We're living in an extraordinary moment in history.

We are at a moment here in 2025 where we have world historic game-changing technologies now starting to scale.

Artificial intelligence, clean energy technologies, bioengineering, all here.

We're at the cusp of a potentially a great era of progress.

But America and the world itself are going through huge contortions.

Old systems of the past are collapsing, and new systems of the future are still to be born.

I call this moment the great progression.

I'm Pete Leyden. I've been here in San Francisco for 30 years.

I've basically been following the story of technology, and its evolution, and looking ahead into how it's gonna change the world over the next 25 years.

And my current project right now is looking at the great progression, what I think is gonna be a great era of great progress from now until about the year 2050.

So Peter, let's start off with something nice and straightforward.

Could you just describe for us what was the Long Boom, and maybe what pulled you into this whole topic of human progress?

Well, way back in the '90s when the very beginning of this digital revolution and the earliest days of the internet, there was really only one place in the world that was really all over that.

And that was Wired Magazine.

The founders of Wired picked up on me as a kind of young journalist, as someone who kind of had the same kind of sensibility about the transformative nature of these technologies.

And so they wooed me to work with them in the early days of Wired.

Now, what's interesting about those days in the early part of that was people had no idea what was even going on with the internet,

and literally what's email, what's the web, and there was stuff like that.

They had no idea how these goofball startups with names like Amazon were ever gonna amount to anything.

There was all these naysayers in the mainstream media and pundits in the government that were saying no one in their right mind is gonna put their credit card on the internet.

I mean, we had all these myths from the Wired era of trying to explain what was really coming in the next 25 to 30 years.

And so what was interesting is I was working with the founders there, and we thought in the middle of the '90s, there was a point where someone had to breathe life into what is a digital economy,

how is it different from previous economies?

How could that scale and really make a big difference?

How could it supersede the current, you know, conventional 20th century economy?

And the other thing that was going on there beyond this, the digital revolution, and the beginnings of the internet was essentially the beginning of globalization.

And so those two things that people at the time, the mid '90s had no idea what a big deal that was.

And so myself and a co-author, which was Peter Schwartz, who was probably the premier futurist at the time, he and I worked for about a year it took us to really build out what was essentially a famous iconic cover story at Wired that was called "The Long Boom".

And it was called "The Long Boom".

And it was a history of the future, the story from 1980, which was in our past, to 2020, which was in our future, written in the mid '90s there.

But we told it like we were historians in the future explaining this amazing era of essentially that what we were going through at the time.

Now, not all of it, in the mid '90s, you can't predict everything right.

And by the way, we weren't necessarily saying flat out, it's a prediction.

We were saying, hey, these technologies, these trends, like globalization have the potential to do many, many positive things.

And so The Long Boom was really skewed towards the positive possibilities of these technologies, and this integration of the global economy.

And so what we did lay out there, I would argue, is largely came to pass.

And in fact there's a lot of ways to measure that.

And once we passed 2020, there was all kinds of stories that people kind of checking back on our work.

There were many things that were completely nailed.

We were saying, hey, the doubling of computer chips was gonna continue under Moore's Law for 25 more years.

And it did.

When we wrote this, you know, there were 25 million Americans in the mid '90s on the internet.

And by 2020, we had, you know, 60% of the world. It's 4 billion people on it.

And so anyhow, a lot of the through lines of what we were saying happened.

There were some minor things that didn't happen.

We actually thought humans would get to Mars by 2020.

We thought there was enough energy towards that.

We thought there'd be more progress honestly, on climate change than we ended up in the end.

But we didn't understand the backlash to that the way we've actually been struggling for the last 20 years.

But in general, it was very much a kind of vision that actually people could really see, and it really clicked with people, and it actually energized both the entrepreneurial generation that was building it, like they were inspiring them to fill it out.

And then it also kind of helped people outside the Silicon Valley, and outside the Bay Area, and outside California to understand, oh my God, this is possible.

And if it's possible, maybe we need to get with the program and come along,

This isn't a new story in America and globally.

And tell us how often these epoch resets happen.

