Media Mentions of his Analysis & Insights
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.
Documentary Film on Solving Climate Change
Leyden was one of the key interviews of a new documentary film on how the world can find common ground to solve climate change in time.
A half-dozen members of a Canadian film crew rented out the penthouse of a skyscraper in San Francisco to provide the environment for Leyden to give his big-picture, relatively blue-sky analysis of how we can stop global warming in the next 25 years. (The photo at the top of the page and adjacent are part of that shoot.)
The full-length film “Close the Divide” is now out and available on all the major streaming platforms. Click on the adjacent photo or the link above to see all its outlets and awards.
A Bloomberg Businessweek Cover Story Starts with Leyden
The first event in Peter Leyden’s new event series The AI Age Begins in the spring of 2023 attracted many national media outlets, from The New Yorker to Axios. Leyden had a track record of convening the top minds in Silicon Valley and journalists were eager to attend his Meeting of the Minds.
Brad Stone, the Editor of Bloomberg Businessweek, was one of those attending and he used the event, and Leyden’s initial talk, as a way to start his cover story on the monthly magazine with the adjacent cover:
In late May, 300 entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, journalists and assorted self-described thought leaders crammed into Shack15, a stylish social club on the second floor of San Francisco’s Ferry Building, where most spoke in soaring terms about what they saw as the next gold rush. The gathering, dubbed a “Generative AI Meeting of the Minds,” would’ve been unthinkable during the pandemic and improbable earlier this year, when the city’s main obsessions often seemed to be car break-ins and retail store closures. The night had the feel of a religious revival.
“Something is happening, something is cracking open,” said the evening’s host, futurist writer Peter Leyden, in the first of many upbeat speeches. Just as everyone “was talking about the demise of San Francisco, how everyone is leaving the Bay Area, how no one wants to live in California, how we are in doom loops—that’s exactly the time you know the place is right about to burst open in reinvention,” Leyden said to applause. The speech, the whole event, captured the feeling coursing through tech circles these days: Silicon Valley is back.
Politico Two-Part Series on The Future if Trump or Harris Wins
Leyden has become one of the go-to sources for some journalists at Politico to check in on perspective on what’s going on in the world of technology and particularly what may be soon coming.
In the run-up to the 2024 election they published two pieces, one on The Future if Harris Wins, and the other on The Future if Trump Wins.
Leyden was quoted in both, and extensively in the one on Harris. Click through to each of them through the links above or the two images adjacent.
The Telegraph from the UK on What to Expect with Elon Musk
Leyden also is approached by journalists in Europe who need to be oriented to the latest tech developments and particularly their potential impacts on the economy and society.
After Trump won in 2024, the prospect of Elon Musk heading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) sent European journalists scrambling for insight.
The Telegraph in London did a long story that used Leyden to help put this all in context. Since the story is paywalled, here’s one extended passage:
“For better or worse, Musk is a guy who feels he has a place in history,” says Leyden. “It’s broader than ‘can I get a better deal for Starlink?’. I think he got into politics because he thought he could make an even bigger impact. Buying Twitter has not been good for his other businesses, but he went into it because he thinks he has to save free speech for the 21st century.”
“You could say that the Western version of the welfare state is a 20th-century legacy industry, similar to automotive and space, that needs to be reinvented profoundly,” he adds.
“It’s intriguing that Musk would bring that Silicon Valley entrepreneurial approach to government. There’s something exciting about what could be done and how he might do it. You need a crazed, entrepreneurial focus to do that when everyone else says it’s impossible. There’s a sentiment in America that we need fundamental change. Elon is the character that could actually have a shot at it.”
New York Times Ross Douthat on Leyden’s California is the Future Series
Leyden coauthored a four-part series of articles in Medium called California is the Future that exploded in popularity and controversy well before the 2018 midterm American election.
The series made the argument that California was roughing out the future of American politics and predicted that the Republicans would lose the House and Senate in the 2018 midterms, and Trump would lose his reelection bid in 2020 - both of which turned out to be prescient.
In the spring of 2018 Ross Douthat, the conservative columnist for The New York Times, weighed in on that analysis in a full column. He was quite impressed by the argument, though pushed back on various aspects. Here’s the column or click on the adjacent image.
LA Times Story on Tech Backing New SF Mayor
Leyden often helps younger journalists who are relatively new to covering tech and the San Francisco region with long conversations putting current events in a larger historical context.
He did on before the 2024 election of outsider Daniel Lurie, who won, with the backing of significant tech money. Leyden put that in context in a big story in the Los Angeles Times, with this extended quote, among others:
....."The start-up founders of 20 years ago have since bought homes, started families and leased office space for thousands of workers. And with the rise of AI stirring terrific optimism about tech’s next chapter, some industry leaders have decided it’s time to get involved in local politics and help mold the city going forward, said Peter Leyden, a former managing editor of Wired magazine and founder of Reinvent Futures, a company that brings together top leaders in artificial intelligence.
“I think what you’re watching in politics is a realization that San Francisco is here to stay. It is going to be the tech hub of the world for the foreseeable future,” Leyden said. And “if we’re going to be here, and if this is the world we’re living in, let’s remake it in a way that works.”
De Zeit Interview for German & European Audience
The prescience of The Long Boom, Leyden’s iconic cover story for Wired and book of many languages, lead to many interviews by the mainstream media. Here’s one by De Zeit, the leading media company of Germany with a large European audience.
This interview went through many of the positive as well as negative developments that the original work forecast - and that turned out to actually come true. He also talks about why some missed the mark too.
Politico Longer Interview on AI
Politico is all about politics and government and the vast majority of the staff work in Washington DC and at the very least the East Coast. So they don’t have very much insight into technology or matters of the near future.
Leyden has become one of their go-to people for explaining what is going on in technology and what is probably coming. So we’re laying out a few of the best one since technology is definitely hitting politics and government right now.
This interview was Leyden’s attempt to tamp down the fears of Generative AI at the very end of that tumultuous first year of its arrival to the public.
LA Times on San Francisco Going from Doom to Boom
Leyden also keeps helping the journalists from the Los Angeles Times in the south of California understand what’s really going on in the San Francisco Bay Area in the north.
Here he helped the journalist from the beginning of the reporting on this story to understand that the city was not in the doom loop that outsiders kept saying but that was at the beginning of what was going to be a huge boom around artificial intelligence.
Here’s how the story ends with Leyden’s extended quotes:
A big part of San Francisco’s enduring appeal for tech is that it’s in the city’s DNA to be a “tolerant place,” added Peter Leyden, a Bay Area entrepreneur and, most recently, the founder of Reinvent Futures, a company that helps convene top leaders in artificial intelligence.
In Silicon Valley, Leyden said, it’s pretty much a requirement to fail with one company to get access to the capital and credentials needed to gain success with another. While the right-wing and libertarian “crypto crew” fled for red states during the pandemic, he said, the old guard stayed put, confident that San Francisco would rise again.
“The point is every place has its issues, and we do, too, but the narrative that’s out there is just wrong,” Leyden said. “Because there really is nothing like San Francisco.”
Politico Interview on the State of Strategic Foresight
On the 25-year anniversary of The Long Boom, Leyden’s famous - and quite prescient - cover story in Wired Magazine that later went into a book in multiple languages, Politico circled back to get Leyden’s take on the state of strategic foresight and a look ahead at the next 25 years. Check out what he had to say.