Who is Peter Leyden and why would you subscribe to read the essays in his new series The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050? That’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask about any writer on Substack, columnist for Freethink Media (the company syndicating these essays), or book author before you commit to reading their work.
It’s an even more pressing question when the world is going through traumatic change, with a lot of collateral damage and a highly uncertain future, and you only have enough time in the week to read a short list of perspectives. Who do you read to help you figure out what is really going on today, what is probably coming in the next decade, what is possible to achieve in the next 25 years, and what you should do now?
So, to start this series, I’m going to give you a dozen good reasons to follow what I expect to lay out over the course of the next year. I’m going to help you think through the kind of generic person you would want to listen to at a world-historic juncture when everything seems to be changing, and then I’ll give you something from my background that could help fulfill your need. For those who are only interested in a short bio, there’s no need to read on.
For those who want a deeper dive, think of the subhead on each of the dozen short sections below as answering the same prompt: In a tumultuous time like today, you’d want to listen to…
Someone with experience who has been through a similar juncture before
I kicked off this series last week with an essay featuring the image above, which sums up the whole series and looks very similar to the image that tops this essay. Last week’s timeline spanned from the years 2000 to 2050, putting all of us smack in the middle at the year 2025. This week’s timeline spans from 1975 to 2025, but the curves of the old world dying and the new world struggling to be born remain the same.
The main point of that last piece was that the reason everything seems so chaotic and traumatic right now is that we happen to be living through a highly unusual time. Many of the old systems that we have gotten used to from the long 20th century are breaking down or being dismantled, while the new systems of the 21st century that will take their place are just starting to emerge — and most people can’t really see what lies ahead.
The closest analogy in recent history is what happened during the digital revolution and the opening up of the internet in the 1990s — that’s what is captured in the image at the top of this piece. The internet was a general-purpose technology with the potential to transform all kinds of industries and fields as the technology was perfected and adoption scaled up throughout America and the world. You can think of the blue line in that top graphic as the adoption curve of the internet and digital technologies. The red line represents the old media world of newspapers and television, among other industries that floundered and were superseded during this era.
Today, artificial intelligence is an even more transformative general-purpose technology that has the potential to change how we do pretty much everything in the next 25 years. AI is a much bigger deal than the internet, but some important lessons about it can be learned by looking at how the internet played out.
Someone with proven prescience who has early insights into the future
I came to San Francisco in the 1990s to work with the founders of WIRED, whose magazine was the first to really explain how the digital revolution was going to transform the world and whose online websites pioneered the early web. When I was at WIRED, we were closely watching the developments represented in the image just above and getting increasingly excited by the year.
However, people outside San Francisco and Silicon Valley were deeply skeptical about the significance of these incremental developments. We constantly had to combat pronouncements from the mainstream media and East Coast pundits: “No one will ever give their credit card number over the internet.” “Who cares about a goofy startup called Amazon selling a few books online?” And then when the investor froth of the dotcom boom collapsed in 2000, many gloated that the digital revolution was dead.
We at WIRED in the 1990s understood that part of the skepticism was because people could not see how a digital economy would work after everyone and everything was connected through high bandwidth networks. They could not see what a difference it would make if computers kept shrinking and getting more powerful to the point where you could carry one around in your pocket, so I coauthored a famous cover story for WIRED in the mid-1990s called The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980 to 2020, which later became a book that went into multiple languages.
The Long Boom illustrated what a digital economy, along with a globalized world, might look like by the year 2020. I essentially explained everything under the blue line to the right of the year 2000 in the image at the top of this essay. Most of the major through lines that I roughed out back then essentially happened in those 25 years.
Much of what I did back in the 1990s will serve me well on this next big project. Through The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050, I aim to help you see how a world empowered by AI and other transformative technologies, such as clean energies and bioengineering, could scale up in the next 25 years.
In short, what The Long Boom did for the Digital Age, I want The Great Progression to do for the AI Age.
Someone who deeply understands artificial intelligence
In a tumultuous time like today, you want to read someone who really gets AI. The arrival of generative AI a couple years ago will be seen by those in the future as a world-historic development that marked the beginning of the AI Age. For all of human history, anything that required intelligence had to have a living being doing it. Now we have intelligent machines that are going to do an increasingly large portion of those things. This is giving humans a step change in our capabilities and a superpower that we will now begin applying in all directions to solve the problems of the world.
This is a very, very big deal, and almost no one is thinking big enough about the implications of how an economy and society empowered by intelligent machines will work, so at this juncture, you want to listen to people who know something about AI.
