A Call for the A Team to Come Together in San Francisco to Help Figure Out the New Way Forward

Watch this video or read the transcript of the kickoff talk for a new series of physical events about how to build off all the key ideas in our series so far & lead others into The Great Progression

On a literal level, the video above is my kickoff talk for a new physical event series that I delivered to about 250 innovators from a wide range of fields, all jammed into a club in the Ferry Building in San Francisco — ground zero for all things AI.

On a larger level, the talk is a call to what I call the A Team — the advance team of innovators throughout Silicon Valley, the whole tech and innovation economy of the region, and, really, the A Team in every field through all America — to come together consistently and start figuring out the new way forward into The Great Progression.

For those of you who are new to this Substack series, this short talk lays out all the general themes that have emerged from my last dozen essays of “The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050.”

For those of you who have been following the series since the relaunch three months ago, this talk ties all the key big ideas from each of the essays into one integrated whole, creating a new piece that is greater than the sum of the parts.

This Substack series is a core part of an ambitious project that will culminate in a book of the same name, which HarperCollins will publish in January 2027, just in time for the start of the next American presidential political cycle.

The new physical event series in San Francisco with the same name is the next stage of the project done in partnership with Freethink Media, which has been syndicating my Substack articles to broader audiences through their media world online.

We launched the quarterly series on May 29th, and my keynote talk was designed to sum up in 25 minutes many of the biggest ideas and key themes from my dozen essays in The Great Progression Substack series, bringing attendees up to speed on the foundation of ideas that we have built up over the last three months.

Freethink produced an extremely well-done video of my talk that you can watch in full above, which includes many of the graphics developed for the essays. Those 25 minutes are the most efficient way to absorb all the key ideas of the series — and perhaps the most fun.

I’ve also included a transcript of the keynote below in case you prefer that format or want to cut and paste the ideas that resonate with you and spread them around. I’ve layered some links to many of the essays and added some of the key visuals into the transcript, but not all — best to sit back and watch the video for the full effect.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for length and readability:

We're all living in an extraordinary moment in history, in the United States, in the world. This image, this kind of iconic image that we’re using for this series, you can look at what's going on in the world — with climate change and what Trump's doing and geopolitical tensions — and you can see the world falling to pieces. You can see gloom and doom.

But you can also look at the other side of it. We have these world-historic technologies coming. We have these tools. We have these other pieces lining up here that could drive great progress. We could reinvent America for the 21st century, and we could really make moves towards a much better world.

It's that kind of dividing line. We are here in that moment, and we're here in the Bay Area, which is a critical, critical piece of the puzzle to figuring out this going forward.

Now, the way I talk about this is — I've been saying it for the last three years — is it’s The Great Progression. I'm trying to get people to focus on how we could be on the verge of a great era of progress, literally starting now for about the next 25 years. I'm trying to get people to stretch their minds in the same way we were trying to do in the ‘90s, trying to explain to people the next 25 years — What happens when the internet connects everybody? What happens when these little startups become giant companies? What happens? — and largely, it did play out.

I've been talking. I’ve been doing keynotes. I've probably done 40 talks on this in the last few years. I've been writing on this [idea of the Great Progression], but what we've decided to do is start an event series on this, and we’re doing it in partnership with Freethink.

They bring the production value, the media, and their networks. Some of you here are coming from their networks. We're doing it with SHACK15. We said, "Hey, we want to throw this, catalyze this network," they said, "We're in." They're giving us this space, and a big portion of you are coming in from SHACK, which is kind of a global network of all kinds of entrepreneurial characters, innovation characters, including those in Gen AI.

Then I bring a bunch of OGs, kind of the old guard and the networks that, over the last 30 years, I've collected: people from the tech world, from WIRED, from Global Business Network, from The Long Now Foundation, from UC Berkeley, Stanford…

This is a crazy-interesting network of people mashed up here, and so that's partly why we've reserved an hour and a half at the end for you all to have a party and connect up.

I'm going to give you a little quick history on what happened here.

