away. And it is inevitable that socialism will happen in America. It's absolutely inevitable.
Steven Bartlett: Do you think the US as an empire is in decline?
David Friedberg: In terms of the power of the dollar, in terms of the prosperity of Americans — the average American, the majority of Americans — the answer is yes. But the potential hasn't been deleted. Decline is not inevitable. To be very clear, we are not yet at a point where it's a runaway train.
In the history of democracies, there's never been a place like America where an individual like myself — moving here from South Africa, going to public college, graduating with debt, and then being able to work my way out of the debt and find myself in the position I'm in today, with no nepotism, with no handouts — it's an amazing place that that sort of story can be told a million times over. It's not just one or two people this has happened to, but millions of people. The problem is it's all the other hundreds of millions that didn't get to live that opportunity. And if we can fix that, America is not in decline. America is a prosperous nation and has centuries ahead of it.
Steven Bartlett: When you look at the national debt, though, it does look very much like a runaway.
David Friedberg: Want to know where inflation comes from? That's where inflation comes from. By printing more dollars to pay for that debt — which is what happens — the Federal Reserve buys the debt and issues dollars to the bank system to buy the debt from the government. Remember, the Federal Reserve is separate from the government. So the Federal Reserve can print dollars. They can send dollars to banks, and now the banks can loan money out and it makes its way into the economy. Now there are more dollars in the economy, and that money was owed back to the government at some point, but the Federal Reserve may never get paid back. They may just keep adding and adding and adding, just printing more and more dollars.
Steven Bartlett: Is that sustainable?
David Friedberg: No.
Steven Bartlett: I don't understand the force that's going to intervene to stop this sort of compounding debt.
David Friedberg: The outcome of this is socialism. That's the moment we're in right now. That's why we're seeing this wave of socialism. I've been saying for five years we're going to face a wave of socialism. And after Donald Trump was elected, my prediction for the next year was that the next wave in politics in America will be socialism. And people thought I was crazy. And I'm like, it is absolutely inevitable.
If you look at this — this is where we're headed. It is de facto socialism when the government employs roughly half the people of the United States. Right now, if you look at all the federal, state, and local agencies — the people that are employed, the people that are contractors of those agencies, and the people that live off of some sort of government pension or social security system — the total amount is close to 50% of Americans. So we're getting to a point where people are like, the only place I can go is more money from the government. And then eventually the government becomes the whole economy.
Capitalism, compounding wealth, and the tax system
Steven Bartlett: If the outcome of socialism was the cause of capitalism —
David Friedberg: It's a great question. I think it was capitalism plus policies. Let's say you have a million dollars. You're making, say, 10% a year. Next year you have $1.1 million. The next year you have $1.21 million. And you keep adding it up. That's called compounding. After a couple of years, your million dollars turns into $10 million. And you never have to sell shares along the way. You can just own the shares and whatever's going up, your value just keeps going up. You've never paid taxes along the way. And suddenly, fast forward a couple of years, instead of having a million, you've now got ten.
That's capital compounding over time. Meanwhile, if you're working, every paycheck taxes are taken out. Every time you get more money, more capital, taxes are taken out. So if you don't get capital, if you don't get enough savings to allow you to compound, you are never going to get there.
So from a tax policy perspective, labor — working for your money — should have never been taxed higher than earning returns on your capital.
Steven Bartlett: So you're saying tax the rich?
David Friedberg: I'm saying tax capital at a rate that's equivalent to labor.
Steven Bartlett: Wealth taxes?
David Friedberg: Wealth taxes are asset seizures. Definitely no. So one of the principles of the United States — the principle of what this country was founded on — is private property rights. If you go back to England, 500 years ago, or let's just talk Europe broadly, there were very few places where you as an individual citizen had rights to own private property. There were very few places where you could say, I have this thing and it doesn't belong to the king or it doesn't belong to whatever the local lord is. Everything was the property of the lords, of the higher class, of the upper class. It was endowed to them, vested to them by birthright for centuries. Same in Asia, same in the Middle East, same in Africa. Every nation started out with this system where people didn't have rights to private property.
The United States was founded on the principle of private property for an individual. I think when they were drafting the Declaration of Independence, it was about life, liberty, and the pursuit of property, and they later changed it to the pursuit of happiness. The pursuit of property was really the measure of what you've accumulated as an individual. You now have a right to accumulate things. You now have a right to build value, to build wealth, to build a house and have your family in your house. That was a founding principle of the United States.
I'm all for taxes when people transact. When they turn their stock that they've held for a couple of years into cash and buy something with it — boom, tax. That's when you should get taxed, when you're able to turn that asset you own into another asset. But if I go into your shares and I'm like, hey, I'm going to take 5% of your shares — what are you losing? Well, you can't use those shares to buy anything, because as soon as you try and buy something, you owe tax on those shares. So by taking away your shares before you've actually transacted with them, before you've actually sold them — or taking away your private property, your home, or giving the government the right to come into your garage and audit everything you own and say this year we're doing a 2% tax — that is antithetical to what the United States was founded on, which was a founding principle of private property.
Now, if your property goes up in value and you eventually turn it into some other property, that's a transaction. And that's when you get taxed. That's how the system's set up. So if we have an issue with people having too much wealth, that's the moment to increase the tax rate. That's capital gains tax, income tax on high earners. Those two things can get you 97% of the way there.
Separately, if I'm very wealthy, I own a bunch of stock and I've never sold any of it, and I borrow against my stock to go buy a yacht — I don't pay taxes. That should be a taxable event. We should fix that. That's an easy fix in the tax system. I'm not taking away your private property, but as soon as you borrow against it, it's effectively like transacting on that property. So that's a moment to pay a tax. And if we think the rich aren't paying enough taxes, you can raise income tax or capital gains taxes to get them to pay more.
Steven Bartlett: Most people that own stock in big companies will just borrow against their stock and they never pay a tax. I didn't know this until I was about 26. My company had gone public and a bank in Europe approached me and said, by the way, we'll give you 20% of whatever the value of the stock you have in my company, called Ocean AG, as a tax-free loan. I was like, explain this to me. So you'll just send me millions of pounds and I don't have to pay tax?
David Friedberg: You don't have to sell your shares.
Steven Bartlett: You don't have to sell anything. I said, well, look at the rest of my portfolio. I had some Facebook stock at the time. They're like, we'll give you 50% to 60% loan to value on that. I.e., if you have a million dollars of Facebook stock, we will transfer you today $700,000 tax-free and I can do whatever I want with it. I thought, fucking hell, this is what the rich do.
David Friedberg: That's exactly right. And the truth is that no one talks about it. Behind closed doors, everyone knows that it needs to change.
Steven Bartlett: But no one wants to say it because —
David Friedberg: I'm saying it. It's got to change. What's interesting about that is — say I have $10 million of Facebook stock and I take a loan and they give me $5 million in cash. What a rich person then does is they take that $5 million and they go and buy other assets. And then they start acquiring more and more assets. That's what's unfair about the system. Because then when you have capital, you're accumulating more capital, while labor — if you haven't crossed that chasm from labor to capital — you're still here grinding every month, grinding every week, trying to pay your bills. And then these guys have all these shenanigans going on.
Steven Bartlett: Yeah, it is wrong and it needs to be fixed.
David Friedberg: The answer though is not taking private property. As soon as you start taking private property, those gates are open. By the way, it's not even going to be constitutional in the United States. The Fifth Amendment has this takings clause. It's legally not going to win in federal court. It could work in some states — there are seven states that actually have a constitutional ban on private property tax like this. There are 43 states where it's game on, and we'll see how they play out in the courts as they try to pass these wealth taxes. But these are asset seizure taxes. You can have a wealth tax by raising capital gains, making high-income or high-asset people pay more taxes when they sell stuff or when they buy stuff. There are a lot of ways to tax wealth. But taking assets from people after they've paid their taxes — or before they've paid their taxes — is not the right way to do it.
The inevitable drift toward socialism and what stops it
Steven Bartlett: What will ultimately happen?
David Friedberg: The ultimate outcome will be that 51% of people will say, hey, give me all the stuff that the 49% have. What would stop them from doing that? Because ultimately you can take as much as you want from a minority of people and distribute it to the majority. And that minority starts out with a few billionaires, then a couple more 50 millionaires, then a couple more 10 millionaires, then millionaires, then people with $100,000. And there's no limit to where this thing goes. And that is socialism.
Steven Bartlett: And what does that do in terms of how talent moves and how people move to different places?
David Friedberg: I know billionaires — many of them have moved or are planning to move out of California. Just on the threat of this. And people say, forget them, good riddance, get rid of them. But the top 1% of taxpayers in California pay the majority of taxes in the state.
Steven Bartlett: The top 1% of earners pay 40 to 50% of California's total personal income tax, depending on stock market capital gains performance.
David Friedberg: There you go. So that 1% are the people I'm talking about that are leaving the state because they see where this is headed. I don't think California wants that. Those are very productive people for the state. They're people that create companies that hire people that pay well, go to fancy restaurants, pay for cars. They support the economy. It's not just the taxes — they're a big part of capital flowing through the economy.
We saw this happen in France. France had this wealth tax and then their total tax revenue declined by more than they were making on the wealth tax, because everyone left France. Then they stopped doing the wealth tax and everyone came back and the income came back. So this is a well-studied case.
I don't think a wealth tax or an asset seizure tax is the solution. I think we've got to fix all the other stuff we've talked about and we've got to fix the government spending problem. And if we can do those two things, then I think we can bring inflation down, bring the wealth inequality down, and give more people the ability to make that transition.
But I do think every politician should be talking about the focus on what percent of people in the United States every year are moving from labor to capital. How many people can say, hey, I've got enough cash to retire if I wanted to? That's what we want to try and get everyone towards.
Not just convincing people — and this is one of the great lies — convincing everyone that the great American dream is to own a house. When owning a house for a lot of Americans ends up putting all your capital in one asset, and you've got to basically get the price of housing to go up every year to keep everyone moving up the ladder. So now, fast forward 30, 40, 50 years, young people can't afford to buy a house anymore because we've pushed the asset value up so much to try and make sure that everyone's got good household wealth.
Steven Bartlett: We are told — that's the sort of central idea once you leave university — to figure out how quickly you can get a mortgage or buy a house.
David Friedberg: Great lie. It's one of the great lies. And there are a lot of countries where people have been able to accumulate capital and jump that ravine from labor to capital much more quickly when they don't buy a house, because they can invest in stuff. They can buy the S&P 500, which you can just buy on an E-Trade or Robinhood account, and you can just own it. On average it will make you 10 to 11% a year. You just put your money in, you're making 10 to 11% a year, it can go up every year, and you don't have to pay taxes. You don't have to pay property tax. You don't have to pay insurance. You don't have to deal with repairs and maintenance.