Shortly after ChatGPT burst onto the scene, I hosted and convened a Who’s Who of guests for what became one of the premier AI event series in San Francisco: The AI Age Begins (see the photo of me at one of my gatherings below). At each of these events, I would pose one big question about AI and invite a dozen world-class experts to give their short answers in a meeting of the minds in front of an invite-only audience of 250 other innovators. We captured much of these events, which were held throughout 2023 and 2024, with documentary-style video that you can still watch and learn from today.
From those gatherings, I gleaned new insights into artificial intelligence, adding to a knowledge base that I had been cultivating over the years. I now am considered an expert in AI and frequently give keynote talks where I spend an hour or more explaining AI to business conference attendees and senior leaders throughout America and sometimes Europe.
Someone who is based at ground zero San Francisco and knows Silicon Valley
An increasing number of people all over America and the world might claim that they know something about artificial intelligence, but I would point out that San Francisco is unquestionably ground zero for all things AI right now, and the story is moving fast. The city has become a magnet for technologists and entrepreneurs from all over the world, and every day, night, and weekend is jammed with meetups, hackathons, and parties where the latest developments are endlessly discussed. There is a significant time delay between when something is commonly known in San Francisco and when it is commonly known on the East Coast or in Europe — let alone the rest of the world.
The impact of AI is reverberating through all the other technological frontiers in Silicon Valley and the region, too, and it’s not even the only potentially game-changing technology that will make a huge impact on the next 25 years. Clean energy and climate tech are rapidly improving and will be increasingly important as climate change mounts. The same with bioengineering and synthetic biology, both of which are also rooted in the region. Those who know AI are fanning out into all these other tech worlds to figure out how to accelerate developments across the board.
I’ve been living and working in the San Francisco Bay area ever since moving here to work for WIRED. Over those 30 years, I have built relationships with what has become an extraordinary network of technologists and entrepreneurs, investors and philanthropists, academics and intellectuals, creatives and artists, and other out-of-the-box thinkers that this region tends to attract.
These are the kinds of innovators whom I expect to interview and learn from in the next year as I write this series. I also will be inviting them to join me in my monthly virtual gatherings over Zoom and at my physical gatherings at Shack15 each quarter that I will be doing in partnership with Freethink Media.
Someone who came from the heartland of America and knows that life
On the other hand, you might be suspicious of someone who has spent his or her entire life in the tech bubble of the San Francisco Bay Area or only ever lived in the megacities on the West or East Coasts.
We are entering a very traumatic transition time for all Americans, and things may well get more traumatic with more pain and suffering before they get better. The better future that you want to hear about has to attempt to be better for all Americans and not just the elites on the coasts.
I was born and raised in the middle of the heartland of America, in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. I grew up in a typical Midwestern, middle-class family as the oldest of four kids. All three of my siblings and their families still live there, and my 95-year-old mother is still alive in the house where I grew up and that I still frequently visit. I grew up in a big extended Catholic family that spans the gamut of classes and professions and political beliefs.
Every time I write something, I think about how someone back home would think and feel about it — and what feedback they will give me when I next visit.
Someone who has lived and worked in the red states of the Deep South
The other glaring divide in the United States right now is between blue states and red states, and that divide seems to be growing into a chasm. You want to read a writer who can draw on experiences living and working in both worlds as he or she tries to think through a better future that works for all of us.
I’ve lived for several years in the Deep South, first working on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico off the tip of Louisiana for an oil company based in Houston. I also worked my first journalism job as a general assignment newspaper reporter working in Birmingham, Alabama. Every day for a couple years, I would interview people in all walks of life in neighborhoods and cities across that state.
I came to appreciate the differences as well as the many more similarities between most people from the red and blue worlds.
Someone who has studied at the highest levels of academia on the East Coast
You might want to listen to someone who has taken advantage of the best institutions of higher education in America and excelled in multiple fields against the smartest students in the country.
I graduated with the highest honors as summa cum laude at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, after designing my own interdisciplinary major in intellectual history. I set out to read all the great books and understand all the key thinkers in Western civilization since The Enlightenment, and that required essentially doing a triple major in history, literature, and philosophy.
I had a full-ride scholarship for a PhD at Columbia University in New York City, but I left that program after gaining a master’s degree in comparative politics because I did not want to deeply specialize but rather learn about a broad range of things. After taking another master’s degree at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, I left academia to cover a succession of many different beats.
Someone who has founded and run multiple businesses in the real world
Maybe you are not impressed with academic eggheads and would rather read someone who has worked in the real world and knows how to run a practical business, raise money, meet payroll, and sell things.
