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- We're living in an
extraordinary moment in history.
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We are at a moment here in 2025
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where we have world-historic,
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game-changing technologies
now starting to scale.
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But America and the world itself
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are going through huge contortions.
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And there's been three previous junctures
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where Americans have found
themselves in this exact place.
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And the key piece of
this is tipping points.
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When do you go from the
slow, slow build of a thing
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that's kind of clunky
and not really working,
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to, you all of a sudden
get an iPhone that goes,
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holy shit, this is the most
amazing thing in the world,
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and then everybody needs them?
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And what I'm trying to tell you now
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is we are in the middle
of three tipping points
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that are world-historic changes
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that are happening around us today.
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I'm Pete Leyden.
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I've basically been following
the story of technology
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and its evolution and looking ahead
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into how it's gonna change the world
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over the next 25 years.
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(epic dramatic music)
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Way back, way back in the 90s,
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in the earliest days of the internet,
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there was really only
one place in the world
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that was really all over that,
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and that was Wired Magazine.
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And it was in those early days
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that the founders of Wired picked up on me
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as someone who had the
same kind of sensibility
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about the transformative
nature of these technologies.
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And so they wooed me to work with them
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in the early days of Wired.
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Now, people had no idea
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what was even going on with the internet.
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And literally, what's
email? What's the web?
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They had no idea how
these goofball startups
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with names like Amazon were
ever gonna amount to anything.
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And the other thing
that was going on there
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beyond this digital revolution
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was essentially the
beginning of globalization.
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And so myself and my co-author,
which was Peter Schwartz,
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wrote a famous iconic cover story at Wired
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that was called "The Long Boom."
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And it was a history of the future.
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The story from 1980,
which was in our past,
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to 2020, which was in our future,
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trying to explain what was really coming.
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(dramatic synth music)
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Now, those of us who are in technology
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and those of us who have
been immersed in it,
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which I have been for
most of my career now,
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can see clearly these
kind of incremental stages
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of these new technologies
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that all successful new
technologies go through
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a technology adoption curve.
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Let's say, like Uber,
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the idea like, oh my God,
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instead of a taxi, it's all on your phone.
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And then all of a sudden
when enough people show
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how amazing it is,
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boom, the entire crew moves over,
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and the old system of
the taxi system is gone.
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So, you're watching an old system
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being essentially dismantled
or having to come down
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at the same time as we're taking off
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on these new technologies
to build the next systems.
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We're in the middle of that.
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Right now is smack in the
middle of that in our era,
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but we've also seen this
in American history before.
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There's been three previous junctures
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where Americans have found
themselves in this exact place.
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Now, that's not to say it's common,
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like, you know, this is 80
years ago last time we saw this.
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And they tend to come
in these 80-year cycles.
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But what's amazing about these things
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is they have bursts of
unbelievably widespread innovation
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that lasts for 25 years.
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The last big one was
coming off World War II,
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1945, 80 years ago,
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America was on a very similar parallel.
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(dramatic violin music)
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We basically were watching
the essentially dismantling
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of the old world that had
been working pretty well,
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the economy and societies of the West,
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and then there had been a crash
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and you would run into the
Great Depression of the 1930s.
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Now, what that was
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was the old system of running the economy
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just wasn't working.
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And so what happens as
you watch these junctures,
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in American society,
we get super polarized.
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For example, there was an America
First movement in the 30s.
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We were on the verge of
violent conflict in America.
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And then you had FDR
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and the kind of New Deal Coalition
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that came out of the Depression
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and they started to get traction.
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But anyhow, we had to resolve
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this political tension in America,
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and frankly, had to do it in the world
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because the world also is
going through this juncture.
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And so from 1945 to 1970,
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we watched the great post-war boom.
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Many people call it the high
point of global capitalism.
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And you built this crazy economy,
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where you did many things
that were completely different
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than the previous year.
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Tax the rich at 90%.
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You watch incredible investment
in public infrastructure,
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like the interstate highway
system, and building suburbs.
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You basically watch the GI Bill,
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and education building,
institutions for higher education,
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expanding it for the Boomers.