It was Freethink that approached me three years ago, in 2022. They said we needed another kind of “Long Boom” cover story, and they commissioned me on a 10,000-word magazine piece, which was called “The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050,” even though it came out in September of '22. Just to put this in context, ChatGPT 3.5, generative AI arrived on the scene in November of '22, so this predates that.

I came up with this idea of having to rethink how much possibility we had in the future in a more can-do, forward-thinking way. That has now morphed into a Substack series, which I've been doing for the last two months here, a weekly essay that is just going gangbusters in Substack.

For those of you aren't on Substack, you've got to tune into this thing. It's just a hive of great thinking. A lot of these pieces, I've tripled my audience. People are loving these ideas. Not just because of me. People want to positively think about the future and what's possible here.

I also have a book deal coming out of this with HarperCollins. They grabbed the global rights. It's going to be coming out, and they want to push it out into the world, so we have a vehicle here to actually squeeze down some of the new ways forward.

But the key thing is this quarterly series. We're going to start doing this every three months.

Now, the big idea that starts this is that we are actually witnessing the arrival of three world-historic technologies. These are technologies that we could only dream about 25 — let alone 50 — years ago.

One is AI. Just without question, a world-changing technology, and I'm not going to have to preach to the choir here, but I'm just saying we take that as a given, that this thing is a world-changing technology.

The second one is we're making a transition into clean energies. Energy is going from a commodity — a carbon commodity — to a technology, which means you can drive down the cost, so we're on the verge of abundant, clean energy — with also fusion on the horizon.

We've also in the last few years figured out how to bioengineer living things, which is a crazy, wild thing that's happened in the last 25 years, but recently we've gotten the capability to do this and now we could rethink so many materials, products, as well as extend lifespans and all kinds of things that we’re on the verge here.

This is all hitting, triple whammy, at the same time.

So, we're actually entering an AI age — that is essentially giving us a fundamental step change in capabilities. We can really reorganize the world around AI in ways that are profound, and we'll never go back. Humans, for centuries, will be on AI.

We are actually crossing this threshold into the potential for abundant clean energy, and the function of any civilization is how much energy you can draw off of without blowing out the climate — we're on that threshold.

And we're on the threshold of an age of bioengineering, synthetic biology, and the like.

One way to think of what's happening to us today is that we are witnessing an old world that's dying. The old world could be carbon energies that are dying. The old world could be the post-World War II, Pax Americana world, the welfare state, kind of going down.

We're also watching the new one [that] is struggling to be born.

What I'm calling this is The Great Progression. 

You are here. One of the reasons it's so confusing right now is we're caught in the middle of both things happening at the same time, and we're freaking out about one going down, and we're kind of starting to understand what's going up. 

Now the key thing that people forget about is that scaling up holds the potential for what economist Carlota Perez calls the “Golden Age.” Every transformative general-purpose technology eventually gets over this hump, and you can open it up for everybody — it leads to what she calls “The Golden Age of Technology,” which we will chat about a little bit later. 

When you look back here, all three of these technologies had huge breakthroughs just 15 years ago. 

One was AlexNet in AI. That was essentially a neural network, using large language models, was able to identify pictures, cat pictures, better than any kind of human-coded AI could do.

Then, we had the breakthrough in CRISPR — cheap, easy gene-editing breakthrough that happened there. 

The third one, we didn't have an exact date, but we basically had breakthroughs in scaling up solar energy.

So all three of these things have happened, but they're just taking off, and we haven't seen them all come into fruition. We haven't seen what's going to happen here, and what I'm trying to breathe life into, and what we're trying to do in this series is breathe life into: What does that look like? How does that work? How does that world actually operate? What's the best we can do? How can we make the most of this stuff? 

When you have transformative technologies, general-purpose technologies, when they come out, if they're big enough deals — which these are — they start reshaping how the economy works. Once the economy starts changing, it reshapes how society works. Ultimately, with certain technologies, if it's big enough, it actually has civilizational-scale change.

I'm basically positing here that we're starting this chain reaction. 

Everyone's talking about the technologies today. This series is going to start looking at the next layers. What's the economy we can make? What's the society we can do? And even some of this across the century, how can we start thinking civilizationally? 

