The Great Progression: Peter Leyden on AI, Trump and the Next 25 Years

About this episode

Peter Leyden discusses his thesis on the future of America and the impact of AI, clean energy, and bioengineering.

Some people see a world coming apart. Peter Leyden sees an old world dying so a better one can be born. That, in essence, is The Great Progression, the thesis of Peter Leyden’s forthcoming HarperCollins book and the spine of our conversation. Peter is the OG Silicon Valley futurist who came to San Francisco at the dawn of WIRED, co-authored the iconic 1997 Long Boom cover story with Peter Schwartz, and has spent three decades trying to draw a coherent map of where humanity is actually headed. His claim is audacious: we are living through a fourth reinvention of America, an event that occurs roughly every 80 years (the founding, 1865, 1945, and now 2025), driven this time by three converging general-purpose technologies: AI, clean energy, and bioengineering. Stack them together, he argues, and we are looking at a civilization-scale change on the order of the Enlightenment. The Positive Reframe: If there is a phrase to walk away with, it is this: positive reframe. Peter is not a naïve optimist. He is something more interesting: a man who has built a methodology for looking at the same chaos everyone else is looking at and pulling out the constructive story buried inside it. Trump…

People in this episode

Host: Nikola Danaylov

Guest: Peter Leyden

Topics covered

• AI
• future of America
• technology convergence
• political change
• optimism
• civilization-scale change

Keywords

• AI
• Peter Leyden
• future
• technology
• Trump
• civilization
• optimism
• HarperCollins
• The Great Progression

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: HarperCollins, WIRED

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