So a lot of people would have been better off, depending on the markets they're in — there are some markets that ballooned — but a lot of people would have been better off over the last 30 years actually owning the S&P 500 than owning their home and paying for the rent on a home.
Steven Bartlett: One of the things I see in the comment section whenever someone makes that point is you'll have someone who bought a house 20 years ago saying, well, I bought a house 20 years ago for this amount and now it's worth this. That is always the top comment whenever this argument is made from financial advisors or investors.
David Friedberg: It actually indicates a problem. If your house went up in price so much, that house is much less affordable to a young person who's going to buy it next. And that's what we've fundamentally done with this asset class — residential real estate. We've created a system whereby residential real estate prices go up so much, and there's a whole bunch of policies around making this happen.
All of the policy around residential real estate has allowed the middle class in America — which holds the majority of wealth — to grow their asset base, to accumulate more assets, to become wealthier. All the boomers are so wealthy because they owned all these houses. And now young people graduating college can't afford a house. It is a bad fact that a lot of people got very wealthy by owning a home, because it means that the next generation is going to say, I want socialism because I can't afford a home. That's the moment we're in.
40 to 45 million Americans graduated from colleges in the United States in the last ten years. That's a large number of people who are now on average encumbered with some amount of student debt, facing a challenging job market. And then the only way to buy a home is you've got to come up with a million bucks. It leads to this problem where everyone's like, I need help.
Steven Bartlett: What would you say then to people that are in that 63%?
David Friedberg: People will challenge it, but I would have never thought that podcasting would be such a massive business. I would have never thought that being an Instagram influencer would be such a massive business or a TikTok influencer. I would have never thought that individual artists could publish online and make money without getting a record deal. I would have never thought that individual artists would be able to sell their work and make a living on eBay and Etsy. I would have never thought that craftspeople would be able to find jobs through the internet.
The internet has been this incredible enabler of millions of new ways to work, of new ways to earn an income. And a lot of people will roll their eyes and say, but that's not what the system was supposed to have set me up for. The system failed us. Maybe the system did fail you. And maybe the government's solution wasn't the right solution. But human agency is what got all these people there.
Did the government give you your job as a podcaster? Did the government teach you how to podcast and build this incredible media empire that you've built? I don't know if the government played much of a role in it. I think you played the role in it.
I think this is really important for a lot of people to observe firstly — the government isn't going to save individuals. The government's going to make things harder for individuals to find their path. If I have to go and start a barber shop, I've got to go get all these cosmetology licences. I've got to go figure out a way to go to school, pay thousands of dollars, get health inspections done. There are a lot of government layers that stop me from doing that work. There are a lot of ways that the government actually inhibits people's agency and makes it harder for them to do the things they want to do and progress.
But I think the second thing is I never discount human agency. There was this great podcast done years ago by those guys at the Hoover Institute where they talked about the success of China — where China grew GDP per capita from like $3,000 to $30,000 — and a lot of people were saying, Chinese central planning is brilliant. But these guys made the argument that it was actually the agency of the individual, the entrepreneurship, the drive, the motivation of the population of the individuals in China. Not central planning. Basically the government enabled free markets. They allowed people to work. They allowed people to trade. They allowed people to create value for each other. And when the government loosened the shackles on individuals, that population grew the economy.
If you think about all the success that's come from the United States, it's not a central message that the government said let's do this and then this and then this. It's individuals making their own choices. You've seen what people want to learn, what people want to watch, what they're interested in, and you give it to them. You create value for them. You deliver that value and you've earned something from that. People are willing to pay for that.
And I don't think we teach it in schools. I don't think we teach it as a value. We've lost that value of agency. The importance of the individual taking their own action. Every conversation we have in every context is all about the government. Government this, do this, do this. For me, what individuals can do is limitless. And that's where I think we fall short.
Every day someone should ask themselves — I tell my kids this — what did you do today that someone else valued? And if you focus on figuring out something that you can do that someone else can value, and you do that over and over again, rinse and repeat, I think there are paths for people.
The role of government infrastructure and the limits of personal agency
Steven Bartlett: So, a couple of counter-arguments here. You pointed at me and said I started podcasts, I started businesses, those businesses grew. But if I were to rebut that, I would say I was born in Africa. Would that have been possible in Africa? Would that have been possible in Nigeria, where my mother's from, or in Botswana, where I was born? Is it the fact that I moved to the UK where I had this sort of foundation of stability because of the government — where school was free, healthcare was taken care of — so I never had to think about those things, which allowed me at 18 years old to not go to university, take a risk, drop out, be in that room?
When I was sat in that room in Manchester, I actually at one point printed off the jobseekers allowance forms — basically the government will give me free money if I get to the point where my shoplifting of pizzas is no longer a reliable way to feed myself. But I had that form on my desk. And there's maybe something psychological about knowing that I had this sort of underlying safety net — where I could rush back on a 300-mile round trip to my parents in Plymouth and live in the house, or I could fill out this form and they would pay me money — that allowed me, maybe at some deeper level, to go and take that risk. And I never even realised the privilege of, oh, there's healthcare, and there are laws, and there are roads, and there's this Wi-Fi thing that allows me with this laptop in my room to build this website. So that's the government's involvement in my success. They gave me this great foundation of stability and infrastructure.
David Friedberg: Great. Great role for government to play.
Steven Bartlett: But the problem is that's a slippery slope, right?
David Friedberg: That's right. There's balance here. There's nuance of personal agency, but then also the government giving you a good foundation. And the government shouldn't employ you. That's the slippery slope we end up on. And that's where I worry about our ability to come back from that, because if you do end up with 40 to 50% of Americans getting paid some check from the government, it becomes very hard to get off of that check. And then people vote for that check to get bigger and bigger.
Steven Bartlett: The other point I wanted to make — and you know this because I've heard you say it before — is that there is a privilege that we both have in terms of our nature. And I said nature because upbringing implies that our parents were great to us and that's what made us whatever. But also the opposite can be true. If you think about someone like Elon Musk — his dad wasn't that nice to him. So not necessarily a lovely upbringing. But the circumstances of our upbringing, and maybe our nature, maybe our biology, set us up to be a certain type of person where agency, however that's defined —
David Friedberg: I think you're exactly right. And I think that's what education should be teaching — that value. That's where I think the role of a public school comes in. What's the role of this infrastructure that government's building around us? If it's teaching you that your next job is to come and work for the city or come and work for the state, it's not teaching you that you have agency. If it's telling you that the only path you're going to have coming out of this rural school is to go work in the military, it's not teaching you about your agency.
And I'm not saying it's wrong to do civil service or military service. I think those are very important parts of what all of us should strive to do — to support the government that makes our society possible. But this idea that we should all be proposed as the government path, the government work, is what we should all be stuck doing for the rest of our lives — that's the wrong setup.
Steven Bartlett: The opposite is though also probably the wrong setup, which is that we should all start a business or become a creator.
David Friedberg: I think that's a mistake too. But this idea that you can find a path where you can provide value to someone — as part of an organisation, as an individual, as a leader — you can choose your path. The idea that you should be accessing your capacity to create value for someone else should be the objective.
Inequality, progress, and the Denmark question
Steven Bartlett: Do you think there's always going to be inequality?
David Friedberg: Yes. It's either inequality or it's lack of progress. Those are the two options.
Steven Bartlett: That's the dance.
David Friedberg: That's the dance. So China's very good at this. If you watch their policy, they just recently shifted to a free market policy. They literally just have like a throttle. I always envision it as this lever in a big room where they go free market, not free market, rolling it back and forth. When you have a free market, people push the frontier. They discover new things. They make new things that have never been done before. They create new value and the economy grows. The problem is it doesn't grow evenly initially.
Let's say you came up with a goose that lays golden eggs. And this technology is making golden eggs. And you're getting very wealthy with these golden eggs. And then that goose makes two geese and three geese and four. It starts breeding and you start selling the goose. And it takes a number of years before everyone has a golden goose. During that time, you've raced ahead because you've got now dozens of geese making lots of golden eggs for you. And a lot of people are like, I want a golden goose. By the time they get a golden goose, you've now got a million golden geese. And it feels like inequality. But the truth is now everyone has a golden goose. And if you told them 30 years ago they would have a golden goose, they'd be like, no way, that'd be amazing.
Every day they're making the golden goose, they're printing the money, they're buying stuff with it. That's the problem with progress, whether it's medicine. A lot of medicines today are a million dollars a dose — CART therapies, for example. These can save you from cancer. Only 50,000 people in the US can get them every year, and there are hundreds of thousands of people that die because they don't have access to these therapies. So it's limited in terms of its availability. There's technology like AI — not everyone has access to it, not everyone owns a piece of a model, not everyone's using it, and the people that are using it are getting ahead faster than the people behind.
Steven Bartlett: In your golden goose analogy, by the time the golden geese get down to the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder —
David Friedberg: I would use the word diffuse.
Steven Bartlett: Those golden eggs buy less, because something happens along the way.
David Friedberg: That's right. Along the way, the government says, let's give everyone access to more stuff to make up for that difference, and then things get more expensive.
Steven Bartlett: Is this in part because when the nation becomes prosperous — because the GDP is high — and you have four-year election cycles, politicians get in by offering you lots of free stuff? And that is the nature of the four-year election cycle.
David Friedberg: I always said the kid that got elected president in middle school was the kid who said he's going to make the vending machines free. That's always going to be true in any election. And at the end of the day, that's how the system grows. We don't talk about this four-year election thing enough as maybe being a causal factor that's causing short-termism amongst these leaders, where they're all just spending more money.
I cannot tell you how much it drives me nuts when I go to Washington DC — and I go every couple of weeks or whatever — and I meet with Congress people, senators, and representatives. Literally all of them just talk about getting stuff for their constituents. That's all they're there to do. Just get stuff for their people. That's their job and that's how they get elected. The incentive is I'm going to get you something, vote for me.
The founding fathers had this idea that they would rotate into public service and rotate out and go back to private life. There's a lot of writings about this in the early days of the formation of this republic. It was like, we should all go do our tour of duty. There was never this belief that America would evolve to a world where you have career politicians — people that are just constantly trying to get elected and whose job is to be a politician. It's just a mind-numbingly crazy idea to think about.
And all my politician friends are about to chop my head off about this, but I think it's nuts. I don't think a person should be a politician. I don't think that job title should exist. I'm sorry to all the politicians out there. I think the people that represent the people should have the best long-term interests of the people in mind because they should be constrained to serving for a limited period of time and then go back to private life. That means we should have term limits. You should never be able to be elected more than two terms as a senator or four terms as a representative or whatever it is. And it should be the case that if you're in one public office, maybe you shouldn't transition to other public offices under those same limits. Because at the end of the day, you have created a system whereby you've proven that you can get stuff for people and your job is to go get stuff for people, and that causes the government to inflate, be mismanaged, and then there's all the waste, fraud, and abuse that happens along the way.