Now, when you start thinking that way, the closest thing we've been to in America in living memory for some people — not anyone in this room, but my mother, for example — is what happened after the Great Depression / World War II. We saw a similar thing, a dismantling of an old world of colonialism and all kinds of stuff, laissez-faire capitalism. We saw new things trying to struggle to get born, setting up what eventually became the post-war boom.

JFK, for example, fighting in the war, and later, the first GI generation president, was there. We can remember this great boom from 1945 to 1970 —- it goes down in history as one of the biggest, greatest booms ever. We actually rebuilt America. We rebuilt Europe. We rebuilt the whole thing. That wasn't an odd thing, because we've done this several other times in history. 

We go back to the ‘30s and ‘40s, and FDR was elected, but there was ferocious politics. The Republican Party at that time was literally on the verge of, certainly isolationism, but even fascism. You had world-changing technologies, like nuclear fission, and you had geopolitics at an incredible scale, where you had the rising powers of Japan and Germany — we had to fight them off. Essentially, it set up this great boom.

This is a big deal. We're on the scale of that kind of change, and we gotta tune into this. 

The nice thing about this is ground zero is the San Francisco Bay area — there is no other place on the planet, without argument, in terms of these core technologies and particularly AI. Now, you could kind of quibble on the other two a little bit, but the point is this: You are here. 

You are literally sitting right there. We're in the middle of this, so we bear some responsibility, frankly, folks, for helping think about the new ways forward, how to make the most of this, how to make it work for everyone over the long haul.

I want to just run over some stuff here on technological step changes. We're making three of them, and to be fair, folks, historians of technology say there's been about 25 world-changing general-purpose technologies. This is like the printing press, electricity, the wheel, and things like that. We're in that league. These are going to go down as world-historic, world-changing capabilities. 

Now, one thing here is AI is a special category of this, because you could actually argue that, until The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, humans could augment their physical power by just hanging onto a horse or then something like a plow, but once we cracked a machine, a steam-powered machine, we could get the power of 200 horses.

That was the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the beginning of the world that we're living in today, the modern world of prosperity and wealth and all the things that we take for granted today. 

But up until now, anything to do with intelligence had to have a human brain connected to it. Anything. The simplest thing. You're sensing the world. You're reasoning about what's going to happen. You're making the decision. You had to have a human doing it — until now. 

We now have machines that can augment our mental powers. Not our physical powers. Our mental powers, our intelligence. This is an unbelievable shift because intelligence can be applied to everything. Every industry. Every field. That's what people haven't fully grokked: how big a deal this is going to be. 

Now, there's been other game-changing technologies. If you go in the past, The Enlightenment, we had the printing press, and it changed the world, which is more communication. We've had energy. We figured out how to dig coal out and have energy at scale, and then we had, again, machines. 

We are in the same game now, because you could say AI's basically applied to everything, but it's communication, simultaneous language translation. We're shifting in energy in a fundamental way, and we're shifting in production towards bioengineering, synthetic biology and the like, which could supersede industrial production in many ways over this century.

When we first came out with electricity, it took us 40 years to come to terms with that. Then we had the car revolution, and then we had the digital revolution that a lot of us in this room have lived through. 

But we're having a triple whammy phase shift in three step changes in human capability. That's what I call the Great Progression, and so that's kind of the frame of what we're trying to do here.

[In] “The Long Boom” cover story, we had tried to project 25 years in the future — me and Peter Schwartz, a famous futurist at the time — and I will say one of the reasons you can do this is there's a way to start to understand tipping points in technology adoption curves.

Every successful technology goes through this — a lot of people in this room, I don't have to repeat this — but the point is, boom, the tipping points. When did the tipping points happen? I'm arguing we are hitting the tipping points on all three of those. They're all tipping. It's not like a debate: “Is it going to happen? When's it going to happen?” It's happening. And it's going to go fast. 

One thing about tipping points is, up until that point, everyone's kind of, “Eh, it's not quite working.” Boom. After it, they think, "Oh my god. This is amazing." We're on the amazing point of all three of these. 