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That all happened in 25 years.
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The Great Society, the
whole thing, 25 years.
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And then we ran into the 70s,
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it started kind of
getting long in the tooth:
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stagflation, oil shocks.
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But here's the point, old
system had to come down,
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super conflict around it,
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and ultimately the building of a thing
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that was dramatically
different than before.
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We've been through that
before, and funny enough,
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like I say, if you go
another 80 years back,
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we did it again.
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(epic dramatic music)
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It's 1865. What is 1865?
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It's the end of the American Civil War.
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Now, this is a good example
of how passions run very high
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and political conflict is
extreme at these junctures.
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And the Civil War was the most extreme.
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I mean, we literally had to
have 750,000 Americans died
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in the Civil War.
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America since the founding
had been in tension
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with these two economic systems.
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One was essentially a system
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of the early manufacturing economy
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where you needed free labor in the north,
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but in the old south, we
basically had slavery.
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And they said, "No, we're not going there.
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We're not gonna give it up.
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We're not gonna let go of this old system.
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We're gonna fight to
the death on the thing."
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And so this is a good example,
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anyone rooted in the old
systems that are going down
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passionately want to
defend that at all costs.
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Now, the thing that people do
not know about the Civil War
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or don't really remember
as much about the Civil War
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is the Civil War after 1865
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had an unbelievable explosion of progress
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that lasted for, what do you know,
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25 years.
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For example, the Homestead Act,
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which is you gave
anybody who went out West
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150 acres for free.
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There was also land grant universities.
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All these little states
started building institutes
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of higher education to
educate average people,
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but also to be pushing
scientific understanding
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of agriculture.
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But here's the other
progress that was going on.
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It was technology.
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It was only after the
war that America blew out
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like 175,000 miles of rail
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and essentially stitched the
entire continent together
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with these steel-based rails.
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And essentially we reinvented
America in 25 years.
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And here's the even crazier thing, though.
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You go back another 80
years, we did it again.
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(epic refined music)
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1787 to about 1810, 1815,
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we had created what is America.
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One way to understand what
was happening in America
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at that time was it was part
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of a bigger part of Western Europe,
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and particularly an extension of Britain,
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which was going through the
Enlightenment at the time.
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The Enlightenment is essentially
a fundamental system change
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from a feudal society,
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kind of dominated by the Catholic church
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and all that kinda stuff
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into essentially what
we would now consider
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the modern world.
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And they invented six huge things
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that we still are working within today.
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Now, the reason I'm kind of saying that
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is that had world-historic implications.
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That was a building of a civilization
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that we essentially invented, we humans,
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but we Western Europe, in
basically a space of 120 years.
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The forward motion of innovation
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essentially from the West
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was coming with those crazy-ass Americans
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who had this wide open
continent to spread into.
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And that is what America's role
has been vis-a-vis the West
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in every one of those epochs.
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I'm arguing we have one
more crank of that wheel
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with the arrival of three
world-historic changes
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that are happening around us there.
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And the most obvious one
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is the arrival of artificial intelligence.
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- [News Anchor] ChatGPT.
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Maybe you've heard of it.
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If you haven't, then get ready,
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because this promises to
be the viral sensation
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that could completely
reset how we do things.
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- The arrival of generative AI
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with the arrival of ChatGPT
3.5 in November of 2022,
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I think we're gonna see that
as a world-historic moment.
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I think people will look back
on that is the starting gun
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of what will be understood
as the age of AI.
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And I use age in a very
explicit way, which is,
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when you talk about a different
age that humans enter,
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like, oh, the humans, you know,
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entered the Bronze Age or the Iron Age,
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I mean, you're talking about essentially
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a fundamental, game-changing technology,
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a breakthrough, a
step-change in our abilities,
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that once you cross that
threshold, you don't go back.
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We're gonna watch an
explosion of amplification.
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The amplification of our mental powers
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with digital computers and now AI
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are gonna be very similar
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to the amplification
of our physical powers
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that mechanical engines
initially by steam created
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the prosperity and wealth of
the world that we know now,
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where we're just gonna say,
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"Holy shit, we had no idea
this is the world we're in."