Now, to really understand where we are and where we're going, you have to kind of pull back a little bit, and understand, at least from my perspective, how the world works.

And I think one of the things that I think people can really underestimate is how foundational new technologies are to kind of creating essentially the context for a new world.

Now those of us who are in technology and those of us who have been immersed in it, which I have been for most of my career now, can see clearly these kind of incremental stages of these new technologies,

that all successful new technologies go through a technology adoption curve,

that essentially starts out with very few innovators trying it, and then some early adopters who kind of use it.

Then there's a kind of early majority of people that start to think, oh my god, this is an interesting thing.

And then the late majority think, oh my god, my neighbor's doing this way, I'm gonna take on with that, and they grab on.

And then you eventually get to the point where you even get the laggards.

Everybody in the society has to take on, let's say, a color TV set, because you can't even buy a black and white TV set.

Like all technologies have gone through this.

So those of us have kind of are in the technology world, have seen this over and over and over again with technology.

And the key piece of this is tipping points.

When do you go from the slow, slow build of a thing that's kind of clunky and not really working, and these cell phones don't really work, till you all of a sudden get an iPhone that goes, holy shit, this is the most amazing thing in the world, and then everybody needs them.

And what I'm trying to tell you now is we are in the middle of three tipping points that are world historic changes that are happening around us today.

And the most obvious one is the arrival of artificial intelligence.

Literally, this is the biggest technological story I have ever lived through.

It's going to go through the roof of exponential growth, and it's going to hit all fields at some level.

'Cause anything people do with intelligence, you're gonna have to rethink, is the machine gonna do this, or is the human gonna do this?

And then the other thing about it is, if the machines do enough of it, we're gonna, the humans are gonna take the machines to augment themselves and go to the next level of problems, the next level of jobs, a whole nother thing.

Anyhow, that's one tipping point.

There's another tipping point which I won't go into the same detail, but around clean energy technologies.

That solar, which has been this incremental thing, just like you know, the internet or just like AI, going through these stages of still expensive, kind of clunky, not really taken off, has taken off big time in the last 10 years.

And that thing is hitting tipping points around the world, and it is going to exponential growth.

And there's some other ways we can talk about later about bioengineering and synthetic biology, which is more complicated and a little bit later than that.

But it is getting to the point now where we can see in the next 25 years, we're gonna be able to engineer all living things.

And so these are huge shifts in our technology.

And so getting back to the bigger picture, what we're talking about is once you give essentially a society, an economy, a society, a people those kind of technological powers, it starts to essentially force a transformation of the economy, society, and just how things work.

And so the old system, how we did it all through the 20th century, and how it had worked really well, and how all these people were kind of tied into that are essentially invested in that thing.

But that thing is getting dysfunctional, it's getting along in the tooth.

And this goes everything from carbon energy technologies, which is causing climate change, to essentially government bureaucracies that can't work like they did, you know, over the last 80 years getting increasingly difficult to work.

So you're watching an old system being essentially dismantled or having to come down, at the same time as we're taking off on these new technologies to build the next systems.

We're in the middle of that.

Right now is smack in the middle of that in our era,

but we've also seen this in American history before.

There's been other areas where this exact thing has happened.

We can kind of learn from them if we look back.

There's been three previous junctures where Americans have found themselves in this exact place.

Now that's not to say it's common.

Like you know, this is 80 years ago last time we saw this.

And they tend to come in these 80 year cycles.

Many people might think, why 80 years?

What happens every 80 years?

Now, there's a lot of things going on here.

One is there's usually a set of new technologies that are ready to take off that are essentially not under development, but are essentially about to scale up.

And that you can go back in history and show how that happened in every one of these 80 year junctures.

There's also a kind of economic reason of how essentially economies boom into long booms of technological booms, but also economic booms and then they die out.

But the one of the main reasons is essentially that comes up to a essentially a changing the guard of generations.

And so there are some lessons you can learn, some patterns you can see there, and some lessons we could learn that'll help us kind of understand what's really going around today and what we need to do going forward.

The last big one was coming off World War II, 1945.

It is exactly 80 years ago from 2025 where we are here.

80 years ago, America was on a very similar parallels.