Now, this is Carlota Perez's version. I borrowed this and reworked this, but she put it in a bigger way that every major technology, from a societal point of view, goes through a “Gilded Age” when it's a frenzy of making money. Then, after this turning point or tipping point — particularly with government intervention, if you intervene it the right way — you can make it work for everybody, and that's the “Golden Age.”

I'm saying that we're at that stage now where we have to figure out the new way forward, and we need some intervention to make it work for everybody. 

Now, the Long Boom version of this, for people who remember that stuff — this is not the same scale, but we saw the old media dying. We saw the new digital media coming. 

I was trying to write about this, The Long Boom, looking out there. I was there, A lot of you people in the room were there. We understand how that works, because when you went back into the ‘90s, the Mac came out, and then the web came, and then the dotcom boom. Get a little frenzy there of making money, and then we basically had The Long Boom. 

What I'm saying is we're just applying the same thing to the tech today. 

So, what happened? In the last 40 years, we built the power of these computer chips. That's what The Long Boom said: We're going to keep getting stronger. We're going to connect everything to the internet. Okay. It happened. We got to digitize all our information. Then, we got to get it all in the cloud — that took 15 years of convincing every business to do that. Then, we had to have prosperous tech companies to pour billions into this since the government wasn't doing it, and only then we got AI.

But here's the point: The foundation for AI is built. It's done. We don't have to wait, like in the mid-90s: "Well, someday someone's going to have fiber optic cable at your house." That took 20 years, right? But that's all done, so this is going to move fast, probably faster than any tech transition we've ever seen.

Now, technological revolutions go through two big revolutions — go through two stages — and I'll give you just the car one [that] everyone gets. I just want to do this quick, but it took about 40 years from the Model T Ford to get a gas station in every neighborhood, to build roads, to figure out where to drill oil — 40 years it took to do that.

But then after the war, when we finally did that, everyone had a car, and they said, "Well, what can you do with a car?" And then, it was like, "Oh, shit. We can do the suburbs, malls, drive-ins." I mean, it just exploded in innovation and fundamentally changed the world, fundamentally changed what America was. 

We're in that same thing now. The foundation, we've already got. We spent 40 years trying to explain what the hell the cloud was to everybody, and now we're at the point where, “What can we do with AI?” 

Executive assistants for everyone. Individual tutors. Oh, wow. Autonomous vehicles. You can start to see them, right? It's like now we're just starting the explosion of innovation in all directions, so we are all going to get personal assistants for everybody. I mean, it's just happening. In fact, in the next two years there'll be agents you're going to be surrounded by. This is just one person — you're going to have 25, whatever, agents in every direction, telling you everything you know. If you know a little bit about climate, you don't know shit about finance, let your agent help you do that.

Anyhow, it's crazy, so it's possible productivity rates could go up, growth could go up. There's a bunch of things. We might have another kind of Roaring Twenties. Some economists are starting to think this: "Hey, this is going to do it." I'm going to talk to Steven Johnson about this in a minute. 

Same thing with tutors. Here's a good example. Now we have AI. Clearly, you could have a tutor for every kid. We know that, basically, everyone in this room had one teacher to 30 kids. A few of us got it. Hopefully a lot of people in this room got it. The middle of the people kind of got it, and the people at the bottom had no idea what was going on, but it was one teacher. She or he was trying to do their best. 

We know, with human teachers, you can take any kid in that group, put them in the top 5% of the class with one human tutor. It's clear that we're going to be able to, basically, supplement this assembly line of education with one AI tutor that learns what the kid is like for their whole life, and then for that matter on, that tutor can kind of live with you for the rest of your life. 

This is possible now. Why aren't we thinking from scratch, how to redo education from scratch, as opposed to grafting into something or figuring out if a kid is cheating with it? 

So, this brings up this abundance idea. Rich people always had tutors, but what happens when everybody has a tutor? That's abundant education. Same thing with energy. One thing, if solar is so cheap, it drives the price. Poor people will be driving electric cars because they're going to cost five grand or something. We have this possibility of abundance. That's why you're starting to see it in politics coming up. 

So everyone here is probably like, "Okay. Well, how are we going to get from here to there?" And I'm going to tell you one way we're going to do it. 

