Top White House Advisor: The US Empire Is DYING And Socialism Is Coming Next! | David Friedberg

**David Friedberg** (0:00)
It's inevitable that socialism will happen in America, but I don't want to lose my agency, my liberty, my freedom.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:04)
Do you think the US as an empire is in decline?

**David Friedberg** (0:06)
The answer is yes. I was appointed to President Trump's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. And one of the great lies is that the government will save you. But the more government has tried to create services for people and help bring them up the ladder, the more expensive those things get. 63% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. People can't afford to pay their bills, and it needs to be fixed.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:27)
What will ultimately happen?

**David Friedberg** (0:29)
So all my politician friends are about to chop my head off about this, but...

**Steven Bartlett** (0:33)
David Friedberg, what is the most important subject of our time?

**David Friedberg** (0:36)
AI. We're entering this golden age and people don't realise we're in it. And I don't buy into the narrative that Dario, Elon and Sam end up having all the value in AI. Because in the next 10 years, there will be a billionaire that will emerge that has zero net worth today, downloaded open-sourced AI and built a company that made them a billionaire. And they're going to be someone that's going to come from nowhere. And there's going to be a lot of these sorts of stories.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:55)
But this narrative of AI will take jobs away. You don't believe it.

**David Friedberg** (0:58)
So from data, from evidence, over all periods of the technological revolution like this, we've never seen jobs decline. And the average person doesn't see it. But oh my god, the stuff we can do is unbelievable. Right now we have a billion people in the world that are starving. We have hundreds of millions dying from curable disease. These are the sorts of things that are going to get resolved. Because AI unleashes this capacity for human advancement. And it's transforming every aspect of biology and our understanding of life sciences.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:22)
So I wanted to ask you, do you think we're going to be able to live forever soon?

**David Friedberg** (1:26)
The truth is...

**Steven Bartlett** (1:30)
Guys, I've got a favour to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make this show better. I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much.
David Friedberg, you're someone that graces lots of different subjects. If you were to sort of self-define who you are and what you do, now this is difficult because you've got to kind of put yourself in a label here. What would that label be? How would you self-categorise yourself?

**David Friedberg** (2:18)
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. And I'm a big believer in human agency to affect the universe around us. And that's kind of my core kind of driving motivation. A lot of the other stuff, ancillary is about how do you enable that?
And I think that that's sort of probably where I also spend some time is in the enablement of those things.

**Steven Bartlett** (2:42)
Got a nice cute photo here of that kid that wanted to be Einstein.

**David Friedberg** (2:46)
Yeah.

**Steven Bartlett** (2:47)
And then as it relates to how that manifested into like a professional journey, what's your professional journey been for anyone that might not know?

**David Friedberg** (2:52)
I started in college majoring in math and physics, and then I changed my major to astrophysics. And it was during the time I was in college is when the.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 like an unbelievable, unfathomable amount of money. And so there was this change that was happening in the world. And I got enamored with this idea of businesses and how to 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.