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.
The New Great Progression Series
The Great Progression 2025 to 2050 interview series is part of Leyden’s larger book project that will run through at least 2025 on Substack.
Each month Leyden will interview at least one remarkable innovator to help fill out a grand narrative of how we could make the most of our historic opportunity to harness artificial intelligence and other transformative e technologies to drive progress, reinvent America, and make a much better world.
He will then write up a lengthy post that distills what he learned from the interview that helps fill in the larger narrative and he will weave in extended passages from the interview too.
That series also will have a monthly virtual gathering on Zoom that Leyden will host and moderate a conversation that might include some invited guests with his extraordinary network.
The AI Age Begins
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. And he invited many of the leading innovators from industries and fields impacted by AI to these exclusive gatherings.
These events always maxed out with waiting lists and have attracted top journalists from The New Yorker, Bloomberg, Businessweek, Forbes, Reuters, Axios and even foreign media from Asia.
Watch the adjacent playlist of one such event with the first video of Leyden setting the context of the series and the event to try and make the case for techno-optimism around AI.
What’s Now San Francisco
In the five years before the pandemic, Leyden hosted What's Now San Francisco, a monthly series of physical events where he publicly interviewed a remarkable innovator from a field going through big changes to talk about what they were working on now and what they saw coming next.
The whole interview was done before an invite-only audience of about 125 people and live-streamed to the web through a sophisticated three-camera shoot. You can watch the entire series through a playlist on YouTube.
Or start by watching the adjacent video on a remarkable gathering of a who’s who of Silicon Valley luminaries to pay tribute to the one-and-only Stewart Brand, a longtime mentor of Leyden’s.
That video is just the first in the playlist of another 33 full videos of other interviews in this series that you can keep watching here, or click through to watch and skim in YouTube.
What’s Now New York
The What’s Now series was so successful in San Francisco, with each event becoming maxed out and regulars wanting to return each month, that Leyden expanded the concept to What’s Now New York.
Leyden then began building a similar network through an invite-only audience and built a comparable body of work that can still be watched on a playlist in YouTube.
You can watch the last event with Kara Swisher held on the week before the entire United States locked down for the pandemic - and ended the series after a two-year run.
That video is just the first in the playlist of another 16 full videos of other interviews in this series that you can keep watching here, or click through to watch and skim in YouTube.
A Pioneer of Virtual Video Interviews Before Podcasts
Leyden founded his second startup media company Reinvent in 2012 to take early advantage of the arrival of interactive group video. He loved how it would allow he and his team to connect up with remarkable innovators wherever they happened to live and work and draw them into conversations about fundamental reinvention.
At first they called the weekly gatherings “Reinventors Roundtables.” Leyden and his company introduced a wide range of thought leaders to their first experience of group video, which now is routine after the global pandemic. Over the years the company tried all kinds of different setups to get innovators to talk about their big ideas.
This adjacent playlist is a series of 55 videos that were recaps of the various roundtables, starting with one anchored by Larry Lessig, which attracted half a dozen other top thought leaders and activists to participate in the conversation with him.
Evolving to Hybrid Interviews with the Future of the Sharing Economy
Leyden and his company Reinvent tried all kinds of formats for interviewing remarkable innovators in these early days before the podcast boom took off.
For two years they partnered with Airbnb to create an independent series of interviews with thoughts leaders on all things to do with the sharing economy, particularly trying to answer the question: how do we get the sharing economy to work for all?
Some of the interviews were done in a hybrid manner, with the thought leader streaming in over video and cameras shooting Leyden in a room interviewing them. That’s how the first one in the adjacent playlist for the series works with Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup. After him you can watch 56 more.
And Experimenting Again with The Future of Work
Sometimes we took the interviewing to another location where experts were gathering like in a Future of Work series done in partnership with Intuit.
This playlist starts out with an overview of some key interviews taken at a big conference with the OECD and top professors at the University of California Berkeley.
But then the playlist goes on to capture another 30 one-on-one interviews in studios or conversations in physical gatherings like panels.
All of them showcase experts in The Future of Work.
Many Fireside Chats
Leyden is often asked to host one-on-one fireside chats or moderate panels at conferences.
Here’s one from just before the pandemic with the CEO of Calm, the wildly successful unicorn tech startup at the StartUp Health Festival in San Francisco.