And there's a bunch of parallels around this.

One, we had basically were watching the essentially dismantling of the old world that had been working pretty well, the economy and societies of the west.

There had been a wave of new technologies, there had been a boom around that.

And then there had been a crash in the great crash of '29, and you would run into the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Now what that was was the old system of running the economy just wasn't working.

Huge inequalities, all these kind of problems around that.

So you were watching essentially the need to fundamentally reinvent the economy.

But before we get to the new system, you get to the other pattern of all these junctures.

You get extremely high passionate politics.

And so what happens is you watch these junctures in American society, we get super polarized around two visions of essentially the way to go forward.

One is let's hang on to what we did, or go back and make America great again the way we did.

And there's another crew that says, no, we gotta move forward and innovate and be more progressive, and kind of drive another progressive era.

And those junctures happen at these times, and it gets extremely conflictual.

And to be fair, the 1930s in America, people forget this part of America, but there was an America first movement that really took over the Republican Party.

There were essentially American level fascists in the '30s, and we were on the verge of kind of violent conflict in America.

And then you had this kind of FDR, and the kind of new deal coalition that was kind of came out of the Depression that was pointing towards a kind of different way to run the economy and the society post-war.

And they started to get traction.

But anyhow, we had resolve this political tension in America, and frankly it had to do it in the world, because the world also is going through this juncture.

And after the war though, we watch the updraft of the next system.

And this is important to know, yes, there's conflict, yes, there's this kind of collapse of the old system, but what's amazing about these things is they have bursts of unbelievably widespread innovation that lasts for, what do you know, 25 years.

And so from 1945 to 1970, we watched the great post-war boom, many people call it the kind of high point of global capitalism.

And you built this crazy economy where you did many things that were completely different than the previous era.

Tax the rich at 90%.

You watch incredible investment in public infrastructure like the interstate highway system and building suburbs.

You basically watch the GI Bill in education, building higher institution for higher education, expanding it for the Boomers, all that kind of stuff.

That all happened in 25 years. The Great Society, the whole thing, 25 years,

and then we ran in the '70s, it started kind of getting along in the tooth, and it wasn't kind of the boom started running out.

Stagflation, oil shocks.

But here's the point, that was a good example.

Within recent memory of, let's say, my mother who is in that older generation, where we watched a very similar thing.

All three of those pieces, old system had to come down, and got, wasn't working, super conflict around it.

And ultimately the building of a thing that was dramatically different than before.

We've been through that before.

And funny enough, like I say, if you go another 80 years back, we did it once a time before that too.

So from 1945, you go back exactly 80 years, and it's 1865.

What is 1865?

It's the end of the American Civil War.

Now this is a good example of how passions run very high, and political conflict is extreme at these junctures.

In the Civil War, it was the most extreme.

I mean we literally had to have 750,000 Americans died in the Civil War.

I mean, you talk about, you know, you think, hey, it's a little edgy now, and we're a little worried about political violence breaking out.

Yeah, we've been there.

I mean we've seen how that happens.

Now, what was going on there?

This is the probably the most easiest way to understand the old systems failing, because America, since the founding, had been in tension with these two economic systems.

One was essentially a system of the early manufacturing economy where you needed free labor in the north essentially to create an economy that's, you know, reminiscent of what we still have now.

But in the old South, we basically had slavery.

And yes, there was a human rights aspect to that, but really it was an economic thing, which is the powers at be, political people and economic powers of the South were absolutely dependent on slavery.

They could not survive together.

We had to bring down finally and fully essentially an economy that was essentially based on slave labor.

There was immoral reasons for that, but there was an economic reasons for it.

We had to stop that.

And when we decided to do that, which is in the 1850s, it started getting clear that we're gonna have to do this.

One side, the South side essentially seceded.

They said, no, we're not going there, we're not gonna give it up.

We're not gonna let go of this old system, we're gonna fight to the death on the thing.

And they wanted to secede.

And then when we wouldn't let 'em secede, they basically, we had the Civil War.

And so this is a good example.

There's a similar system that has to go down, in our era, I'll just say, and let's just call it, carbon energy.

