We're living in an extraordinary moment in history. We are at a moment here in 2025 where we have world historic gamechanging technologies now starting to scale. But America and the world itself are going through huge contortions.

And there's been three previous junctures where Americans have found themselves in this exact place. 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 to you all of a sudden get an iPhone that goes, "Holy 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 it. I'm Pete Leiden. I've basically been following the story of technology and its evolution and looking ahead into how it's going to change the world over the next 25 years.

Way back way back in the '9s 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. And it was in those early days that the founders of Wired picked up on me as someone who 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 people had no idea what was even going on with the internet and literally what's email, what's the web. They had no idea how these goofball startups with names like Amazon were ever going to amount to anything.

And the other thing that was going on there beyond this digital revolution was essentially the beginning of globalization. And so myself and my co-author which was Peter Schwarz wrote a famous iconic cover story at Wired that 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 trying to explain what was really coming.

Now those of us who are in technology and those of us 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.

Let's say like Uber, the idea like, oh my god, instead of a taxi, it's all on your phone and then all of a sudden when enough people show how amazing it is, boom, the entire crew moves over and the old system of the taxi system is gone.

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 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, the last time we saw this, and they tend to come in these 80ear cycles.

But what's amazing about these things is they have bursts of unbelievably widespread innovation that last for 25 years. The last big one was coming off World War II, 1945. 80 years ago, America was on a very similar parallels.

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 and then there had been a crash and you run into the great depression of the 1930s.

Now what that was was the old system of running the economy just wasn't working. And so what happens is you watch these junctures in American society. We get super polarized. For example, there was an America first movement in the 30s. We were on the verge of violent conflict in America.

And then you had the FDR and the kind of New Deal coalition that came out of the depression and they started to get traction. But anyhow, we had to 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 so from 1945 to 1970, we watched the great post-war boom. Many people call it the 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 watched incredible investment in public infrastructure like the interstate highway system and building suburbs. You basically watched the GI Bill and education, building institutions for higher education, expanding it for the boomers. That all happened in 25 years. was a great society.

The whole thing 25 years and then we ran in the 70s. It started kind of getting along in the tooth. Stagflation, oil shocks. But here's the point. Old system had to come down. 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 again. It's 1865. What is 1865? It's the end of the American Civil War.

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. But in the old south, we basically had slavery and they said, "No, we're not going there. We're not going to give it up. We're not going to let go of this old system. We're going to fight to the death on the thing."

And so, this is a good example. Anyone rooted in the old systems that are going down are passionately want to defend that at all cost. Now, the thing that people do not know about the Civil War or 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.

For example, the Homestead Act, which is you gave anybody who went out west 150 acres for free. There was also land grant universities. All these little states started building institutes of higher education to educate average people but also to be pushing scientific understanding of agriculture.

But here's the other progress that was going on. It was technology. It was only after the war that America blew out like 175,000 miles of rail and essentially stitched the entire continent together with this steelbased rails. And essentially we reinvented America in 25 years.

And here's the even crazier thing though. You go back another 80 years, we did it again. 1787 to about 1810, 1815, we had created what is America.

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.

The Enlightenment is essentially a fundamental system change from a feudal society kind of dominated by the Catholic Church and all that 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. Now the reason I'm kind of saying that is that had world historic implications.

That was a building of a civilization that we essentially invented. We humans but we Western Europe in basically a space of 120 years.

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 that is what America's role has been visav the West in every one of those epics.

I'm arguing we have one more crank of that wheel with the arrival of three world historic changes that are happening around us today. And the most obvious one is the arrival of artificial intelligence.

Chat GPT. Maybe you've heard of it. If you haven't, then get ready because this promises to be the viral sensation that could completely reset how we do things.

The arrival of generative AI. With the arrival of chat GBT 3.5 in November of 2022, I think we're going to 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 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 gamechanging technology, a breakthrough, a step change in our abilities that once you cross that threshold, you don't go back.

We're going to watch an explosion of amplification. Our the amplification of our mental powers with digital computers and now AI are going to be very similar to the amplification of our physical powers that mechanical engines initially by steam created the prosperity and wealth of the world that we know now where we're just going to say, "Holy we had no idea this is the world we're in.

This is the first time we have an energy source that is a technology. 100% a technology, not a commodity. We don't have to dig it up as coal. We don't have to tap into it as oil. Why is that important? Because once it's a technology, you can consistently drive down the cost.

And there's a kind of a rule of thumb in manufacturing which if you double the number of producing solar panels, you will come up with about 20% of a drop in cost. And this is the point, it's going to keep getting cheaper.

And the same thing flipping around the same thing with electric cars. People think, well, electric cars are still expensive and whatever. You're not thinking this through because battery technology is the same thing. That's in lithium batteries. We're now getting whole another generations of batteries like solid state batteries that essentially will be a next generation. But the point is the forward motion of costs coming down on clean energies is just beginning. And when that happens, you're going to have what? Abundant clean energy.

basically right around the time that we essentially had our earliest breakthroughs on generative AI which is about 15 years ago. We also had the big breakthrough in what they call crisper which is we figured out a way to cheaply and easily edit the genome of any living thing.

And you just take one example. We now know how to take a cell, put it in a vat, and you can give it the same amino acids and the same kind of nutrients and the same things that a cow roaming around a field for like years chewing on grass would get those same nutrients, the same amino acids, and essentially would produce in their muscles, the meat. That same thing can happen in a vat to actually grow the same cow cell into actual meat. Not like kind of meat, not like plant-based meat that's kind of like meat. It's meat. It's the same cell. It tastes exactly the same.

And what's happened? We've only 25 years ago. It's like 2003 was the first time humans had ever cracked or understood the human genome. Took three billion dollars and it took 15 years to do it. The cost of doing that from three billion had been driven down so far it was a thousand bucks. It's now at the point where it's about a hundred bucks and eventually it's going to keep driving down to 50 bucks or nothing.

It's not just the same level. It is twice as fast. We can now essentially design these things for outcomes that we want to happen cheaply and easily.

So the technology story of today, AI, clean energies, even bioengineering is kind of familiar at some level. The next several iterations here though, I think, is putting a bigger lens on what's going on today. And it gets us back to what we were describing is what's happening in America is a once in 80 year reinvention.

And in fact, it's even possible that what's going on here is essentially the early days of building a 21st century civilization. And so when you think about that, you go beyond the technology. That's like the foundation.

And so the next thing up I think from technologies, you start thinking, okay, well, what could you build with those technologies? What kind of an economy would you want to build?

The economic system that the United States has been based on that has worked for essentially the top 10% for sure and certainly for the top 1% has not been working for 80%. And it's gotten to the point where they just have had it.

So, as crazy as it sounds, we could be at a point in the world right now in 2025 where we are watching the beginnings of a shift from financial capitalism born and raised out of the Enlightenment to essentially some version of a sustainable capitalism.

We're going from a world of representative democracy, which was a brilliant move forward, to essentially a digital democracy.

And we're also going to go from a world of nation states, which again was a great breakthrough from empires and colonies of the past, to some kind of global governance that coordinates the 10 billion people on this planet.

That's the level of change I think we're actually heading into. That's the level of change I think your kids are going to be wrestling with. And that's the level of change I think America is going through now. And the quicker we start to wrap our heads around that challenge and and the kind of scala of the invention we're up to, the the better off we're all going to be.