Steven Bartlett: Everything is a trade-off, right? Even in that example, if some people did eight years in government and they know they're going back to private life, they could be dealing their friends. I'm going to do eight years in government, I'm going to run the transportation division, I'm going to serve some nice benefits to my friend who runs Boeing, and then when I step back in, I'm going to step in as the chair.
David Friedberg: That's a law to make sure that doesn't happen, and he goes to jail if that happens. That's a pretty easy fix. You can't buy stocks. You can't own stuff. You can't trade. There are just so many obvious things. If you're going to go serve in government, you can't do stuff that you can do as a private citizen, and you shouldn't be able to enrich yourself. If you do, you should go to jail. But we should also make sure that the incentive structure is set up right so that good people come and work in government and that we have good rotation between public and private life.
Steven Bartlett: It's a hard problem, this problem of how you fix this incentive structure. Has anyone fixed it globally? Is there any nation you look at as a model for a better system?
David Friedberg: A lot of people will point to Denmark and say, hey, these guys do a great job. There's a lot of public services and people pay high taxes. But there's not a lot of great progress. There's no entrepreneurial success coming out of those places. What happens in America — the freedoms afforded the individual, the agency, liberty, and rights to private property — creates an incentive structure that says go try and do crazy stuff that could work. And if it works, there's tremendous return. So it's worth taking the risk. And that level of risk is what pushes the boundaries. It's what discovered CART therapy, what discovered gene editing that can lead to curing human diseases. It's what's discovered new advances in agriculture, new physics, new engineering, AI. All of these things came from this risk-taking system that we've set up in the United States, built around these individual incentives. And it works.
So you can have great comfort for a great many people in Denmark and people will be very happy living there and they will have a good life. But you will not have progress like you have in the United States. We push the frontier because we create this incentive structure, and that's where progress comes from.
Steven Bartlett: Would you say the vast majority would choose to live in a place like Denmark if they could? I'm looking at some of the stats here. They have higher societal trust in government, police institutions, and strangers. They have a standard 37-hour work week, five to six weeks of paid vacation, and a cultural emphasis on balance. They have a lower ceiling of extreme wealth but a higher floor, so less poverty and financial ruin. And according to global happiness metrics, Denmark consistently ranks significantly higher than the United States. Most people would choose that, right?
David Friedberg: Absolutely.
Steven Bartlett: So central planning might stop a few very high-agency, ambitious people, but the vast majority would theoretically be happier with a Denmark model.
David Friedberg: The vast majority, maybe. And do you think the vast majority of this country, if there were two buttons and they had to press one, would press Denmark?
One of the things that I think makes American culture different from Denmark is this idea of individual progress. If you ask the majority of people — you can have that, but you don't get to progress. Meaning you don't get to earn more next year. You don't have a shot at becoming a millionaire. You don't have a shot at building something great. You don't have a shot at buying a second home. You're limited. But you get that guarantee over here. Or — you don't get anything guaranteed to you, but you could have the world. You could make a million dollars. You could own a second home. You could buy a second car. You could pay off your kid's college tuition debt if you earn well. There are more options here.
Steven Bartlett: You think the 63% would pick?
David Friedberg: I think even within the 63% there would be some percent that would say this. But I do think this is why we're headed the way we're headed in the United States. People want more of a guarantee. The question is, do you want to maximise the number of people that are happy, or do you want to maximise the number of people that are truly free? And being truly free increases the rate of progress across the whole population. That rate of progress may be asymmetric. It may be diffuse — starts with some, makes its way to others over time. I think that's what America has chosen to be for the last 250 years. I'm not sure we're choosing to be that for the next 250 based on what's going on across the country right now.
Steven Bartlett: Maybe because people aren't happy, and actually maybe that was always the more important thing versus progress.
David Friedberg: Important in an aggregate way. Again, I'll come back to the individual. We choose to live in a society because it gives us that foundation — that ability to have the safety, the security to take risk, to make our own decisions, and potentially build a media empire as you have done. And maybe you would have been happy in the other context where you didn't have that, but would you have reached your potential as a human?
Steven Bartlett: I'll be honest, I'm not sure I would have been happy, because again, that goes back to my own nature. It's just the way that I am. If you put me in a room, I'll try and create something and build something. But I've come to learn with time that not everybody has that bias or those desires. Not everybody has that lottery trauma from their childhood of being the only black kid in an all-white area and thinking money was really important and it was freedom. Not everybody has that. So I realised that when I design solutions, they shouldn't probably be designed for me.
David Friedberg: The challenge with America in this moment is — can you give what you're describing, the Denmark answer, to enough Americans without taking away the liberty that the Americans who want that liberty have today? And I'm not sure the answer is yes. As soon as you start taking private property from these people, the ones that are successful, then you're taking away the incentive for them to be in America.
Steven Bartlett: And I'm seeing that. I see people wanting to leave. The UK is quite an interesting example here. One of the big subjects of conversation in the UK is that the millionaires are all leaving in high volume. They're going to Dubai or they're coming to America. A lot of my friends that are building technical companies in particular have come over to America. And I do think we might have a bit of a spending problem, but also a bit of a productivity problem in the UK.
David Friedberg: Well, do you think the productivity problem is related to the spending problem?
Steven Bartlett: Oh, yes, of course.
David Friedberg: Right. If you're collecting checks or getting services provided to you, the incentive to be more productive as an individual goes away. But also as a system, it becomes a lot harder to create economic incentives for productivity gains when tax rates are very high and you don't actually get to reap the benefits of the risk you take. That's the economic argument.
AI and the jobs debate
Steven Bartlett: This kind of ties into the subject of artificial intelligence and where it all fits, because the narrative of artificial intelligence is that it's about to take our jobs. And you think about that backdrop — I'm already struggling, I'm in the 63%, and now you're telling me I'm going to lose this job that's paying me and I'm already living hand-to-mouth. And what's the offer? We might get UBI. We might be sent checks in the post at some point. Well, actually, I like my job. It's a community, a sense of purpose. It gives me something to do. And that's the narrative.
David Friedberg: Yes, that is the narrative. But this narrative that AI will take jobs away — I don't believe it.
I recently pulled up — and you guys can go to archive.org — there's a Newsweek article about computers taking all the jobs from 1963. So the mainframes were what got put in the basement in the '60s, and everyone had to walk past the scary mainframe on the right, blinking lights and buzzing and making sounds. And it's like, the mainframe is going to destroy all the accountant jobs, all the typing jobs, all these things that we all do that we get paid to do. And I like working in my office. I like my colleagues. I like coming in every day having lunch. That's a good life. This mainframe is going to ruin my life. And so there was this effort to legislate against these things at the time that didn't get through in Congress.
And then in the '80s there was another wave on computing where it was like, hey, now we're all getting desktop computers, it's going to replace the workers. So empirically — meaning from data, from evidence over all periods of technological revolution like this — we've never seen jobs decline. We've always seen jobs go up and we've seen demand go up and therefore incomes rise when new technology enters the workforce. That's because the new technology makes an individual more productive, so they can do more per hour with their time, and as a result they can get paid more for doing that work.
So imagine instead of having a painter painting a wall, what if he was in charge of the five robots that are painting the wall? Now he's going to get paid more because you can get so many more homes painted in a day. People are going to be like, well, there's only so many homes. That's always the argument — the fixed pie argument, that the pie doesn't grow. But what always happens is that the pie grows. The economy grows. And so as automation or technology is used to give individuals more leverage to do more things with their time, then more things get done. People come up with new product ideas. Hey, we've got excess capital. Let's build new homes. Let's build a building.
Steven Bartlett: But who benefits from the expansion of that pie?
David Friedberg: In all cases, there's been deep economic value created for the entire workforce, all the way down to the lowest level. It doesn't happen overnight. And that's where, during that period of time when you see the new technology — oh, the mainframe's in the basement, or the desktop computer's on my colleague's desk, and you're like, oh my god, I'm going to lose my job — to the time that your company is growing considerably in revenue and giving everyone raises and bonuses and adding more product lines and doing more stuff, you're like, okay, I feel better. And I think that would be the argument from the '60s and '80s and even back in the industrial revolution.
The question today is how does work change? In the industrial revolution, people moved from farms — 60% of labor was in farming, today it's like 2% — into factories, and they got paid a lot more and they lived a better life. The transition in any sort of technological revolution is net beneficial for all parties involved. But there is a transition.
Are we all going to lose our jobs? AI is definitely different, but I don't think that AI is this world where humans are going to look around and be like, none of us have anything to do anymore. I don't believe in that narrative. And the reason is I already see extraordinary creative things being done with AI that were not possible years ago. People are creating TV shows — one person — that they would have needed a staff of 20 people to do. They can use AI to create AI-generated content and put these shows out on YouTube or TikTok or Instagram. As this stuff gets better and better, the creative output of people using AI on creative channels where we're all consuming media is only going to go up, and people are going to make money that they weren't able to make before from that output.
My ability to do work — I don't have to think about my four hours a day that I'm writing documents today. I can get all that work done in 10 or 15 minutes and then I can spend the other three and a half hours doing other things that create new value for my company.
Steven Bartlett: If we go back to the robot painter analogy — you said a guy might have had five people painting, now they can have five robots painting.
David Friedberg: No, I was saying the guy, instead of painting on his own, can now have five robots painting. And then he can produce five times as much with his time.
Think about what we saw with the desktop computer revolution. Adobe Photoshop came around and everyone was like, oh my god, photographers are out of work because a big part of being a photographer was all the post-editing and cleaning up and airbrushing. And they're like, that whole industry is destroyed with Photoshop. What ended up happening is a ton more media was created and print media was created because Photoshop created leverage to create many more beautiful images. And then all these magazines took off. If you look at magazine circulation, they grew considerably as Photoshop came out, because it allowed much more production of high-value photography.
Steven Bartlett: I think the reason why it feels different is — the industrial revolution example is kind of like physical work moving to cognitive work. That was cognitive work creating a new type of cognitive work. The Adobe analogy — if AI takes the cognitive work, and from what you said about robotics, robotics takes a lot of the physical work — what is this third type of work?
David Friedberg: I think it's cognitive and physical. It's no different than what we've seen in the past. But it doesn't mean that there isn't an individual who's going to program the robot on what rooms to paint, how to paint them, how to do the detailing correctly. The homeowner doesn't have the level of skill that the painter does.
Think about going back 50 years. There was no yoga instructor. There was no dog walker. There was no Instagram influencer. There was no podcaster. There are a million versions of new work that emerged along the way as the internet took hold and people could start to spend their time or market their capabilities in other ways. So I think it's a pessimistic view to assume that robots replace all humans and then humans have no logic, no agency, no capacity for creative work anymore.
