# The Great Progression: Peter Leyden on AI, Trump and the Next 25 Years

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/singularity-fm-1654370/the-great-progression-peter-leyden-on-ai-trump-and-the-next-25-years
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/singularity-fm-1654370/the-great-progression-peter-leyden-on-ai-trump-and-the-next-25-years.md
Podcast: [Singularity.FM](https://stenobird.com/podcast/singularity-fm-1654370)
Published: 2026-05-01T12:34:10+00:00
Episode link: https://soundcloud.com/singularity1on1/the-great-progression-peter-leyden
Audio file: https://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/2312742083-singularity1on1-the-great-progression-peter-leyden.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/singularity-fm-1654370/episodes/the-great-progression-peter-leyden-on-ai-trump-and-the-next-25-years
Duration seconds: 7200

## Resource

Some people see a world coming apart. Peter Leyden sees an old world dying so a better one can be born. That, in essence, is The Great Progression, the thesis of Peter Leyden’s forthcoming HarperCollins book and the spine of our conversation. Peter is the OG Silicon Valley futurist who came to San Francisco at the dawn of WIRED, co-authored the iconic 1997 Long Boom cover story with Peter Schwartz, and has spent three decades trying to draw a coherent map of where humanity is actually headed. His claim is audacious: we are living through a fourth reinvention of America, an event that occurs roughly every 80 years (the founding, 1865, 1945, and now 2025), driven this time by three converging general-purpose technologies: AI, clean energy, and bioengineering. Stack them together, he argues, and we are looking at a civilization-scale change on the order of the Enlightenment. The Positive Reframe: If there is a phrase to walk away with, it is this: positive reframe. Peter is not a naïve optimist. He is something more interesting: a man who has built a methodology for looking at the same chaos everyone else is looking at and pulling out the constructive story buried inside it. Trump, in his telling, is not the future but the wrecking ball that takes the political hit so the next coalition can build the next thing. AI is not the great extractor but the first technology that takes intelligence, the rarest resource we have ever known, and makes it cheap and abundant. You don’t have to agree. I pushed back hard, and he pushed back harder. Where I Pushed Back: I challenged him on three fronts: the human cost of the in-between (every 80-year reinvention he cites was paid for in blood), the myth of golden ages (drawing on Ada Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance to argue that real b…

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## Transcript

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