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.
The New Substack Series
The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 is a 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 into the ideas published that month.
A positive reframe of many seemingly negative things happening around us today that may be necessary for this transition and ultimately will be seen as part of a more positive story that will play out in the near future.
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.
Once there you can get the full understanding of the critical chart in the adjacent images.
The Original Magazine Piece
This long magazine article started the ball rolling by being published in Big Think magazine two months before Generative AI burst on the scene with the Arrival of ChatGPT 3.5 in late 2022.
Big Think, the pioneering online magazine that has conducted interviews with 2000 of the world’s biggest thinkers since 2008, commissioned the piece to anchor its Progress Issue.
Leyden used it to lay out his latest thinking on the real story of progress that will take place in the next 25 years. It's a positive reframe of what's really going on in America and the world right now, and what's actually going to happen in the near future.
The Great Progression is jammed with world-class art and info-graphics like his original highly prescient piece in Wired magazine called The Long Boom from 25 years ago. In fact, Big Think hired the same artist who did the art for Wired back then.
The Transformation series
The Transformation is the precursor to The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 and was published on Medium at the end of the year 2020 in the depths of the global pandemic.
Leyden’s The Long Boom magazine article and book in the mid-1990s had told the story of how the Digital Revolution would play out to the year 2020 — and largely did. So in the year 2020 Leyden published a six-part series that picked up on the date and played out what could possibly happen by 2050.
The series laid out the very positive yet plausible story of how America can solve the many challenges of climate change, economic inequality, racial inequities and political polarization that were convulsing through the country in 2020.
The story is told from the perspective of a member of Generation Z at the end of his life in 2100 as he explains not only how we solved those challenges but helped lay the foundations for a different kind of civilization that evolved through the entire 21st century.
This series was based on deep interviews with 25 world-class innovators and helped counter the pervasive despair and made a compelling case for hope that better days lie ahead. The series proved very popular and attracted 50,000 followers.
California is the Future series
Leyden was commissioned to write a four-part series on how California often foreshadowed the future of American politics by the online publishing platform Medium when they just started attracting professional writers.
Leyden made the controversial case that the changing politics of California over the first 15 years of the 21st century— from paralyzed stalemate to progressively blue— may be prefiguring the politics of America in the decades ahead.
This series was published in 2017 during the first term of President Donald Trump and Leyden correctly predicted that the Republicans would lose the 2018 midterm elections, and that Trump himself would lose his reelection bid in 2020.
This series turned out to be very popular but also controversial and helped stimulate a national conversation on what may lie ahead.
The AI Age Begins series
Leyden started his first series on Substack called The AI Age Begins that ran through the two years of 2023 and 2024.
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 San Francisco to convene a meeting of the minds of many of the tech innovators he had come to know over 30 years 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.
On a separate page on this website you can get an overview of the six essays— as well as links into the individual Substack essays.
The Long Boom Original Magazine Cover Story
The origins of Leyden’s current work looking out at the next 25 years start with a cover story in WIRED magazine in the summer of 1997 called: The Long Boom: A History of the Future: 1980 to 2020.
The story was a 14,000 word piece that had been developed starting in 1996 to rough out how the rise of the digital economy combined with the spread of globalization would lead to a massive tech boom but also an economic boom that would carry on for the next 25 years until the year 2020.
The story was not a flat out prediction but a positive story of what was now possible, partly done to inspire the generation of builders and partly to get everyone aware of what might come.
The story was very controversial and helped stimulate a national conversation about the potential of what was then called “the new economy.”
The Long Boom Book
The great interest in The Long Boom cover story in WIRED led to the development of a book version, which eventually went into paperback and was translated into many languages.
Leyden left his position as Managing Editor of WIRED magazine in 1998 to devote his full-time focus on reporting around the world and writing the book.
He worked closely with Peter Schwartz, his coauthor of the magazine piece and the CEO of the strategic foresight company Global Business Network, where he later worked.
The book went far beyond the magazine piece and filled out how the digital revolution and globalization would transform the world in the next 25 years, which largely happened by the year 2020.
The book helped those building this new world see the vision of what was possible to achieve by 2020, and helped those outside the tech world better understand what might be coming, particularly the positive outcomes.
The What’s Next Book
Leyden worked at Global Business Network, a renowned strategic foresight and scenario planning firm, run by his coauthor for The Long Boom Peter Schwartz, around the time of the Dotcom crash of many over-inflated tech stocks.
Then came the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York’s World Trade Center Towers, and many people in America and the world were groping to figure out what was really doing on in the world and what was probably coming.
So Leyden set off on another book project where he conducted long, deep interviews with 50 “remarkable people” that GBN’s cofounder Stewart Brand had curated over the years to help glean insight into the future.
Leyden worked with GBN’s CEO of that time, Eamonn Kelly, to distill what senior business leaders could learn from the insights of this collection of pioneering innovators from many fields about what was coming in the next 10 years.
The What’s Next book also went into paperback, and other languages, including Chinese.