I have an optimistic view, which is that AI and robotics enables individuals to do far more things than they ever could have contemplated, and that's going to give everyone much more ability to realise their potential with their agency. Even the podcast — I think that game is going to be significantly disrupted in some part. We ran a test a couple of years ago to figure out if a synthesised voice of me could have the same average view duration as me, and it was just me reading out the stories of founders through history. I did a Steve Jobs episode where it was my voice, AI had written the script, AI had synthesised my voice, so I had no involvement. And the amount of people that got to the end was 40 to 50% of an hour. And they knew it was AI because it said at the top, this is an AI podcast.
So I thought, okay, there is a lot of the informational part of what you and I do — where we're sharing pure information — that will be taken away. However, what I hear through listening to your answer about creators and art is that there will be this irreplaceably human component.
Steven Bartlett: Yoga teachers aren't just telling you yoga. It's also community and gathering in real life and being there amongst other people.
David Friedberg: I think the IRL job is going to explode and I think it's going to be extremely valuable. I always had this view like, oh, coffee shops will be automated. But I actually think the opposite is probably true. I think there will be a premium on coffee shops. I'll pay $40 for a latte because that human is making the latte and I get to go be with other humans. I get to go to a workout class with humans. I get to go spend time at a concert. I get to go spend time at dinners.
I think this live, experiential part of our world that we kind of think about as luxury today — maybe it becomes more core. Maybe it becomes more of how we spend our time. Maybe we spend 30 to 40% of our time in these sorts of spaces and automation is generating income for us and supporting us in whatever pursuit we're interested in in work, and we spend far less time doing work and far more time paying a premium in the live space economy.
Steven Bartlett: It's hard, isn't it? Because we don't know what these jobs are.
David Friedberg: We just don't. Imagine telling someone who worked in a factory in 1923 that fast forward a hundred years, there are going to be people making X dollars as personal trainers, or there's someone who has a job dog walking in their neighbourhood. I don't know if that would have been fully grockable.
Steven Bartlett: But the pace of disruption here seems to be different than the industrial revolution. It's targeting cognitive work. It's built on this platform called the internet.
David Friedberg: I'm telling you, I just don't see it. At my work, everyone's using AI and everyone's just doing more, and then they ask for more employees. You can kind of think about a business having two sides — revenue and costs. Revenue is I'm making stuff and people are paying me for the things I'm making or doing. Cost is how am I operating the business? The argument has always been, okay, you're going to lose customer service reps, you're going to lose all the cost side of the equation. No one ever says you're going to lose the revenue side. The truth is on the revenue side, what ends up happening is you create new products that you couldn't create before because of AI.
Let's say you're a material science company. Your job as a company is to discover new materials, new synthetics that can be used to make microchips or for computing or for travel or for airplanes. The material science world has been challenged by its experimental cycle. You've got to create an experiment, make a product, test it, do it all manually. AI can now screen through millions of material science ideas in a computer, print them out, test them, and you can automate that throughput. Therefore, that materials company can now have more revenue. They can make more products.
Steven Bartlett: Do you not think that maybe there's a possibility that people like me and you exist in this particular band — because we're both founders and we have capital and we're thinking about how to really push intelligence to create new things — and maybe we're not representative? Because what you're saying, I can relate to. AI has probably made me more ambitious about hiring, especially in the near term. I would caveat it by saying that there's a certain type of role that I'm now hiring much less for, especially when you think about entry-level roles. I have to pause a lot more now because a lot of the agents and some tooling can do some of those things that I would have otherwise hired for. But generally, I feel like I'm hiring as fast as I possibly can. But would you not say that for the 21-year-old that's graduated from university, or the DoorDash driver, or those types of individuals — the leap from where they currently are to this new world is so great that there's going to be this messy middle?
David Friedberg: Yeah. But what I'm saying is as new products are created, new revenue comes in, you don't cut costs, you grow costs and you hire more people and you uplevel and you train people. That is what I'm seeing on the ground. We just published one of the lowest unemployment rates in the US. And I think this idea that your current job is going to get disrupted and you're going to lose your job — I don't think that's how the enterprise transitions. Companies transition by doing more things and bringing people up the ladder, hiring more people. And that's just what I'm seeing on the ground.
I think there's a media narrative on, oh my god, there was a layoff at so-and-so company, because it underlines what they've been promoting to everyone, which is AI is going to cause job loss.
Steven Bartlett: The interesting thing is it didn't come from the media. It came from the AI guys.
David Friedberg: Yeah. I listen to the All-In podcast, by the way. It's one of my favourite podcasts. I don't think I've ever missed an episode. So I very much understand your perspective and all of your —
Steven Bartlett: I had no idea you were a fan.
David Friedberg: I've listened to — I've gone on people's shows where they're like, I don't know who you are, and I'm like — it's good to meet you.
Steven Bartlett: I've heard all of this. I've heard Jason's opinion. Weirdly, I tend to side a little bit more with Jason on this because I think Jason's arguments seem to present the most nuance. And also, when we think about different people's incentives — you're right, often on that show it's framed as a media narrative, whereas it's actually all your friends.
David Friedberg: So, first of all, none of them are my friends. But what I will say — look, I've said this on the show, I'll say it again. I think there is a deep arrogance in making these sorts of proclamations.
Steven Bartlett: Which proclamations?
David Friedberg: That we're not going to work anymore. It effectively discounts the human. It's like, what you do today is your limit. But this idea that these jobs will go away is sourced by people that are seeing the crazy stuff that they're doing and they're like, oh my god, this is amazing. I'm responsible for this. We are going to change the world. We are going to take all jobs and they're all going to sit in my computer. I don't think that's what happens, because I think that humans have a profound capacity for doing things that these technologists don't necessarily see. The great technologists see technology. They don't see people.
I think you have to see people — meaning the potential of people, of individuals — and you have to believe in that. They believe in technology. They engineer technology. But I am not going to be pessimistic about people. Humans are amazing. And arguably many humans have been limited in their potential. And I think that AI enables more capacity for those individuals to realise more of their potential.
Incentives, AI CEOs, and the job displacement debate
Steven Bartlett: The older I've gotten, the more I just try and look at incentives to figure out behaviour and also to figure out who to trust. So when I look at the incentives of the people that are building the AI companies — Andy Jassy has said that there are going to be fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and then they cut tens of thousands of jobs. Marc Benioff, who I know has been on your show, cut 4,000 jobs and said, I need fewer heads because of AI. And I think, okay, maybe they're saying that because they want their share price to go up. But then I look at the AI CEOs — Dario, Elon, Sam Altman — and I go, their incentives have just kind of changed with whatever's good for them at that moment oftentimes.
If I go back through the quotes of these individuals — you have Sam Altman in February 2015 saying, "Development of super machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity." You have Elon in 2014 saying, "With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. It's far more dangerous than nukes. Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside societal scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear wars." And that was signed by Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei, Bill Gates, amongst many hundreds of others. Sam Altman in the Senate in 2023: "I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go very wrong." OpenAI's superintelligence letter: "The disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction could be caused by superintelligence." Again, in the Atlantic, Altman said jobs are definitely going to go away, full stop. Dario Amodei in May 2025 predicted a white-collar bloodbath — half of entry-level white-collar jobs gone, unemployment at 10 to 20% within one to five years.
And Altman at the Federal Reserve in July 2025 said whole job categories will disappear, customer support first — that one is "totally, totally gone." And then suddenly the message changed before his sort of pre-IPO discussions. He said things could go pretty wrong, and then he says he now has changed his mind and he's delighted that he feels like he was wrong, and suddenly he's talking about how OpenAI and ChatGPT will benefit all of humanity. Should we trust the same people that told us to be scared when they say don't be scared?
David Friedberg: First of all, I think there were a bunch of companies that said early on that they were cutting all their customer service reps — the big company that starts with a K.
Steven Bartlett: Klarna. But I did call the founder.
David Friedberg: And what did you find out?
Steven Bartlett: He said that he's been misinterpreted in the press. I've actually called him live on this show. He said that the media just completely misconstrued it. He said he had 7,000 employees by the end of last summer. He said he had 3,000, but the media framed it as I had 7,000 employees and then I tried to cut some, I realised I couldn't, and I went back. That's not what happened. And I see it on all these podcasts and I'm just repeating it. I heard it repeated on your show.
David Friedberg: But he said we are cutting because of AI.
Steven Bartlett: Yeah. And he's confirmed that he's doing that. He's DM'd me on X. I've got the DM, and live on this show he confirmed it to all of our listeners.
David Friedberg: Is his business still growing?
Steven Bartlett: The business is growing. What he did say, and this is a point of nuance, is with the cost savings, he's able to offer better white-glove services to his highest-ticket clients.
David Friedberg: Which makes a lot of sense. And you could think about that analogy being in another business where they would take that capital, invest in offering new products and new services, but then you need employees to offer those new products and new services. And so you do actually hire up. And while he may have this acute restructuring he's doing on the ground, I just see people hiring more because they can do more with AI. It's counterintuitive, but if you're a business manager you can invest $10 and make one product a year, or you can invest $20 and make five products a year. You're going to invest the $20 to make five products a year. You're going to spend more. And I think that's what AI does. As soon as you have the ability to get leverage on how much more productive people are, you'll put more capital towards hiring more people and scale up.
And look, I could be wrong and all jobs go away in five years and we have 20% unemployment. I don't think that's the case. I think there's going to be a big growth in media, a big growth in entrepreneurship, and a big growth in IRL stuff.
Steven Bartlett: This was five months ago. I'll play this interview. Klarna has always been mentioned because I think the media has said that you doubled down on AI and then you reversed because it didn't work out. So I know I spoke to you a while ago and we exchanged a couple of DMs about it, but that was almost a year ago now. So I just wanted to get an update on Klarna's business, AI agents, and all of that if possible.
"First and foremost, we were early on, released AI to support our customer service, which had that initial benefit of more calls being dealt with by AI, which customers liked because those calls or chat messages were much, much faster and more qualitative. Then since then that has actually expanded slightly. What we did however try to communicate as well is that we believed in a world where AI is cheap and available, the value of human interaction will be regarded as higher. So the future of customer service VIP is a human. We have hence doubled down on providing more of that. But at the same time, the efficiency gains within the company have continued. I mean, we used to be about 6,000 people and now we are less than 3,000, which is two to three years since we stopped recruiting. And at the same point in time, our revenue has doubled."
David Friedberg: No, this is a startup, just to be clear. I don't know how much restructuring he was doing in his AI-ification of his business. That's totally fine and totally fair. But the question is, what are the people that were doing customer service calls — how many of them were actually fully occupied on the phone? Were they on the phone for four hours a day, two hours a day, or eight hours a day? Were they actually fully employed? I don't know.
