A Short Update on the next Virtual Gathering and a New Video of a Keynote talk from the Edge of Russia

Our monthly virtual meeting of paid members will be next Thursday Nov 6th and the next monthly essay will anchor a special Progress Edition at Big Think in November

We added many new subscribers in the last week coming from Big Think and so I thought I’d give short update to orient the newcomers and also keep the long-time subscribers abreast of various changes happening in The Great Progression project.

We had a wave of newcomers in the last 10 days because another video based on an interview of me went viral on YouTube with close to 1.5 million views, 50,000 likes and 4000 comments — and it’s still charting out. (This is not the video above, but below.)

Longtime subscribers who watch the video will recognize that it is basically the same 15-minute, highly-produced, documentary-style video that was released last summer by Freethink and went viral with similar metrics too. This time it was repackaged and released to different audiences on Big Think, which has been around since 2008 and has amassed millions of followers on YouTube.

If you are confused about the difference between Freethink and Big Think — you are not alone. The same company owns both websites and both YouTube channels and just this month they have decided to consolidate both brands under Big Think. This matters to me since my substack essays have been all syndicated by Freethink, and sometimes by Big Think, and now they all will be published on the open web on Big Think.

I also host a quarterly physical event series in San Francisco and that will now be done in partnership with Big Think Media, not Freethink Media, with the next event in the first quarter of 2026. You can forget about Freethink Media from now on.

What has not changed is that those Substack subscribers who chose to become members on the paid tiers will still be meeting monthly with me over Zoom. Our next virtual meeting will be next Thursday, November 6th at 4 pm PST, which is my base in San Francisco.

We hold the meeting at that time to accommodate Americans in different time zones at the end of the work day. We might change the time if we get more European members but so far this time has worked.

If you are a free subscriber you can always upgrade to paid and join the meetings. The links to register are only sent to the paid subscribers, including the founding members. That email invite will go out this Thursday, with a followup early next week.

And only the paid members can participate in the private Chat, and we have a plan for more activity in the Chat going forward. We will explain all that next Thursday.

The upcoming essay that makes comparisons to The Progressive Era

As for the videos, the one at the very top of this piece is a keynote talk I did in September to kick off a conference of top business leaders in Lithuania and the nearby Baltic region. Lithuania and its neighbors were part of the Soviet Union and, despite now being part of NATO, they are very worried about Russia’s moves in the region, particularly in Ukraine.

The talk is a good tight overview of some of the major themes that I have been writing about in the last dozen essays or so. This video lays out in 35 minutes the big idea that America is going through its fourth Great Reinvention, and also makes the case that we may be facing civilization-scale changes that are comparable to what Europeans went through in The Enlightenment, when the United States was founded.

The video does a good job of integrating all the many slides and motion graphics, with multiple camera angles on me. The video ends with an interview by a TV personality that probed deeper into what I thought about the geopolitics of the region.

I’m finishing up a new essay this week that will compare what’s going on today in America and what happened in the Progressive Era of the early 20th century in reaction to the Gilded Age, the power of the Robber Barons, and the widespread corruption of government.

I attended the Progress Conference this month in Berkeley put on by the Roots of Progress organization and was struck by the parallels between what appears to be happening now and what I know from my history happened in the 25 years from 1895 to 1920.

The longish piece will get to you as always through Substack but it will also anchor a package of stories related to that conference that will be published in the middle of November in Big Think. I think you will like this one.