We cannot keep carbon energy going the way we have for the last 250 years of the Industrial Revolution without destroying the planet.

And so what you're seeing through the lens of that same kind of system that must be dismantled, you're watching the similar resistance of anyone rooted in the oil economy, whether it's oil petro-states, whether it's regions of the country that are rooted in that in some of the red states in the United States.

Whether it's, you know, political platforms of like, you know, trying to kind of deny climate change.

The same thing is, it's a similar kind of thing.

It isn't quite to Civil War now, but you can see how old systems that have to be dismantled, there's a lot of people invested in that are very resistant to shifting.

And so that we saw it in the Civil War.

Now the thing that people do not know about the Civil War don't really remember as much about the Civil War is the Civil War after 1865 had an unbelievable explosion of progress that lasted for, what do you know, 25 years.

The what they called the the Republican Party, which was the progressive kind of side of that conflict, not the conservative hold the old thing, but move forward.

They passed some just unbelievable landmark legislation.

For example, the Homestead Act, which is you gave anybody who went out west to 150 acres, for free.

If you just went out there, and basically helped tame the west.

There was also land grant universities where they essentially all these little states started building institutes of higher education to educate average people beyond the kind of Harvards of the East Coast, but also to be pushing scientific understanding of agriculture growing.

So there was a lot of governmental-driven but also economic kind of progress in that.

But there was, here's the other progress that was going on.

It was technology.

The technology of that time was essentially, think of it, one of them is trains.

Before the Civil War, we had trains just like, you know, we had computers before the internet boom.

There are these beginnings of these technologies, but it was only in the Civil War when we started to realize, holy shit, we could really scale these things.

It was only after the war that America blew out like 175,000 miles of rail and essentially stitched the entire continent together across the whole continent,, and stitched every town and everything, cut together with this, you know, steel-based rails.

And essentially we rebuilt America, we reinvented America in the next 25 years.

And here's the even crazier thing though.

You go back another 80 years, we did it again.

So you go from 1865, which is the end of the Civil War, and you go back 80 years.

The late 1780s, we essentially started a 25 year boom.

And when you say boom, it's like a technological boom, it's an economic boom.

It's essentially upward swing of a lot of widespread innovation that America went through coming off the Revolutionary War to create the world that by the end of the Founders Era, after Thomas Jefferson had already been a two term President and all that kind of stuff.

By the kind of, you know, 1810, 1815, we had created what is America, which kind of was then rolling until the Civil War period.

So there was this kind of creation at that side, and then there's another thing about it that people forget is there were loyalists in the fight around the Revolutionary War.

There was a significant amount of Americans who were loyalists, who were fighting for the Crown, who were fighting for the British.

And that had a lot to lose because they benefited from the colonial situation that essentially had been the system, the old system of that time.

And that it was the revolutionary side of the Americans who were trying essentially the progressive side that had to fight in the war.

I mean, we had Americans on the British side.

I mean, we had real debates on this thing on a fundamental level.

And that political debate got settled in the war, and then we basically started the building of America.

So it was really one way to understand what was happening in America at that time was it was part of a bigger part of Western Europe, and particularly an extension of Britain, which was going through the enlightenment at the time, that essentially has global implications.

It was a fundamental system change from a feudal society, kind of dominated by the Catholic church and all kind of stuff, into essentially what we would now consider the modern world.

And they invented six huge things that we still are working within today.

One was they invented mechanical engines.

I mean, that was essentially, we essentially could amplify human physical power like never before by essentially harnessing steam engines to kind of scale up our powers.

That was huge.

The second thing we did is we essentially invented large scale carbon energies, mining coal to actually create giant furnaces to kind of create an industrial production.

That was a breakthrough, and we've gone on to coal, natural gas since then.

Third thing is industrial production.

For the first time we were able to scale at unbelievable scale, essentially the production of industrial goods, which has essentially created the prosperity and wealth of the world that we know now.

We also invented financial capitalism.

Before that time, people couldn't take money, their little gold pieces, and they never, they couldn't trust sending it into somebody in another country that would, you know, protect that thing.