Steven Bartlett: And what are they doing now? And is whatever they're doing now defensible again from this spread of intelligence?
David Friedberg: They could be doing DoorDash. I know. They could be lawyers, but they could also be doing DoorDash. And Dario sat here and said that the 9,000 people that are riders won't have jobs.
Steven Bartlett: The ones that are driving food around. Yeah. And drivers. That's obviously all their big investments. I was with him the other day and he was talking about their autonomous vehicle investments.
David Friedberg: What does he think?
Steven Bartlett: He thinks that those drivers will have to do something else.
David Friedberg: What does he think that something else is?
Steven Bartlett: He loosely hypothesised what it might be. It could be data labelling.
Now, let me just go back, because your whole point about AI is going to destroy us all and these guys were making all these claims and then they all kind of backtracked — I think there's an important question to ask, which is, should we stop AI development? And can we? Meaning, can we really affect what China does? Can we really affect what Europe does? Can we really affect what some lab in Indonesia does if they get a group of people together?
There are moments in human history when technology advances and it's not like you can just put the catapult away and say, let's not develop the catapult anymore. Once the catapult's out there, the catapult's out there. So the question is, what is going to enable the most productive path forward for US policy, for US citizens? And China's asking themselves the same question. China's answer, I think, is to make models free and ubiquitous, which by the way benefits a large part of the global economy, but it doesn't do very well for Sam Altman, Dario, Google, or others that have invested billions or hundreds of billions of dollars in model development. And now those investments have been reduced to rubble because China's got a model that's as good or cheaper.
So I think the more important question is, what does the US do to navigate? If we stop data centres, those data centres are going to be built somewhere else. They'll be built in Iceland. They'll be built in China. They'll be built in Indonesia. They'll be built in places where you can get access to energy and plug them into the internet. Now they're on the internet. So do we want those data centres to exist in the US because they're going to create jobs and create economic value, or do we want them to be built offshore? Do we want to have the AI models built in the US or do we want to have them built by China? Those are the important policy decisions.
The idea that you can slow or stop AI development — I unfortunately think at this moment it's too far, too late. The AI is out there. And I do think there's a ton of stories. Look at the number of companies that are doing stuff that you could never do before because of AI. There are delivery companies delivering robots on the ground, robotic cars, drones. Those companies aren't employee-less. There are now 15,000 new jobs being created at the factory that's making the robots, or 15,000 jobs to service the robots because they're breaking down all the time, or 15,000 jobs to get the food made that goes into the robots. The economy doesn't just shrink in terms of jobs. We're just not seeing it in the data. It's not happening.
Steven Bartlett: Let's ask that question. What would have to happen? What sort of metric or piece of evidence would be the signal?
David Friedberg: Job loss. And wage growth. So if wages are declining and unemployment is climbing, that's a red flag. That's an alert moment and that's when we have to address this from policy. But it's very speculative right now. And if you get in the way and you stop it and you stop advancement — the ability to create higher-paying jobs, the ability to create new jobs — and you turn all of that off, it's going to happen in China, it's going to happen in Europe, it's going to happen in South America, and the US gets left behind.
Maybe that's the decision we decide to make. But I would argue that tracking what's the consequence that we're worried about is the most important thing to be doing at the moment.
Steven Bartlett: You might have heard about the study — I think it was Stanford — that showed there was a 13% relative decline in employment for workers aged 22 to 25 in roles most exposed to generative AI. Could it be that by the time we start seeing significant job loss, it's a little bit too late to be having the conversation, because it could be quite a rapid decline given the nature of this technology and the adoption of it?
David Friedberg: No, I think what you're describing is exactly the right time — when we see the first sign. Now the question is, if you dig into that — in software engineering, what's happening right now is young people are not getting hired. You can use AI to write a lot of code.
Steven Bartlett: But in order to be really good at using AI to write a lot of code, you've got to have experience writing code.
David Friedberg: Yeah. And so there's a fight for senior, experienced software engineers and there's disinterest in junior software engineers, because you're not just putting a junior software engineer in a seat to have them write their first line of code, which is what you used to do. With AI you can turn one engineer into a hundred, but the junior guy is not going to do that. The senior person is. So you want to hire more senior people, and that's what's happening in software across the board right now.
Steven Bartlett: But more of the operational functions that used to be done by people are also just being done by software. So if I think about it — you might have had a PA whose job was to respond to your emails, check your emails, organise them, and put them in your Monday board. Now, with agents, I have an agent that goes across all of my inboxes every single day, pulls everything into this central system. And I used to have someone doing that kind of work. Now it's a software job. Now it's Claude doing it.
David Friedberg: So now the PA can use Claude to do it.
Steven Bartlett: I don't need the PA. I can just do it myself.
David Friedberg: Okay. What else could you use that PA for in your life that you couldn't even contemplate using that PA for in the past?
Steven Bartlett: At the moment, it's real-world stuff. I probably would have continued to hire more in that team, but now I don't need to because I've got this agent that does my scheduling.
David Friedberg: What are you going to do with the money you have? The extra money you have that you're not spending?
Steven Bartlett: This is a good point.
David Friedberg: And then that money you're investing. You're not going to just put that money in the bank and leave it as cash. You're going to invest it in something.
Steven Bartlett: I could invest it in assets.
David Friedberg: What's an asset? It's either a productive or non-productive asset. If it's productive, it's employing someone. It's doing stuff. You could theoretically go buy the S&P 500. And when you buy the S&P 500, that money goes to individuals that are now going to be able to employ more people. That capital finds a way to get spent. It goes into the economy. And that's my point. This is why economies grow when technology shows up. The leverage you got gave you more capital. You could either build a new product and hire more people to do it here, or you could choose to go buy the S&P. But when you buy the S&P, that money ends up in other people's coffers, and they're using that money to hire people and do new stuff. At some point, the whole point of the economy is that money flows, and that money is going to ultimately flow into individuals that are productive.
Steven Bartlett: Do you not think a lot of it's going to flow disproportionately into the billionaires and the most wealthy that are building the robots?
David Friedberg: I am a huge advocate for open source for this reason.
Open source AI and the democratisation of technology
Steven Bartlett: Open source. What does that mean for Janet and Dave who might not know what that term means?
David Friedberg: Open source just means that the software is free for anyone to use. If you go back to the early days of the internet, Netscape made server software and a browser. In order to produce a website, you needed to pay for Netscape software, install it on a server, pay Netscape a fee for that software, and then you could create a website. And if you wanted to browse the internet, you got to pay for Netscape Navigator. Charge, charge, gatekeeper, gatekeeper.
And then what came along? The Mozilla Foundation made an open-source browser called Firefox. And the Apache Foundation came along and made an open-source web server. And now anyone could download Apache and make their own website and plug it into the internet and it would be available to everyone in the world for free. And anyone could download Firefox, go on their computer, and browse the internet for free. Open source then enabled all the entrepreneurs that built websites that made money to proliferate. They weren't gatekept.
The idea in AI of open-weight models — open-source models are free. So now you don't have to go pay Anthropic or Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT for AI. You can actually use this AI model for free and no one's making money off of you using it. There's no one getting paid. The only cost is the cost of finding a computer to run that model. So you could have your own computer, you could rent one, but that cost is coming down like crazy now too. This is why technology without government intervention is so amazing. It always gets cheaper and then everyone benefits.
Steven Bartlett: There could be a risk. Is that one of the key arguments of the open-source idea — which is if anybody can download these AIs onto their computer, they can jailbreak them, they can use them as —
David Friedberg: So there are two things that people are fighting about. Number one, government people are saying, hey, that's coming from China, we don't know if there are backdoors. That's not how open-weight models work, by the way. People that are technically deficient don't fully grok what the open-weight model really is. It's not like some backdoor program that you're running. It's literally just a list of numbers in a document. It's just trillions of numbers. That's all it is.
And then some people are arguing, okay, so now that AI is everywhere, everyone has access to it. You can use it to design a cyber weapon. You can use it to design a bioweapon. You can use it to design a physical weapon. The same is true with DNA printing and DNA sequencing. Everyone can buy a DNA sequencer and a DNA printer and they could theoretically make a virus. That exists today. We haven't stopped DNA sequencing. We haven't stopped DNA printing. We don't have constraints around it. Similarly, we haven't stopped people from buying guns in the US.
There's a very good argument to be made that any sort of technology that theoretically could be used to cause harm should be banned and the government should control it and decide who gets access to it. And the flip side is that if it's allowed to proliferate, there's far more benefit than risk, and the risk side needs to be mitigated. That's where you build good defence systems — good cyber defence, bio defence, and all these sorts of things that are critical, especially in a post-AI era.
And that might help the sort of inevitable inequality. I will bet you anything that in the next ten years there will be a billionaire that will emerge that has absolutely zero net worth today, downloaded open-source AI, and built a company that made them a billionaire five years from now, seven years from now. And they're going to be someone that's going to come from nowhere, and everyone's going to be like, wow, look at that. And there are going to be a lot of these sorts of stories. That's what we saw with the internet.
AI and the future of work — agents, restructuring, and the messy middle
Steven Bartlett: When Elon says that working will be a choice, you think he's wrong.
David Friedberg: He's selling robots. But I do think he's right in a sense. Think about how many hours a week you work. You and I are similar in the sense that every moment I can, I work. But look at Denmark — 37 hours a week. What was the average number of hours worked 50 years ago, 60 years ago, 100 years ago in the US, when you did farm labour and you were managing your own farm, or you worked in a factory? There were 12-hour shifts. A lot more work per week was being done. Going from 100 hours a week to 80 to 60 to 40 — that is part of the progress of humanity. We're no longer encumbered by this labour category, being told what to do and how to do it and when to do it in order to get money to pay our bills. We get to this world where we have more capital. That capital is also time. And I've now accumulated the ability to make a choice on what do I do with 40 hours of my week.
Steven Bartlett: You know, we all have a hypothesis about how AI is going to play out. Which is the part of your hypothesis that could quite easily be a miscalculation? How could you be wrong?
David Friedberg: Mass unemployment. But where in my current hypothesis is the weakest part of my first principles that could result in that? The choice that people will make to go to higher-paying jobs, to different jobs that they see an opportunity in, and they make a choice to change. Because I think that's the key to this whole thing.
If you were a taxi driver in New York and you were paying rent on a medallion — a medallion is a right to drive a cab in New York. There was a limited number of them, so the medallions were restricted. New York City said we'll only allow so many cabs on the streets. So the price of medallions went up and up and up. Then Uber came along. You could get paid more and there are more rides with Uber. Uber grew the number of people taking car transportation around New York considerably. And when Uber demand shot up, a lot of these guys said, I'm not going to be a cab driver anymore. I'm going to be an Uber driver. I can make more money as an Uber driver. And the number of Uber drivers grew. Everyone made the choice. They moved. The market found its way. Individuals said, oh my god, I can make more money doing that. I could pick my own hours. I don't have to rent the medallion.
