About Peter Leyden
There are few people in America today better positioned than Peter Leyden to tell the big-picture story of our times and the grand narrative of what’s probably coming and possible to achieve in the next 25 years.
Leyden is a longtime tech expert and thought leader on the future who came to San Francisco to work with the founders of WIRED magazine at the beginning of the digital revolution and has followed the front edge of technological change every step since — including into the AI revolution today.
He’s an influential writer and author, and a frequent keynote speaker explaining the implications of new technologies and the positive possibilities to come to audiences throughout America and Europe for the last 25 years.
Leyden currently is the creator of The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050, a series of talks, as well as essays and interviews in Substack, to culminate in his next book on how to harness AI and other transformative technologies to drive progress, reinvent America and make a much better world.
He’s also the founder of several previous startups that pioneered fields transformed by new technologies, and currently is founder of Reinvent Futures, where he advises senior leaders in strategic foresight, and which has its own website.
This website here is the one place on the internet where you can get the most comprehensive understanding of how all the pieces of Peter Leyden’s past life and work experiences, big ideas and current projects, come together at this critical time.
Scroll below for a short look at all the pages on this website that taken together will help convince you that Peter Leyden is someone worth reading, watching and listening to at this extraordinary juncture in history, a moment of truly transformational change.
Professional Bios
Who is Peter Leyden? AI and tech expert. Thought leader on the future.
Creator of The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050, talks and essays heading towards his next book. Founder of Reinvent Futures. Advisor on strategic foresight for senior leaders.
Keynote Speaker represented by Keppler Speakers for 25 years. Author of two influential books on the future, including The Long Boom.
Host & Curator of the event series The AI Age Begins. Longtime convener of virtual and physical gatherings of top technologists and innovators from Silicon Valley.
Former managing editor at WIRED in the heyday of the 1990s. Former Journalist and Foreign Correspondent in Asia for Newsweek magazine.
Founder & CEO of two startups pioneering new mediums in video. Cofounder of a political startup that helped transition politics to the internet.
Peter Leyden is a hard person to describe because he does not fit into any one particular box. He has a wide range of experiences and an unconventional career so we have put together a variety of ways to explain his background and what he does now.
The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 Now on Substack
The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 is new book project based in Substack made up of:
A new series of essays by Peter Leyden that aim to rough out a grand narrative of our historic opportunity to harness artificial intelligence and other transformative technologies to drive progress, reinvent America, and create a much better world.
A new series of interviews with Leyden’s network of remarkable innovators pioneering these fields as part of a year-long project to create his next book that makes sense of the historic transition taking place around us today.
A monthly gathering to leverage the burgeoning intellectual network of Substack by virtually convening those interested in this framework to contribute their insights and dive deeper into the ideas published that month.
Go directly to Substack to subscribe for free to all the written material and consider joining the network to attend the monthly gatherings with him over zoom.
Speaking About Tech & the Future
Peter Leyden is a keynote speaker on AI, transformative technologies and the future who explains better than almost anyone what’s really going on in the world today, what’s probably coming in the decade ahead, what’s possible to achieve in the next 25 years, and what you could do now to adapt.
Leyden has been giving keynote talks on the future and the impact of new technologies to business and general audiences throughout America and Europe on roughly a monthly basis for the last 25 years, working through Keppler Speakers.
He’s a gifted speaker who uses stunning images and powerful info-graphics in multimedia presentations to back up his foresight into the future. His positive, can-do attitude about what lies ahead often leaves audiences energized and inspired.
Writing on The Great Progression & Much More
Peter Leyden has been writing for his entire work life and that continues to this day with his work on The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 book project.
Leyden began his career as a journalist working for daily newspapers in several regions of America, including the Deep South. He also spent time abroad working as a foreign correspondent in Asia, mostly working for the weekly magazine Newsweek, including in China during the Tiananmen Square crisis.
He then worked for the monthly magazine WIRED and wrote an iconic cover story in the mid-1990s called The Long Boom that foretold the story of how the digital revolution and globalization would scale up by 2020 — and mostly did. The Long Boom then became a book that went into multiple languages.
The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 is following a similar pattern to The Long Boom. The generally pro-tech optimistic story of the next 25 years started with a popular magazine piece in Big Think just before generative AI broke onto the scene, and now is an active book project that you can follow on Substack.
Interviewing Remarkable Innovators
The main way Leyden figures out the real story of our times and what’s probably coming in the near future is through deep interviews with remarkable innovators operating on the front edge of a wide range of fields.
Many of these one-on-one interviews over the years have been done in live events like the long-running series Leyden hosted before the pandemic called What’s Now San Francisco that are still publicly available on YouTube..
He also frequently hosts conversations among groups of remarkable innovators where he moderates the emergent discussions and helps synthesize what everyone learns like in his post-pandemic event and Substack series The AI Age Begins.
He’s currently interviewing remarkable innovators and writing up what he learns as part of The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 series on Substack that is heading towards his next book.
Convening His Extraordinary Network
Leyden has built up an extraordinary network in the 30 years since he came to work with the founders of WIRED magazine at the beginning of the digital revolution. He has followed the front edge of technological change and come to know a large number of top innovators pioneering a wide range of fields.
Over the years he has convened this burgeoning network in various event series to help collectively figure out what’s really going on in the tech world and what’s probably coming. So when Generative AI arrived he saw the need for another series of meetings of the minds.