There was no financial capitalism until essentially Great Britain invented it.

And you had a trustworthy system that investors could actually put their money due to the scale of the Industrial Revolution.

The final two things were the nation state.

You know, before that, we had empires and colonial things, but we didn't, colonies, we didn't have the nation state system which they created.

And the final one was representative democracy, which we've mentioned how the United States did that.

Now the reason I'm kind of saying that is that had world historic kind of implications.

That was a building of a civilization, that was an integrated civilization that the world had never seen before, that we essentially invented, we humans, but we, western Europe in basically a space of 120 years.

America took the mantle at the end of that, the late 18th century, 1776 and 1780s, kind of rolling into the 19th century.

The forward motion of innovation, essentially from the west was coming with those crazy ass Americans, who had this wide open continent to spread it to, and had this crazy opportunity to just do whatever the hell they wanted to do.

They didn't have a aristocracy, they didn't have the whole place owned by the old rich that have been in for centuries.

They had a lot of open space to just create and innovate and create new things.

And that is what America's role has been vis-a-vis the West in every one of those epics.

Then Europe followed and kind of emulated and had their own welfare states and various things, and they did, you know, enough innovation.

I don't want to say it was all America, but America was the 800 pound gorilla in driving innovation going forward.

I'm arguing, we're, we have one more crank of that wheel.

And I think the place to look right now for this next big innovation, this next reinvention, not just of America, but potentially civilizational scale invention is gonna basically come out of America.

Again, it's not 100% true, there's a lot of drama and difficulty right now, but I would say if you had to compare us to China or others, I think what you're gonna see is America going through one more level of that scale of change.

That actually drives us right into this next sort of second part.

Let's get into the future that we are sort of currently living in, whether everyone realizes or not, let's start with the one that we are seeing and hearing about constantly, which is AI.

We are in the middle of three tipping points that are world historic changes that are happening around us today.

And the most obvious one is the arrival of artificial intelligence.

The arrival of generative AI with the arrival of ChatGPT 3.5 in November of 2022.

I think we're gonna see that as a world historic moment.

I think people will look back on that is the starting gun of what will be understood as the age of AI.

And I use age in a very, you know, explicit way, which is when you talk about a different age that humans enter, like, oh, the humans, you know, entered the Bronze Age or the Iron Age.

I mean you're talking about essentially a fundamental game changing technology, a breakthrough, a step change in our abilities that once you cross that threshold, you don't go back.

You're always going to incorporate and always gonna use these technologies, and it's going to essentially fundamentally change the world.

AI is essentially the culmination, I would argue, of the entire digital revolution that goes back to mainframe computers in World War II actually, it's really the start of computing, mainframe computing.

AI is now the cherry on the top.

It's like the last thing we really needed to do was to harness all that technology, harness all the digitization, everything, harness the cloud, harness all the things we did over those years, laying fiber optic cables, and wireless networks, and everything, to kind of come to the point where now the computers can actually think,

they can interact with us via voice, and they can do things that we could never do on our own.

So anyhow, that is a big deal.

I just wanna say, and I think if you, once you kind of grok that or really get it, you realize, oh my god, we could start applying intelligence to everything.

And we are gonna start this crazy sorting process between humans and machines now.

That boring stuff or things that are essentially humans are, you know, really don't wanna do, are gonna be done by machines.

And we're gonna take it and invent new jobs that are gonna use that capability to augment us to kind of do new things that we didn't think we could do, and scientific breakthroughs we never thought we'd see.

Anyhow, there's a bunch of sorting going on here, I don't wanna go into those details, but the point is, it's a huge deal that we're crossing here.

And I think because of that, we have to be thinking extremely expansively of what's possible now.

And one of the things I think that's gonna, we're gonna talk about in a recurring fashion is this idea of abundance.

One thing you can say about AI is it is a technology with the potential to create incredible abundance.

And I can explain why in many respects, but let's just, I'll give you one example.

Every knowledge worker and basically every person is essentially gonna have a digital assistant, essentially like an executive assistant who's virtual, essentially AI.

Now, you could say, well rich people or wealthy people, or you know, CEOs have always had executive assistants.