So, what I would say — and again, we have a whole party where we can talk about this later, and I'll argue with probably everybody at the bar until midnight — but basically, Trump is a populist backlash against the old thing that wasn't working. And frankly, the old thing wasn't working. The kind of Pax Americana, we couldn't sustain it with our deficits. The welfare state. The bureaucratic thing. It just really wasn't solving the problems. 

I mean, be honest. No matter what your politics are, it's been 80 years, those two things. I think the main reason that Americans voted for him, in their gut, was somebody was going to at least try to change, as opposed to just keep it going, keep it going, keep it going, which is what the Dems essentially keep saying all the time. 

So don't think of him as the future. Think of him as the spasm against the past. But what's interesting about American politics is we've gone through this many times, and basically there's a pendulum swing in American politics. Let's say we're at the 50/50 spot here, right? All it takes is a shift of 10% of the country into one camp or the other, and then you have a 60/40 majority, and then you can drive change for as long as 40 years. This happens frequently.

All we have to do is, one way or the other, depending on what your politics are — and it doesn't have to be the same kind of vicious politics that we’ve got now — but I'm saying, to build a political coalition going future-forward is not that hard.

We've seen, for example, if you go after the war — that one I just told you, the Golden Age — that was a progressive period. That was a focus on equality. Government intervention to build public infrastructure. Tax the rich quite large — I mean, the taxes on the upper 1% were like 90%, 70%.

That was a period where a lot of things worked. Then we had a different kind of pendulum swing. We've had 40 years — which has also got its revitalizing side — of unleashing the private sector. We were able to build the internet, all kinds of stuff around that. To be fair, that was a lot of progress in that period, too, so I'm just saying we're on the verge of another thing. 

Trump is just trying to get rid of all 80 years of that, because both sides, Republicans and Democrats, kind of bought into that, but the American people were like, "We got to do something different." 

So, I'm thinking this is the thing, and this is where we're at. I think there's room to start to talk about a new way forward in politics, about what we could do here, because what's interesting about American history is we've seen these pendulum swings. 

Basically, there was a populist backlash against the original crew and the Revolution. There was a whole Civil War. There was a progressive era — even the Republicans and the Democrats at the time were both kind of progressive. Then, there was the kind of post-war thing I just mentioned, and then there was the Reagan Revolution. We shifted that way, and even Dems kind of got on to the small government idea and all that. 

There's something happening now. It's not Trump, but it's not clear who it is. I don't want to personify, but the moment is ripe for this kind of figure, is what I'm saying. 

Now, here's the crazy thing about this. Those are revitalizations. Three times in American history, we have completely reinvented the country, and I would say we're in one of these now.

This is the crazy thing. It literally comes down to every 80 years. There's a bunch of reasons for this — I've written essays on this, trying to explain it. Without going into the reasons for this, I will say we've watched this happen. I mentioned to you it happened coming off the Great Depression, World War II. 

I went through that one, but the same thing happened in the Civil War. What was happening there is they had the old system dying with slavery, and the whole new thing being born with a manufacturing economy, free labor. 

Then, we had this kind of period, coming off the Civil War, the boom. Lincoln was in the middle of there, and what happened is, once we settled that, after 700,000 Americans died in that fight — we think it's bad now? 700,000 people died in this debate over that one — but you actually had a Golden Age. We had a great expansion. Transcontinental railroad. Homestead Act. The American dream was born out of that whole period.

So we had these tensions, these horrible politics leading up to that. We had new technologies, like Bessemer steel for the railroads. Things happen, and then it also shifted.

It even happened in the Revolution. If you really think of that as a reinvention of America, or an invention of America, the old system was the colonial system dying. The new one was this new thing trying to be born.

We basically had a boom coming off the Revolutionary War. George Washington was smack in the middle of it, and we did have a Golden Age. There was a huge expansion. All kinds of crazy stuff happened. The Louisiana Purchase, all kinds of stuff. We had the same tensions in those 15 years. Boston Tea Party. The Declaration of Independence. We had to have a war.

So what I'm trying to say to you is we're in another one of those moments now. 