Leyden hosted one of the most influential event series on Generative AI at ground zero for the AI revolution in the center of San Francisco for the first two years after ChatGPT burst onto the scene. He convened dozens of the world’s top experts and entrepreneurs in the AI field in public conversations through his series The AI Age Begins.
You can watch each of six epic events that were recorded in high-quality video and shot in documentary style with the first one in every playlist showing Leyden setting the stage and posing the key question of the night.
The AI Age Begins series of Essays
The arrival of Generative AI in the form of ChatGPT took most of the tech and innovation ecosystem of the San Francisco Bay Area by surprise.
So Leyden created a new events series in the iconic Ferry Building of San Francisco to convene a meeting of the minds of many of the top tech innovators he knew as well as the new GenAI builders.
Leyden wrote essays published in Substack of what they all learned in each of these meetings that focused on a key question about AI.
The dozen world-class experts who gave five-minute answers to the question were videoed and those published in Substack as well.
Here you can get an overview of six of the events and essays — as well as links into the full Substack essays.
Advising on Strategic Foresight
Everything Leyden knows about the future and learns from his network can be synthesized for smaller groups and tailored to the needs of a particular industry or field, company or organization.
Leyden does private projects and internal sessions with senior executives or leaders of organizations where he makes a presentation to expand their thinking but then drives conversations that help them figure out what to do.
He works through his company Reinvent Futures to put on everything from internal talks, to half-day workshops to full six-month coaching projects
Short Video Clips of Key Ideas from Talks
For the two years after Generative AI broke onto the scene, Leyden has given probably 40 keynotes talks in America and Europe that explains the big picture story of what’s happening and how this all could play out in the next 25 years.
Here you can find short video clips of several highly-produced videos of recent keynote talks that lay out many of Peter Leyden’s key ideas on artificial intelligence, transformative technologies and the future.
If you want to get a sense of Leyden’s high-energy, inspirational style of speaking, as well as his use of dazzling images and powerful info-graphics in his slides, then sample these short clips.
Full Talks for Deeper Dives
If you want to really understand in a more comprehensive way how all Leyden’s ideas on new technologies and the future come together then you should watch an entire keynote talk or two or three.
Here you can watch the entire talk of The Great Progression that he gave in the fall of 2024 to 1300 tech and business leaders from 17 countries who are building data centers that are powering the AI boom.
Or you can see his entire talk complete with all the slides on The AI Age Begins that he gave in the American heartland at the end of 2024. This lays out in an hour much of what everyone needs to know.
Or watch a 30-minute keynote he did in Cannes. France before top European executives about the possibilities of a new era of great abundance that might be within reach.
Media Mentions of His Analysis
Leyden has become known over the years as a public intellectual who the mainstream media seeks out to explain what’s going on in the always-evolving story of new technologies.
He’s now a 30-year veteran of Silicon Valley who can put new developments in historical perspective and he has a track record of being more prescient than most on what you can expect to come.
As a former journalist he knows what the current wave of journalists are looking for and so he’s quoted quite a bit in new outlets on the East Coast of America as well as Europe.
Here you can see some of his more interesting recent media mentions, as well as see his key role in a feature-length documentary on how we could actually solve climate change.
Podcasts Interviewing Him
The rise of digital media has created a cornucopia of alternative online media outlets and an ecosystem of podcasts where Leyden makes appearances.
These appearances are good ways for Leyden to lay out more nuanced analysis tailored to particular audiences about what he thinks is actually going on in the world today and what they should be thinking about that’s probably coming.
Here you can get some of the more recent ones that are worth a deep dive.
Photos to Download
Here you can find plenty of photos of Peter Leyden whether they are headshots or photos of him in action on stage.
Pretty much all the photos used on this website can be downloaded in high resolution from this section.
Feel free to use these photos in appropriate ways for upcoming events or podcasts or stories in the media.
Past Stories & Series of Essays
Leyden probably wrote more than 1000 stories as a journalist working in daily newspapers, weeklies like Newsweek and monthlies like WIRED. But the vast majority of them are not available online.
As the Digital Age progressed and the mainstream media of newspapers and magazines continued to decline, Leyden kept following the front edge of technological change.
In recent years he’s been increasingly writing for some of the more interesting digital media outlets like Medium and now Substack. On this website you can see some of his most impactful series of stories laid out to give you an overview before sending you to the online publications themselves.
Older Talks Still Relevant Today
Peter Leyden has given hundreds of keynote talks over the last 25 years but the vast majority are not videoed. Unfortunately most conferences and executive summits do not record their keynote speakers, though that is starting to change.
Here you can find some full keynote talks that were captured in high enough quality video to still be viewed in their entirety today. They show a range of experiences that date back to the decade before the pandemic, including a talk to 2000 city planners at the Javitts Center to New York City.
Some go back even earlier to the early days of web video, including one at YouTube headquarters itself and another at Apple in the days of Steve Jobs.
Short Video Clips from a Virtual Talk
During the pandemic Leyden got very good at speaking to virtual audiences over the internet. His highly visual slides and powerful motion graphics based on tons of data keep audiences stimulated and engaged.
Here you can find short video clips of a highly-produced virtual talk Leyden gave during the pandemic on The Transformation, a Future History of the World from 2020 to 2050. You can see many of the seeds of ideas that he kept developing with more sophistication and nuance in The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050.
This talk was part of the prestigious Seminars on Long-term Thinking series put on by The Long Now Foundation. And it shows how a virtual talk can be as compelling as a physical one.