Steven Bartlett: It's a very similar sidestep. And going from being a taxi driver to a taxi driver for a different firm using an app is quite a —
David Friedberg: So I could sit here and pontificate all day with you on this and we'd both be wrong, I'm sure, because I don't know what the leap is going to be for an individual. I think we have to start to pull these stories out of the economy. What's going on?
Palantir put out this promotional video which I thought was quite good where they interviewed a nurse. She's like, I normally spend most of my time filling out paperwork on the computer, but Palantir's software takes care of all that for me. So now I can spend more time doing rounds face to face with patients. It's a better job and it's better for her. I think it was a very poignant story about what AI actually does on the ground.
Steven Bartlett: I think we agree on the fact that jobs are going to get more human in every sense of the word. That was your yoga teacher example. That was the nurse that can spend more time with her patients. And that will become even more valuable, more scarce. My concerns still — or the gap that I have in my head — is how that transition looks, especially at speed. Retraining. You talked about the human agency point. Should we be preparing for such a transition? Because I do believe that, providing there's no existential issues, we'll net out in a better place. But the journey to that better place is still this big question mark.
David Friedberg: I think that's right. And I'm not trying to defend it and say it's going to be a clean, smooth line. I'm just trying to say we are going to get to a better place. We could argue all day long about displacement or dysfunction along the way. Or maybe a lot of people are smiling as they jump to new jobs and try new stuff out and they're like, oh my god, my life's better. I'm optimistic in that sense. I think you're right. We have to track it. And if people are out of work and can't find work and they're challenged in paying their bills, we have a problem.
Steven Bartlett: And what's the solution to that problem? Is it UBI?
David Friedberg: Well, it's going to be socialism.
Steven Bartlett: So in that messy middle, you think we'll adopt socialism if that messy middle does occur?
David Friedberg: Yeah.
Steven Bartlett: And what does that look like in reality? Is it just giving money and free food?
David Friedberg: Well, that's not going to work, but that'll take time to not work. But in the meantime, it'll look great. Yeah, it'll be more checks, more government employment. It's like the government creates jobs to pay people. They're not productive jobs. Meaning, if you get paid $100, do you create $120 of value? No, you're getting paid $100, maybe you're creating $60 or $80 of value. But there's going to be more government payments, whether it takes the form of UBI, government jobs growth, or some other sort of financial support.
Steven Bartlett: That's the direction of travel at the moment. All directions point to more socialistic America. How do you feel about that?
David Friedberg: I don't want to lose my agency. I don't want to lose my capacity, my liberty, my freedom. And I feel sad for people that embrace it, because I think they don't realise that they're losing their freedom in that process too. They're losing their agency. But it's offering them a solution where there is no other solution being offered for them.
Steven Bartlett: But they feel there's no other solution being offered. That's right. But is it also logical to say — if we talk about incentives — that billionaires want to stay billionaires, and billionaires aren't actually as philanthropic as they claim to be, and what billionaires are protecting are their interests? They want to remain free.
David Friedberg: I had a call with Ro Khanna about this.
Steven Bartlett: Can you give context on who he is for a moment?
David Friedberg: Ro Khanna is a congressman from California. He used to be a moderate Democrat and he's kind of pivoted to becoming a hard-left, true socialist. Silicon Valley is his district — California 17. He was asking me why people are so outraged at his support for a wealth tax.
Steven Bartlett: He means billionaires being outraged.
David Friedberg: No, it's not billionaires. It's anyone that has built something and created value. It's entrepreneurs, people that have had success. And he's like, I don't get it. It's just 5% or 2% a year or 1% a year. Like, why do people care? And I'm like, Ro, it's the first time in American history that you're talking about taking something from someone after they've paid their taxes and it's now their private property, and the government gets to decide how much of their private property they get to keep. It doesn't matter that it's 1% or 5% or that they'll be fine. It's fundamental to private property rights. It makes me feel — and everyone can think about this, it's not just rich people — anyone can think about what does it mean to list out everything you own and send it to the government every year and they decide what you get to keep. That's what it feels like to everyone.
Also, financially, it doesn't solve a problem. I'll just give you the statistics. Total net worth of people in the US is $183 trillion. Billionaires' total net worth is $8 trillion. And even if you take it from billionaire down to 50 millionaire — so people that have $50 million or more — the total net worth is $23 trillion. $160 trillion is everyone else. The problem is that the bottom 50% of Americans only have $6 trillion. And the middle — that kind of 50% up to the 50 millionaire — they've got $160 trillion. That's where the net worth is in the United States. It's in that population that people call boomers or Gen X or whatever. The bottom 50% have nothing.
So if you taxed 100% of the billionaires' net worth, that's $8 trillion. That's one year of government spending. One year. It doesn't stop fundamentally. A wealth tax doesn't actually solve a fiscal problem. It creates a system where everyone feels better about taking money from the billionaires. Are the billionaires paying their fair share of taxes? This is the politician's trick. The politician's trick is they say, how much tax did you pay as a percent of your assets versus how much tax did you pay as a percent of your income? Your income is when you sell stocks or when you make money for services you provide. And every year, if you're wealthy in the United States — in California, I pay 53% tax. I pay like 14% in California plus 39% federal.
Steven Bartlett: But you must try and avoid that.
David Friedberg: No, I just pay it.
Steven Bartlett: But I mean, in terms of when I say avoid that — you would rather take it like a capital gains tax, which is lower.
David Friedberg: California — there's no difference. In California, capital gains or income is the same, which by the way should be the case at the federal level if you want to solve this compounding problem. So can we lower income tax in the United States and raise capital gains tax? Absolutely. Can we make income tax lower for people that are working for their money versus people that are earning gains on their capital assets? Absolutely. And we can solve the problem that way.
But by taking their assets — even if you took 100% of the billionaires' assets, that's one year of spending. It doesn't actually solve a fiscal problem. The tax rate is the fiscal problem.
Steven Bartlett: So for these people, the 63% that are potentially championing socialism because they need a solution and it sounds like a solution — make my bills cheaper — what they don't hear from other politicians is a better solution. And this one sounds great.
David Friedberg: This is what's crazy to me. I don't get why all the politicians are fighting against a wealth tax or for a wealth tax when there are literally 15 other things you could do to make this better. Make the capital gains and income tax the same, cut stupid spending at the federal level, and all of a sudden things become more affordable. People have more take-home pay, they can afford more stuff.
Steven Bartlett: But let's be honest, you're not going to be able to cut the spending at the federal level. They've tried that. And because of this whole thing we just talked about — the four-year election cycles — Elon went in, he tried to cut it, he bounced straight back out.
David Friedberg: And I think that to me was the most depressing piece, because I was like, oh my god, Elon's going to go in, he's going to blow up spending, we're finally going to cut all the nonsense out of the spending. And if Elon can't, no human can.
And then I went and visited DC and I went to all these Congress meetings and sat with senators and I was like, oh my god, none of them want to cut it. Like they're all on board with it. This isn't even a party thing. This is just like everyone's doing it. And I'm like, this is the system. This is how it's set up.
The science of aging and epigenetic reprogramming
Steven Bartlett: Slightly changing direction, but linked to AI — I know you work in the life sciences. Do you think we're going to be able to live forever soon, or at least extend life significantly within the next couple of decades?
David Friedberg: I do. And I think the reason is we've discovered the mechanism of aging, which is the most fundamental of human diseases. We have 10 trillion cells in our body. Every one of those cells has a copy of our DNA in the nucleus of the cell. That DNA — segments of it are called a gene. A, C, T, and G make up the little nucleotides, and you put a bunch of them together and that's a gene. What is a gene? Well, a copy of that comes over to a protein printer in the cell called the ribosome. The act is the programming for which of 20 amino acids — three letters is one amino acid — that ribosome takes a segment of the DNA copied as RNA and it prints out amino acids. A sequence of amino acids from that gene, which is defined by that gene, makes a protein. So all a protein is is a chain of amino acids. As soon as it's done printing, those amino acids collapse into a three-dimensional machine called a protein.
So proteins are three-dimensional machines and they do crazy things. There is a protein in your mitochondria that spins 6,000 times a second as hydrogen protons go through it, and that's what makes energy in your cells. That's what makes ATP. It's literally like a propeller, like a turbine in your mitochondria in your cell. It's an incredible machine. There are machines that carry oxygen from your lungs into your cells in your body to give them the oxygen they need to work. There are proteins that do all sorts of crazy stuff. So all that genes are is the programming for making proteins in your cell.
Now, your DNA is not a strand like this. It's actually a small clustered thing. And there are little molecules that sit on top of the DNA that turn a gene on or off. So if the molecule is sitting on top of a certain gene, that gene is off.
Steven Bartlett: Like a little switch.
David Friedberg: Like a switch. Histones. Or acetyl markers. And this is all epigenetics.
So for a given cell, there are genes that are on or off. The genes that are on — those proteins are being made in that cell. The genes that are off — those proteins are not being made in that cell. And that's what makes all of our cells in our body different. Every one of our cells has the same DNA, but our eye cell and our brain cell and our heart cell and our skin cell just have different genes that are on or off.
Those markers that sit on the genes — those little switches — every time you drink a glass of alcohol, or you go in the sun and get hit by sunlight, or smoke a cigarette, or eat some bad food that's burnt, all of these things can cut DNA. And when DNA gets cut, your cell is really good at fixing it. It puts it right back together. This is happening millions of times a second in your body, literally all over your body. Your DNA is breaking and your cell's fixing it. But every time your cell fixes it, there's a chance that that switch moves a little bit. And if the switch moves to the wrong place, suddenly that cell starts making the wrong protein or stops making the right protein.
So statistically, over time — when you're a baby, everything is tuned great, working right, all the right proteins are being made in every cell. You're young. Your skin is not wrinkly. You can run. You can breathe. You can see perfectly. As you're a young person, suddenly you turn 30 and you're like, wait, my vision's kind of fading a little bit. I can't run as fast. I can't breathe as deep. Oh my god, I'm getting wrinkles around my eyes. 40, 50. What happens as we get older is those switches kind of move around to the wrong places. And as those switches move around, that cell stops making the right protein and starts making the wrong protein and it becomes dysfunctional. And if that happens in enough cells, then that tissue starts to misbehave. You get wrinkles. Your heart can't beat quite right. Your retina doesn't pick up light as well. Your hearing starts to go. You can't think as quickly. You can't respond as quickly. That's what aging is.
Aging is the core human disease. And as epigenetics — which is where the switches are on a cell — start to get moved around to the wrong place and that tissue starts to misbehave, we get all these diseases. It could be one of the core drivers of cancer.