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(dramatic digital music)
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This is the first time
we have an energy source
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that is a technology,
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a hundred percent a technology,
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not a commodity.
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We don't have to dig it up as coal,
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we don't have to tap into it as oil.
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Why is that important?
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Because once it's a technology,
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you can consistently drive down the cost.
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And there's a kind of a rule
of thumb in manufacturing,
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which if you double the number
of producing solar panels,
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you will come up with about
20% of a drop in cost.
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And this is the point, it's
gonna keep getting cheaper.
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And the same thing flipping around
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to the same thing with electric cars.
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People think, "Well, electric cars
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are still expensive and whatever."
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You're not thinking this through
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because battery technology
is the same thing.
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That's in lithium batteries.
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We're now getting whole nother generations
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of batteries, like solid state batteries,
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that essentially will be next generation.
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But the point is the forward
motion of costs coming down
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on clean energy is just beginning.
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And when that happens,
you're gonna have what?
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Abundant clean energy.
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(quiet dramatic music)
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Basically, right around the
time that we essentially had
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our earliest breakthroughs
on generative AI,
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which is about 15 years ago,
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we also had the big breakthrough
in what they call CRISPR,
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which is we figured out a way to cheaply
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and easily edit the genome
of any living thing.
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And you just take one example,
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we now know how to take
a cell, put it in a vat,
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and you can give it the same amino acids
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and the same kind of nutrients
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and the same things that a
cow roaming around a field
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for like years chewing on grass
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would get those same nutrients,
those same amino acids,
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and essentially would produce
in their muscles the meat.
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That same thing can happen in a vat
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to actually grow these same
cow cells into actual meat.
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Not like kind of meat,
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not like plant-based meat
that's kind of like meat,
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it's meat.
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It's the same cell, it
tastes exactly the same.
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And what's happened,
we've only 25 years ago,
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it was like 2003 was the first time humans
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had ever cracked or
understood the human genome.
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Took $3 billion and it
took 15 years to do it.
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The cost of doing that from $3 billion
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had been driven down so
far, it was a 1,000 bucks.
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It's now at the point
where it's about 100 bucks.
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And eventually it's
gonna keep driving down
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to 50 bucks or nothing.
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It's not just the same level,
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it is twice as fast.
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We can now essentially design these things
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for outcomes that we want to
happen cheaply and easily.
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(pensive synth music)
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So, the technology story of today,
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AI, clean energy, even bioengineering,
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is kind of familiar at some level.
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The next several iterations here, though,
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I think is putting a bigger
lens on what's going on today.
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And it gets us back to
what we were describing
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as what's happening in America
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is a once in 80-year reinvention.
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And in fact it's even possible
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that what's going on here is essentially
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the early days of building
a 21st century civilization.
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And so when you think about that,
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you go beyond the technology.
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That's like the foundation.
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And so the next thing up,
I think, from technologies,
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you start thinking,
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"Okay, well what could you
build with those technologies?
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What kind of an economy
would you want to build?"
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The economic system that the
United States has been based on
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that has worked for essentially
the top 10%, for sure,
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and certainly for the top 1%,
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has not been working for 80%.
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And it's gotten to the point
where they just have had it.
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So, as crazy as it sounds,
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we could be at a point in
the world right now in 2025
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where we are watching the beginnings
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of a shift from financial capitalism,
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born and raised out of the Enlightenment,
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to essentially some version
of a sustainable capitalism.
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We're going from a world of
representative democracy,
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which was a brilliant move forward,
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to essentially a digital democracy.
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And we're also gonna go from
a world of nation states,
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which again was a great breakthrough
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from empires and colonies of the past,
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to some kind of global governance
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that coordinates the 10
billion people on this planet.
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That's the level of change
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I think we're actually heading into.
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That's the level of change
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I think your kids are
gonna be wrestling with.
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And that's the level of change
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I think America is going through now.
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And the quicker we start to wrap our heads
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around that challenge
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and the kind of scale of
the invention we're up to,
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the better off we're all gonna be.
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(dramatic synth music)