Now, the final little kicker I'm going to do here is the bigger way to think about this is we might even be in such profound change — the AI is such a profound change — that we might be closer to what happened in The Enlightenment.

That was roughly 1680 to 1800, but in that period of time, we came up with six crazy-big inventions that the world is basically still defined by. 

We had mechanical engines, I mentioned that. We had carbon energies at scale. We had the Industrial Revolution around those steam engines. We had financial capitalism to keep it going. We had to invent that. That didn't happen before this. We had representative democracy. That was the American version of that, although the French tried a shot at that, too. And we had nation states. 

These didn't exist before, and they are still the world we're all working in, but they're also screwing things up now, including climate change.

So, what happened in that period was you had the technologies come out in the first 40 years — that was the breakthrough. The economy morphed in the second [40] years — Industrial Revolution all at scale, financial capitalism. Ultimately, it was the political revolutions that came after that, French and American. 

What I'm just planting the seed here — and we're going to explore it later in this series — is are we in something comparable? Are we in such a big change of fundamental tech changes that we're essentially now, just like those, we've got our absolute game-changer: AI? 

That's like a civilizational-scale reboot, but also we're watching clean energies emerging out of energy. We may see some kind of biological engineering revolution out of industrial production. We may see — and this is more open-ended; it's going to take a while — a different kind of capitalism, more equitable, better on the environment. We might see something supersede this goofy thing that we're still trapped in from 250 years ago that's certainly not working — Trump's banging his head against it. And then even some way to coordinate global governance.

I don't know how this is going to work. But I'm saying there is something at the scale of that era that I think we have to at least open ourselves up to. 

I think we've seen the tech come — I just laid it out to you. There's probably going to be the economics, and ultimately, it might take a while for the politics, but you are here. We're out of the pure tech game — we're into the “innovate everything else” game, and that's what I'm trying to get us technologists or people rooted in tech to be thinking big here. 

Now, the final little kicker is it even gets more complicated because it's happening for everybody. We've got China, and so there's basically two AI superpowers. If that's the core technology of the future, there's two superpowers. There's nobody else on that, by the way. And there's been a battle from the history of the country between democracies and autocracies. We're slipping a little bit here, too — we might become an autocracy. But I'm just saying, the point is we've been part of a global community on this. 

And so, the AI way of the Chinese is pretty much authoritarian, top-down. And boy, will it be a great authoritarian tool to monitor people constantly, the whole thing, and that's a model for the world. 

And then there's the Western way, the American way, which is this bottom-up crazy-ass thing, but, honestly, I think we'd rather figure out the way forward in this. So I think we have a responsibility — beyond us, beyond America, to the world — to figure out how AI works in the future.

You are here. We are caught in this moment. It's an extraordinary moment. It's fraught with peril, but it also has so much positive possibilities here, folks. 

We are at this moment where we could actually make a difference in shifting the zeitgeist of this country, potentially the world. And it's not out of the question that people in 50, 100, 1,000 years from now, they're going to look back and say, “Ah, people in that period, they figured out AI. They finally got over to AI, and the AI that we're still using centuries in the future." They’ll say, "Ah, they finally got onto clean energy, abundant clean energy, so we finally solved the climate change thing. We figured they were going to do it eventually, but glad they did it then."

One more notch. They’ll say, "Yeah, they figured out bioengineering. We're able to make a much more sustainable world, more in sync with nature, extend their lifespans, and get rid of diseases. Ha, that's great, all the things that we now use. They were able to pull this entire foundation for a civilization that we're still living in 500, 1,000 years from now.”

They might even go one more notch, and they'd say, "Wouldn't it have been an amazing thing to be living in that time, in that period, where they were making all those insane changes? Wouldn't it be exciting to be part of that? Wouldn't it have been something to be in San Francisco at that time, at that moment when everything was so fraught with energy, but also could change so fundamentally?" 

And I just want to end this by saying, folks, we are here. We are here now. We have this possibility.

So what we're going to try to do with this series is we're going to try to pull together the networks, drive the conversation, get people thinking in this direction and around this framework, and do the best we possibly can to actually figure out this new way forward and figure out the new way into The Great Progression. 

And with that, I'm going to say thank you and welcome.