My Upcoming Book with HarperCollins

We successfully pulled off Phase One of The Great Progression book project and now head into to Phase Two with reporting in China and Europe and deep-dive interviews with experts from many fields

An AI image of the future book by HarperCollins in a bookstore — not the actual cover to be created by a human next year.

From the very beginning of The Great Progression project that we launched in March we have talked as though the culmination of the project would be a book that pulls together everything we have learned along the way and explains it all to a broad audience in order to potentially make some impact on America and the world.

I can now announce that the book will be published by HarperCollins, the second biggest book publisher in the world, and that they bought all the foreign rights, which essentially ensures that this book will get out to a global audience.

Don’t be fooled by the AI-generated image that tops this essay — that book has yet to be written and there is a lot of work that lies ahead (including with a human designer to create an amazing cover). But it’s fair to say that we have successfully completed what I consider Phase One of this book project.

We have created a dozen lengthy essays that lay out many of the core themes and big ideas that will developed further in the book. Those essays have been syndicated by Freethink Media through their media network on the open web primarily at Freethink and for many essays on Big Think.

I use the word “we” because I have been helped by all of you through your comments on the essays and your sharing of them throughout Substack and your social networks.

We have created a virtual community of the paid members that gathers monthly on zoom to discuss the signs of The Great Progression that we are seeing through every region of America — and sometimes from participants in Europe.

We also have created a community in San Francsico with the launch of a new physical event series that I host and curate with Freethink Media and that founding members attend. In all these gatherings I learn from those gathered as much as you learn from me.

Out of the physical gatherings we were able to create some excellent videos that make these ideas accessible to wider audiences who might not read a 2500-word essay but will sit back and watch a video.

The crowning achievement of that effort has been the documentary-style, 15-minute video interview of me that explains my big idea about how we are now in America’s fourth great reinvention and that lays out the case for The Great Progression.

In just one month that Youtube video by Freethink has gone viral with more than 1 million views, 35,000 likes, and almost 4,000 comments - and it continues to gain thousands of viewers from around the world each day. If you have not watched it, do so in the embedded version at the end of this piece.

The culmination of all this activity is that we more than tripled our Substack subscribers to 14,000 over roughly the first six months. We often have appeared in the leaderboards of the top 100 “Rising Bestsellers in Technology” and even the top 100 “New Bestsellers” across all categories in Substack — from tech to politics to culture to cooking.

The crowning achievement of all this Substack activity came when a top editor from HarperCollins who had been reading my essays reached out unsolicited and asked whether I wanted to do a book with them.

I had a book proposal prepared but I had yet to find the right book agent since the agent of my previous two books had retired. I was confident when I started this project on Substack that I would be able to land a book contract but HarperCollins made this process much easier.

I directly negotiated with them without an agent this summer and we came up with an excellent book contract with a signifiant advance that will set me up for the next phase of the book, to be explained more below.

The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 will now be a book to be published by HarperCollins in January 2027, which is the start of the next presidential cycle in the United States.

They think my big idea that America is now in its fourth great reinvention, partly driven by the arrival of another wave of general-purpose technologies, particularly AI, could influence the national conversation at that time. They also think my positive narrative of what’s possible to achieve in the next 25 years would also be of great interest and potential importance.

That date seems like a long way away but in the book world that is roughly the time it takes to do this right. I have to deliver the manuscript in April of 2026, which gives me a little more than six months to write. They could have sped up the production phase to come out before the fall of 2026 but they see this book as potentially having more impact at the start of the big-picture conversations about the future of America that come out of presidential elections.

So as we end the summer of 2025, I am proclaiming the end of Phase One of this ambitious project. We accomplished a lot in the last six months, and we have much to celebrate. I’ve slowed down a bit for a break so far in August and will take a real vacation the next couple weeks with my wife in Europe.

I need to regenerate before shifting gears and heading into Phase Two of this ambitious project to start the fall.

In September I will head to China for visits to the regions around Hong Kong, Chengdu, Beijing and Shanghai. All of my travel in China will be on the ground via high-speed trains to see how the country has transformed since I first visited it as a young foreign correspondent 35 years ago when that country was still mostly a nation of poor peasants.

A mind-boggling amount of change has happened in China since then, and although I have popped back from time to time, this will be a real immersion into China today. It will also be a way for me to reflect on how much a nation can change in a relatively short timeframe like 25 years.

In the fall I will also start conducting a series of long, deep interviews with many key experts and innovators who I have come to know and respect most over my career and also with a range of new ones who I don’t personally know. I will be asking each of them what is now possible in their fields over the next 25 years if we make the most of AI and other transformative technologies.

And then I have to start seriously writing the book alongside those interviews. I’ve written two books before and they are deeply immersive undertakings. They take an incredible amount of focus if done right.

So my activity on Substack is going to change going forward, as I have said from the beginning in the About page.

I am still committing to write one great essay of at least 2500 words each month, which will appear here and be syndicated on the web by Freethink. I have great concepts for the next four, and I expect one to be based on what I learn in China.

We will continue to old our monthly gathering over zoom for the paid members, and this will become more important to the project in this phase. I will report on what I am learning but not able to work up into essays, and I will want to hear from you about what you are seeing, and get feedback on nascent ideas too.

I do think I might use the Notes more during this timeframe since they are quick to do, unlike an essay. And I would love to see the Chat for paid members have more activity going forward.

I might also just put out a relatively quick update from time to time — kind of like this one. They will be more like a blog post and not thoroughly researched and edited like the ones you have come to appreciate in Phase One.

I hope our next Phase Two on this learning journey will be as successful as our Phase One. And I hope you stay with me on this journey.

As I have said before, and say below, we are all living through an extraordinary moment in history and I think the best is yet to come.