Steven Bartlett: Why is aging so even across my body then?
David Friedberg: Because all these cells are suffering the same statistical effect of time as DNA breaks happen in every cell in your body. And as those DNA breaks happen, those switches are moving around at the same rate in all parts of your body. And that's why parts of your body start to suffer. Your young viewers may not appreciate this, but being 46, I'm starting to appreciate it.
In 2006, a guy named Shinya Yamanaka discovered four proteins that you could put into a cell or apply to a cell, and it would basically take all the switches in that cell and move them to the place that a stem cell has — which is basically an embryo in a human. And now that cell operates like an embryonic cell. And you can take that embryonic cell and put other proteins on to move the switches around even more, to turn that stem cell into an eye cell, into a skin cell, into a heart cell, into a lung cell, into a brain cell. So we suddenly developed this technology in the mid-2000s to take any cell and turn it into a stem cell — re-differentiated, it's called differentiation from one cell type to another.
But then years later, another guy said, well, what if instead of putting a lot of that protein on the cell, we just put a little bit? So they took the Yamanaka factors — which are just four proteins — and they put a micro dose of them on a couple of cells, and the switches started to move around, but they didn't move back to being a stem cell. What happened is they moved back to being a young version of that cell type. So the eye cell basically became a young eye cell. The skin cell became a young skin cell. The heart cell became a young heart cell, by putting a small dose of these proteins.
So it turns out that these proteins kind of move the switches around. And if you put just a small amount of them on, you can move the switches just back to their right position. That's now called epigenetic reprogramming. That's this new area of science that seems to indicate — and they've now done it in mice, where the mice can live to the equivalent of 100-plus years old. They've put it on the tissue of monkeys and gotten rid of the wrinkles. We now have David Sinclair — one of his companies did the dosing in the retina to reverse blindness in people with retinopathy.
So this epigenetic reprogramming is an entirely new lane of medicine that says, not just can we address all of the downstream effects of aging, but can we go to the core? Can we reset aging in all these cells in the body? And the answer so far is yes. The risk is if you reset it too much, it becomes an embryo and it turns into cancer. So that's what everyone's been working against in the last couple of years — how do you put the right dose of the right proteins in the right cells to get them to reverse their age and become young again?
And the path — it's really just an engineering exercise at this point, as opposed to a biological proof of concept. The science is there, the foundation is there. We're just doing the engineering. So I am extremely excited and optimistic about this work. It seems very likely that in the next couple of years, we're going to have more human therapy trials that are going to not just address the core of aging, but they'll start to put in — like they did with the eye — maybe reverse wrinkles, maybe improve cardiomyopathy, improve the heart tissue. I think there'll be a lot more of this sort of thing coming to market over the next few years.
Steven Bartlett: And AI is going to play a role, I assume, in accelerating this, because you can theoretically make new discoveries and run the tests faster.
David Friedberg: Just to help provide some context on what goes on in a cell — you can think about a cell as having about 10 billion proteins interacting with each other, building things, breaking things, creating new molecules, creating new proteins, interacting, interacting. So the proteins are these machines, 10 billion of them in a cell. If you assume each protein is the size of a human, the cell would be the size of Manhattan. So now imagine a city the size of Manhattan with 500-storey tall skyscrapers and 10 billion people living in these buildings, going back and forth, building stuff together, talking, making babies — and assume they just do this for 80 years, all these humans interacting, 10 billion humans in Manhattan for 80 years non-stop. They don't sleep and they just keep working. That entire set of interactions is one second in one cell. That's how complicated biology is. And we have 10 trillion cells in our body, and those cells are all shooting out proteins and messages to each other all the time.
To answer the question — AI allows us to build models to better understand what the heck is going on and to make predictions about proteins we could put into the cells that can affect the outcome of changing the epigenome on that DNA, without us having a deterministic understanding of what's going on. So with AI, I can come up with a million different ideas for a new protein. I can test it in silico — how it would interact with other stuff, meaning on computers. I could see what happens. I could see if it actually has the same sort of effect as the other protein. Would it be more efficacious? And then I reduce my candidate list down. And I take that candidate list and I put it in a lab. And now the labs are being automated. And I can test it on cells and see if it's actually reversing aging. I can test it in models. And then I take that candidate and now I've got a probability of success in 10 years that instead of being 1% is now like 75%.
That's the way AI plays a role in life sciences discovery. And it's transforming not just epigenetic reprogramming, which is this whole big avenue of medicine now, but it's transforming every aspect of biology and our understanding of life sciences. Where we can use AI to make these simulations and have a better understanding of what these complicated, incredibly immense interaction sets look like — versus me needing to be a scientist going, oh, I got a good idea, let's try that, okay, five weeks later, okay, another good idea, let's try that. All of that gets reduced to silicon.
Steven Bartlett: And are you using your own model? Are you training your own AI or are you using some of the publicly available frontier models?
David Friedberg: In my world we use both. So we take our own data and then we build our own predictive models from it, and then separately we use off-the-shelf life sciences models, and then we also use some of the general models. So it's a great combination. And to your questions and talking about AI earlier — oh my god, the stuff we can do is unbelievable and it's mind-blowing. And we're hiring more people because of it. So it's not like AI got me to get rid of jobs. It's like the frontier has gotten so much wider. That's why I'm so optimistic about AI not destroying jobs, because all I see is opportunity — with new companies, new ideas, new pathways, new things, new breakthroughs in sciences, in materials, in engineering. Things that we could have never ever tackled, we can now tackle with AI.
The great lies of American policy
Steven Bartlett: It is a persuasive argument. Okay. So, what are the great lies in America in your view?
David Friedberg: If you go to any college with any degree, you're going to have a great job waiting for you at the end. Okay? Number one.
If you buy a home, you've achieved the American dream, and all of your assets should be in that home. Okay?
Social security will take care of you when you get old and it's a fair system. Everyone should have ownership in stocks — that's the truth about that lie. Because all the money that went into social security went out to the government to pay bills and it wasn't actually kept in the trust. And as a result, social security is going to go bankrupt. So social security was one of the great lies — you'll be safe and protected when you retire.
Steven Bartlett: Those are three great lies. Is there any more that come to mind?
David Friedberg: Public pensions — it's the same as the social security lie. When you put money into a pension plan — that's called a defined benefit plan — when you retire, you're going to get $1,000 a week or whatever it is, and every paycheck some money is taken out. The idea is that the accountants and the investors will do a good job investing that money for you and you'll get your benefit at the end. If they don't do a good job, then the pension plan is bankrupt and you don't get your retirement check. And if they do too good a job or you put too much money in, then the pension plan is overfunded and you should be getting more money out than you're actually getting.
So what companies realised was that pension plans are unfair — they either go bankrupt or they're overfunded. That's when everyone moved to 401ks. And that middle class we talked about earlier, those people that have $160 trillion of assets — the reason they have $160 trillion of assets is because a lot of them had 401ks. Meanwhile, the bottom 50% of people that are just relying on social security were making less than 3.5% a year on their money. So that's the great lie — that these public retirement funds would take care of their people.
Steven Bartlett: Is there a fifth great lie that comes to mind?
David Friedberg: I actually don't have a great answer for you on healthcare. I think that there's a moral obligation on healthcare. So I do buy into this — in a civil society, I could make the libertarian argument but I won't, because I do think it's probably the right thing to say that in a civil society, no one should be without healthcare. How do you make that work where the government's paying bills and the costs don't just go through the roof? That's probably a six-hour conversation and it's very technical on what you have to do to make healthcare accessible. And it's definitely got to be a multi-tiered system.
US foreign policy, Iran, and the limits of military action
Steven Bartlett: I guess one of the things I was curious to get your take on — because I've not really heard you talk about this a lot on the All-In podcast — is your view on everything that's going on with this war and the situation there. I'm not sure if this is within your area of expertise, but it appears that the US is now stuck. It's a quandary. I read Ray Dalio's piece a few weeks ago, which I thought was exactly right. The Chinese make their influence known in the same way that you would read about it in Sun Tzu's Art of War. If you have to go to war, you've already lost. And that's a big difference between how the US behaves and how China behaves. If you look back on the track record of presidents' decisions as it relates to foreign policy in the United States over the last couple of decades, there have not been a lot of good actions that have ended up in a good place.
David Friedberg: I think China has this capacity for influence without action, which is a really interesting model to observe. And the US has this — I don't want to say incentive, but when you go to a general and say, hey, should we go attack these guys? The general spends the whole time training to attack the guys. And then you have a national security council and you have advisers and all this sort of stuff, but there's a priming in the US that I think maybe plays out in a way that maybe we take action when we shouldn't always be taking action.
Steven Bartlett: China's position there is only possible because there is a dominant force that is running around trying to police everything. So they can kind of chill and let the US go police all the problems and wars. Their military capacity is pretty impressive, but it's untested at scale, I guess, is one argument you can make against that point. China's got a lot of economic gamesmanship that they do. We'll give you cheap stuff. If we can get these things from you, we'll keep an eye on you if you need help. There's a lot of stuff that doesn't require direct kinetic action that they can kind of get things done.
In terms of the US's position in Iran right now, it appears there's a threat to oil — in terms of the price at the pump — and I think the US oil reserve is down to a couple of weeks.
David Friedberg: I want to say this is on the order of 24 million barrels in the SPR.
Steven Bartlett: So at the G7 summit in France, President Donald Trump addressed the precarious state of global oil inventories following supply disruption. He said, "We run out of reserves at about four weeks. You know, there are reserves all over the world and we would really run out and there'll be a time when you wouldn't be able to get it. It would be bedlam." And this was just as I think this was the explanation as to why he signed that with Iran.
David Friedberg: Mm-hmm. So I mean, if this is true then something needs to happen. But again, it doesn't appear that Iran have much of an incentive now — you've decapitated the leader — to do really anything. They can kind of wait out. Game theory is Iran knows that the US can't do much more.
Steven Bartlett: Yeah, we're going to do — drum roll — bombs, right? And well, I mean, Iran's now threatened Arab neighbours with retaliation against their energy infrastructure, which would be devastating to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE. So at this point, it seems like a bit of a stalemate — the US can't act for fear of the retaliation and the impact it would have on America's actual allies in the region.
What do you think happens here? Trump straight up news — Iran now have this sort of chokehold on the world it seems.
David Friedberg: I mean, the biggest driver also is the election cycle we're in.
Steven Bartlett: The midterms.
David Friedberg: The midterms. So going into November, this war is deeply unpopular on both sides. And so trying to get rid of the war is the incentive at the moment. It's a tough situation.
Steven Bartlett: You seem hesitant.
