World Football in Qatar is the podcast taking you behind the scenes with all 32 teams at the World Cup.

We're hearing from the players, the fans and people in Qatar, telling the truly global story of the competition.

That's World Football in Qatar from the BBC World Service.

Find it wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today in San Francisco

is a scientist, a technologist and a businessman, but perhaps most important of all, David Friedberg is an extreme optimist.

He gained entry into California's Tech Billionaires Club

by founding and building the Climate Corporation.

His big idea was to harness computing power

to predict weather patterns and offer farmers around

the world real-time advice on how to maximize yields and minimize crop damage.

He sold that business for a billion dollars to the AgTech giant Monsanto.

Since then, he's become a serial investor in technology start-ups, driven by a conviction

that science and technology can and will fix humanity's existential problems, namely the sustainable

production and distribution of food and energy. His optimism about the human capacity to engineer solutions to problems

seems unshakable. But the truth is, some of the shine has come off the tech sector in

California and around the world. There are growing concerns that the giant tech corporations

have become too powerful, that the internet is facilitating the spread of

disinformation and serving as a tool of manipulation rather than empowerment. Maybe the optimism

that human ingenuity will be used to build a better world is misplaced. Well, David Freiburg joins me now. Welcome to Hard Talk.

Yeah, thanks for coming by. It's a real pleasure to be here. You describe yourself as an extreme

optimist when it comes to we humans and our ability to overcome the most fundamental challenges we face. What

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