Following my first career in journalism, I founded and ran three different businesses, two of them media startups backed by investors from Silicon Valley. Next Agenda helped pioneer the early days of web video leveraging YouTube, and Reinvent helped pioneer the early days of interactive group video (or what we now know as Zoom).
I most recently founded Reinvent Futures, a strategic foresight company that I use to advise senior leaders on the four questions that started off this essay: what’s really going on today, what’s probably coming in the next decade, what’s possible to achieve in the next 25 years, and what they should do now.
Someone who has worked in politics and government in Washington, DC
Maybe you think that knowing about business is not as important as knowing something about politics and government in 2025, given the rise of President Donald Trump and the dismantling of the federal government by the Trump Administration.
I worked full-time in politics and government for a full four-year cycle from 2005 through 2008 to help those in Washington transition their worlds for the first time to digital technologies and the internet.
I co-founded a political startup called The New Politics Institute where each month for four years I would take a top technologist from Silicon Valley to Washington and do at least one public event followed by individual consultations with leading Democrats and their progressive allies.
I would do things like go on a retreat with Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats and explain to them what Facebook was, or how to use a Google Ad, or why they might want to use text messaging to raise money (sorry). I would do similar things with Chuck Schumer and the Senate Democrats.
I ended up as part of the movement that helped elect Barack Obama following his historic 2008 campaign. In fact, I served on his Technology and Media Advisory Board and learned a lot about politics and government in the process.
Someone who knows China and Asia and has lived and worked there
But what about China? How can you write about the next 25 years without knowing something about China?
I actually covered China as a foreign correspondent in the late 1980s while based in a bureau in Seoul, South Korea. I mostly worked as a special correspondent contracted to Newsweek, but I filed stories for many American newspapers.
I was reporting and writing stories in China right after the Tiananmen Square massacre of students in Beijing, though I was covering the region of Tibet, which was under martial law. I even got arrested and spent time in a Chinese jail for taking photos of a crackdown on Tibetan protesters.
I also spent quite a bit of time in Japan and traveled widely through all of Asia while the entire region was entering the early stages of the economic boom due to globalization.
Someone with a global perspective who has traveled widely throughout the world
What about Europe or all the developing countries across the globe? I have visited more than 50 countries in almost all major regions of the world over the course of my life and career so far. As a young man I spent a couple of years as a global traveler, often hitchhiking through developing countries and making my way through half a dozen war zones.
I traveled all the way down Africa from Cairo to Capetown, moving through a South Africa that was still under apartheid. I traveled through a war-torn Central America, hitching from the Sandinista’s Nicaragua all the way back to Chicago. I traveled to Moscow and Eastern Europe back in the days of the Soviet Union, and I spent time in the Middle East.
I’m married to a Brit, and my daughter is half-European, so I have spent a lot of time in Europe and know that region very well. Every time I write an essay, I consider how my in-laws in Europe will read it.
Someone who is a great writer and knows how to communicate to mass audiences
I started my career as a writer, and now towards the end of it, I am once again devoting much of my time to writing, including this new series, which will become my third book.
I have written two influential books on the future and new technologies, both of which were translated into multiple languages. I have probably written thousands of stories over the years as a journalist, and even in the last 20 years, when my day job was primarily as an entrepreneur, I periodically would write important essays that I felt needed to be written.
My storytelling to mass audiences for the last 25 years primarily has come through my public speaking. I probably have given an average of one keynote talk a month for the last 25 years, mostly through talks arranged by my speaking agents Keppler Speakers.
I’ve gotten very good at explaining anything related to AI, transformative technologies, and the future to a wide range of audiences through my keynotes.
Someone who is an independent voice and not controlled by anyone behind the scenes
Finally, at this critical juncture in history, you want to be able to trust that the person you are reading is not being constrained about what they can talk about or being subtly influenced about what to say because they get their paycheck from a billionaire publisher or the like. You don’t want the writer you follow to be dependent on a corporate sponsor who does not want the writer to offend anyone or do anything to undermine their business.
I have decided to carry out this series on Substack for this exact reason: I need to be able to say exactly what I think about what is going on in the world at this critical moment in history. I need to be able to say exactly what I think we should do in the future. Presumably that’s what you want too.
Substack has set up a remarkable environment where the individual readers in the audience can support the writer and help keep him or her independent. I’m at the point in my career where I can try this experiment. Join me on this year-long learning journey as we figure out the new grand narrative of The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050.
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