David Friedberg: No, I just — I'm not a great guy to opine on this. I just don't know what to do. But just when you look at it from the outside, you see a president that says he's going to bomb, he's not going to bomb, he's calling it off, he's bombing, he's not bombing, he's calling it off, we've got a deal, there's no deal.
Steven Bartlett: And you're flopping around. And I think even that as a behaviour to observe from the outside, you go, oh, okay. Well, let me ask you one question. It kind of makes him unpredictable, right?
David Friedberg: And that unpredictability can in some cases be an advantage. I do think people have made this case that the president's unpredictability makes it hard for people to have a clear path on how to attack. My poker player buddies — their whole poker strategy, the guys who are the best in the world — their whole strategy is like, create randomness in your gamesmanship so that it's very hard for someone to exploit your gameplay. And I just don't know if you know what you're going to get with President Trump. You can meet with him and hear him say one thing and then he'll do something different later.
Steven Bartlett: I understand the merit of that argument. But in this situation, what I'm observing now is he's become predictable.
David Friedberg: Yeah.
Steven Bartlett: In terms of not being able to take any action. Threat, post it, biggest strike coming since World War II, call it off.
David Friedberg: What would you do if you were him?
Steven Bartlett: There's only bad outcomes. So it's which bad outcome am I willing to accept the most.
David Friedberg: And I guess for someone like Trump, I don't know him, but I guess he's probably thinking which one would save the most face.
Steven Bartlett: That's probably the right kind of objective function for him. I think the worst thing is all outcomes in my view lead to the Strait of Hormuz being now basically a tool of Iranian negotiation, and it wasn't before.
David Friedberg: New point of leverage.
Steven Bartlett: Yeah. New point of leverage in that region, which is a powerful point of leverage.
David Friedberg: Yeah. But it may create alternatives. There's conversation about creating other pipelines out to Israel. And so on. So maybe at the end of the day it creates incentive for other channels to be opened. TBD. I do think it's not just about the Iranian programme, but it's like where's all the enriched uranium? That's probably — if you're asking a military adviser — what they're thinking about as the core, because it takes a long time to enrich uranium to use for nuclear fuel like this. So getting the enriched uranium is probably a key objective.
The 2028 election and the political future of America
Steven Bartlett: The next election, 2028, for the presidential office. Do you think a Republican's going to win on the course of how things are going?
David Friedberg: No, I think it's going to be AOC.
Steven Bartlett: You think it's going to be AOC?
David Friedberg: Yeah.
Steven Bartlett: Really? Why?
David Friedberg: It's all the stuff we've talked about. I just think that's the state of the nation. I think that's where people are at. They want help. People feel desperate and they want a candidate that can promise to help make their life better. I think they're less concerned about freedom of movement, the kind of stuff we talked about. I think they're much more concerned about paying their bills and getting healthcare and getting childcare.
Steven Bartlett: You think she's going to run?
David Friedberg: I think she'll run. I think she'll beat Pete Buttigieg and Kamala —
Steven Bartlett: Newsom.
David Friedberg: Newsom. I don't think Newsom's going to have a great presence on a national stage. I think he looks and acts the part but it's going to be hard for him to sell the rest of America. And I think Kamala is just — no one wants to take the risk. AOC is just like a very different voice, and I think this DSA movement has real legs to it because I don't see a lot of young people speaking out against the DSA movement. I see a lot of old Democrats speaking out against the DSA movement.
Steven Bartlett: You see Kamala Harris being perceived as more of a risk than AOC.
David Friedberg: Yeah.
Steven Bartlett: Because she's lost before and they've seen —
David Friedberg: Oh, okay. Yeah. Because she's lost before. But look, what do I know?
Steven Bartlett: It's interesting. I think I've heard you guys on the All-In podcast say before that you think in 2028 it will be a Democrat or a socialist that wins.
David Friedberg: I mean, there's a lot of runway between here and there. And look, I want to talk about the profound frontiers in front of us, because I think there really is this idea — and a lot of my friends have this idea of this golden age hypothesis — that we're entering this golden age and people don't realise we're in it. That AI unleashes this capacity for human advancement.
The age reversal stuff. Right now we have a billion people in the world that are starving. We have hundreds of millions of people dying from curable disease. I think these are the sorts of things that are going to get resolved more quickly than we realise. I think that the productivity gains that are going to arise from AI are not just going to be a battle on does the painter have a robot or not, but it's going to be about all this new stuff that's starting to be realised. Material science is going to have a profound revolution right now. Travelling to the moon, which might seem like a billionaire's fantasy, but ends up becoming a real, true industrial frontier that everyone's going to participate in. There's just extraordinary abundance that arises from the stuff. Not in the sense that we're just making everything that we've had in the past cheaper, but the stuff that's in front of us — the frontiers that all of the entrepreneurs want to pursue, that all of the dreamers see as the opportunity and the hope for tomorrow, that all of the pragmatists are kind of acknowledging is legit for the first time in our history. That's where I think there's a light rising off this horizon. And I feel very good about that.
Maybe AOC gets elected. That's just my view on timing where we sit today socio-politically. But I do think that the light is rising in a way that everyone's going to have a profound change to their lives in the next couple of years. So I am profoundly optimistic. We talked a lot about socialism and government spending and all this today, but my experience on the ground is just like, holy — and there's no stopping it. These amazing breakthroughs are here.
Steven Bartlett: One of the things you learn when you hire lots of people is that in every change or every announcement you make in your company — we've raised money, or whatever it might be — there's a second question which is what everyone on your team is actually asking. What does it mean for me?
And actually, on the ground, talking about being on the ground — it's the 63%. They can't — they look up and they see a trillionaire, the world's first trillionaire. They see AI. They see a job displacement coming. And then they go, well, listen, can't pay the bills. So what's the mechanism for doing that right now, for helping the people on the ground to benefit from the advances in this technology?
David Friedberg: 401ks to own this stuff would be what we need to change from a public policy perspective, so that they all have direct ownership in these things. And they can look on their phone and see how they're benefiting.
I'll tell you — everyone thinks that AI is going to accumulate to two or three companies. I don't think that's how it's going to play out. Everyone's using AI and everyone's using open-source AI now. Meaning every company's going to benefit from AI, which means every company is going to have more money to pay their employees, hire more people, train them up, do other things with them. I don't buy into the narrative that Dario, Elon, and Sam end up having all the value in AI. I think the Chinese blew that up. I think the open-source stuff is the best thing to happen.
Steven Bartlett: Doesn't that mean there's going to be a bit of an economic collapse here? Are we in an AI bubble in that regard?
David Friedberg: If the capex on AI — if the cost to run a Chinese model comes down by some number of fold over the cost to run a proprietary model — I'm going to run more models. I'm going to do it more. And as I do it more, I'm going to need more compute. I need more data centres. I need more things to do that. So that's where it goes.
By the way, on the data centre argument — I totally buy into people's concerns about data centres driving up the cost of energy. The water thing I think is BS, but the cost of energy thing — every data centre should be on its own grid and every data centre should make enough power not just to be on their own grid, but to pump energy back into the grid. If you set that as a standard for every data centre project in the US going forward, you've solved the data centre problem. Because now you're dropping the price of electricity for everyone in America, and these data centres are all off the grid. And then everyone can own those. They can all be in REITs and people can buy stock, and many of those are publicly traded, so they should be in your 401k and everyone can own a piece.
Closing question — ending the federal student loan program
Steven Bartlett: David, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you is: what is one idea you have that is uncomfortable for people to hear, that you don't typically say out loud?
David Friedberg: I think we should end the federal student loan program in the United States, and I think education costs will come way down and the private market will still provide all the student loans that people need. The federal student loan program doesn't discern colleges, degrees, or individual performance. By ending that federal student loan program, the quality of education in the US will improve dramatically and the price will drop dramatically, and more people will have access to higher quality education. I know it's counterintuitive, but that's what'll happen.
It's sort of like Milei removed rent control in Argentina and rents declined. We've propped up the price of education in the US with the federal student loan program. And so if the federal student loan program were replaced by a programme that is accountable — meaning the person that's underwriting the loan knows that that loan has to perform, meaning that that school has to be good or that individual has to be doing a good degree — the market will correct itself. And people will end up getting a loan if they go to get one degree versus another. So if you get a bad degree — pick your basket weaving major — there's no loan available. But if you get a degree in something that might be useful and you're likely to get a job, there's a loan available.
Steven Bartlett: But for those people that can't get a loan because they want to do basket weaving, they're going to have to go find something else to do.
David Friedberg: So they might have to go work somewhere else. The alternative was we put them in $200,000 of debt and then they didn't have a job afterwards.
Steven Bartlett: Is the counterargument also that the most privileged will get the best education — and that privilege can be intellectual privilege or it can be financial privilege — but there'll be a divide between, okay, you guys are all going to Harvard?
David Friedberg: You still have a scholarship system. The scholarship system doesn't change. You still have scholarships and solve for that. And education with AI is changing as well. But there are a lot of these universities that get accredited and they provide terrible education.
Steven Bartlett: Yeah, it's true. Then they just give you debt.
David Friedberg: And then they give you debt. And so you graduate with a degree from whatever crappy university or college, but you assumed that because the government gave you the loan, you were going to have a job at the end.
Steven Bartlett: Yeah. It's a scam.
David Friedberg: It's a scam. It's one of the great lies. Imagine if it was all privately funded. There's plenty of lenders. The amount of money that's going into student loans is actually a small percentage of what's going into home loans. So there's plenty of bank capital out there to fund student loans. So the student loan debt would suddenly become — hey, if you go to this crappy university, we're not giving you $200,000 of debt.
Steven Bartlett: True. I see what you're saying. It would also force people to pick things that were linked to the employment market versus, say, basket weaving. Maybe I'd be forced more into things that had a higher guarantee of return because of the private markets.
David Friedberg: And it doesn't mean — it is a retraining mechanism in that regard. I think this is a great reset that's needed. I don't think you can reform federal student loans. It's just too complicated. But if you shut it down and transition it over time and let the private market underwrite it, you'd have a better path.
Steven Bartlett: David, thank you. Thank you to you and all your co-hosts on the All-In podcast. It's one of my favourite podcasts. So I highly recommend everybody goes and listens to that. I listen to it all the time and it really helps me develop my own perspective on the world. So I really appreciate the fact that you guys take the time to do that amongst your very busy schedules.
David Friedberg: Well, thank you for having me. And yeah, appreciate you coming here today and hopefully we can continue this conversation once we get more of these answers and the fog clears a little bit.
Steven Bartlett: Absolutely. Thank you so much. And I'll link all of your links below for people to go read your stuff. Is there anywhere else in particular people can get more of your content?
David Friedberg: All-In is really where I'm at.
Steven Bartlett: Anywhere else? Follow you on social media?
David Friedberg: Follow me on Twitter at Friedberg. I don't post very much, but that's it.